In his analysis of the Georgia campaign, Burne views Sherman as a general who avoided risk and was too obsessed with raiding to wage an all-out offensive battle. Yet he asserts that “Grant in his heart of hearts feared Lee” and also suggests that Jubal Early’s Valley campaign might have been the most brilliant of the whole war.

He sees Sherman as more concerned with the geographical objective of capturing Atlanta than the military goal of smashing the Confederate army, lacking Grant’s understanding that the principal object of war is to conquer and destroy the enemy’s armed forces. Fuller on Grant and Basil Liddell Hart on Sherman-but his assessments were so unorthodox that even with the endorsement of preeminent Civil War historian Douglas Southall Freeman, his book received scant attention in its day. Burne assesses the military leadership of Grant, Lee, Sherman, Hood, Johnston, Early, and Sheridan from mid-1864 to Appomattox, contradicting prevailing perceptions of the generals and even proposing that Grant’s military capabilities were inferior to Lee’s.īurne sought to challenge the orthodox views of other historians-J. Out of print for more than fifty years, Lee, Grant and Sherman is an unrecognized classic of Civil War history that presaged current scholarship by decades.

Many might be startled to learn that a British army officer also called these opinions into question long ago. About the Author Captain Basil Henry Liddell Hart (1895-1970) was one of the foremost military theorists of our time.Had Lee enjoyed the manpower or materiel advantages of Grant, would the South have triumphed? Had Hood possessed strength superior to Sherman’s, would he still have lost their encounters in Georgia? Popular sentiment has long bowed to the military leadership of the Civil War’s victorious generals-a view that has been disputed by modern scholarship. Saturday Review of Literature From the Back Cover Liddell Hart considered General Sherman the dominant military genius of the Civil War to prove his point, he traced Shermans military campaigns, from the first Bull Run debacle to General Joseph Johnstons surrender in 1865. Nearly every page bears evidence of the fact that it is the product of painstaking and exhaustive research, mature thought, and an expert understanding of the subject in hand. Henry Steele Commager, New York Herald Tribune It is not often that one comes upon a biography that is so well done as this book.

one of the most thorougly dignified, one of the most distinguished biographies of the year. Book Synopsis When Liddell Harts Sherman was first published in 1929, it received encomiums such as these: A masterly performance.

Liddell hart sherman