The Mammoth Book of Losers by Karl Shaw

Author:Karl Shaw [Shaw, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780338309
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2014-06-04T22:00:00+00:00

Most Clueless US Commander

The American Civil War was not short of amusingly incompetent characters on both sides. The Union Army commander-in-chief, Winfield Scott, was too fat to mount a horse or even climb into a train, so he effectively handed command to Robert E. Lee, who repaid his faith by quickly resigning and joining the enemy. Scott planned to starve the South into submission by blocking all of their ports, despite the fact that he didn’t have enough ships to mount and sustain a blockade of the Confederate’s 3,000-mile coastline.

The US Confederate, General Thomas J. Jackson, had several nicknames before he earned his new handle “Stonewall” at the first battle of Bull Run by sitting astride his horse “like a stone wall” while bullets flew around him. When he was a junior officer, he wore his thick army greatcoat throughout a long and very hot summer because he had not received an order to do otherwise. He was also a strict Presbyterian, hence the nickname “Deacon Jackson”. His deep religious convictions also meant that he refused to fight on Sundays. During the thick of the battle of Mechanicsville in 1862, Jackson spent the day praying alone on a nearby hill, refusing to speak to anyone, while his troops took heavy casualties. He was accidentally shot by his own men during the battle of Chancellorsville and died from complications a week later.

The Union general, Ambrose Everett Burnside, was famous for two things: the most ridiculous-looking facial hair 20 and the most awesome incompetence on either side in the war. It was said that no numerical or tactical advantage was so great that he could not throw it away.

In September 1862, Burnside sent his men across the Antietam Creek using a thirty-eight-metre-long narrow stone bridge; it was just wide enough for two soldiers to walk side by side. The crossing was slow, making them easy targets for Confederate sharpshooters, who lined up on a nearby ridge and shot them for fun. Most of Burnside’s men were killed. If he had been slightly better prepared, he would have known that that river he was trying to cross was only waist deep.

A month later, Burnside was rewarded for his failure with a promotion, although he had turned down two earlier offers of promotion because he didn’t think he was up to it. The Battle of Fredericksburg proved him right.

In December 1862, the Confederate Army was dug in along the heights overlooking the town of Fredericksburg. Burnside ordered a series of assaults that accomplished nothing, except the deaths of another 12,000 of his men.

The following January, Burnside was in action again when he decided to initiate a risky winter campaign. He sent his men on a long march, right at the start of a four-day deluge of freezing rain. By the end of the first day, the roads were rivers of mud, clogged with the bodies of exhausted dead horses and the artillery and wagons they were pulling. Meanwhile, as Burnside’s men staggered along, soaked,

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