Posted: 4/4/2008 3:01:01 PM EDT
|
Some say he was guilty of war crimes and most say he was a hero who saved numerous lives and shortened, or ended the Civil War. What say you? |
|
He was a Bastard.... But he did what he had to do to "preserve the Union" He ravaged the South... and that is what it took to keep us Southern gents from fighting another 40 years... That said.. Why are we not employing these tactics to win wars overseas???? ETA: For the Union |
Nope. The South was not Japan. The Japanese would have fought to the last man, woman, and child. Estimates for deaths if Japan was invaded were as high as one million. The women and children of the South were not going to take up arms to repel a Northern Army. The War was already lost. Nothing like the same. |
|
He knew that you couldn't win a war without crushing the morale of the citizens as well as the soliders. He basically invented the modern version of 'total war'. Notice how we later employed the same tactics against the Germans (Dresden) and the Japanese (Hiroshima/Nagasaki). The man was a military genius - and very pragmatic and practical. He knew before the war even started that the North would win simply because of it's industrial advantage:
|
|
He hastened the War's end by destroying infrastructure, property, and the South's will to fight, thus saving lives on both sides. Lives are harder to replace than property. Some of us are here today because one (or more) of our ancestors did NOT die in the War. Patton modeled his tactics and strategy in part after Sherman. |
i see it this way, he did what he had to do to bring the war to an end, just like a street fight, when you beat down someone bad enough they don't want to fight again. we lost, time to move on