Union Combined Operations in the Civil War
Craig Symonds has compiled essays and articles from creditable and established historians chronicling eight combined military Union operations against the Confederacy. However, his work is far more than a mere collection of essays describing battles and their significance. Symonds expertly frames the writings with an introduction and concluding essay that firmly establish the significance of combined army/navy Union actions during the Civil War. In fact, the final essay documents how the United States military, immediately following the war, could have learned valuable lessons from these Civil War experiences. The essay reveals which important factors assure success or guarantee failure in combined operations. Additionally, in order to provide a unique perspective on the combined operations issue, Symonds includes an essay from Howard J. Fuller that succinctly describes how the British responded to Union combined operations. Symonds’ book is a fantastic exposition about a rarely covered topic. It is required reading for anyone interested in Civil War coastal operations, interpersonal relations among Union commanders, and early U.S. naval history. Significant aspects of each operation are fully explored in these lucid and straightforward well-documented essays. The maps help readers place the actions in distinct geographic regions and demonstrate how an area’s geography influenced the campaign. However, more maps and pictures would have provided even greater clarity to complex battle descriptions. Because of the complex and somewhat complicated coverage of a dynamic topic, this book is particularly recommended for serious students of the war. There is no doubt that such readers will be entertained and enlightened by this valuable study’s insights into one of the Civil War’s most unstudied topics. Reviewer: Evan McLaughlin Evan McLaughlin, valedictorian of his Muhlenberg College class, is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a social studies teacher at Mountain View Middle School in Mendham, N.J. |
Maps, notes, bibliography, index, 159 pp., 2010, Fordham University Press,