The Campaign of Gettysburg: Command Decisions

Lt. Col. William D. Hewitt (ret)

Thomas Publications – 296 pages

ISBN: 0578103028

                Much has been written about the strategic and tactical shortcomings of the Gettysburg Campaign.  William D. Hewitt attempts to do so in a different light and in a different layout than previous historians.  With a lifetime of experience as a career military official, he uses his military experience to analyze the Gettysburg Campaign and comes up with something quite different.

                Lieutenant Colonel William D. Hewitt is a seasonal guide at Gettysburg National Military Park and is retired from the United States Military with 31 years of experience in intelligence in armor and cavalry.  He has edited many manuals of strategy and tactics along with analyzing battles which coincide with the armor and the cavalry.

Hewitt’s work, The Campaign of Gettysburg: Command Decisions, is an interesting book which chronicles the different parts of the battle.  While most historians tend to think of battle as the first, second and third day of fighting, Hewitt takes a different approach by separating the major points of action as the pinpoints of the campaign.  The complexity of the work is high and is more of a reference to a new thought of strategy than the common work on the battle or the campaign.  Within the introduction of his work, he mentions that the book is not for “novices” and more for the experienced reader of the campaign.  He does bring something new to the table when it comes to the analysis of the battle such as the leadership of the Union First Corps and the placement of the army between the days of combat.  While he praises General Meade for his command abilities, he seems to disagree with the way in which the Union handles themselves during the battle.  While he claims that Lee had no real leadership surrounding him at the battle, he analyzes more of the Confederate strategy of the battle instead of the Union.  While this is understandable since the Union was mainly on the side of the defense, he devotes more time to analyzing the Confederate end of the field.  He separates these analyses by chapters and does so with one chapter based on the Union side and another on the Confederate side.  There is a feeling of want when it comes to his chapters based on the Union side of the conflict and he exhausts the Confederate side.  This makes the book seem very one sided which good historians tend to avoid but cannot escape.  The major failing of this book is the attitude in which Hewitt writes.  He attempts to disprove previous historians by stating that everything which has come before him was false and this does not only appear once but many times.  There is a wonder if he is ostracizing himself from the rest of the Civil War community by doing this in his own writing and what this could mean for his future scholarship.  Hewitt also relies on the same sources, mainly Napoleon’s Maxims and Jomini, to analyze the situation instead of looking at the modern sources for the work which have done similar things to his own work.

In the end, what Hewitt’s work has accomplished is create a new type of study when it comes to the Battle of Gettysburg by breaking the combat up in phases instead of days.  He is correct in stating that the more simple way of analyzing the battle is by days.  This is the new thing which he brings to the study of Gettysburg but with a hope that there could be more study on the Union side of the battle.

Pickett’s Charge: The Untold Story – Bruce Mowday

ISBN: 1-56980-508-3

Brigade Books: 232 pgs.

Image Courtesy of Amazon

                In Pickett’s Charge: The Untold Story, Bruce Mowday brings us an outlook onto a section of the battlefield which has been written about over and over again.  He brings us the Union side of the engagement and does so through the eyes of Alexander Webb.

                Mr. Mowday is an accomplished author and journalist who has authored more than thirteen books, many of which are pictoral histories of towns surrounding Southern Pennsylvania.  He is also an award winning journalist and lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

                Mowday’s work really is the first step in a larger world where he goes up against some of the most respected historians of this fateful event such as Earl J. Hess and Carol Reardon.  What Mowday has done in this case, however, is brought us a work which should be read as one of the first books a person reads on the Battle of Gettysburg.  There are some major flaws in both design and writing.  The first is that since Mowday is a journalist, he writes like a journalist which leads to many short sections and bits of information which leaves the reader wanting more.  Also, because he is giving us the Union side of the charge, we do not have any of the planning or mindset of the Confederate end of the battle.   The planning of the Confederate assault is crucial even if you are only writing a Union perspective on the charge.  This makes the book very one sided toward the Union and while there is merit in doing that, the reader has no idea behind the charge from the attacker’s point of view.  We get a rather intense account of the defense of Cemetery Ridge instead of an account of the attackers and defenders.  Also, due to his journalistic background, Mowday states in every other paragraph where he found the information.  This should be easily footnoted, but it is brought to the attention to the reader in the paragraph.  The major design flaw of the book is the large print and the margins.  It seemed as though the margins in this book were an inch and a half on all sides and the print was fourteen sized font.  This leads many readers to believe that the publisher is “beefing” the book up in order to make the price higher.  What looks like a two hundred page study ends up being approximately twenty-thousand words stretched out over these amount of pages.

                This is Mr. Mowday’s first escapade into the American Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg.  As stated before, this should be one of the first books read about the battle to get people interested in the battle, but nothing new is presented here which would behoove the Gettysburg student or scholar to pick this up immediately.  I do hope that Mowday attempts to write another Civil War book but on another section of the battlefield and with both sides of the conflict instead of just the Union side.

Protecting the Flank at Gettysburg: The Battles for Brinkerhoff’s Ridge and East Cavalry Field, July 2-3, 1863

Eric J. Wittenberg

Savas Beatie – 2nd Printing 2013

ISBN: 978-1-61121-094-1

Image Courtesy of Barnes and Noble

                Easily considered the least visited section of the battlefield, Eric J. Wittenberg handles this area with a great amount of scholarly information and gives a narrative which is action packed from beginning to end.  Though initially published by Thomas Publications in 2002, the second edition published by Savas Beatie allowed Wittenberg to add more to his work including an appendix which disproves the ideas previously about General Stuart.

                Eric J. Wittenberg has written many works on the Civil War including his other work on the cavalry during the Battle of Gettysburg, Gettysburg’s Forgotten Cavalry Action, and co-authored One Continuous Fight along with David J. Petruzzi and Michael Nugent.  He has won the Bachelder-Coddington Literary Award in 1998 along with the Army Historical Foundation’s Distinguished Writing Award for Reprint, 2011.

                Not only does Wittenberg handle the East Cavalry Field well, but he handles the Battle for Brinkerhoff’s Ridge which is also something not talked about as much in the annals of Gettysburg.  For a battle which has more than a thousand books written about it, the East Cavalry Battlefield and Brinkerhoff’s Ridge never got their due until this book was released.  Upon the release of this book in 2002 under Thomas Publications, it was the only book in print which detailed the East Cavalry Field and Brinkerhoff Ridge.  Now there are imitators who use this work as the backbone of their study.  What is most interesting about Wittenberg’s work is the ability in which he disproves the common theory of Stuart riding around the Union lines and piercing Cemetery Ridge from behind as Pickett, Pettigrew and Trimble would have hit it from the front.  He states that nowhere in any of the official reports of Lee, Longstreet or Stuart does it mention that plan.  It is beneficial for anyone interested to read the appendix in which he studies this more in depth than he does in the body of the work.  Also, since the section of East Cavalry Battlefield is not traversed as much as the regular field, he offers an appendix which is a driving tour accompanied by pictures of some intricate monuments.  The aspect of the book for which is most appreciated is the participation of General Custer, the youngest Union general at the time of the battle.  History tends only to remember Custer at Little Big Horn and the disaster which happened there, but at Gettysburg, Custer shines as one of the greatest cavalry leaders in this engagement. 

                I cannot recommend enough this pivotal work on the Battle of Gettysburg.  Though it had been released in its first edition in 2002, Wittenberg and Savas Beatie has released a work which has been expanded and is easily accessible for the readers more interested in this area of battle.  The method in which he disproves the “planned” use of Stuart during the battle fills the holes in the study which never had many legs to stand on.  Thankfully, he ended the debate about what had happened with Stuart on the day of the third and historians can now look differently at the tactics being used that day.  Wittenberg has proven that there is always more to write about Gettysburg and that the subject never dulls even one hundred and fifty years after the event.