Staff Ride Handbook For The Overland Campaign Virginia 4 May To 15 June 1864

Contains more than 100 maps, diagrams and illustrations The Staff Ride Handbook for the Overland Campaign, Virginia, 4 May to 15 June 1864, is the tenth study in the Combat Studies Institute’s (CSI) Staff Ride Handbook series. This handbook analyzes Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant’s 1864 Overland Campaign from the crossing of the Rapidan River on 4 May to the initiation of the crossing of the James River on 15 June. Unlike many of CSI’s previous handbooks, this handbook focuses on the operational level of war. Even so, it provides a heavy dose of tactical analysis, thereby making this ride a superb tool for developing Army leaders at almost all levels. Designed to be completed in three days, this staff ride is flexible enough to allow units to conduct a one-day or two-day ride that will still enable soldiers to gain a full range of insights offered by the study of this important campaign. In developing their plan for conducting an Overland Campaign staff ride, unit commanders are encouraged to consider analyzing the wide range of military problems associated with warfighting that this study offers. This campaign provides a host of issues to be examined, to include logistics, intelligence, psychological operations, use of reconnaissance (or lack thereof), deception, leadership, engineering, campaign planning, soldier initiative, and many other areas relevant to the modern military professional. Each of these issues, and others also analyzed herein, are as germane to us today as they were 150 years ago.

"The Staff Ride Handbook for the Overland Campaign provides a systematic approach to the analysis of this key Civil War campaign. Part I describes the organization of the Union and Confederate Armies, detailing their weapons, tactics, logistics, engineer, communications, and medical support. Part II consists of a campaign overview, which establishes the context for the individual actions to be studied in the field. Part III consists of a suggested itinerary of sites to visit in order to obtain a concrete view of the campaign in its several phases. For each stand, there is a set of travel directions, an orientation to the battle site, a discussion of the action that occurred there, vignettes by participants in the campaign, and suggested analysis questions and topics for discussion. Part IV discusses the final phase of the staff ride, the integration phase. In this phase, students integrate the classroom portion of the staff ride with the field phase and seek to provide relevant lessons for the modern military professional. Part V provides practical information on conducting a staff ride in the Overland Campaign area, including sources of assistance and logistical considerations. Appendixes A, B, and C outline the order of battle for the forces included in the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor battles, respectively. Appendix D provides biographical sketches of key participants, and appendix E provides historical maps of the area. An annotated bibliography suggests sources for preliminary study."--DTIC website.

Includes 8 maps and numerous other illustrations One hundred and fifty years ago this spring, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant launched the campaign that marked the beginning of the end of the American Civil War. For over a month, he and General Robert E. Lee were locked in a remorseless struggle that took their armies across the woodlands and farm clearings of central Virginia on the road to the Southern capital of Richmond. In the Wilderness, Union and Confederate soldiers battled in an almost trackless forest in which the opposing sides could hardly see each other and the severely wounded fell victim to spreading flames from underbrush set afire. At Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle, for over twenty hours, opposing troops grappled from opposite sides of a breastwork in a pouring rain in some of the fiercest hand-to–hand fighting of the entire war. At Cold Harbor, perhaps 5,000 Federal troops fell in the first hour of a hopeless, bungled attack that Grant would forever regret having ordered. And at Yellow Tavern, Union horsemen cut down the great Confederate cavalry leader, Maj. Gen. James E. B. “Jeb” Stuart. The myth of chivalry that Stuart represented could find no room in a grim, pitiless contest that inflicted almost 100,000 casualties, went far toward ruining two great American armies, and foreshadowed the massive industrial conflicts of the twentieth century. Yet, after six weeks of bitter, unrelenting combat, the nation was that much closer to Appomattox Court House and eventual reunion.

“[T]here will be no turning back,” said Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. It was May, 1864. The Civil War had dragged into its fourth spring. It was time to end things, Grant resolved, once and for all. With the Union Army of the Potomac as his sledge, Grant crossed the Rapidan River, intending to draw the Army of Northern Virginia into one final battle. Short of that, he planned “to hammer continuously against the armed forces of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to him . . . .” Almost immediately, though, Robert E. Lee’s Confederates brought Grant to bay in the thick tangle of the Wilderness. Rather than retreat, as other army commanders had done in the past, Grant outmaneuvered Lee, swinging left and south. There was, after all, no turning back. “I intend to fight it out along this line if it takes all summer,” Grant vowed. And he did: from the dark, close woods of the Wilderness to the Muleshoe of Spotsylvania, to the steep banks of the North Anna River, to the desperate charges of Cold Harbor. The 1864 Overland Campaign would be a nonstop grind of fighting, maneuvering, and marching, much of it in rain and mud, with casualty lists longer than anything yet seen in the war. In No Turning Back: A Guide to the 1864 Overland Campaign, from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, May 4 - June 13, 1864, historians Robert M. Dunkerly, Donald C. Pfanz, and David R. Ruth allow readers to follow in the footsteps of the armies as they grapple across the Virginia landscape. Pfanz spent his career as a National Park Service historian on the battlefields where the campaign began; Dunkerly and Ruth work on the battlefields where it concluded. Few people know the ground, or the campaign, better.

Two of the great themes of the Civil War are how Lincoln found his war-winning general in Ulysses Grant and how Grant finally defeated Lee. Grant’s Victory intertwines these two threads in a grand narrative that shows how Grant made the difference in the war. At Eastern theater battlefields from Bull Run to Gettysburg, Union commanders—whom Lincoln replaced after virtually every major battle—had struggled to best Lee, either suffering embarrassing defeat or failing to follow up success. Meanwhile, in the West, Grant had been refining his art of war at places like Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, and in early 1864, Lincoln made him general-in-chief. Arriving in the East almost deus ex machina, and immediately recognizing what his predecessors never could, Grant pressed Lee in nearly continuous battle for the next eleven months—a series of battles and sieges that ended at Appomattox.