Re: Quote of the Day. -- Abraham Lincoln.
Posted by:
grophusharris
()
Date: April 25, 2017 09:36PM
True the Vote! Wrote:
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> Honest Abe killed 50 thousand civilians. The South
> won the war, until the North fought dirty.
How are wars won? Victories on the battlefield? Perhaps, but what contributes to victories on the battlefield? Brilliant leadership or strategy? At times.
The largest single contributor to a victory is the ruination of your enemy's ability to make war. You deny him access to supplies to feed his soldiers and his war machine. You hinder the movement of supplies and soldiers. You divide his territory and isolate his armies. You force him to expend supplies for small or questionable gains. You cut him off from the outside world.
The Yankees did all of the above in the Civil War.
They shut off the Confederate seaports. In doing this, they also sunk ships carrying ordnance to the Confederacy.
Initially, they denied the Confederates control of the Mississippi River and eventually controlled it themselves beginning with the fall of New Orleans in 1862 and ending with the fall of Vicksburg in 1863. This split the Confederacy in two and isolated armies and resources in Texas and Arkansas from the rest of the Confederacy. It cut off the Confederacy from anything that could be brought into Texas through Mexico. Thus, it also contributed to the isolation of the Confederacy from the outside world.
The Yankees either took control of key roads and railroads or took control of key junctions and stations. What they could not control, they destroyed. This hindered the movement of armies and supplies throughout the South.
The Yankees seized food from farms in the Confederacy. What they could not carry with them, they destroyed and killed the livestock. This denied food to the Confederate army. Bonaparte was correct when he stated that an army marched on its stomach.
The Yankees then forced the Confederates into battles. While the Confederates may have won the field in many of these battles, the gains were often of little strategic or tactical value. In fact, sometimes their position was untenable, in the end, largely due to insufficient supplies to withstand repeated attacks. Grant ran Lee all over The Wilderness. Lee often won the field, but could not hold his gains, due to lack of supplies and the knowledge that Sherman and Sheridan were on their way from South Carolina.
In short, the Yankees made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the Confederates to wage war.
Similar happened in the First World War. The Grand Fleet shut Germany off from foodstuffs from Argentina and the US of A (while it was still neutral). In addition, Germany could not get fuel for its motor vehicles and aeroplanes.
In the Second World War, the United States won those battles and sunk those ships because its submarines did serious damage to the Japanese war effort. In fact, the US submarines in the Pacific inflicted more damage on the Japanese war effort than did the German submarines in the Atlantic on the Allied. Once the US Navy had a torpedo that actually would explode when it struck a target, they put a stranglehold on Japan. The Japanese had all the oil that they wanted in Indonesia. The refineries were in Viet Nam, China and Japan. They had to get the oil there. The US Navy F-boats sank tankers faster than the Japanese could build them. Aeroplanes crashed and tanks and other vehicles stalled due to bad fuel. By 1943, the US Navy was moving relatively unhampered about the Pacific due to the lack of fuel for Japanese vessels and aircraft.
So no, the Yankees did not "fight dirty" in that war. They fought it to win it in the most effective way possible. They fought it by hindering their opponents' ability to fight.