Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [60]
As a general Grant defined for all time the American way of winning a war, from which, nearly 150 years later, we deviate at our own risk. Grant understood better than anyone that, first of all, any American war must be firmly based on the support of the American people and have an essentially moral base, and that the best way for the United States to win a war was to use to the full its great industrial strength and its reserves of manpower—and to apply them both unhesitatingly on the battlefield.
Grant was not a showy general. No admirer of Napoleon, he nevertheless had to some degree what Napoleon called “le coup d’oeil de génie,” the quick glance of genius, by which Napoleon meant the ability to see at once on the battlefield where the enemy’s weakness lay and how to exploit it with one unexpected blow. Grant, like Napoleon himself, didn’t rise to that level every time—at Shiloh he was caught off guard and fumbled his way through the first day of the battle, to be saved by Johnston’s death on the battlefield and Buell’s arrival at the last minute with fresh troops—but usually his keen grasp of the enemy’s position and its potential weaknesses was remarkable.
Lee had that quality, too, of course, though it failed him at Gettysburg, where he allowed the battle to become a “pounding match,” in Wellington’s phrase, which, given the enemy’s position on high ground with interior lines and Lee’s own inferiority in numbers, he could only lose, even though Lee was a better general than Meade. Both Grant and Lee were masters of the quick, surprising movement, the sudden change of plans that, for example, brought Grant’s army from north of Richmond to southeast of it, and led to the siege of Petersburg and, eventually, the end of the war.
The war they fought is studied all over the world in staff colleges, still today—indeed German tank commanders like Rommel, Guderian, Manteuffel, and Manstein (and their Soviet equivalents) learned Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah campaign by heart, so that for them Winchester, Harrisonburg, New Market, Harpers Ferry, Port Republic, and Cross Keys were as familiar as German place names, and the landscape of the Shenandoah Valley was as firmly planted in their minds as that of the Rhine or the Elbe or eastern France. Similarly, in every imaginable language, in military academies all over the world, Grant’s capture of Vicksburg, his pursuit of Lee from the Wilderness to Appomattox, and his swift, implacable movements to the left to isolate the Army of Northern Virginia and force Lee’s surrender are taught and studied down to the last detail. The machine gun, the tank, the aircraft, the computer and “smart” weaponry have changed the way wars are fought, but not the way they are won. Grant understood topography, the importance of supply lines, the instant judgment of the balance between his own strengths and the enemy’s weaknesses, and above all the need to keep his armies moving forward, despite casualties, even when things have gone wrong—that and the simple importance of inflicting greater losses on the enemy than he can sustain, day after day, until he breaks. Grant the boy never retraced his steps. Grant the man did not retreat—he advanced. Generals who do that win wars.
When the United States has succeeded in war, it has been by following Grant’s example.
When asked who France’s greatest poet was, the nineteenth-century French literary critic Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve replied, “Victor Hugo, hélas.” If I were asked who America’s greatest general