Last weekend I attended the Civil War Institute which brings together academic historians, public historians, and students of the American Civil War to explore the lead-up to the war, the conflict, and Reconstruction. This year’s program was heavily influenced by the death of the Institute’s director Professor Peter Carmichael. I will be posting several articles on what the talks were like. First is the first lecture last Friday.
Doug Douds of the United States Army War College lectured on The World War II Generation and the Civil War, World War II broke out just after the United States had finished observing the 75th Anniversary of the Civil War. Most Americans knew at least some participants in the war, and there were still a small number veterans left alive. Douds said that many people in the United States looked back to the Civil War as an example of what effect a massive outpouring of blood would have on the country.
Douds said that the excitement of the coming of the Civil War was met by many white Southerners with giddy anticipation. Secessionists boasted that a Southern soldier could lick ten Northerners. William Sherman, who during the Secession crisis was at what became Louisiana State University listed to this discussion at a dinner. Sherman could only take this for so long. He stood up and said that “the North could make a steam engine, locomotive or railroad car. Hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes could you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, mechanical, ingenious and determined people on earth. You are doomed to fail. Only in spirit and determination are you prepared for war, in all else you are totally unprepared, and with a bad cause to start with.”
Douds continued; “In World War II it was no different. Adolf Hitler used propaganda to say that democracy had become soft. It could talk big but it would not be able to stand up to a hard punishment.” However, on the day the war began, Ike Eisenhower wrote ‘Hitler should be aware of the power of an aroused democracy.”
Winston Churchill gave his “Shoulder to Shoulder” 9th of May Speech of 1943 to Congress after Stalingrad and other allied victories. He compared the situation in 1943 to Gettysburg in which the suffering would be hard to win the war, but no one doubted that the Union would win. Everyone understood what he said.
Many of the trained soldiers in Roosevelt’s administration by 1942 wanted the United States to adopt the “Ulysses S. Grant approach” towards winning the war. This was the strategy used in 1864 and 1865 by the Union forces. A direct approach to the German capital would win the war, but Roosevelt did what Lincoln sometimes did and ignored his generals.
Lincoln also showed the North that its tremendous capacity to manufacture the implements of war would help the Union victory. It was the same situation in World War II where even Joseph Stalin said that without United States production the war would be lost.
Many of the military leaders of the army during World War II were the grandchildren of Civil War soldiers. John Mosby regularly visited the Patton household. Douglas MacArthur’s father was a Medal of Honor winner after his heroic actions at the Battle of Missionary Ridge where he was an eighteen year old soldier.
Douds also notes that many units during World War II were started during the Civil War. The 26th Division, the “Yankee Division” of World War II included the original 9th Massachusetts regiment and the 2nd Maine regiment from the Civil War, as well other regiments from the Civil War.
Enlistment of African Americans continued in World War II, Blacks were first enlisted during the Civil War in large numbers and by World War II there were over a million African Americans serving. Unfortunately, Blacks were subject to some of the same discrimination in both wars.
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