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• W2080347611 abstract "Reviewed by: In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat David W. Lowe In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat. By Earl J. Hess. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-8078-3282-0, 264 pp., cloth, $45.00. Earl J. Hess's latest book, In the Trenches at Petersburg, is an attempt, he writes, to fill the need for a detailed study of field fortifications, and engineering in general, during the Petersburg Campaign (xiv). Hess intended this to be the concluding volume of a trilogy on the use of entrenchments in the eastern theater—the preceding volumes being Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War: The Eastern Campaigns 1861–1864 (2005) and Trench Warfare with Grant and Lee: Field Fortifications in the Overland Campaign (2007). But barely into the preface, Hess informs the reader that, as there is no one-volume history of the Petersburg Campaign that satisfies his criteria, his book is intended to fill that gap in the literature, as well (xvii). Somewhere in the process of finishing a trilogy on fortifications, Hess was seduced into attempting a definitive history of Petersburg. The result is disappointing. Hess excels at ferreting out first-person accounts, and here are numerous [End Page 192] vivid vignettes of soldiers digging, living, fighting, and dying in the trenches. He has thoroughly gleaned the Official Records and presents the reports of the engineers and commanding officers who designed and oversaw construction of the principal siegeworks. It is gratifying to see Gen. G. K. Warren, fortifications guru of the Army of the Potomac, awarded a plaudit or two. To have all these accounts gathered in one place is worth the price of admission. But, as a campaign study, Hess's effort lacks the coherence and consistency of Noah Andre Trudeau's The Last Citadel (1991). Students of Petersburg are familiar with Richard J. Sommers's seminal work Richmond Redeemed: The Siege at Petersburg (1981). This beloved 670-page tome covers the fighting before Richmond and Petersburg in autumn 1864 in exhaustive detail. To swell his volume's purview, Hess seized upon a framework devised by Sommers. But even grafting a gratuitous Ninth Union Offensive onto Sommers's eight does not let him own the material. As a result, Hess leads the reader off into anonymous-sounding Second or Seventh Offensives during which his discussion of fortifications languishes. Hess cannot decide whether to follow Sommers's road map, to present his eyewitness accounts in chronological order, or to group them under subject headings, and so he lurches from style to style. Sommers also describes the situation at Petersburg as a strategic siege, in which an army, such as Lee's, was forced to maneuver on a narrow front to defend its vital logistical base; this, as opposed to a tactical siege, in which defenders were cut off from the outside world and starved. Hess refuses to acknowledge the usage. He claims that Petersburg was less of a siege than it was a traditional field campaign with some limited aspects of siege warfare (xv). Yes, the Federal armies made a series of offensive moves to extend Lee's entrenched lines, but the traditional nature of a nine-month long, dug-in field campaign is nowhere explained. The Civil War had seen nothing like it. Hess concludes that if Lee had remained in Petersburg to the bitter end, allowing himself to be invested, then the campaign would have to be considered as a siege operation. (285). This pronouncement vaporizes upon scrutiny. Would the term siege operation then have applied retroactively to the preceding nine months? More to the point, the officers, engineers, and soldiers of both armies used every element of siege warfare available to them, including planting siege batteries, parallels, saps, mines, countermines, torpedoes, bombproofs, wire entanglements, and impoundments (as Hess documents). They referred to their day-to-day work continually as siege [End Page 193] operations and labeled their maps Siege of Petersburg. Why does Hess insist upon cross-examining his own witnesses? Hess laid out a number of themes for his trilogy in the preface of his first volume, but he does not revisit..." @default.
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• W2080347611 title "<i>In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat</i> (review)" @default.
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