Questions about military order of battles

[cragwolf]

Is there any literature apart from the Official Records which list regiment numbers engaged in a battle? Essentially, it would be a statistical reference work, and for each battle you would have the names of the regiments involved in the fighting (for both sides obviously), and a rough estimate for the number of men involved in the fighting in each regiment. Or is this something that one would have to laboriously find out for oneself by consulting numerous works on specific battles? I know that this info is available for a few well-known battles (e.g. Gettysburg), but I was wondering if there was a reference that did it for a large number of battles.

[johan_steele]

Friar, there are TO&E's out there for several battles and campaigns.... It is actually easier to follow an individual Regiment than a Division or higher echelon units and this can be particularly difficult for CS units.

For one in depth TO&E work I would suggest Dyers Compendium which follows every Union Regiment from the beginning of their service until the end. There are works on battles, campaigns, individual Regiments and Brigades, memoirs etc... there are literally so many works on the CW that if you were to read one book a day on the subject you would not have finished by the date of your passing from this world.

The West Point Atlas series has detailed maps of evry major engagement of the war and it has Brigade & some Regimental markings on each map. THough it lacks statistics.

If you find that one work... post it here. I want a copy.

Welcome to the board Friar and good luck.

[cragwolf]

Thanks Shane. I was planning to get the OR on DVD-ROM from Guild Press, and I'm delighted to learn that it includes Dyer's Compendium. For Confederate units I've found a series by Stewart Sifakis called "Compendium of the Confederate Armies", a state-by-state series of volumes which some people call a Confederate version of Dyer's Compendium. Have you seen any of Sifakis' volumes? I don't live in the USA so my local libraries don't have them.

[larry_cockerham]

The great thing about these records is that they aren't at all consistent in many instances. Commanders tried to make themselves appear in the best light possible after a particular battle. Actual numbers for the Confederacy are particularly difficult to obtain particularly late in the war. There is a 20-plus series of regimental histories on the Confederate units published individually at about $20 per book. Some of these are sadly out of print but most are still available if you have a particular unit in mind, they are worth the trouble and are in many US libraries. Sadly no accurate composite for Confederate units that I've seen. As Shane wrote, if you find such, we could all use one.

[ole]

<font face="arial,helvetica">Friar:

The Battles and Leaders volumes almost always include the orders on both sides for each battle: army, corps, division, battalion, and regiments, together with their respective commanders.

Sifakis' compendiums are published by Facts on File and are very handy to get a thumbnail sketch of each unit from each Confederate state.

For the union side I use Welcher's The Union Army; 1861-1865. These are two volumes (Eastern and Western Theaters) and were published by Indiana University.

For any of these, plus anything else you'd care to find, go to abebooks.com. This is a list of books offered by some thousands of independent used book vendors. Hint: you can always find one book seller with a copy in better condition than one offered by a higher-priced vendor.

Happy Hunting.
Ole</font>

[ole]

Friar:

Forgot to mention -- abebooks.com is well represented in English-speaking countries (including Canada) so you might find a vendor within your own and thereby pass on the shipping.

Ole