"Maj. Gen. JFC Fuller in his classic Decisive Battles of the Western World describes Sherman as the first of the modern totalitarian generals. Sherman universalize the war, waged on his enemies people and not only on Army, and made terrorism the linchpin of his strategy." Russell F Wigley as aptly characterized his strategy is one of annihilation. It transcended protracted conventional warfare. It not only aim to destroy Confederate armies, but also affected the destruction of transportation links, factories, agricultural crops and entire cities. Sherman's war of annihilation created an animosity towards the north that lingers in the south to the state. His strategy became the American way of war. It would reach its apogee with the strategic bombing of World War II." I the Book Unintended Consequences by British Military Historians Kenneth Hagan and Ian Bickertonthye say this
"What Sherman had in mind when he first announced that war is hell, he wasn't merely describing the awfulness of the experience, nor was he denying the possibility of moral judgment. He made such judgments freely, and he surely thought of himself as a righteous soldier. His maxim sums up, with admirable brevity, a whole way of thinking about war a one-sided and partial way of thinking, I shall argue, a powerful nonetheless. In his view, war is entirely and singularly the crime of those who begin it, and soldiers resisting aggression or rebellion can never be blamed for anything they do that brings victory closer. The sentence war is hell is doctrine not description: it is a moral argument an attempt at self-justification. Sherman was claiming to be innocent of all those actions(though they were his own actions) for which she was severely attacked. Sherman wants to judge war only at its outermost boundaries. But there is a great deal to be said about its interior regions, as he himself admits. Even in hell, it is possible to be more or less humane, the fight with or without restraint. Sherman's view is war is cruelty and you cannot refine it and therefore the one on those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and malediction is a people can pour out. But he himself deserves no curses at all" I know I had no hand in making this war". He is only fighting it, not by choice but because he has to. He has then been forced to use force in the burning of Atlanta is simply one more example of that use, one of his entailment support. It is cruel, no doubt but the cruelty isn't his own, it belong so to speak to the man of the Confederacy" you who in the midst of peace and prosperity have b plunged us into war.
another example of this kind of thinking comes from Phil Sheridan Sheridan, on leave from Indian-fighting on the western frontier, had attached himself as an observer to the victorious Prussian army, where he established a personal friendship with Otto von Bismarck, the architect of German unification. Asked by Bismarck how he thought the Germans should respond to costly French guerrilla attacks, Sheridan unhesitatingly replied: "The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with after the war." He advised that the insurgents be hanged, their villages burned and their lands laid waste until they begged for peace. While some Germans found this advice unacceptably cruel, Bismarck took it to heart. There should be "no laziness in killing," he ordered.
General Phil Sheridan, commander of the Department of the Missouri, issued orders for the Washita River expedition, including the following: "…to destroy [Indian] villages and ponies, to kill or hang all warriors, and to bring back all woman and children [survivors]."[62] The purpose of this "total war" strategy,[63] envisioned by Sheridan, was to make "all segments of Indian society experience the horrors of war as fully as the warriors"." We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux even to their extermination,men, women and children.
General William Tecumseh Sherman" If this is not evil what is? Sherman admitted in his memoirs that he was taught at West Point that he could have been prosecuted and possibly hanged as a war criminal for doing the things he did. My concern is not what he did that was 150 years ago it is the ramifications it had on military theory. The authors I quoted are all British and have no whining Confederate apologia going.