Was Stonewall Jackson actually that good? Let me end this debate.
In the spring of 1862, the Confederacy was losing. McClellan was marching 100,000 men up the Virginia Peninsula toward Richmond. The capital was about to fall. The war was about to end.
Then a weird, lemon-sucking, ex-VMI physics professor changed everything.
Thomas J. Jackson had 17,000 men in the Shenandoah Valley. The Union had three separate armies under Banks, Frémont, and Shields totaling over 60,000, all converging to crush him, then reinforce the assault on Richmond.
What Jackson did next is still taught at West Point, Sandhurst, and the Israeli Defense Forces' command college.
In 48 days, his "foot cavalry" marched 646 miles through the Blue Ridge. He fought five battles, McDowell, Front Royal, Winchester, Cross Keys, Port Republic, and won every single one. He used interior lines to appear in three places at once. He marched his men until their shoes fell off, then marched them more. He told no one his plans, not even his generals. When asked where he was going, he'd say "to do my duty."
He didn't just defeat three armies. He paralyzed them. Lincoln personally diverted 40,000 reinforcements away from Richmond to chase a ghost. McClellan's offensive collapsed. Richmond was saved.
He had done it with a third of the men.
Then came Chancellorsville, May 1863. Lee was outnumbered 130,000 to 60,000 by Hooker's army. Most generals would've retreated. Lee split his army. Then Jackson split it AGAIN, taking 28,000 men on a 12-mile flank march directly across the front of a numerically superior enemy, a maneuver textbooks call suicidal.
At dusk, his men exploded out of the woods into the unsuspecting Union right flank. The XI Corps disintegrated. It is, to this day, one of the most audacious tactical movements in the history of warfare.
Hours later, riding ahead in the dark to plan a night attack, his own men shot him by mistake. His arm was amputated. He died of pneumonia eight days later.
Lee, on hearing it: "He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right."
Patton studied him. Rommel studied him. Moshe Dayan reportedly modeled parts of the Six-Day War on his Valley Campaign. MacArthur called him the greatest natural military genius America ever produced.
He was 39 years old.
You can hate the cause. But pretending Jackson wasn't one of the most lethal field commanders in military history is just bad history.
The man was a problem.
On this day in 1981, the U.S. Army unveils the EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle. Modelled on the 1976 GMC 26 Palm Beach line of motorhomes, it's fully equipped with machine guns, flame throwers and rocket launchers, along with a state of the art communications and navigation suite.
WOUNDED DEER, Massachusetts – Emily Dickinson College sophomore Fawn Liebowitz died suddenly last week in a kiln explosion on campus. Liebowitz, 20, was a sociology major from Fort Wayne, Indiana. 5/31/62 💐
I was drinking a beer and the bartender yelled “Does anyone know CPR??” I replied, “I know the entire alphabet!” and we all laughed and laughed.
Well, except for this one guy