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The Smoke at Dawn is the third volume in a series that tells the story of the Civil War in the "West." (West being the areas West of the Appalachian mountains.) From the first two volumes, A Blaze of Glory dealt with the 1862 campaign at Shiloh. A Chain of Thunder describes the summer of 1863 and the siege of Vicksburg. The Smoke at Dawn carries the reader into the Fall of 1863 as the campaign around Chattanooga develops. Major General William Starke Rosecrans had risen through the ranks under Gen McClellan and is given command of the Army of the Cumberland responsible for an area that includes eastern Tennessee and parts of Alabama and Mississippi. His adversary is Confederate Lieutenant General Braxton Bragg, a strong-willed disciplinarian who has turned his troops into an effective fighting force, fearful of no one. Rosecrans, a better academician/engineer than a field commander, outmaneuvers Bragg, getting him to abandon Chattanooga, a crossroads for four major railroads for the South. Bragg flees into Georgia with Rosecrans in hot pursuit. When Rosecrans splits up his force into three arms to try to trap Bragg, Bragg turns his forces back on Rosecrans and his weakened field force. Rosecrans' position is then routed by Longstreet at Chickamauga and Rosecrans flees back to Chattanooga, where he is quickly surrounded by Bragg and is cut off from his Federal supply lines. Lincoln, disappointed by Rosecrans' predicament, promotes Gen Grant to theater commander who then replaces Rosecrans with Gen George Thomas, the man who covered Rosecrans' disorganized retreat from Chickamauga. Grant then assembles a large force including the armies led by Joe Hooker and Wm T Sherman with the command to free Chattanooga and to destroy Bragg's army. Union troops, now strongly reinforced, return to Chattanooga to drive Bragg and the Army of Tennessee away from their positions surrounding the city, permanently securing the North's control of the state of Tennessee. Chattanooga's railhead now becomes the major supply and logistics base for both the continuing support for the occupying Army of the Cumberland and for launching Sherman's Atlanta campaign in the Spring of 1864. This tale is told through several voices: Generals Grant, Wm T. Sherman and George Thomas, the vaunted “Rock of Chickamauga”, as well as the private Fritz “Dutchie” Bauer, now familiar from previous stories, on the Union side, and those of Generals Bragg, Patrick Cleburne and James Longstreet, as well as the legendary cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest for the Confederacy. We get immersed in the world of the commanders, their infighting and insubordinations, and of the common soldiers, the misery and monotony of their daily lives—endless drill, poor food or none at all; dirty, tattered uniforms filthy with lice; bad weather, bad water; countless flies, chiggers, ticks, mosquitoes and scorpions; illnesses; interminable marches with too little rest, and so on. Shaara's voices come from the well-researched letters, documents, memoirs and diaries from those who survived the events and lived to tell the tale. Their fears, their angst, their musings and their wonderments touch readers where the cold facts of history books do not. Whether history is made live for the reader or made soap opera depends upon the reader at the time of their reading, but either way, the reader gets to hear from voices from the past as those voices share how they saw and/or made these events occur. That is time worth sharing. It is intimate, it is interesting and it is worthwhile...Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
i have read almost all ,s books, all great and educational
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
Anyone who is a Civil War follower will love this book. Well researched. Well written.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
The stories of the individual conflicts within the history of this battle were very compelling.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New
Excellent civil war novel
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
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