Overview

In the Trenches at Petersburg , the final volume of Earl J. Hess's trilogy of works on the fortifications of the Civil War, recounts the strategic and tactical operations around Petersburg during the last ten months of the Civil War. Hess covers all aspects of the Petersburg campaign, from important engagements that punctuated the long months of siege to mining and countermining operations, the fashioning of wire entanglements and the laying of torpedo fields to impede attacks, and the construction of underground shelters to protect the men manning the works. In the Trenches at Petersburg humanizes the experience of the soldiers working in the fortifications and reveals the human cost of trench warfare in the waning days of the struggle. |In the Trenches at Petersburg, the final volume of Earl J. Hess's trilogy of works on the fortifications of the Civil War, recounts the strategic and tactical operations around Petersburg during the last ten months of the Civil War. Hess covers all aspects of the Petersburg campaign, from important engagements that punctuated the long months of siege to mining and countermining operations, the fashioning of wire entanglements and the laying of torpedo fields to impede attacks, and the construction of underground shelters to protect the men manning the works. In the Trenches at Petersburg humanizes the experience of the soldiers working in the fortifications and reveals the human cost of trench warfare in the waning days of the struggle.

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9781469609959

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Hess has a well-deserved reputation as the master on American Civil War field fortifications. . . . [Makes] a coherent whole of the months-long contest by placing the series of offensives and counteroffensives like beads on a string of digging, tunneling

By relating the development of the army's field engineering to the course of the combat action, and through the use of previously untapped sources, Hess brilliantly unravels the complexity of the Petersburg story. This is simply one of the finest Civil War studies of our generation. --A. Wilson Greene, Pamplin Historical Park, author of The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign

Hess has a well-deserved reputation as the master on American Civil War field fortifications. . . . [Makes] a coherent whole of the months-long contest by placing the series of offensives and counteroffensives like beads on a string of digging, tunneling, and mining. . . . Hess fans and students of field fortifications will be pleased, and others will find a work of first class military history. -- Journal of America's Military Past

Author Information

Earl J. Hess is associate professor of history at Lincoln Memorial University. He is author of many books on the Civil War, including, most recently, The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi.

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