Killer Angels
...ay of battle during which his cavalry unit was decimated. July 2, 1863 (PART III)"Thursday" sees the Union victory at Little Round Top and Lee’s plans for the next day: a valiant attack at the Union center. Fremantle theorizes that the Civil War came about because the South is like a transplanted Europe whereas the North despises the Old World; Chamberlain comes upon a black man and reflects on the ethics of slavery and the institution’s role in starting the war; Longstreet reluctantly attacks the Union’s left flank; Chamberlain defends the Union’s extreme left flank against Longstreet’s assault; Longstreet broods over his loss at Little Round Top and Stuart’s return; and Lee reprimands Stuart and makes the decision for a final attack at the center of the Union line. July 3, 1863 (PART IV) "Friday" sees the failure of Lee’s grand plan to charge the Union center; the Rebels are forced to retreat and must give up their invasion of the North. Chamberlain moves his men from the vulnerable extreme left to the safety of the center of the Union line; Longstreet debates with Lee over the need to fight a defensive war but Lee wants to end the war here and now; Chamberlain is caught under the storm of Rebel artillery that precedes Pickett’s Charge; Armistead leads his men alongside Pickett and reaches the Union wall only to be beaten back by overwhelming numbers; Longstreet watched the disillusioned Rebels retreat; and the victorious Chamberlain looks over the battlefield and watches the rains come. The author’s purpose for writing this book was because he wanted to know what it was like to be there and also to inform his readers of the Civil War. He did so by adding many different themes in such as loyalty, death, and strategies. Loyalty is essential for an army to function well; soldiers have to trust their officers in order to follow them successfully. The idea of loyalty appears many times in The Killer Angels: Kilrain is loyal to Chamberlain, Goree and Sorrel are loyal aides to Longstreet, and most importantly, the entire Confederate army is fiercely loyal to Robert E. Lee. Although The Killer Angels reads like an adventure novel, it also describes one of the bloodiest battles in the history of the Civil War. As he awaits the next battle, Chamberlain remembers piling up corpses at a previous battle in order to protect himself from bullets. He instinctively orders his brother to plug a hole in the regiment line and realizes he may have ordered his brother to his death. Limbs are sawed off wounded men in order to save them from infection, but Kilrain still dies from amputation and blood loss. During Pickett's Charge, soldiers are blown apart by artillery, "and here and there, tumbling over and over like a blood-spouting cartwheel, a piece of a man." Many historians view the Battle of Gettysburg as a turning point between the old methods of warfare and the new methods, changes that were dictated by the development of new technologies such as repeating rifles and long-range artillery. The Civil War saw the first ironclad battleships and the last great infantry charge: Pickett's Charge. The devastating losses of that charge—Pickett lost sixty percent of his division—marked the beginning of the end for the usefulness of infantry in major warfare. Cannons, grenades, tanks, planes, and missiles would eventually...