Who are the great generals?

[Pete]

I've always been astonished by the focus of Americans on their Civil War whenever the topic moves to military history. Even really smart Americans seem to treat that one few-year civil war as a kind of inexhaustible reservoir for military history insights. I've yet to meet a British, French or Russian who's comparably fixated on the Crimean War, for example.

For a discussion of the influence of the American Civil War on European military officers I recommend the book The Military Legacy of the American Civil War: The European Inheritance, 1959 and reprinted in 1988, by the late Jay Luvaas. The career of Dr. Luvaas included being an instructor at the U.S. Military Academy and a professor at the U.S. Army War College. His book contains a chapter on German observations and analyses of the the war. The author concedes that the war had a negligible impact on German military thinking because of the preoccupation of Bismarck and the German states on unification during the 1860s. However, British army officers studied the campaigns of "Stonewall" Jackson at staff college during the first half of the last century.

Colonel G.F.R. Henderson (1854-1903), a York and Lancaster veteran of Tel el-Kebir, wrote the book The Fredericksburg Campaign in 1886, which brought him to the attention of then-General Garnet Wolseley and led to his appointment as an instructor at Sandhurst in 1890. In 1898 he published Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War, the book for which he is best known. Henderson was appointed chief of intelligence in South Africa in 1900 but he caught malaria and was invalided home, where he died in 1903. Regular British officers serving in the First and Second World Wars would have studied Lee and Jackson's campaigns at staff college, which became part of the curriculum when Colonel Henderson was a staff college instructor.