Bertherville III: Revenge Of The Union

Berthierville III: Revenge Of The Union








Looking at the American plan during Berthierville, one only gets the further sense that there is something unreal about it.





American operations




It is suggested that Grant's plan is to march on Trois-Rivieres and cut the British supply lines. This would be an advance of forty miles, which is too far to sustain an army overland, and it also neglects the detail that the British can simply land their supplies at Berthierville rather than Quebec – an error which Grant, in reality, would likely not have made.

There were also plans to use two ships of the line to defend Quebec – and a channel of 24 foot depth (minimum low tide) leading to Trois-Rivieres. It makes sense to use them there if needed.




The Union troops have occupied Sorel, at the head of the Richelieu river, and are using it to build ironclads. This is an impressive achievement (the Richelieu is 77 miles long), and it raises plenty of questions – one of them is why there are not corvettes shelling Sorel, since the cut through the flats on Lake Ste. Pierre is 18 feet deep at minimal low tide (this is the limiting draft) and, with a tidal range of up to four feet then it is quite possible that a Liffey class heavy frigate could get through Lake Ste. Pierre at high water – though not, frankly, necessary. A dozen gunboats are quite feasible (though we see perhaps four).







But Sorel is on the south side of the St. Lawrence, and the British and American positions around Berthierville are on the north. Which raises the question – where is the US base of operations? There is no rail line on the northern bank of the St Lawrence, and British gunboats/corvettes/ironclads could raid at will if the St Lawrence was being used to transport supplies – so the supplies are presumably coming by road from Montreal, a staggering distance to successfully transport supplies by road. (If they are coming up the Richelieu to Sorel and then crossing, then there are worse problems, as British ships can interdict the supply route at any time and as the supply head on the north bank is vulnerable.)







Sherman's HQ (at St. Thomas) is about twenty road miles from his two forward divisions, and this raises a major problem as formed troops road-march at about 2 miles per hour and horses walk at about four. This means that Sherman's HQ is more than a day's march away for infantry or supply wagons, and a few hours away even by fast courier.

The practical upshot of this is that, if the intent is for Sherman to send Hurlbut to support Prentiss:

The message from Prentiss to Sherman warning of the attack takes perhaps three hours. Immediate action by Sherman gets his message off to Hurlbut, who gets it two hours later, and Hurlbut's troops are ready for an immediate road march (formed in column, rather than occupying their defensive works - to form column would take about another hour).

The road march takes roughly four hours. By the time Hurlbut arrives to support Prentiss, nine hours have elapsed, and to deploy from line of march into a proper support position consumes another half hour or more.




Similarly, Wood, Mitchell and Negley's positions as given are all about three hours of march apart from one another. This is too far to be mutually supporting, and raises the question of why the British did not simply send their whole force against one division (the one defending their supply head, wherever it is) and cut the American supply route. This, at least, would have a good historical precedent in that it would roughly parallel the Seven Days battles after the initial phase.
Outnumbered 3-1 or worse by regulars for between five and eight hours, and surrounded, the division defending the supply head (Mitchell's? Wood's?) would likely surrender. Then, with the supply head blown away, the Union army would have to rapidly execute a change of base to get their supply link reestablished.
The difference with the Seven Days would be, however, that at the Seven Days McClellan's army was quite compact and that it had a clear line of retreat (i.e. the James River). The Union army here does not even have one clear supply line, let alone two, and the majority of their men are so far from any possible supply head that the destruction of the army seems not only possible but likely.







What TFSmith meant?




It is possible that the intent was that the “fortified line” of Wood and Mitchell was manned continuously, at about 2,000 men and one battery per mile (or 1,200 men and one battery per mile if Negley's position is correct on the map and he is in reserve).

While this makes a little more sense in terms of position, it is far less believable that the Americans could withstand any kind of attack – at 2,000 men per mile, a two-rank line of battle for each mile is 600 yards wide with a 1,000 yard gap on each flank. At 1,200 men per mile, a two-rank line is 360 yards wide with a 1,300 yard gap on each flank; both formations are extremely vulnerable, the flanks are too exposed. (If the whole force is spread as a skirmish line covering the entire frontage, then it is fragile enough to be shattered by a cavalry charge let alone an infantry attack.)
It's also so sparse as to be nearly completely uncontrollable, with messages taking hours to travel down the line.

For comparison, at Gettysburg Meade's 100,000+ man army defended a line about four miles long, at 26,000 men per mile – this provided for multiple successive lines in depth, to reinforce the front or prevent a catastrophic breach. At the Alma, the Russian troops were at 15,000 men per mile and in fixed defensive works – this proved insufficient to stop the British attack.

Even during WW1, the defence – with magazine rifles, machine guns, and barbed wire – used about 5,000 men per mile in heavy trench works as standard. Of course, since TFSmith plagarizes and alters a quote from Pakenham to suggest that the rifle musket and the trench are comparable to high powered magazine rifles and machine guns, perhaps this is his intent.



In implying that Americans with “rifled weapons” (realistically mostly smoothbores for these troops, as noted previously) at 2,000 men or less per mile are equivalent to cutting-edge 1890s weapons such as high velocity magazine rifles or machine guns, TFSmith is committing a major error of history – one it is clear could not have been made in ignorance.






How it would really go?




Of course, this is Grant and Sherman, but Grant and Sherman in a marble-man caricature which does not represent the reality. Like other US generals of OTL, they are simply Right instead of having their real foibles – Grant and Sherman, like many of the “old guard” of the US Army, were very opposed to entrenching their men. (Sumner, who in this timeline is commanding at Portland and fighting a trench war with the British, in reality testified in 1863 to the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War that establishing field fortifications was bad for the men.)




The most appropriate model for Grant's preparations is more likely to be Shiloh – his first major field battle after Fort Donelson in OTL. From Wiki:

Grant developed a reputation during the war for being more concerned with his own plans than with those of the enemy. His encampment at Pittsburg Landing displayed his most consequential lack of such concern—his army was spread out in bivouac style, with many of his men surrounding a small, log meetinghouse named Shiloh Church (Shiloh was a biblical city that served as the capital of the Kingdom of Israel). passing the time waiting for Buell's army with drills for his many raw troops without establishing entrenchments or other significant defensive measures.
In his memoirs, Grant reacted to criticism of his lack of entrenchments: "Besides this, the troops with me, officers and men, needed discipline and drill more than they did experience with the pick, shovel and axe. ... under all these circumstances I concluded that drill and discipline were worth more to our men than fortifications."

Grant telegraphed a message to Halleck on the night of April 5, "I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us, but will be prepared should such a thing take place." Grant's declaration proved to be overstated. Sherman, the informal camp commander at Pittsburg Landing, did not believe the Confederates had a major assault force nearby; he discounted the possibility of an attack from the south. Sherman expected that Johnston would eventually attack from the direction of Purdy, Tennessee, to the west. When Col. Jesse Appler, 53rd Ohio Infantry, warned Sherman that an attack was imminent, the general angrily replied, "Take your ****ed regiment back to Ohio. There are no Confederates closer than Corinth."

This General Grant has had no experiences along the lines of Shiloh to wake him of this problematic view, nor has Sherman. Grant has never commanded in any field battle in this TL before Berthierville, with his experience consisting of skirmishes, brief sieges, and two forts captured by a combination of Act of God (Fort Henry, rendered impotent by an unusually high flood) and a confident letter (Donelson, which surrendered because Grant ran a bluff).





With Grant's army at Shiloh being saved by a flank-marched reinforcement from Buell (thus giving the Union troops about a 2:1 superiority on the second day), the immediate question is simple.

In a timeline where any British mistake from roughly 1840 to 1900 is fair game, why have Grant and Sherman both become amazingly prescient generals able to avoid their mistakes of OTL, aside from sheer bias? Going by the historical record of the preferences of these generals, we should expect to see the army in a field camp - and for the British Army to roll over them in about half an hour.




Conclusions


The operations at Berthierville have no place in the 19th Century. They look more like the kind of operations that would be conducted in a post-WW1 environment, with individual forces dug in on absurdly wide fronts and in large part unable to maintain contact with one another except through radio.

Where the author takes parallels from the battles of the 19th century he inverts who the winner was - despite the Union (in the position of the historical loser at both the Alma and Stones River) being worse off relative to the British (in the position of the historical winner) than in both actual battles.

The generals in the battle are certainly great generals from the late Civil War, but they are presented as infallible geniuses compared to their real selves.


More plausible possibilities, given the situation as shown (that the Americans are on the offensive) would be either for the Union army to manoeuvre by wings (have one part of the army fix the British and the other attempt to conduct a flank assault) or for the Union army to conduct a march on Berthierville to force the British up the river. This still does not answer the question of the Union supply route, but it at least means the land operations are from the right century.

But perhaps the most plausible outcome is the one the author cannot countenance - that the British, with the advantages of weapons, position, training, numbers and surprise, might actually come off best.