GDG- Martin & Pfanz's books on Day 1 - a quick comparitive study

[Alan David Brunelle]

James Cameron wrote:
> Esteemed GDG Member Contributes:
>
>
> Alan,
>
> <snip>
>
> You do raise a good point in terms of the authors' approaches to the 
> sequence of events west and north of town, in terms of a time-based, 
> or geographic approach.  In a way, this is a problem for any treatment 
> of the first day.  The 1st and 11th Corps fought on two very distinct 
> fronts, with not a whole lot of interaction until the retreat phase of 
> the action. Unlike the second day, where the progressive nature of 
> Longstreet's attack, working its way sequentiually up the line, 
> provides a certain narrative continuity, when writing about the first 
> day it can be difficult to keep from jumping back and forth from one 
> corps sector to the other.  It can be very difficult to provide a 
> strong narrative connection between events which happened at the same 
> time, but on different parts of the line.  One has to explain, say, 
> what took place on Barlow's Knoll, and then go back and discuss what 
> took place on Seminary Ridge at the same time.  That's one reason I 
> still hope John Imhoff will do a day one map study.  A visual 
> depiction would go a long way toward allowing events on the two Corps 
> fronts to be viewed in context.
>
It is amazing to me, nonetheless, that even though this all took place 
in a relatively small geographic area, there can still be such a 
disjointed nature to the battle. In some ways there really were at least 
3 distinct areas in the critical late afternoon: "Barlow's" Knoll, 
Railroad cut area, and then the McPherson/Seminary Ridge action. Then 
you can continue to break that down because of the way the attacks were 
coming in from most areas of the compass (E, NE, N, NW, W and SW), which 
induced various defensive measures that caused further splits in the 
action. (Clearly the disjointed nature of the Confederate attacks - 
especially from Ewell's Corps - creates this interesting effect.)

Alan