Good stuff, Raybin old pal, though I must defend my good friend Paddy G. Having walked around several ACW battlefields with him it is clear that he knows the period, the tactics and the weapons. He just doesn't believe the 'accepted view' in many cases, and, frankly, so much of the accepted view is a mix of heroic mythology, folktale and the natural urge to filter the past through more recent experience. He is not an apostate but an iconoclast he likes to break idols, and many of them are well worth the breaking. Interestingly, his work on WWI, where he concluded that the doddery old British "Butchers and Bunglers" were far more competent than the mythology of that war has allowed, has been attacked by proponents of the existing view also. Myself, I think he isn't always right, but he is always interesting, and that we need historians who challenge traditional views rather than parrot them. Back to Dispatch July 2002 Table of Contents Back to Dispatch List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 by HMGS Mid-South This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com