(NOTE: As of 7/2018, there's a newer edition of this book available with a new title - "Our Fathers at Shiloh." I'd suggest you check out the new version as it contains a lot of additional information about the battle. Jack Kunkel - author) One Sunday morning in early April in 1862, the North and South clashed at an obscure river landing deep in the Tennessee woods, far from the intensely watched battlefields near Washington and Richmond. Until now, many experts believed that the Civil War would be over within a matter of months. But they were in for a shock! Fought by amateur soldiers - mostly Midwestern farm boys led by generals who had never conducted operations on this scale - when the two sides finally came to grips at Shiloh they fought with incredible ferocity that piled more casualties in two days than the losses of the American Revolution, the Mexican War and the various Indian wars combined. Shiloh was a confusing battle, partly because it was a battle of amateurs and partly because it was fought in rugged terrain. Because of this, the author carefully takes you through the fighting hour by hour with generously detailed maps, illustrations and photos to help you understand what this tremendous battle was really like, both for the generals and for the young soldiers who did the fighting.
About the Author: Describing myself gets me kind of depressed. At my advanced age, it doesn't look like I'm going to make President or even become a nice dentist. (Sorry, Mom!) I console myself with my pipe, a shot or two of bourbon, and decent health. When not sitting at home on my duff behind a computer, I can often be found tooling around the country in a beat-up old van, along with my attack-cat, Pepper, my chief critic. The stated purpose of these trips is to gather data and photos for books - all three of them at present - but I do love walking battlefields and writing about them. The Civil War has always fascinated me. I can remember when I was a kid in Illinois, reading about the clash of the Blue & the Gray and being amazed that Americans would fight each other with such fury. Back then that war seemed to have happened a zillion years ago. But as I've grown older and time passes faster, I've come to realize that the Civil War wasn't that long ago at all. I think the last Civil War veteran died in the 1950s, in my lifetime, and there were lots of them still around when my parents were born. Anyway, I decided to combine my interest in the Civil War with a couple of others - writing and computer technology I consider myself more of a "splainer" rather than a true historian. For one thing I've never been to historian school, and for another I haven't spent years pouring through letters, newspapers and journals of the era. I greatly admire those who do and in my next life I might join them, but right now my goal is to take their consolidated research to the next step by explaining what happened in a way that readers can easily relate to, taking full advantage of computer technology that was only available to a limited extent if at all to my predecessors, including but not limited to, photography, map illustration, GPS, and whatever other tools I can lay hands on. This is not to say I don't research my books. I do, usually for months. But I try not to get lost in research or in technology. My ultimate goal is to explain in plain terms what happened back then, and to do so in an entertaining fashion, and also to get across to the reader what it was really like to be a participant in these terrible battles. The result is the book you see here. And that's pretty much the story of my life - so far. Hope you enjoy this book and have a good day! Jack Kunkel