What tactics did the union use to win the Battle of Shiloh?

Answer 1

The Union really used no tactics at all, and were extremely fortunate to escape with the victory. There was a force under Grant camped at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, near Shiloh Church. There was another force, under Don Carlos Buell, marching to join Grant. The Confederates, under Albert Sidney Johnston, knew they needed to defeat Grant before Buell could arrive, and the combinned force became too big to handle. The inexperienced Confederates took three days to cover the 25 miles to get into position to attack Grant's force. They had planned for one day. This delay was to prove fatal. It rained heavily during those three days, the roads were a sea of mud. Many Rebels disobeyed orders and fired their guns, just to see if their gunpowder was still dry. With all this banging of guns in the woods just south of their positions and with numerous reports of scouts that a sizable Rebel force was drawing near, Grant's force was STILL surprised when the Rebels finally did launch their attack. Johnston had let his subordinate, Beauregard, make the plan of attack. Beauregard screwed this up as thoroughly as it could possibly be done. There were three corps to the Rebel army, and instead of placing them side by side, where each corps commander could watch over his own section of the line and bring up reinforcements as and where needed, Beauregard placed the three corps in three lines, one behind the other and each stretching the entire width of the battlefield. Thus when the troops got into action they became inextricably mixed as the first line, then the second halted to fight and the lines behind caught up and mixed in with them, and none of the corps commanders could see more than a portion of their widely spread commands. Johnston, already fuming from the long delay getting the troops up the road to Pittsburg landing, was asked when he learned of Beauregard's faulty dispositions whether he wanted to call off the attack. "I would fight them if they were a million" Johnston grimly replied, and the attack went ahead. Then Johnston stopped to aid a wounded Union officer, and left his own doctor to attend to him. Shortly after Johnston was shot in the leg, and before anyone realized how serious the wound was, he bled to death. A simple tourniquet would have saved him, but his doctor was still behind attending the wounded Yankee. This left command of the Rebel army in the hands of the "excitable" Beauregard. Despite all these Rebel blunders, they soon drove the Yankees from all areas of the field except one. Some Yankees held out in a stand of cedar trees, forever after called "The Hornet's Nest". It took some hours for them to run out of ammunition and be forced to give in. Thousands of other Yankees abandoned their units and ran for the dubious safety of the river bank, where they cowered for the rest of the day by the Tennessee River. Only the confusion following the death of Johnston prevented the complete annihilation of Grant's army. During the night after this day of bitterly intense action, Buell's army arrived, having had time to get there with the three day delay of the Rebels in launching their attack. So the next day, the tactics the Union forces used were just to attack all along the line with these thousands of fresh troops, against the still disorganized Rebels. They soon recovered their lost camp, but made no effort to pursue when the Rebels broke off the action and withdrew back whence they had come.