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Why did Robert E Lee chose a direct attack at Gettysburg rather than a siege?
Wiki User
∙ 11y ago
He may have feared that the Union could outlast him in a siege. If they received enough reinforcements over time, the Union could have shifted to the offensive and he was already at a tactical disadvantage with fewer men, who were poorly provisioned. Lee was not strong on logistics. Also, his experience in the Mexican War may have taught him the wrong lesson. There he had been able to dislodge a numerically superior force using direct assaults, but there, the enemy was poorly trained and poorly provisioned. His ego also got involved. He may have believed that his army, with him in command, could defeat a numerically and materially superior force, as it had when on the defensive in Virginia.
NEW RESPONDENT
IMPROVEMENT.
To set up a siege of an enemy army operating in its own territory and in an open field it is indispensable:
-1 encircle the enemy army.
-2 Prevent the same from receiving reinforcements or being relieved by a friend force, by gaining the control of the surrounding territory.
Without taking into account other factors such as logistic, consistency in terms of manpower, equipments, guns etc., the Confederate Army would never had been strong enough to accomplish those preliminary tasks.
Therefore Lee's choice to fight a pitched battle aiming to destroy or badly defeat the Union Army was the right one and it had been already taken since when the invasion of Pennsylvania had started.
His failure was mainly due to the fact:
A- that he was forced to accept battle before his army could have been deployed as planned.
B- That he fell prey of the "Fog of War", because J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry Corps was not able to join the battlefield in time, thus depriving his army of the indispensable support of reconaissance and intelligence.
Wiki User
∙ 11y ago
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