A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg

From the Crater's Aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill, Volume 2

De: A. Wilson Greene

Narrado por: Paul Woodson

Grinding, bloody, and ultimately decisive, the Petersburg Campaign was the Civil War's longest and among its most complex. A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg offers a gripping, comprehensive history of the decisive campaign in the eastern theater. In this second of three volumes, A. Wilson Greene narrates the critical months from August through October 1864, during which Ulysses S. Grant's army group launched three major offensives against Robert E. Lee's defenses around Petersburg and the Confederate capital in Richmond. The Confederates counterpunched after each Union advance and conducted a spectacular cavalry raid that netted almost 2,500 cattle from Federal grazing grounds. But as winter approached, Grant had captured one of Lee's primary supply routes and extended the lines around Petersburg and Richmond to some thirty-five miles.

Greene's narrative chronicles these bloody engagements using many previously unpublished primary accounts from common soldiers and ranking officers alike. The struggle for Petersburg is often characterized as a siege, but Greene's narrative demonstrates that it was dynamic, involving maneuver and combat equal in intensity to that of any major Civil War operation.

©2025 The University of North Carolina Press (P)2025 Tantor Media

rich detail in dire need of chronology

this being volume 2 of a series, it does not linger on the events which were already covered in volume 1 and continues in exactly the same style. which is indeed what you'd want from a history of the battle for petersburg that is going to go into extreme detail.


that is where it excels, covering events with the sort of day to day meticulousness you typically see only in books covering the "famous" battles like Antietam or especially Gettysburg. thus far this author and his two volumes (a third one hasn't been published as of 2025) has established itself as the quintessential military history of the battle of Petersburg.


my sole complaint is the same one I had about volume 1. for a series that is often describing multiple major movements and events unfolding over the court of 1 week or even just 1 day, the author does not stick strongly enough to organizing the events chronologically


that sort of thing isn't a problem when it comes to broader subjects or cultural or political histories but when you're describing events happening on Day X at 2:30pm to 2:45pm, it completely throws off the vibe and makes for only frustration when you're listening to details on a specific movement or battle only to have the next section describe movements or actions that happened before the battle or slightly after.


thankfully it is not as incoherent as volume 1 was with regards to the battle of the Crater, where events were being described as unfolding over a timeline that was frequently self-contradictory, plans being made for the crater tunnel after the tunnel was already being dug, or work beginning the day after work was already described as beginning. the only significant incident in volume 2 is a brief description of general Birney leaving his command due to sickness and dying of Malaria en route home, only for the next chapter to cover a minor battle in which Birney is not yet dead and still commanding his army while sick.


as a whole this is probably going to be the definitive work on Petersburg that I can find (at least on audiobook) and demands to be read with the same level of precision (and hour to hour maps) as Gettysburg