The Texas in the Civil War Message Board - Archive

Re: Officers not in line units
In Response To: Re: Officers not in line units ()

ah - this explains why I keep running into names that don't seem to exist in most of the references. I notice that officers seem to get elected into a unit, resign later, act as a civilian contractor, go active again in a different unit or level (State, CSA, CSN, militia). Thank heaven for the geneaology people. If you are used to modern tables of organization, trying to reassemble a unit structure from the OR's can be a bit daunting. Texas seems to have had a predeliction for what the Germans called a "kampgruppe" (roughly "Battle Group"), a temporary formation made up of elements of a number of separate units assembled for a specific objective, then disassembled after the action and the troops returned to their original units. A pretty effective technique if your command structure is flexible enough for it. It seems to me that Magruder, Ford, et al specialized in this type of command structure, much to the challenge of historians and interested parties trying to figure out how something actually happened. The closest military tradition to that found in Texas in my opinion was the Boer commandoes in S. Africa. It also explains why commanders more comfortable with a conventional command structure found Texas such a challenge (Hebert and Walker).

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Officers not in line units
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Re: Officers not in line units
Re: Officers not in line units