Talk:Army of the Potomac

I was looking at the list of corps and commanders and was going to point out, pedantically, that the IX Corps was not part of the Army of the Potomac on the Overland Campaign, nor at any time after Fredericksburg. At that point it became something of a floater: It was at Vicksburg but did not join the Army of the Tennessee, was part of neither the Army of the Tennessee nor the Army of the Cumberland during the Chattanooga campaign, and just came along for the ride in the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns without joining the Army of the Potomac. Burnside reported directly to Grant, partly because he was senior to Meade, just as in the West he was senior to Sherman and Thomas and Hooker and pretty much everyone other than Grant. (I don't know about Rosecrans, but I believe he was gone before the IX Corps became involved in the campaign anyway.) It's no fun having s former underling as your CO, and would have been made even more awkward by the fact that Meade was so furious at the way his division was left to twist in the wind at Fredericksburg that his criticism of Burnside verged on insubordination. As it was Meade kept bitching and moaning that Burnside should at least coordinate more closely with AoP HQ, but then, poor old Meade always was a curmudgeon, wasn't he?

Anyway, I was going to do something about this, and then I thought, Do we need a section on who the corps commanders were at all? None of them appear in GotS except as cardboard cutouts for the demo of the AK-47, and there are no Union POVs to make the AoP's organization relevant. And do we need a link to an OTL Order of Battle?

Actually I was thinking that the whole article sort of felt like a holdover from the days before we took over here and that never got brought up to current standards. In fact I created it, Redem only made one proofreading change, and all three of us have tweaked it in the post-Silver period of our being in charge. I think we should consider a rewrite just the same. But not now, I'm going to bed. Turtle Fan 05:42, May 19, 2011 (UTC)