Booknotes: Attack at Daylight and Whip Them

New Arrival:
• Attack at Daylight and Whip Them: The Battle of Shiloh, April 6-7, 1862
  by Gregory A. Mertz (Savas Beatie, 2019).

Having just left Chattanooga, the Emerging Civil War series stays out west with Gregory Mertz's Attack at Daylight and Whip Them: The Battle of Shiloh, April 6-7, 1862. It is one of those volumes that integrates tour and narrative together, as opposed to placing the driving tour at the back like most of the others (I seem to recall) have done. At least in terms of organization, it looks like the text primarily serves the tour here rather than the other way around. This means the battle narrative does not follow a strict chronology, with the content of the later chapters freely moving back and forth between Day 1 and Day 2 events. The concluding chapter examines the immediate aftermath of the battle.

Mertz's book possesses the series's typical abundance of photographs and other illustrations. There are seventeen maps, which is an unusually large number for an ECW entry. The tactical maps depict the action at mostly brigade scale. The single appendix discusses Lew Wallace's ever controversial march to the battlefield on April 6. Army orders of battle and a brief suggested reading list round out the volume.