We remember Sherman as the man who never lost. That’s not quite the record. On June 27, 1864, he ordered a frontal assault on entrenched Confederate positions at Kennesaw Mountain, northwest of Atlanta. It cost him roughly 3,000 casualties against about 1,000 for Johnston’s dug-in defenders. The attack gained nothing.

What interests me as a military man is what Sherman did next. He admitted the error—to himself and in his own writing—and went back to what had been working all summer: flanking. Within two weeks he’d maneuvered Johnston out of the Kennesaw position entirely without another major assault. By early July the Confederates had fallen back to the Chattahoochee, the last natural barrier before Atlanta. Days later, Sherman had troops across it.

Compare that to commanders who repeated the same frontal assault over and over because doctrine, pride, or political pressure demanded it. The Civil War is a catalog of them. Sherman’s genius wasn’t that he never made mistakes. It was that he made a mistake once, paid the bill, read the receipt, and changed.

There’s a lesson there that outlasts the war, and I’ve seen it in every organization I’ve served in: the dangerous leader isn’t the one who errs. It’s the one who can’t admit it.

In Howl, Kennesaw happens on the same day as a death at Andersonville that sets the entire second half of the novel in motion. History and story running on parallel tracks—that’s the structure of the whole book, with interstitial sections giving you the real history alongside the fiction.

Howl is on Amazon. https://amzn.to/40WYgfJ