USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -His forces followed a “scorched earth” policy, destroying military targets as well as industry, infrastructure, and civilian property, disrupting the Confederacy’s economy and transportation networks. The operation debilitated the Confederacy and helped lead to its eventual surrender.

Detailed explanation-2: -Through the employment of a scorched-earth policy, Sherman successfully disrupted the flow of supply of Confederate forces, broke the will of the civilian South to support the Confederate cause, and thus, hastened the end of the civil war.

Detailed explanation-3: -To them, Sherman’s devastating march through the South opened the way to the kind of warfare that culminated in World War II. Called total war, it goes beyond combat between opposing military forces to include attacks, both deliberate and indiscriminate, upon civilians and non-military targets.

Detailed explanation-4: -Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman believed that it was necessary to break the South’s will to fight. Sherman summed up the idea of total war in blunt terms: “We are not only fighting hostile armies, ” he declared in 1864, “but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war."