Far and away the best Gettysburg book I have read….
https://www.abebooks.com/Second-Day...T9IiC_QIVIxTUAR0LNQSeEAQYBCABEgKRfvD_BwEReally a book about the whole battle, not just the Second Day. Gives credit to Meade not often given. Handed command just THREE Days before the battle, handed a mess by Hooker but aided by able subordinates scarcely slept at all over that three days, got the Army of the Potomac in motion with exemplary speed.
Buford is properly given credit for day one, generally overlooked is his excellent reconnaissance in the days leading up to the battle that enabled Meade and his generals to make the decisions they did.
Two wrong decisions you can hang on Longstreet:
1) His insistence on delaying the attack for hours while waiting for his favorite Alabama shock troops to arrive from twenty five miles out. Then his throwing those same exhausted troops against Little Round Top with empty canteens on a stifling hot day.
As it was even given that long delay Warren put the 20th Maine and Vincent’s NY troops on Little Round Top with just minutes to spare. What would have been the outcome if nobody had been on that hill and the Confederates had flanked the Union line?
2) His absolute refusal to consider Hood’s urgent requests to strike the main Union Artillery Park while lay just on the far side of the Round Tops, on the turnpike being used by the arriving Union Army. How would it have affected the already rattled Union troops on Cemetery Ridge if Hood had gone around their rear?
As for disengaging the whole army and going around the Union left as Longstreet reportedly proposed, hardly possible with both armies already in close contact with arriving troops and supply trains of both armies spread out over twenty miles. Add to that, in the absence of Stuart, no one on the Confederate side knew where the Union Army was other than those they could see in front on them.
JMHO
