Civil War Rockets - Tapa blanda

This is a history book about the use of military rockets in the American Civil War. During the Mexican War, many future Civil War generals became familiar with rocket warfare, and the advantage these light-weight weapons had in swampy terrain and on steep hillsides. In the Confederacy, there was active combat -- between the leaders. PGT Beauregard's advocacy of rockets led to conflect between him and Jefferson Davis, and ruined Beauregard's military career. A legendary two-stage rocket, fired from Richmond, missed Washington and may have gone into orbit. In Texas, the contract to manufacture rockets was given to a man already certified as incompetent. Up north, the two rocket regiments were commanded by a man who predicted that his newly-designed rocket gun would shoot "fifteen-foot-wide balls of fire 1,500 yards, terrorizing the traitors." Later medical records suggest that he suffered from syphilis of the brain. A separate chapter outlines the progress in cannon technology which left rocketry far behind, remembered only in the records of bureaucratic infighting and predictions of Great Balls of Fire.

The author received his medical degree at Stanford in 1957, practiced over forty years, and was Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCSF when he retired. In the years 1964-2012 he has published four medical books and twenty history books. The latter are mostly about the Civil War, with one each on Lewis and Clark and on the 1940 Attack on Taranto. He and his wife Beverly read all 75,000 Union courts-martial and created a searchable MS Access database. They have four children and six grandchildren.