This Was Andersonville

the true story of Andersonville Military Prison ...

Plot

KIRKUS REVIEW To anyone who has read MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville much of the material relating to that horror of the Civil War will be familiar for McElroy's diary was one of Kantor's basic sources. It is horridly fascinating to get the material first hand in this excellent editing of the original. While McElroy, understandably enough, has unrelieved scorn for everything Confederate (and plenty of criticism for the powers in Washington that permitted Andersonville to happen), one must read this as a personal, and wholly unrelieved, record. Possibly the only touch of humanity lies in the friendships that knit men together, that made sacrifice and endurance conceivable, that helped sustain life. John McElroy was among those who were shipped to Savannah at the threat of Sherman's approach; shipped back again to Millen; later to Florence, so that he and his buddy experienced the horrors of each of the worst of the Confederacy's prison stockades, knew through intimate relationship the key personalities that perpetrated those horrors. McElroy was a journalist. His gift for reporting is undimmed by the years. Roy Maredith says he has left out some of the most horrible details; what he has left in makes Dachau and Belsen credible. As one reads this story, fiction pales beside the facts. In addition to the text of the diary, this includes a selection of the photographs made at the time and the transcript of the Wirtz trial. An important source for students of the Civil War, but one that will raise the hackles of the South.