The Damned of Petersburg

New York Times bestselling author Ralph Peters returns with the fourth installment in his Boyd Award-winning, Battle Hymn series on the Civil War, The Damned of Petersburg.

Glory turned grim, and warfare changed forever. From the butchery of The Crater, where stunning success collapsed into a massacre, through near-constant battles fought by heat-stricken soldiers, to the crucial election of 1864, The Damned of Petersburg resurrects the American Civil War's hard reality, as plumes and sabers gave way to miles of trenches.

Amid the slaughter of those fateful months, fabled leaders--Grant and Lee, Winfield Scott Hancock and A. P. Hill--turned to rising heroes, Confederates "Little Billy" Mahone and Wade Hampton, last of the cavaliers, or Union warriors such as tragedy-stricken Francis Channing Barlow and the fearless Nelson Miles, a general at twenty-four.

Nor does Ralph Peters forget the men in the ranks, the common soldiers who paid the price for the blunders of leaders who'd never know their names. In desperate battles, now forgotten, such as Deep Bottom, Globe Tavern and Reams Station, soldiers on both sides, pushed to the last human limits, fought on as their superiors struggled to master a terrible new age of warfare.

RALPH PETERS is an award-winning, bestselling novelist; a retired U.S. Army officer and former enlisted man; the author of numerous works on strategy; and a popular media commentator. In uniform and as a researcher and journalist, he has covered numerous conflicts and trouble spots, from Africa to the Caucasus, from Iraq to Pakistan.

Renowned for accuracy and authenticity, his Civil War writing, under his own name and as Owen Parry, has won numerous prizes, including the American Library Association’s Boyd Award (three times), the Hammett Prize, the Herodotus Award, the Grady McWhiney Award, and the Meade Society’s Order of Merit. In 2015, he received the Andrew J. Goodpaster Prize as an outstanding American soldier-scholar.

His Civil War series, the Battle Hymn Cycle, spans five books: Cain atGettysburg, Hell or Richmond, Valley of the Shadow, The Damned ofPetersburg, and Judgment at Appomattox.