Америка Азамат Соғысының Батыр Генералы: Гренвилл Меллен Додж

Union Army general during the American Civil War

Grenville Mellen Dodge (April 12, 1831 – January 3, 1916) was a Union Army officer on the frontier and a pioneering figure in military intelligence during the Civil War, who served as Ulysses S. Grant's intelligence chief in the Western Theater. He served in several notable assignments, including command of the XVI Corps during the Atlanta Campaign. He later commanded troops against Native Americans and served as a U. S. Congressman, businessman, and railroad executive who helped direct the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. Historian Stanley P. Hirshon suggested that Dodge, "by virtue of the range of his abilities and activities," could be considered "more important in the national life after the Civil War than his more famous colleagues and friends, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan."

Dodge was born in the Putnamville section of Danvers in Massachusetts, to Sylvanus Dodge and Julia Theresa Phillips, a descendant of the Rev. George Phillips who settled Watertown, Massachusetts in 1630. He settled in the Missouri River city of Council Bluffs. For the next decade, he was involved in surveying for railroads, including the Union Pacific. Following Confederate General Van Dorn's repulse at the Second Battle of Corinth in October 1862, Dodge's command fought successful engagements near the Hatchie River and then turned to West Tennessee where they captured a band of Confederate guerrillas near Dyersburg. On February 22, 1863, troops from Dodge's command attacked Tuscumbia and the rear column of Van Dorn's column, capturing a piece of artillery, 100 bales of cotton, 100 prisoners and Van Dorn's supply train. He then served as Grant's intelligence Chief through the Vicksburg campaign. Dodge was later appointed by General Grant as commander of a Division in the Army of the Tennessee, where his troops aided Grant and William T. Sherman by "rapidly repairing and rebuilding the railroads, bridges, and telegraph lines destroyed by the Confederates," and defeating or capturing the Confederate guerrillas, who had been ripping up the track and destroying railroad bridges, by employing techniques such as building two story blockhouses near the bridges. In 1863, he was summoned to Washington DC by President Abraham Lincoln, and although Dodge thought he was being called before a court of inquiry for his aggressive recruitment of black soldiers, the President was instead interested in Dodge's railroad expertise, and asked him to divine a location along the Missouri River where the Union Pacific Railroad's transcontinental railroad should have its initial point. The location provided by Dodge was later established by Executive Order as the starting point in 1864. Following the Vicksburg campaign, his own troops joined General Grant and Iowa Governor Samuel J. Kirkwood in petitioning for Dodge's promotion. Dodge led an expedition to Northern Alabama from April 18, 1863, to May 8, 1863, that screened the advance of Streight's Raid. While Dodge's portion of the expedition was successful, Streight's incursion was disastrous. His command performed various engagements thereafter in northwestern Mississippi and West Tennessee. In December, his forces engaged in a skirmish near Rawhide, twelve miles north of Florence, Alabama that resulted in the capture of 20 prisoners. He was promoted to major general in June 1864 and commanded the XVI Corps during William T. Sherman's Atlanta campaign. At the Battle of Atlanta, the XVI Corps was held in reserve, but it happened to be placed in a position which directly intercepted John B. Hood's flank attack. During the fighting Dodge rode to the front and personally led Thomas W. Sweeny's division into battle. This action outraged the one armed Sweeny so much that he got in a fistfight with Dodge and fellow division commander John W. Fuller. smuggling contraband cotton from the Confederate States to fund his intelligence efforts. He would later come into conflict with Durant. After the war, Dodge joined the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States and was assigned insignia number 484.

His first experience with intelligence gathering came when general John C. Fremont sent Dodge's cavalry regiments on useless raids near Rolla, Missouri based solely on rumors. He set out to rectify this situation and provide accurate intelligence to his superior Samuel Curtis after Fremont was relieved. They are credited with providing the intelligence necessary to achieve victory at Pea Ridge. Dodge created a highly effective intelligence gathering network which later proved vital to Grant's operations and was a precursor to the modern Intelligence Corps of the United States Army. It was one of the largest of the war, funded by the proceeds of captured Confederate cotton, with over 100 agents, and so effective that their identities remain a mystery even in modern times. It was perhaps the most accurate and comprehensive intelligence gathering network in history up to that time. His organization, which later became part of the Union Bureau of Military Information, helped Dodge in short order defeat General John Bordenave Villepigue near the Hatchie River, capture Colonel W. W. Faulkner's command of partisan rangers near Island Number Ten and defeat General Earl Van Dorn at the Battle of Tuscumbia during his service with the Army of the Mississippi, and was later vital in the capture of Vicksburg under Grant. Dodge's network also led to the capture of Confederate spy Sam Davis, who was known as the "Nathan Hale of the Confederacy" and also as the "Boy Hero of the Confederacy." Efforts were led from his "war room" in Corinth, and one of the unit's major successes was the discovery and disruption of Coleman's Scouts, the elite secret service unit of rebel General Braxton Bragg. Dodge would utilize human intelligence from female spies, runaway slaves and unionists living in Confederate territory. Even Grant himself did not have this information. At its peak, his network ran from Georgia (Atlanta and Dalton), to Alabama (Florence, Selma, Decatur, Mobile), to Tennessee (Chattanooga and Columbia) to Mississippi, where information would be reported to Dodge, to Maj. Gen. Richard Oglesby, to Hurlbut in Memphis, to Grant himself, a process of about ten days. Dodge would later report directly to Grant during the Vicksburg campaign, where he even had agents open Confederate General Joseph Johnston's mail. Dodge's agents would report solely to him and him alone, but on May 16, 1863, when intelligence indicated Grant could turn his forces away from Johnston and concentrate on John C. Pemberton's force at Vicksburg, "to achieve timely delivery of information, Dodge violated his own rules of communications security and had his agents report directly to Grant," resulting in the capture of one of his agents and the death of two others.

As the Civil War was coming to a close, Dodge's Department of the Missouri was expanded to include the departments of Kansas, Nebraska and Utah. During the summer of 1865, Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians had been raiding the Bozeman Trail and overland mail routes. Dodge ordered a punitive campaign to quell these raids, which came to be known as the Powder River Expedition. He was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1868 and again at the 1876 convention in Cincinnati. After his term in office expired, he returned to railroad engineering. During the 1880s and 1890s, he served as president or chief engineer of dozens of railroad companies. Dodge went to New York City to manage the growing number of businesses he had developed. Dodge was appointed to head a commission investigating the conduct of the Army during the Spanish–American War. The commission traveled to several cities in Dodge's personal railroad car. The report was published as a Senate document titled "Report of the Commission appointed by the President to investigate the Conduct of the War Department during the war with Spain." This commission came to be known as the "Dodge Commission." Dodge returned home to Iowa and died in Council Bluffs in 1916. He is buried there in Walnut Hill Cemetery. His home, the Grenville M. Dodge House, is a National Historic Landmark. Fort Dodge in Kansas, an important army base during the settlement of the western frontier, was named in his honor, as was Dodge City. Although Dodge Street in Omaha, Nebraska, the location of Union Pacific Headquarters, is often reputed to have been named after him, the street was actually named for influential (and unrelated) Iowa Senator Augustus C. Dodge. The Interstate 480 bridge over the Missouri River is named the Grenville Dodge Memorial Bridge in his honor. Camp Dodge—the Iowa Army National Guard Center in Johnston, Iowa—is named after him. Dodge Hall at his alma mater, Norwich University, is also named after him. In 1963, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.