The history of the regular Army predominates in our understanding of the American military heritage and overshadows the ubiquity and permanence of the first way of war in Americans' martial culture. American military history, the conventional wisdom seems to show, progressed through the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries in a series of more or less orderly wars with European or Euro-American opponents. Indeed, historians have focused on Americans' conflicts between the War of 1812 and the Second World War as little more than regular conflicts that fit nicely within Weigley's paradigm. In those instances when later Americans embraced elements of war that their predecessors would have recognized as their first way of war – whether William Tecumseh Sherman's march through the South in 1864 and 1865 or the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 – they, the historians point out, attacked civilian populations only as a means to the end of increasing the effectiveness of regular war making. “To fight the enemy armies was immensely expensive, above all in lives,” Russell Weigley wrote to explain why Sherman unleashed his armies on the economic and social fabric of the Confederacy. Weigley pointed out that Sherman came to believe that if the Union armies took the war straight to the enemy's civilian population, they would lose their will to continue the war, and without the people's support, the Confederacy would collapse. Sherman therefore designed his marches as campaigns of terror and destruction.