"...breakthrough on Patrick's left flank at Douglasville, severing the mainline rail connection between Atlanta and Birmingham and threatening the rail junction towards Macon, where some of the largest armories and arsenals in the Confederacy still lay. Two days later on the 26th, Menoher's landship divisions broke through at Gainesville, the bloodiest and most difficult point on the defensive line, sweeping Patrick's right southwestwards towards Atlanta itself and cutting Atlanta's rail route to Upstate South Carolina. The two most straightforward resupply routes into the city were now in American hands and Pershing's forces were beginning their encirclement of Atlanta from the other side of the Chattahoochee.
Patrick was certainly no fool and realized that unlike Buck at Nashville, he had no defensive Highland Rim to use as his proving ground. While Atlanta was on a high ridge above the river with an excellent view of Pershing's approaching forces, the hooking actions eliminated his advantages towards the main force between Marietta and Alpharetta. And while Pershing had been unable to bring much in the way of aeroplanes down to Georgia and Patrick enjoyed aerial superiority thanks to a large airfield due south of the city where Atlanta-Maddox Airport stands today, the considerably larger force of landships available to the United States made fighting in trenches extremely difficult. On the 29th, a breakthrough occurred at Alpharetta and the lines continued to collapse inwards; rigid airships launched from Kentucky and artillery joined to rain fire down on the city the next night, and as many as two thousand civilians still in the city were killed, including five hundred slaves. Patrick ordered two divisions, comprised in large part of raw recruits, some as young as thirteen years old (most of whom had lied on their enlistment forms, but the Confederacy was so hard up for fit men at that point that this was ignored), to remain behind to protect his fighting retreat with more experienced soldiers, and on July 2nd, 1916, the order to abandon Atlanta was given as American forces bombed the airfield and closed in on it from the west.
On the morning of July 4th, 1916, Pershing ordered the American flag be raised on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol, which had been badly damaged in the fighting over the last two days. Much of the city was destroyed and even more of it would burn over the next few days, with who exactly was responsible for the arson of Atlanta remaining a contentious trans-Ohio topic to this day. Pershing denied vehemently to his deathbed that he had "ordered" the burning of the city, though the rules of engagement in the March to the Sea that came soon thereafter opens the question of what exactly he meant by "ordered." It is generally established that Confederate commanders in retreat ordered several arsenals, depots, and barracks destroyed as they evacuated the city so that they could not be used by Pershing; it is also generally thought to be the case that Pershing's men, angry and exhausted after the last year of fighting from Tennessee all the way into the heart of the Confederate rail system, may have engaged in a considerable amount of looting and other mayhem across "the Crossroads of Dixie," especially with the symbolic nature of capturing the city on Independence Day, when both nominating conventions were beginning for the Liberals and Democrats back north.
Regardless of cause and the identity of the perpetrators, by the end of the week little of Atlanta stood, with fires having torched entire residential neighborhoods and the sporadic street fighting having left hundreds dead. But the beating heart of Confederate industry and transport, much more so than Nashville, had fallen, understood at home as the crippling, fatal body blow to Dixie's war machine that it was. In his response to congratulations from both Bliss and Hughes, Pershing responded that he intended to regroup, reconsolidate his now extremely stretched supply lines, and then "finish this war" before the end of the year, and in that response lay the blueprint for his most famous campaign - the March to the Sea..."
- Pershing
