Atlanta for Dodge was no less crucial. In fact, it was career-changing. For starters, his participation as a commander in battle reached a high-point during at Atlanta. This occurred when the newly-appointed commander of the Confederate forces, John Bell Hood, gambled everything on a sally in-force from Atlanta in an attempt to roll-up the Union's extreme-left flank, followed immediately by a frontal assault by two Confederate corps. The former met up with Dodge's XVI Corps, which was in need of rest from their other duties and not in the line of battle at the time. General William Hardee, the Confederate corps commander, after marching all night, stumbled onto the XVI Corps; but he could not turn its flank. The ensuing battle led to Hardee's retreat back into Atlanta and to the termination of all offensive action by the Confederate forces therein. Not only did this result tilt the overall course of the battle in the Union's favor, it also critically impacted events all the way to national level politics.

The Atlanta battle and Sherman's consequent free-wheeling path of destruction through the deep South changed entirely the election prospects for Lincoln and the Republicans. Their war was now perceived by voters as imminently winnable, especially now that Western commanders such as Grant and Sheridan were reassigned to command the Army of the Potomac.

There is an important distinction to be noted here with the advent of this new command from the West.   As touched on previosly, such was in sharp contrast with especially McClellan's way of waging war. The issues here devolve deeper than just a brash spit-and-polish gentleman-technocrat overpromoted to high command. McClellan after all was reappointed to lead a demoralized army after its two defeats at Manassas. Moreover, all Union commanders subscribed to modern concepts of mass mobility and concentration of firepower by using the recent innovations available-- such as railroads(like Dodge), Minie bullets, and concentration of artillery. McClellan was no exception here. For example, by moving large masses of men by ship during his Peninsula Campaign.

By contrast, such use of then-modern innovation by Confederate commanders was drastically limited. They almost always lacked superiority in such modern factors for war. This meant, with a few significant exceptions, they were always strategically consigned to a defensive war. Their hope being to mount up Union losses by whatever means availed itself and to stalemate the war to preserve the Confederacy.

Faced with the Confederacy's string of successes in their strategy of attrition and McClellan's command at the time before Atlanta, after Atlanta the difference in leadership afforded by new Western command proved important enough to be decisive. The Western way was to bring to bear Union superiority to the enemy in spite of Union losses. And in such a way reverse the Southern strategy of attrition against itself. The view from the Union command's perspective, especially Grant's view, was that the outcome would inevitably be Union victory. This, despite Union losses in any tradeoff of battle casualties with the South,

It is important here to pause from the Civil War narrative and to put this in historic perspective for our day. For future decades and even into our present day, this maximum exploitation in superiority in resources, especially the resources afforded by the modern technology around the time of Atlanta, eventually would have a huge future downside. Namely, by leading to the doctrine of 'total war' in the twentieth century. Casualties/losses during Grant's Overland Campaign to Richmond were unprecedented at 55 thousand in 30 days of the campaign, with Confederate losses at 33,600. The Overland Campaign's most egregious incident in Union losses occured was the Battle of the Crator. At the time, these were also attributed as an expendible cost of waging war. While Sherman's destruction at-will through Southern heartland provided the US Civil War's major contribution of extending the theatre of modern war way beyond its battlefields.  

Despite having been an integral part of one modern war, even Dodge by the time of World War I saw such escalating orders of magnitude to be disturbing and getting out of hand. Way before Verdun, Dodge viewed World War I "needless" and a "great crime". His belief was that the war would neither "make the world safe for democracy", nor was it "the war to end all wars".  

The Fistfight of the Generals and the Alanta Campaign's Outcome for Dodge After Dodge's distingished part in the Atlanta battle, it ended for him with little in the way of fanfare. Instead came controversy. Shortly after his corps repulse of Hardee, he was involved in an incident thereafter described as "the fistfight of the generals". His Civil War campaigns subsequently ended when he suffered a head wound while looking through a spyglass at the enemy.

The so-called "Fistfight of the Generals" was one of the more odd and unexpected outcomes of the XVI Corps' repulse of Hardee's sally. It occurred between Dodge and a subordinate division commander, one "Fighting Tom" Sweeny, in charge of the XVI Corps' 2nd Division. The story goes that a dispute arose when Sweeny complained of getting no support during Hardee's assault. Argument turned personal and insults escalated, turning into a shoving match-- all of which led to Dodge being challenged to a dual. The terms of which would have been interesting, Sweeny with one arm and Dodge probably weighing less than 130 pounds soaking-wet.

If any if Sweeny's insults stung, it had to be calling Dodge "a God-damned inefficient political general"-- probably as smarting to Dodge as an engineer as his being a corps commander. While Sweeny avoided court-martial, his being mustered out was unavoidable. He moved onto Canada with a new career in the Finian Brotherhood, a pre-cursor to the IRA.

Dodge Shot in the Head. Dodge's exit from the War held few laurels for a commander having a significant role in the Atlanta victory. Instead, Dodge was simply put on leave from service as a result of yet another unusual incident, this time being wounded in the head.

The circumstances surrounding this event were curious. It involved a 'set-piece' incident which seemed suspiciously reminiscent of a later war (Vietnam). Dodge arrives at an entrenched vista point to view the siege of Atlanta. Upon asking one of the soldiers defending the post where the enemy was, as any commanding general would tend to do, he is pointed to a spyglass, only to be shot in the head shortly thereafter. Luckily, it proved more a glancing blow than a serious and therefore inevitably fatal head trauma. While his army days as a corps commander were over, his days as a warrior were far from being so.

Source:
This picks up the commentary on Western command doctrine from "Pea Ridge Arkansas(Spring, 1862)", q.v. and then from " 182 Bridges in 40 Days: Nashville to Decatur Alabama..... And Corinth Mississippi(1862-1863)", q.v.

Footnote for :  Atlanta(July,1864)--  Modern Warfare beyond Atlanta

Dodge views on world War I from JR Perkins Trails, Rails and War: The Life of General G M Dodge (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1929) on Harvard University Free Books Website, https://archive.org/details/trailsrailsandwa027015mbp, p.346.

A mere half-century later World War I losses in one battle would reach almost one million, as they did at Verdun for both sides. Overall battle casualties in that war would be described as a "lost generation". With World War II and the advent of massive air raids, such was compounded by bombing civilians as well, even before the use of nuclear weapons. For example, the firestorm in Hamburg claimed more dead than wounded over just a 24-hour period of bombing: 42,600 and 37,000 respectively. Later on was Tokyo's turn: 88,000 and 41,000 respectively, again in just one day.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overland_Campaign . Also S. Foote The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. 3, Red River to Appomattox (New York: Random House, 1974), pp 427-72&530-63, with the Crator fiasco starting on p 531ff. The way RL O'Connell sees it, from Grant's perspective the battle outweighed any casualties incurred: "(T)here was another side to Grant. Perhaps his best quality on the battlefield was an extraordindinary ability to focus, but with this came an equivalent lack of concern that the agents of his will were made of flesh and blood."   RL O'Connell,   op. cit., p. 96. For Sherman, cf ibid, pp 150ff.

Key American Contributions to Modern Warfare beyond Atlanta extended surprisingly far beyond its own not-so-Civil War. For a country reluctant as Dodge to enter World War I, United States' innovation nevertheless preceded its entry by playing a critical role from almost that Great War's beginning. In effecting how modern war was waged in 1914, the US provided two key contributions which together consigned European warfare to a defensive nightmare in the trenches. The machine gun and barbed wire were both US inventions. The latter was an innovation from Western US ranchers, to the extent it was a robust import to the Great War's battlefields a long time before US entry.

The machine gun was exclusively an American invention, way beyond the Civil War's Gatling gun in firepower. Of its inventor and developers: Maxim, Lewis, Hotchkiss, Borchardt, and Browning, all were Americans!! Hiram Maxim, the machine gun's seminal inventor was influenced by an American acquaintance after his invention had been rejected by the US Army as having no practicable value. "If you want to make a pile of money", his friend advised (which turned-out correctly), "Try the Europeans." They being more inclined in his opinion "to cut each other's throats with greater facility." From MW Brown, "One Hundred Years of Maxim's Killing Machine" New York Times, 26 November, 1985. http://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/26/science/100-years-of-maxim-s-killing-machine.html