Sheer Bloody Mindedness
Dean Webb
1864. The armies clashed, the defense proved superior to the offense, the
sides tried to outflank each other, the soldiers dug their trenches, the
mindless assaults on enemy positions began... the difference in Virginia was
that the line of trenches did not extend from the mountains to the sea and
that the weapons were not yet quite as lethal as their counterparts of fifty
years later. But these were deadly enough and ripped men apart with
terrifying effectiveness.
When Grant charged the Confederates at Cold Harbor, several thousand men
fell in the first few moments of fighting. A Confederate commander on the
scene claimed the battle was not war, but murder. Grant himself regretted
ordering the charges there, as they accomplished no objective whatsoever for
all the blood spilled and life taken. To the south, men at Petersburg
willingly carried out their commanders' orders to attack, but not before
pinning pieces of paper with their names and places of origin so their
corpses could eventually be identified.
In the no-man's land between the trench lines, bodies would pile up. The
combatants could not retrieve their fallen comrades, so the stink of death
covered the field and surrounding country. Disease wracked the armies in the
siege, so that the soldiers had little hope of avoiding becoming a casualty.
If the defenders behind the earthworks didn't kill you...
(See p-burg001.jpg)
... then disease would take you out of the line, it seemed.
In an attempt to breach the Confederate line at Petersburg, Grant approved a
scheme to mine under the Confederate positions and plant 8000 pounds of
dynamite under them, detonate the charges, and rush forces into the breach
to smash the Confederate lines and roll up their flanks.
Never mind that this sort of thing failed to produce any satisfactory
results at Vicksburg. Twice at Vicksburg, even. OK, so only 1000 and 1500
pounds of dynamite were tried at Vicksburg, so maybe the Union commanders
all thought 8000 pounds would do the trick.
Soldiers from Pennsylvania with coal-mining experience dug the tunnels and
planted the charges. They managed to dig ventilation shafts from within the
mine without being detected. From the outside, their mine seemed like a
trench bunker...
(See p-burg002.jpg)
... but we all know better, don't we?
At 3:00 AM on 29 June 1864, the miners lit the fuse to the explosives.
At 3:15 AM, there was no earth-shattering kaboom when there should have been
an earth-shattering kaboom. Some miners volunteered to go down the shaft to
see what the problem was. They found the fuse had gone out, so they re-lit
it and hurried out of the tunnel as quickly as they could: they had barely
gotten out when the whole thing went up, killing 300 South Carolina
infantrymen and leaving a massive crater in the Confederate line.
The Union commanders had trained a brigade of colored troops to lead the
charge into the crater, but changed their plan at the last minute when they
worried about how bad the press would be for them if the blacks all got
slaughtered. In their wisdom, they chose to send an untrained brigade of
white soldiers into the crater. They fought hand-to-hand with the
Confederates and were pretty much wiped out. The commanders of both sides
fed other units into the crater, including the colored troops brigade, and
the result was the same: the troops died horribly. At the end of the battle,
the Confederates held that position and the Union had spent several thousand
lives in what the commanders on the scene realized was a spectacular
failure.
Too bad that realization only came after the lives were lost.
Even so, the Union generals would continue to order frontal charges at
Petersburg and Richmond for the last ten months of the war. In so doing,
they lost about 200,000 casualties. The Army of the Potomac itself mustered
100,000 men, so it's as if the Union burned through two complete changes of
their field army in these battles and sieges. There were no elegant
movements in these battles, just sheer bloody-minded determination to wage a
war of attrition over a few yards of ground at a time.
