Living Hell
Page 9
The maelstrom quickly decimated even large units. In five hours at Franklin, the Confederates lost more troops than U.S. forces did in nineteen hours on D-Day, 1944. At Cold Harbor, seven thousand Yankees fell in twenty minutes. One company of the 4th Alabama dropped 75 out of 105 men at First Manassas. Of the 1st Minnesota’s 384 men at Gettysburg, 234 went down. One Rebel regiment lost 128 of 265 effectives at Kennesaw Mountain. Of 250 in the 6th Georgia at Antietam, only 24 remained unhurt. After Shiloh, General Patrick R. Cleburne reported his brigade reduced from 2,700 to 800. The 2nd Tennessee and 6th Mississippi had virtually ceased to exist. Nearly 30 percent of Ohio troops at Gettysburg fell. On July 1 alone, 70 percent of the 82nd Ohio’s 258 were lost.14
Statistics for overall army losses tell the same tale of concentrated slaughter. At Antietam, combined casualties in close-order combat came to over 22,700. In the Seven Days Battles, McClellan lost nearly 10,000 or 10.7 percent of his army, Lee close to 20,000 or 20 percent. Each side suffered about 9,700 casualties at Shiloh, spread over two days. Chickamauga cost the North 16,550 and the South 17,800 in a day. Lee lost 28,000 at Gettysburg or nearly 40 percent of his force; the Federals 23,000 or 25 percent. At Stone’s River, the Union sustained 31 percent casualties, the Confederates 33 percent. Most stunning, in the month from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, May 5 to June 3, 1864, Lee lost 32,000 or 46 percent of effectives, Grant 50,000 or 41 percent.15
Rather than old-fashioned saber or bayonet thrusts, small arms and artillery inflicted most wounds. Musket balls did massive damage to the body. Unlike a modern high-velocity steelhead bullet in the .30-calibre range, a .57 or .58 lead ball frequently lacked the force to drive through and exit the target, instead staying in the victim, wrecking bone and organs. The 71st New York’s chaplain, Joseph Twichell, “saw one man who received a ball in his cheek and, glancing over his jaw, it was taken out between his shoulders.” Another “was hit in the side, yet some how or other the ball found its way up to behind his ear.” The construction of the minnie ball magnified this roaming characteristic.16
When the rifle fired, the minnie spread out in the barrel, meaning the pliable lead could no longer hold up on impact but became unintentionally a dum-dum or soft-head bullet. Meeting the resistance of flesh and bone, it flattened out further, even assuming the diameter of a half dollar. As it slowed, it travelled the victim, wrecking everything in its way. This is why experienced officers cautioned against crouching during an advance; the ball would travel the body lengthwise. This is also why surgeons amputated so many shattered limbs; physicians lacked the time, tools, operating facilities, or medical knowledge to reconstruct splintered bones. They had to remove the limb before gangrene and peritonitis attacked. “The shattering, splintering, and splitting of a long bone by the impact of the minie were, in many instances, both remarkable and frightful,” recalled a surgeon.17
Minnies inflicted truly horrific damage, their ravaging wounds being excruciatingly painful. During the fighting at Kennesaw Mountain, Rebel Lieutenant Charles Johnsen of the Washington Artillery sustained a fatal shot as he bent over. “A bullet took him, low down, about his waist and in his left side, and ranged up diagonally through the entire length of his body, tearing through his kidneys, bowels, stomach, lungs, and coming out at his shoulder.” He screamed in agony “I am killed” and then managed “Mother,” as blood gushed from his mouth. Hit men might wish to die. At Ball’s Bluff in October 1861, Lieutenant Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 20th Massachusetts, shot by a ball that plowed left breast to right, feared lung damage as he spat up blood. Even though his sergeant had managed to squeeze out the bullet, he considered a laudanum overdose to end the awful pain.18
Minnies shattered the facial structure. At Cold Harbor, 1864, the man standing next to New York gunner Frank Wilkeson took a ball in the face. “A tiny fountain of blood and teeth and bone and bits of tongue burst out of his mouth. He had been shot through the jaws; the lower was broken and hung down.” In Virginia fighting, Georgia private William White saw a Union infantryman similarly wounded, when “an Enfield rifle ball entered the back part of his right jaw, passing inside his mouth, tearing the tongue out by the roots and shivering the upper jaw into small fragments.” Bullets disfigured and disabled. On day one at Gettysburg, Union Brigadier General Gabriel Paul had both eyes shot out; he lived on in darkness. Earlier, in June 1862, Colonel William Duffield, 4th Michigan, shot through the left testicle and thigh at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, suffered a wound “very painful and bleeding profusely.” The genital damage left him in grave pain and mental anxiety. Men with tearing wounds might not survive long enough to get aid. Sixteen-year-old Abe Hanna bled to death after a ball broke his spine and severed a major vein in the pelvis. At Second Bull Run, Robert Sneden of the 40th New York noted a colonel trying to get to the rear who “had been shot through the head which now had swollen to three times its natural size!”19
There is more; let us step along the battle line a moment where the elephant rears and trumpets. Men still in one piece load and fire as fast as they can, ignoring the mule kick of the musket butt that bruises the shoulder black and blue. Union infantry colonel James A. Mulligan described the misery of soldiers fighting all day “without water, their parched lips cracking, their tongues swollen, and the blood running down their chins when they bit their cartridges and the saltpeter entered their blistered lips.” Some have soiled themselves through fear and excitement, or simply because dysentery refuses to take a holiday during combat. Now and then a soldier pauses to urinate in his rifle barrel; without water this becomes the only way to cool the weapon and keep the rifling free of clogging. We see constant movement on the line, some men coming up, but more staggering to the rear with serious wounds.20
We watch Corporal James Quick stumble back as a bullet enters behind his left jaw and exits through the nose. He is just twenty-two. Next to him, Lieutenant William Taylor has been hit in the neck by a bullet that missed the arteries but severed his windpipe. He clasps his hands to his neck, trying to stanch the flow of blood and air hissing through the wound. Private Keils runs past, “breathing at his throat and the blood spattering” from a neck wound. “His wind-pipe was entirely severed,” Colonel William Oates curtly informs us. We avoid Private George Walker because his right arm is off, severing the artery, and blood “on certain movements of the arm, gushed out higher than his head.” Blood spurts, too, from a Federal officer shot behind the bridge of the nose; he wanders about, continuing to blink even though both eyes are gone, “opening and closing the sightless sockets, the blood leaping out in spouts.”21
Over here, a young Rebel in great pain from a shattered arm runs “up and down, forwards and backwards, by the side of a huge fallen tree, always turning at the same point and retracing his steps to and fro,” agony making him oblivious to the enemy fire attempting to kill him. He tries to avoid men on the ground, writhing and shrieking; some have been pierced through the abdomen, which makes an awful wound, usually fatal. One fellow’s knee shatters. “I neaver heard a man hallow so in my life,” his captain, James Wren, assures us. There are more head-injury cases. One is New Hampshire soldier Frank Hersey: “The bullet entered his eye and passed through, the blood spirting in jets.” His comrade, Henry Stockwell, has also fallen, shot through the head and “his brains had partly run out.” So, too, have those of a 12th Corps man who lies moaning underfoot while gray matter oozes out at every breath.22
This is the work of the muskets. What of the big guns? We may recall the rifled cannon-fired shells that, when detonated by a timing fuse or exploded on impact, hurled jagged metal fragments over a wide area. At Gettysburg, the extreme force of one shell bursting in the close-ordered ranks of the 6th Wisconsin took down thirteen; another landing among the 2nd Wisconsin flattened seven. Shells ripped men apart. The blast of a shell exploding right in the chest of Lieutenant Daniel Featherstone threw body parts ten feet in the air and twenty feet over the ground.23
At Second Manassas, Private Wi
lliam Fletcher, 5th Texas, stood gazing at a courier galloping his mount across the field, when “a shell struck them and exploded, and there was a scattering of parts of both man and horse, and I took it to be a percussion shot that exploded when hitting.” Colonel Edward Cross, 5th New Hampshire, fell gravely wounded at Gettysburg after being hit by 12 lb. shell fragments that made a deep wound above the heart and almost caved in his breastbone. Shrapnel lacerated his face, destroying three teeth, and damaging his left leg below the knee. Private Nick Weekes described shells bursting through the ranks of the 3rd Alabama at Chancellorsville. He saw “an arm and shoulder fly from the man just in front, exposing his throbbing heart. The foot of another flew up and kicked him in the face as a shell struck his leg. Another, disemboweled, crawled along on all fours, his entrails trailing behind, and still another held up his tongue with his hand, a piece of shell having carried away his lower jaw.”24
Such macabre shell wounds unnerved those still living. Private Randolph Shotwell recalled being “horrified at seeing a man running, struck by a shell and his head blown square off at the neck, and tumbling before the corpse as it staggers and falls!” At Fredericksburg, a shell hit portly Union Captain William Stewart in the chest, sending his corpse cartwheeling through the ranks. Also at Fredericksburg, Captain James Wren, 48th Pennsylvania, witnessed one of his company sliced apart: “Michael Divine was Cut right in 2 pieces with a shell & his insides Lay on the grass alongside him.” At Gettysburg, a youngster’s corpse startled 1st Virginia Private John Dooley: “the boy’s head being torn off by a shell is lying around in bloody fragments on the ground.”25
Joseph E. Crowell, a survivor of the 13th New Jersey, penned haunting recollections. Here he describes the mutilation at Antietam of a 107th New York private, hit by shell fragments that took off both legs at the knee. “None had ever heard such demoniacal shrieks.” But Crowell accounted the sight worse than the screaming: “there protruded from the lacerated flesh the ends of the bones of the legs in a most horrible manner, making a sight that was simply sickening.” At Chancellorsville, Crowell saw the chin and lower jaw of a staff officer snatched off: “In its place was a mass of blood, raw flesh and gore! A piece of shell had come along and torn away the entire lower portion of his face.” Eerily, the missile traveled so fast the eye missed it: for no earthly reason, the officer suddenly lacked half a face. Understandably, “I involuntarily shrieked.” Just before, a shell had landed in the ranks. “Two men had been literally torn to pieces. Their remains were strewn over the roadway from one side to the other. One man’s heart was still throbbing. Pieces of skull and human brains lay here and there!”26
Serving the powerful engines of war conferred no immunity to damage. Gunners’ ears bled from the concussion of the cannon, their eardrums often shattering and their hearing permanently impaired. Battery to battery counterfire caused some of the worst injuries. Crowell recounted what happened at Chancellorsville when a shell landed on the ammunition stored in a wheeled artillery caisson: debris from the wagon and the remains of men and horses filled the air. One gunner dropped from the sky to the ground right beside him. “ ‘For the love of God,’ it said, ‘for the love of God, shoot me! Put me out of my misery!’ ” The sufferer had gone up amid the flames, and fire had roasted off all his clothes, burning the flesh to a crisp. His eyes had been seared away and the ears gone. The ends of his fingers had charred to the bone and a white kneecap protruded through charcoaled flesh. “Such a sickening sight was never seen. And yet the thing was alive, and not only alive, but conscious.”27
Other eyewitnesses offered similar depictions of ghoulish scenes from hell. Corporal C. F. Boyd, 15th Iowa, remembered seeing after Shiloh twenty-six battery horses lying dead in one small area. The gunners “are torn all to pieces leaving nothing but their heads or their boots. Pieces of clothing and strings of flesh hang on the limbs of the trees around them.” From the Rebel side, Philip Stephenson, 15th Arkansas, related seeing two artillerymen destroyed completely from the waist up. “We found long strips of flesh high up on the trees behind them.” A mutilated battery horse, mad with pain, ran around frantically, finally ramming its head into a tree, the body falling at the base of the trunk in an odd squatting position.28
Compared to the rifled cannon, the smoothbores may seem to belong to an earlier age. But they had a vital role in close action, their discharges devastating at short range. Smoothbores tossed solid round shot, varying from 3 to 12 lbs., at an advancing enemy when still at a distance. The ball bounced along the ground, dismembering any bodies in its path. Lieutenant William Wheeler, 13th New York Independent Battery, testified that “I saw an infantry man’s leg taken off by a shot, and whirled like a stone through the air, until it came against a caisson with a loud whack.” At Shiloh, Corporal Boyd recalled seeing five attacking Rebels mangled by one 6 lb. ball: “One of them had his head taken off. One had been struck at the right shoulder and his chest lay open. One had been cut in two at the bowels and nothing held the carcass together but the spine. One had been hit at the thighs and the legs were torn from the body. The fifth and last one was piled into a mass of skull, arms, some toes and the remains of a butternut suit.”29
At Second Manassas, John Worsham, 21st Virginia, saw a single solid shot kill four men. A captain’s corpse remained upright after the head had been knocked off, “with a stream of blood spurting a foot or more from his neck.” The shattering of heads produced harrowing experiences for those in close proximity to the victim. In action at Fort Harrison, Virginia, 1864, Union General Edward Ripley got “dashed in the face with a hot steaming mass of something horrible,” like an unsavory warm pudding. He first thought that his own features had been blown off, as the foul detritus had temporarily blinded him to his situation. But the debris proved to be from the wrecked head of a soldier standing in front of him, blasted backward. Opening his own blouse, the general remembered, “I threw out a mass of brains, skull, hair and blood.” In another incident, Union Major Thomas Hyde found his mouth similarly stuffed involuntarily with brain matter, bone, and blood, when the smashed pulp of a private’s skull smacked him full in the face.30
When the enemy persisted in coming on despite round shot, smoothbores switched to grape (small iron balls in a rack or held together by slender stems that snapped on firing) or canister (containers filled with musket balls and miniature shrapnel). The effect proved so devastating to the senses that it left gunners themselves haunted by violent memories. Fighting in defense of Cincinnati, 1862, Union Captain Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, 5th Kentucky Artillery (U.S.), had the nightmare experience of being ordered to fire canister into a mixed melee of blue and gray, as they grappled with one another, threatening to overrun and submerge his battery. He carried away with him a horrifying image of the result: the heat from the roasting gun barrels had created a convection current above the battery, swirling body parts, eyeballs, teeth, shards of uniform and equipment through the air:
And they are blown out, rent by hurricane
To bits and shreds that spatter down to earth
What once were men—good friends and foes alike.
At Antietam, General John Gibbon, watching the impact of double rounds of canister on Hood’s advancing division, witnessed whole ranks go down in piles, men visibly torn into pieces. He remembered “an arm go 30 feet into the air and fall back again.” Although gazing upon his sworn enemies, he felt no jubilation, only sickness at the slaughter, confessing, “It was just awful.”31
In the metal storm of combat, officers had an even higher percentage risk of injury and death than rankers. The figures give a stark picture. In both armies, the proportion of officers killed reached 15 percent more than enlisted men, and generals had a whopping 50 percent higher likelihood of dying. General Abner Doubleday, who fought in the east, compiled a list of generals killed and wounded at Gettysburg. He provided names, perhaps to humanize the numbers. On the Rebel side, six generals died: Armistead, Barksdale, Garnett, Pender, Pettigr
ew, and Semmes. Four sustained major wounds: Anderson, Wade Hampton, Kemper, and Scales. Union general officers fared no better. The fighting killed five: Farnsworth, Reynolds, Vincent, Weed, and Zook. Thirteen fell wounded: Barlow, Barnes, Brooke, Butterfield, Doubleday himself, Gibbon, Graham, Hancock, Paul, Sickles, Stannard, Warren, and Webb.32
The cost at the regimental level proved equally exorbitant. Not only were all three brigadiers in Pickett’s division casualties, but thirteen colonels fell also. Even before the killing fields of Gettysburg, there had been a severe loss of field grade and mid-level commanders. Yet, if anything, the attrition worsened as the fighting became more desperate, and the concomitant slaughter intensified during the last campaigns of the war. For example, May 4–June 3, 1864, twenty-two of fifty-eight generals in the Army of Northern Virginia became casualties. In one afternoon at Franklin, the Army of Tennessee lost 50 percent of its regimental commanders, some fifty-four officers wounded or killed, along with six generals who died.33