Living Hell

by Michael C. C. Adams

  Why did such a high proportion of casualties winnow the officer corps, particularly at senior levels, especially when compared to most later conflicts? The battlefield did eventually spread out in acknowledgment of the new, rapid-firing, high-velocity weaponry. To a good degree, by the turn-of-the-century conflicts, the Spanish-American, Russo-Japanese, and Boer Wars, and more so during World War I, units tended to go forward in loose skirmish lines or small groups, as exemplified by German storm trooper tactics, the generals meanwhile overseeing troop movements from the rear. (Old practices nevertheless died hard. As late as the Somme in 1916, British infantry in close-order formations received orders to walk in line abreast across no-man’s-land toward German machine guns firing 500 rounds per minute; the generals had assumed their artillery bombardment would obliterate the enemy front lines, which it had failed to do.)

  With soldiers scattered over a much wider field, commanders down to the regimental level could no longer control their whole force directly by immediate eye and voice contact. Communications technology came to their aid: through wireless, an officer in a command post could hope to know the positions of all units, whether in open view or not. Then, too, as smokeless powder came into use by 1900, commanders and their staff no longer needed to be like their predecessors, grouped in the very heart of action on the firing lines, anxiously peering through rolling dense white sulphur clouds, trying to ascertain what was happening. It made sense that officers who no longer needed to be in the advance to function should keep in the rear, where less chaos existed and they enjoyed a greater chance of survival, preserving their brains to direct events and leaving the brawn to others.

  Those lower down the totem pole did not always appreciate the change in leadership style. British Tommies in the Great War joked grimly that they had never seen a dead staff officer, and they believed the generals were indifferent to the staggering suffering because they never had to witness it, safely ensconced in their chateaux. Even generals with a hell-for-leather reputation, such as George S. Patton in World War II, could be cordially resented. Troops noted cynically that on Patton’s trips to the front he conspicuously drove in a jeep; on the way back he took a plane. The GIs also noted of Patton’s nickname, “Old Guts and Glory,” that it meant “your guts, his glory.”

  By contrast, in the earlier Civil War, officers still adhered to the maxim that necessity required leadership from the front, as their brethren had done for centuries. Generals believed they must, in person, direct the disposition of their troops in the “fog of battle” or chaos would ensue. And they had precious few staff officers to assist them in this. Stonewall Jackson fell fatally wounded by his own men while riding beyond his lines after dark, trying to ascertain the relative position of the combatants. A sniper picked off Major General John Reynolds, mounted and vulnerable, in plain view of both sides, as he led his command into their positions on July 1, 1863. At Pine Mountain, Georgia, on June 14, 1864, a deliberately aimed Union artillery round eviscerated General Leonidas Polk, while he and his staff exposed themselves on rising ground to observe enemy positions. The Yankee Parrott shell passed through his left arm, body, and right arm, before exploding against a tree.

  The poor visibility and tremendous racket of battle required officers to appear in easily recognized dress and equipment, wearing a sash and waving a sword, as they bellowed commands to overcome the fearful noise. Charles E. Davis of the 13th Massachusetts explained how commands were issued: “In Battle the order to charge is not given in the placid tones of a Sunday-school teacher, but with vigorous English, well seasoned with oaths.” During Pickett’s charge, to direct his men into the target on Cemetery Ridge, the copse of trees, General Lewis A. Armistead put his black hat on his sword, making himself conspicuous to his brigade and the enemy. He just reached the Union guns beyond the stone-wall crowning the rise when balls in the chest and arm took him down. He died on July 5.34

  We must remember that, had officers not gone first, many men might have balked at entering the maelstrom. For good reason, the officers’ code demanded that an exemplary leader should never ask his men to do and endure what he would not. This ethic led officers to expose themselves to risk so as to give confidence to the ranks. General John C. Breckinridge, according to J. Stoddard Johnston, one of his colonels, did not seek shelter, but rather “he kept himself in view of his troops and inspired them by his presence.” A price was often paid. Despite repeated urgings to take cover during the September 1862 Battle of South Mountain, Confederate General Samuel Garland Jr. insisted on staying in the open, receiving a mortal wound.35

  The ethic of leadership by example also demanded that officers stay at their posts as long as they possibly could, even if seriously wounded. A famous example is General Albert Sidney Johnston, in command of Confederate forces at Shiloh, who bled to death on the field after refusing to seek aid for a leg wound. On the second day of Gettysburg, Mississippi General William Barksdale, wounded by a rifle ball above the left knee, nevertheless remained on the field. After a solid shot hit his foot, he could not stand and so continued mounted, although bleeding heavily and in great pain. A plain target now, he was knocked from his horse by a bullet entering the left breast, and he died the next day. Rebel General Francis Cockrell had better luck. Though wounded in both hands by shrapnel that broke the bones and stripped off three fingernails at Kennesaw Mountain, he lived to be shot four times at Franklin, yet survived the war.36

  Georgia Brigadier General John B. Gordon, who held a crucial position in the sunken lane at Sharpsburg, remains a vivid instance of stubborn gallantry. A shot went through the right calf and then another hit higher in the same leg. He managed to stay on his feet after a further ball tore up flesh and tendons in his left arm, sending blood streaming down the limb. A fourth bullet ripped through his shoulder and yet, almost unbelievably, he still stood at his post when a fifth ball hit him full in the head. He fell face forward in his hat, unconscious, and would have drowned in his own blood had it not run out through bullet holes in the cloth. Although not fully recovered, he returned to duty to see out the war, even though wounded again over the right eye and in the leg. During the 1862 Kentucky campaign, a ball hit General Pat Cleburne in the cheek, removing two teeth. Because of this disfigurement, his voice developed a harsh hissing sound when raised to issue commands. Cleburne returned to duty in time to be wounded above the ankle at Perryville and later die at Franklin of a ball to the abdomen.37

  Sacrificial adherence to duty was not simply a matter of mythic Southern gentlemen’s honor; the concept also held sway in the Northern officer corps. Union General Francis C. Barlow suffered a serious wound at Antietam, leaving the left side of his face badly scarred. But he was back in time for Gettysburg, where on the first day a bullet tore through his side, lodging in the abdomen. Although he nearly died, he took the field again during Grant’s 1864 Virginia campaign. So did Winfield Scott Hancock, wounded in the groin on Cemetery Ridge, and still carrying bone fragments in the abdomen that frequently caused incapacitating pain. Lesser known examples include Major Henry A. Barnum, 12th New York, shot at Malvern Hill, the ball entering the abdomen and exiting the posterior. A stubborn abscess formed in the wound, which remained inflamed and continued to generate pus. A linen thread had to be drawn through the wound regularly to drain it. Nevertheless, the colonel held his command to the end of the war.38

  We may wonder whether heroic courage shaded into foolhardiness when command capacity diminished with injury. General Richard S. Ewell sustained a light injury before a leg was shattered in fighting on August 28, 1862, the damage necessitating amputation. Afterward, he used a poorly fitted wooden leg that caused abscesses and abrasions. A spent ball, hitting him in the chest in June 1863, added to his injuries, and he endured frequent falls because the artificial leg prevented him from fully controlling a horse. By May 1864, he had become physically wasted, visited by scurvy and dysentery, now forced to travel in an ambulance. Lee came to doubt Ewell’s fitness f
or the field and sent him to command the defenses of Richmond. Indeed, it can be argued that his abilities had been eclipsed earlier, by mid-1863. Writing to the general on January 18, 1864, Lee admitted that, because of Ewell’s injuries and general debility, “I was in constant fear during the last campaign that you would sink under your duties or destroy yourself.”39

  The most controversial case may be that of John Bell Hood. Already noted for his dash and personal bravery, on July 2, 1863, at Gettysburg, he was hit by shell fragments that ranged through the left hand, forearm, elbow, and biceps, rendering the arm largely useless. He returned to Longstreet’s corps in time to be hit in the right leg by an exploding bullet at Chickamauga. A surgeon took off the shattered limb at the thigh. Hood suffered terrible pain that aged him, and frequent heavy medication may have made him erratic, as well as adding to his debility. He may not have been up to the burden of commanding the Army of Tennessee. For example, he failed to exercise proper oversight of the frontal fighting outside Atlanta, especially during a critical phase on July 19, 1864. He also missed a vital opportunity to catch General John M. Schofield’s command in a trap because heavy doses of laudanum for incessant pain had put him to bed. We may reasonably conclude from Hood’s and other case studies that grave impairments and critical losses of leadership adversely affected army operations on both sides.40

  Although our task is dedicated to depicting warfare on land, because this by far dominated the majority experience of the American people, it might prove instructive at this point to briefly sketch in naval combat. Although sailors’ lives paralleled those of soldiers in many ways, we may discern differences. Sailors enlisted as regulars and so came under a more stringent discipline than short-term volunteers. They had more opportunity to keep clean while on active service and regulations required them to do so. But in other ways the experiences paralleled. Though chowders and other fish dishes varied the seamen’s diet, they also steadily ingested hardtack, called ship’s biscuit, dried navy beans, and salt meat, often rancid bacon and beef turned green in the cask. Officers had been educated about the need for fresh fruits and vegetables (the term “limey” came from the Royal Navy’s early pioneering use of citrus fruit and juice rations), but they often proved unavailable on prolonged blockade duty or ocean tours. Poor diet and bad drinking water resulted in scurvy, dysentery, and typhus. Sailors also contracted malaria on many stations. It was not unusual for over 4 percent of a crew to be on sick list.41

  Like soldiers, naval ratings self-medicated with, and found consolation in, alcohol and drugs. Herman Melville, who served as a “white jacket” on an American man-of-war prior to the secession conflict, averred that grog constituted the sailor’s enemy, men going to any length to smuggle it on board, “and if opium were to be had, many would steep themselves a thousand fathoms down in the densest fumes of that oblivious drug.” Alvah Hunter, a ship’s boy on the ironclad monitor Nahant, 1862–63, noted an episode at Charleston, Massachusetts, when “Some despicable creature had smuggled some liquor into the navy yard and sold a quart or two to a group of our men,” so that “half a dozen of our best sailors were fighting-roaring drunk.” The Master-at-Arms and petty officers overwhelmed the culprits, bucking and gagging them to cut off a stream of blasphemous oaths. “One of them was as handsome a man as would be seen in a day’s journey, a model seaman, and as he looked up at me from his ‘trussed up’ position on the deck I felt greater sorrow for him than I would have thought it possible to feel for a stranger.”42

  Sailors routinely faced a horrible death relatively uncommon on land: drowning. High seas and gales sunk ships and drove them onto rocks, or vessels foundered when they struck submerged snags in rivers. Union monitors proved particularly vulnerable: they were never intended to be ocean-going vessels, so the sea washed over their decks even in calm waters, and sailors considered them floating coffins in a squall. Crews fought frequent leaks, meaning they had little air when rough weather required closing the ports, and the ship’s lights flickered for lack of oxygen. Monitors sank quickly, allowing few crewmen time to escape. When the Weehawken went down off Charleston in December 1863, thirty-one hands drowned.43

  As in the armies, veterans of past service carried bodily damage. A smoothbore ball from the War of 1812 still lay buried in the shoulder of the commodore under whom Melville served, and he would be seen often “doubled up from the effect of his wound.” Naval encounters had always been savage affairs, but improved ordnance (firing larger calibre projectiles, up to 20 inches in diameter in seacoast batteries) made them worse. In addition to solid shot, naval armaments included rifle shells, grape shot, and chain shot (two balls linked by chain, intended to cut rigging and sweep decks at kneecap level). Gunners lobbed hot shot to incinerate enemy vessels, and seamen dreaded roasting in the inferno of a ship on fire, just as wounded soldiers on land feared burning up in blazing brush. This horrible fate happened to the crew of the wooden-walled Congress, burned in battle with the ironclad Virginia on March 8, 1862.44

  As soldiers dreaded cannon shot into tree tops, because it brought down lethal wood shards, sailors feared vicious splinters from shattered decks and railings, along with a new threat, rivets and bolts on ironclad sheathing that, when dislodged by the concussion of incoming rounds, ricocheted around the hull. One rogue nut on a monitor in action against Fort Sumter, on April 9, 1863, struck the wheel officer, Edward Cobb, “upon the side of his forehead, tearing off a piece of his skull about five inches long by three wide, inflicting a mortal wound.” It next struck Pilot Scofield near the spinal column at the base of the neck, “effecting a paralysis of the body because of the shock to the nerves.” The nut then glanced off the pilot-house roof, wounding Captain Downes in the foot. On June 17, 1863, off Savannah, a 15-inch Dahlgren smoothbore round fired by a monitor smashed through the armored casemate of the C.S.S. Atlanta, metal and wood fragments flying along the gun deck, killing one and wounding fifteen. The concussion knocked out forty. A further hit sent iron balls from the Atlanta’s broken shot racks careening across the deck.45

  Although there were few open-sea encounters, such as the June 1864 battle between the Alabama and Kearsage off Cherbourg, France, vicious exchanges occurred between Union vessels supporting ground forces that operated along the seaboard and Confederate coastal fortifications. In the Union bombardment of Fort Sumter, April 7, 1863, the Yankee ironclad Keokuk received ninety hits, including steel-pointed rifle shells. The hull sustained nineteen punctures below the waterline. Hits to boilers proved particularly horrible as escaping steam killed and maimed. When a shot from a Brooke rifle on the Confederate ironclad Albemarle penetrated the starboard boiler of the wooden-walled Sassacus, a blast of hyper-heated steam scalded and blinded most of the stokers.46

  The newly invented torpedoes held a special terror for crewmen engaged in river warfare. Detonated by contact with a percussion charge or from shore by electrical cable, these explosives lurked unseen beneath the surface, waiting to hole unsuspecting vessels. Boats opened below the waterline sank fast. The monitor Tecumseh, hit by a torpedo in Mobile Bay, sank in twenty-five seconds, taking down 93 of 114 crewmen. George R. Yost, on the Cairo, described the vessel being struck on December 12, 1862, by two torpedoes in the Yazoo River: “In 5 minutes the forward part of the Hold was full of water and the forward part of the gundeck was flooded.” Although beached on a sand bank, the ship quickly submerged. Confederates manning gunboats on inland waters faced great odds, as most of the fleet consisted of vulnerable wooden paddle steamers, hastily reinforced with railroad irons. Sinking by holing, fire, or explosion quickly destroyed the majority. In the Battle of Memphis, June 6, 1862, Union gunfire annihilated seven of the Rebel flotilla’s eight vessels in sight of the stunned citizenry.47

  As soldiers faced dismemberment on the firing line, projectiles tore sailors to pieces on the gun deck. The wooden walls of the Cumberland proved no match for the ironclad Virginia. One Rebel shell killed all of a starboard gun crew save the pow
der monkey and gun captain, although a round ripped the latter’s arms off at the shoulder. Crewmen dragged corpses to the port rails for later sea burial. A survivor told the correspondent for the Baltimore American that “The decks were slippery with blood, and arms and legs and chunks of flesh were strewed about.” John C. Kinney, signals officer on the Hartford, engaged in Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864, said, “Shot after shot came through the side, mowing down the men, deluging the decks with blood, and scattering mangled fragments of humanity so thickly that it was difficult to stand on the deck, so slippery was it.”48

  For individuals, such death and destruction must have been as awful as that facing soldiers on land. But, if it is not completely obscene to suggest a distinction, not of kind but degree, then we might note that naval actions and their resulting casualties constituted a minor chord in the massive chorus of war. To help realize the point, let us bring Melville back into the conversation (rarely a bad idea). The great teller of sea stories described the aftermath of battle as recounted to him by a black sailor named “Tawney” who had seen action on the U.S.S. Macedonian. He said that intact corpses were thrown overboard during fighting to clear the decks and mitigate the visible horror. But more detailed cleanup necessarily waited until after battle. The fighting had splattered blood and brains all around. “About the hatchways it looked like a butcher’s stall; bits of human flesh sticking in the ring bolts.” The ship required washing down and the galley cooks sprinkled the decks with hot vinegar “to take out the shambles smell from the planks.”49

  Finally, the crew threw overboard a pig that had run around, rooting amongst the chunks of flesh, so that its face and hide had become soaked in human blood. The men said it would be cannibalism to eat the animal now, a prospect sufficient to give anyone a lifetime of nightmares. But note that this occurred to a crew of just hundreds, with abundant water on hand to wash wounds and surgical apparatus, as well as to clean decks. The sea also functioned as a convenient cemetery for expeditious burial of the dead. And, finally, they needed to deal with only one domesticated scavenger.50