What would you say if I told you that an invading army once tried to break a siege against a heavily fortified city by digging a 500 foot long mineshaft underneath it, then detonating 4 tons of gunpowder inside?
What would you say if I then told you that the plan backfired terribly and, through a combination of poor planning and incompetent leadership, resulted in a resounding victory for the opposing side?
You might say “Who was in charge of this operation, Wile E. Coyote?” Then again, you might say “I saw Cold Mountain, asshole, so I know about the Battle of the Crater.”
Regardless, let us turn back the clock to the summer of 1864.
The Civil War is entering its last leg. The Confederate States of America, driven out of the West and thwarted at every turn in the North, is now facing a competent, well-trained, well-supplied Union Army. Chattanooga had fallen to General Ulysses S. Grant last November, and the entire Confederacy lies open for a military campaign that will see General William Tecumseh Sherman within sight of Atlanta in mere weeks.
It is in this climate that beleaguered Confederate defenders hold their ground at Petersberg, Virgina, only 23 miles away from the Confederate capital of Richmond.
A dire situation, indeed. In less than a year the war will be over, and the Confederate States of America will be crushed, survived only by a weathered set of “Heritage, Not Hate” mudflaps. Fortunately for the defenders, however, they are up against General Ambrose Burnside and a motley collection of some of the most criminally incompetent commanders that the United States Army has to offer.
General Burnside is a career fuck-up. He comes fresh from his staggering defeat at Fredericksburg, where he daringly sent man after man after man headlong into withering defensive fire, in bold defiance of the laws of logic and battle. The result was a defeat so stunning that one might have forgiven President Lincoln had he wandered about the White House in a daze, shouting “Burnside, Burnside, give me back my legions!”
Burnside was not a man with a great aptitude for plans. So when the Siege of Petersberg descended into a bitter slog through mud and trenches (an eerie premonition of the Western Front, if only Europe had paid attention), Burnside takes ideas from all comers.
Enter Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, miner by trade. The exchange that follows is one that echoes back and forth through the ages in a long line of “smart guy has a great plan that his superiors are too stupid to properly enact.” His plan is fiendish:
Step 1: Dig 500 foot long shaft 20 feet beneath enemy lines.
Step 2: Fill up with 8000 pounds of gunpowder.
Step 3: Blow up gunpowder.
Step 4: Send troops through resulting hole.
Step 5: Win battle.
Burnside likes the plan because, well, it’s a plan, and he is generally unfamiliar with them. Pleasants is set to task immediately, coordinating men and moving massive amounts of earth. It is only after a series of other failures to break the stalemate around Richmond, however, that Pleasants is given the go ahead to (in the words of General Grant) “Pop the cork on that bitch.”
It is at this point that things go terribly, terribly wrong. For whatever reason, it failed to sink into the Union commanders’ heads that someone was about to detonate 4 TONS OF GUNPOWDER underground. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. They must have had some measure of the glorious clusterfuck that was about to ensue, because the first division chosen to charge into the breach was an all black division led by Brigadier General Edward Ferrero. The men were drilled, trained, and as prepared for what was to come as any man possibly could have been. Then, at the last minute, someone caught a case of the politics and decided that sending only black guys into the post-apocalyptic inferno might raise some eyebrows.
This was in 1864. Remember that the next time a sweaty guy wearing a “The South Will Rise Again” t-shirt bitches at you on the bus about “political correctness.”
A victory for civil rights, perhaps, but a major blow to the plan. Burnside, left with no other options, does what he does best: fucks everything up. Instead of training a new division for the unique job, he decides to just choose a division at random. He lines up all of the division commanders and has them choose from one of three doors. Behind two of the doors are goats. Behind the third door is the chance to run headlong into the aftermath of a giant explosion and probably die. The job goes to the 1st Division under Brigadier General James H. Ledlie.
As fate would have it, Ledlie is an able commander with a keen respect for his men. He prepares them well for the arduous task ahead of them and, when the moment comes, is by their side as they charge headlong into history.
That entire preceding paragraph is a lie.
Ledlie is a coward and a fool. Just ask any of his men. In a previous attack on June 18th he opted to have a few drinks and pass out on the battlefield, bypassing the ugliness of battle much like Bilbo Baggins did at the Battle of Five Armies. In this case he doesn’t even bother to tell his men exactly what job they just got randomly signed up for. I imagine that he just kind of strolled into camp, made a farting noise with his mouth, then said “Welp, guys. You’re leading the attack after they do the, you know, thing with the, you know, thing. See ya there! Unless I’m too drunk to show up!” Then he sauntered away into eternal ignominy (more on this imminently).
We move ahead to the day of the detonation. July 30th. Just before dawn. Ledlie’s men wait for the signal, which will be the loudest man-made explosion in history up to that point. The Brigadier General is nowhere to be found. When the bomb goes off at 4:45am it leaves a crater thirty feet deep, churning the earth into a shroud that blots out the sun. Great clods of earth rain from the hellish sky, complemented here and there by splintered Confederate rifles and shattered bodily remains. Ledlie’s men—caught completely unprepared for the scale of the blast—wait ten minutes before stumbling blindly into the crater (instead of around it, as the original division had known to do). Inside they find Confederate soldiers half-buried by the blast. Some are still living but buried face down, their legs kicking in the air above them. In those chaotic first moments of the offensive, Ledlie’s men perform search and rescue.
As more of the 1st Division enters the crater, all semblance of order evaporates. Units dissolve, officers become separated from their troops, and nobody has much of an idea what they are supposed to be doing. Then, someone remembers that the men in the blue uniforms and the men in the gray uniforms are supposed to be shooting at eachother. The Union soldiers, milling about in the crater, make a fine shooting gallery for Confederate riflemen on the rim, and for Confederate cannons behind the lines.
Burnside, eager to add another entry to his list of “catastrophes I have committed while serving as a general in the United States Army” orders the black division under Brigadier General Ferrero—the very same that was supposed to lead the attack in the first place—into the crater, where they too are chewed apart by concentrated rifle and artillery fire. Brigadier General Ferrero, however, is nowhere to be found.
The Union would ultimately lose the battle but, as we all know, would soon win the war. The casualties of the Battle of the Crater, while heavy, were far from the most outrageous of the conflict. Still, the battle marked a subtle shift in the landscape of battle, a whisper of things that were to come. It presaged a war—only a few decades away—where technology would outstrip tactics, and where military capability would exceed military competence. It even held glimmers of another summer day, 81 years to come, and another plan to end a war with a single, titanic explosion.
Yet a question remains. Whatever happened to Generals Ledlie and Ferrero? Where were they at the moment their men foundered in the crater, when their men most needed leadership? Where were they while madness and confusion reigned on the battlefield?
They were drinking rum together in a bomb-proof bunker, far from the front line.
That’s the story of the Battle of the Crater.
No comments:
Post a Comment