Pray That You May Never Know Part 3 of 3

The monotony and the loneliness on the Canal bred a sick kind of humor. The longer they stayed, the less civilized they became. In one particular incident Dad defused and reassembled a grenade. As he walked by a fox hole, he pulled the pin, let the spoon fly and tossed it in. As the frightened Marine scrambled for safety, Dad yelled back, “Sucker!”

Loud farting and belching became competitive sports, in which Dad excelled. After the war he often reserved his better performances for Thanksgiving dinner at our maternal grandmother’s. As a rule, my brother and I flanked him at the table.  He waited until after “Grace,” when everyone had started eating then he would let a horrendous one go. I swear the air changed color as a sulfuric cloud hovered above us. He turned to me and said I had been taught better manners, which often resulted in me having to leave the table. I will never forget the time he told me, “A hiccup is and educated fart that went up an elevator.” I shared that with my grandmother only once.

The humor bordered on cruelty. He would sing “Cool, Clear Water,” when we had to relieve ourselves and had no place to do so or he would eat an entire steak in front of us while we got vegetables. All the while, with each bite he let us know how succulent it tasted.

Life on the island reduced itself to survival from nature, boredom, and the Japanese who sniped at the Marines as they patrolled their perimeters. The enemy tied themselves in treetops and shot down the Marines behind their own lines. As a wire runner, Dad not only had to drag in the dead and bury them but he had to string phone wire between the rear lines and the forward command posts. On one occasion while running a spool of wire with his rifle across his back, he distinctly recalled a Japanese sniper pocking up the dirt at his heels. On other occasions he had to crawl along the wire to mend broken or cut lines.

He feared Japanese pilots the most. For the three weeks after August 7, until the first Navy and Marine planes arrived at the airfield, the Japanese bombed the island and Henderson field every night. The raids generated few casualties but they kept the isolated Marines awake and on constant alert. During the day reconnaissance planes sortied over Henderson. For two weeks the Japanese showed no serious ground opposition.

Did recalled stringing wire in the trees along the airfield when a Zero made a strafing run along the strip. From 10 feet up in the tree he got a very good look at the pilot’s teeth and scarf as the wing tip swooshed by him.

Another time, while on patrol, a Japanese spotter plane swooped low over Dad’s squad. All 13 men, except the lieutenant hit the deck. He ordered them not to go to ground again. The plane flew over again and everyone took cover but the lieutenant. With his back to the squad, he impetuously reached for his sidearm. Simultaneously 13 ’03 Springfields chambered rounds and the lieutenant joined his men on the ground.”He, who lives to run away, lives to run another day,” Dad quipped. The steely glint in his eyes told us that the lieutenant would have succumbed to “friendly fire.”

Death lurked everywhere on the island, which stank of decaying wildlife and vegetation. Dad always grew worse at night, especially during lightning storms. He constantly paced the floor, vehemently curding. He cried and when sleeping woke up frightened and angry. We never approached him when he slept.

The Japanese usually attacked at night. On the evening of October 13, after a day of intense bombing which destroyed the fuel depot and most of the aircraft at Henderson Field, two Japanese ships shelled the Marines along their entire perimeter.  Dad’s eyes glazed over when he described that night. The men crammed themselves into their dugouts. He said they could hear the men in the back screaming as they fought for air as the last men in pushed them into the mud and coral walls. Several suffocated to death. The ground heaved and rolled. Sand sifted down on the Marines’ heads. The concussions jarred their skulls. They covered their ears and bawled uncontrollably for the bombardment to stop. That sense of absolute helplessness plagued him for the 13 years he lived with us. He escaped by taking long walks, alone, at night. One time, when the car blew a hose on a Florida back road, he took off and left us sitting for what seemed like hours.

Death haunted him. He often cursed God for not letting him die like a large portion of his battalion. (The 2nd Battalion lost all but 45 in killed and wounded on Peleliu.) On the evening of August 22, when the severely wounded native, Sergeant Major Vouza, staggered into Dad’s outpost, he was sent back to get Colonel Pollock at his command post along the Ilu. He returned with the colonel, who stayed long enough to interrogate Vouza before returning to the CP with Dad.

About that time, the Japanese attacked the perimeter along the river. He seldom spoke of the battler, except that three of his friends died there and he had to drag them to the rear for burial. When the attack broke off near dawn, the Japanese lay in mounds in front of the Marine machine gun emplacements. The bodies, in the morning light had already began to bloat and burst, Dad with the other wire runners went out to sort out the bodies and bring in the American dead. Thirty-four Marines had died. He found his three friends, all of whom he had played cards with the day before. They lay in the sun, their distended stomachs gurgling and black. He and another Marine grabbed one of the corpses by the wrists and feet to haul it off when the fellow’s hand tore free into Dad’s. I still see him burying his face in his hands and crying.

By December 22, 1942, the 2nd Battalion had received orders to leave the Canal. Crippled with malaria and weight loss, a lot of the Marines, my father among them, had to be evacuated on stretchers. Every summer after that it literally knocked him flat. I can still see him on the couch, covered with quilts, saturated with sweat, delirious, and freezing at the same time. He suffered so terribly.

He never served in combat again. He spent the rest of the war stateside or in Hawaii. While in Hawaii he was blackjacked and rolled. The resulting brain damage exacerbated his already disturbed mental state. Memory lapses, blackouts, and seizures followed him to his grave.

Dad taught me the history lessons not found in textbooks. He taught me how fragile love and compassion are. He taught me never to forget the “little man.” He showed me that emotion scars run deeper than physical ones and that many men, like himself, have carried and will carry bitter memories and broken spirits to the edge of eternity. They died long before they physically grew old.

A navy doctor who examined the Marines after they left the Canal said they suffered not so much from “a bloodstream infection nor gastrointestinal disease but from a disturbance of the whole organism – a disorder of thinking and living, or even wanting to live.” It is no coincidence that Dad suffered from Survivors’ Guilt. He equated death in combat with sainthood. After the Canal he lived to die – to release himself from the bondage of his memories. He penned his epitaph long before he passed on.

Defenders of the Faith

Out on that burning sand,

Thinking of God, home, and wife,

You gave to your native land:

All you had; your life:

We left you on Guadalcanal,

A bit of America on a foreign shore,

Sleep in peace; John, Joe and Al:

America will honor you; ever more:

When Christ rewards the brave,

After all evil is cast down,

You boys may leave your grave,

And, rightly claim your crown.

Looking back, the years having dissipated but not totally erased the raw emotions which thinking of him resurrect, I am so very thankful that there are organizations, support groups, and doctors available today to assist and treat the veterans and their families with the effects of PTSD. Described as “the melancholy,” “soldier’s heart,” and “insanity,” the veterans of the past just lived with it. Like so many, Laura Ingalls Wilder explained her uncle’s bizarre behavior at a family function with, “He was in the war.” Lieutenant J. Volney Pierce (Company G, 147th New York), writing 19 years after Gettysburg, frankly stated, “The battle is a huge ‘nightmare’ to me.”

Pray That You May Never Know Part 2 of 3

On the night of August 8 a Japanese naval squadron sank several more U. S. ships, including the cruise U.S.S. Quincy. Meigs Comus, a boyhood friend from Winchester, Tennessee, was among the many whose bodies never were found. Worse yet, General Douglass MacArthur had ordered all of the First Division’s supply ships and the aircraft carriers to depart for Australia. The Marines had offloaded less than half of their supplies. Precious food and ammunition was on its way to safety.

Without air cover or adequate supplies, the Marines felt expendable and abandoned. As the days wore on and became numerically forgotten in the stench of the island, he, and others, harbored a bitter hatred toward MacArthur, a hatred which lasted long after the war. We could not speak his name in our home. “’I shall return,’” Dad often growled, “over the bodies of dead Marines.”

From the day the ships sailed out, he held an undying grudge against the Army and Douglas MacArthur. Until his dying day, he believed that the First Division and the Corps had won the war in the Pacific by themselves. The Marines left behind their own version of “Bless Them All.”

We asked for the Army to come to Tulagi/But Douglas MacArthur said, “No.”/We asked for a reason/He said it’s not the season/Besides, there is no USO.

With food and ammunition in short supply, the Marines dug in for a long five months. They plundered the well stocked Japanese warehouses for food. They found cans of raw fish and rice, both of which pretty much supplemented their diets in the early stages of the campaign. Dad never mentions the raw fish but he talked about the rice. Pasty and wormy, it was loaded with harmful bacteria and parasites (probably because of the human and animal waste used to grow it). Dad came away from the island with an infected digestive track.

In 1954, he hemorrhaged so badly one particularly violent attack, he nearly died. Mom kept us boys out of the bathroom. I still remember her shouting through the door over Dad’s retching that the floor was covered with blood. Very shortly after that, he went into the hospital where the surgeons removed part of his pancreas and, according to Mom, 90% of his stomach.  A voracious eater, under normal circumstances, after he came home, he gorged himself and never seemed full.

He loved sea food, a taste which I never acquired. He told us how the men supplemented their foul rice diet with sea turtle. Some of his more exotic tastes included chocolate covered grasshoppers and ants, the latter of which would crawl into the men’s tin cups in which they had melted “pogey bait” (Hershey Bars).

He also introduced us to “Anything Stew.” It consisted of cabbage, corn, and any leftover vegetables resembling food boiled together and finished off with a lot of vinegar to “kill the taste.” He served it steaming hot with a thick layer of black pepper floating on the surface.

The recipe had come from the Canal. While we carefully ladled it up with our throats numb, tongues burning, and eyes watering, he would add with a grin, he said he would have added flied to it, had he had any, to give it some meat. We knew how he hated flies.

He literally went berserk when any got into the house. They had been terrible on the island. He described how they kamakazied into the men’s boiling stews or coffee. He showed us how they vainly tried to flick them off their spoons as they ate. They left big welts wherever they bit. “They sort of crunched,” he added as we tried to swallow his stew.

The Canal, brutal and stinking of rot, hardened my father. It destroyed his capacity to fully love another person. Isolated, exhausted by the innervating humidity and living a mole like existence drained the compassion from him. He replaced it with bitterness and anger.

Besides the flies, MacArthur, and the Army he became hyper vigilant. The Canal abounded in exotic birds and rodents. They filled the nights with their calls and roaming. The jungle rats with their long snouts, stringy coarse fur and beady eyes ran through the foxholes and over the men in their nocturnal raids for food.

The birds, with their sharps, screeching calls kept the men awake at night. There was one particular parrot that only defecated when flying and was known for its big loads. They fluttered through the trees making noises which the Marines suspected the Japanese imitated. Another bothersome nocturnal bird, which apparently lacked night vision, continually flew into the tree overhead with a loud “thunk,” at which point it fell loudly to the ground with an ear splitting scream.

We had to remain quiet in the house – no whistling, no screaming, no shouting allowed. It would set him off. He hated canaries and parakeets. All of ours died mysteriously while we were at school and Dad was off work. We would come home and find the birds dead in the bottom of the cage, with the door open, high above the household cats. Sometimes, he told us, the “fell” off their perches while swinging on them.

Our pet hamsters met a similar fate. I can still see Dad tightly holding the ball of fur in his left hand. With his eyes glistening, he sarcastically teased, “If you hold ‘em by the tail, their eyes ‘ll pop out.” Not knowing whether he was joking or not, my brother and I laughed. Hamsters do not have any kind of tail to brag about. When we returned that afternoon, we found them dead in their cage on the back porch. Mom said they had broken their necks while running on the tread wheel.

Pray That You May Never Know - Part 1 of 3

The British poet, Sigfried Sassoon, in his heartbreaking poem, “Suicide in the Trenches,” concluded it with the bitter line, “Pray that you may never know the Hell where youth and laughter go.” When I walk the fields at Antietam or Gettysburg and work my way through the seemingly endless records that the survivors left behind, I sometimes find myself haunted by the poetry of the “Great War.” And it saddens me. They put in verse what others could not pen. They remind me of growing up the son of a troubled World War II veteran. The following post is going to be the first of several from an article I penned in 1985 to deal with the ghosts of the past.

            It is not an attempt to garner sympathy but rather an attempt to understand “why.” Dad passed away in March, 1972 at the age of 50 from pancreatic cancer, in Florida. I did not attend his funeral nor did I cry. That occurred a year later. The sadness overcame me out of nowhere. It took me another 13 years to put his story on paper. It takes some veterans a very long time to talk about the past. Quite a few never speak about what happened. So it was with me.

            I did not fight in a war, nor did I serve in the military. That does not mean I did not viscerally experience it. I learned history from the people who lived it. World War II never ended because the shooting stopped. No war ever does. The following is the story of a veteran and the events which changed his life and the lives of those that knew him.

Once a Marine

            “I’d rather be a live coward than a dead hero,” my father used to mumble. “Semper Fi-ee! Semper Fi-ee!” he would snarl. “Boy, when I say, ‘Jump!’ you say ‘Sir! How high, sir!’”

            My father, Ira Lee Priest, never left the Marine Corps, or for that matter Guadalcanal. Like many men, who had seen too much combat, he seldom talked about the war. Yet, when he did, we knew he was not telling us a “sea story.” His eyes reflected the deep trauma he had experienced. They would dilate and turn black, distant, the frightening “Thousand Yard Stare.” The memories of the six months in the South Pacific haunted him the rest of his life. They literally siphoned the soul out of him and entombed him in a mental grave from which he could not extricate himself. His loneliness, anger, and nightmares affected the entire family.

            Ira Priest, who preferred being called “Pat,” enlisted in the Marine Corps at 5:00 p.m., May 12 in Nashville, Tennessee, three days before his 20th birthday and the day he would have graduated high school. The next day, he bussed out to Parris Island for boot camp. He finished seven weeks later on July 28, 1941. During the next ten months he was stationed at Quantico, Virginia; Burns City, Indiana, and New River North Carolina. The war started while he was in Burns City. He reached New River at the end of April, 1942 where he became a wire runner, Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. (He sarcastically referred to being in the “intelligence” company.)

            The Division left New River on June 12, 1942 for a 10 day train ride across the U.S. to San Francisco. There they boarded the U.S.S. George F. Elliott for a miserable three week voyage to New Zealand. The men spent a lot of the time below decks in the hold of the Elliott, which had also served as the 2nd Battalion’s supply ship. The bulkhead had been fitted with tiers of racks (beds) suspended by chains and bunks ran fore to aft in through the center of the hold. The place reeked of soured milk or cheese and puke, which washed under the bunks as the ship rolled with the sea. The propeller shaft, which ran the length of the ship over the top racks, banged and clanged incessantly. Sleeping became an acquired skill.

On July 11, the ship docked in Wellington, where the 2nd battalion hastily unloaded, reorganized, and reloaded their supplies in a back breaking 11 days. Despite the cancellation of all overnight leaves, Dad managed to avoid some of the work to strike up an acquaintance with a young lady on Peter Street.

Like Lincoln’s father, my grandfather, apparently, had taught his son to work but never to love it. His high school year book, which his sister sent him, contains a log of every female he encountered from Burns City to Guadalcanal, and back. It reads much like the cartoon of a sailor explaining to his crying girlfriend, “Honey, I ain’t got a girl in every port. I ain’t been to every port.” On his page of “flames” he scrawled: “Ira Lee Priest, His Hand and Pen, He Will Be Good, But God Knows When”

On July 22, the First Division set sail for the Solomons, South Pacific. Once again, under the threat of possible attack, the majority of the men, over the next 16 days, stayed below decks in the swill choked holds.

On August 7, 1942, following the predawn bombardment of Guadalcanal, the Marines went over the sides into their bobbing Higgins boats. The 5th Marines were in the first wave, followed by the 1st Marines, several hours later.

The entire landing force landed on Red Beach, east of the Tenaru River, and moved west toward their objective, the recently constructed Japanese airfield. The 2nd Battalion pushed through a coconut grove west of the beach and disappeared into the jungle.

It took hours to hack through the dense vegetation to get to the Tenaru. Dad and another Marine, being just as lost as the rest of the Battalion, accidentally became the squad point. They found the river by accident. In the thick undergrowth, they stepped into the open air along the steep bank and fell into the fungus covered water. Without thinking, they started slapping the filthy water, until their lieutenant warned them to watch out for crocodiles.

Once across the “river,” the Marines pushed further west to the Shallow, swift running Ilu River. Quite a few of the sweaty Marines lapped up the water as they forded it, despite warnings that it might be polluted. By nightfall the battalion reached the Lunga River and secured the nearby abandoned airfield. The 1st and 3rd Battalions established a perimeter on the ridges and in the jungle south of the airfield. The 2nd Battalion occupies and abandoned coconut grove near the mouth of the Lunga where it emptied into the Pacific.

A steady, hot rain fell that night as the men dug in. Headquarters issued the password “Lilliputian” to every man. Based upon somewhat faulty intelligence, they assumed that no Japanese would be able repeat it without substituting “r’s” for the “l’s.”

The darkness overwhelmed everything that night. No moon.  No stars. Just the sticky, unrelenting rain rapidly pattered their helmets, inundated their foxholes, and rolled into their eyes. Dad said the razor sharp kunai grass, the coconut trees, and the impenetrable darkness made it impossible to see more than an arm’s length to the front. The jungle came alive with the terrible noises of the wild birds. Each man fell prey to his own imagination. Every shadow harbored a ruthless enemy, capable of supernatural stealth. Dad’s eyes got distant when he talked about the coconut grove. Once again, he was along in the unending rain listening for the Japanese.

As the night wore on, occasional shots whizzed over the Marines in the grove from behind, fired from someone sniping at the shadows. Around midnight, a rifle cracked along the front of the Headquarters section, followed by the popping staccato of a Reising submachine gun, then scattered rifle shots. It quieted down within 10 minutes, leaving the men chattering among themselves about what had just happened.

Colonel Alvin Pollock (the 2nd Battalion’s CO) sent Dad, who was one of his runners, into the kunai grass along the perimeter to gather whatever intelligence he could. With his Model 1911 45 in his right hand, Dad crawled very slowly on his belly through the razor sharp grass, feeling in the darkness for whomever or whatever caused the one sided firefight. His eyes grew darker, more aloof and his voice more tense and slower as he described the incident to us – my brother and me. He said he kept reaching out, with his free hand, cautiously probing everything within reach.

Suddenly, he froze as his fingers walked into something sticky and warm. His fingers traced over the invisible mess. They found broken bone, a neck, teeth, a nose and a helmet. He very cautiously felt fro tags. They were oval – American. He stopped there, leaving no details about how they returned the corpse to Pollock’s command post or how they identified it. Tears streaming down his tanned cheeks, he rasped it was a friend of his with whom he had been chatting not half an hour before. (Robert Leckie in Helmet for My Pillow identified the deceased as a navy corpsman who had had trouble with the password.) Dad speculated that he had wandered beyond the perimeter to relieve himself.

The war became immediately personal at that moment. The situation worsened the next day when word arrived that a Japanese Val had dove into the open hold of the George F. Elliott and had sent it to the bottom of Iron Bottom Bay. The battalion had off loaded only eight days of supplies.

The Way I See It

            History has always been personal to me. It has parasitically latched onto me and there are times when I wish it had not. When I am pensive, my mind flooded with memories and observations which I want to share but am afraid to do so because I question whether they really matter at all, I wish I could forget that the past had ever occurred. Studying history, in particular military history, has made me rather cynical. While I have never been in combat, I know how it affects some people. I know how a lot of politicians and their ilk have twisted it and glorified it to suit their own purposes. I know that the effects of war affect the civilians almost as much as it does the men fighting it.  The melancholia of living with the memories is as palpable decades afterward as they were when they were still fresh. As an historian, those impressions overwhelm me at times and make it nearly impossible for me to write.

            History teaches relationships between cause and effect, between perceived reality and reality, between legend and memory, between rage and fear. The list of correlations could go on ad infinitum. People and their basic reactions to stress, fear, and death have never changed. They are part of an eternal continuum than spans the centuries of human existence. My particular quest is to discover, as accurately as I can, what happened on the alleged “fields of glory,”

            On a personal level, I can relate to the intense fear that a person experiences when coming within a second of dying violently. During recurring spats with physical and mental exhaustion I can almost feel the blade of the hunting knife being held against my throat from behind and hearing, “Don’t move.” The incident occurred 56 years ago, when I was 13, but I recall it a vividly as if it had just happened. I remember lying awake at night, frozen in place in my bed, anxiously watching the shadows of the tree branches outside the bedroom window dance menacingly against the pulled window blinds, waiting for the assailant to make a second call while I slept.

            I know what it is like to watch someone very close to me die. The face grows pale then gray. The eyes lock in their sockets and grow dull. The death rattle fills the room with its ominous, rapid clatter and the fingers grow indescribably cold as it creeps progressively up the left arm. The rattling stops. Life is gone, just as Walt Whitman described his hospital experience with a dying soldier. Some things never change and never will.

            I can still see an employee, who had just been severely beaten, on her back on the floor. Eyes fixed but still alive, shivering uncontrollably, yet still as a corpse, not dead but seemingly so. Her boyfriend had stolen onto the jobsite and roughed her up then left her to lie there.

            I remember regaining consciousness after a student kicked me unconscious, having no recollection of what had transpired seconds before. My glasses lay askew to one side. My hearing aids flanked me on either side. I cannot recall him repeatedly kicking me in the chest and head. I still cringe at videos of anyone needlessly getting kicked while down. They trigger memories I would prefer to leave in the shadows. Hyper-vigilance and I have become lifelong companions.

            I just read an article about a study of generational trauma concerning Civil War veterans and the longevity of their male offspring. Many historians could honestly verify that “The sins of the father are visited upon the children.” Many who have had relatives in the Holocaust, who survived the Great Depression of the 1930’s, or who was raised in abject poverty has experienced some generational trauma. Children perceive the world through their parents’ eyes and will probably pass on, to some degree those influences, to the generation which follows them.

            So it is when I write history. Rifled shells “Scream.” Twelve pounder Napoleons “ring.” The faces of the dead and dying glow phosphorescently in the moonlight of a humid, sultry spring night in the mosquito infested swamp land along the James River. Men reek of sweat and wood smoke and scratch the lice and wood ticks imbedded in their clothing and their skin. They weep uncontrollably when a friend dies in their arms and often swear out of frustration and hopelessness. Others just leave their comrades where they lay because they have no choice and can do nothing for them because after all “Death is just Death.”

            My experiences growing up have shaped who I am and not always for the better. I understand from my past why I write history the way I do. It is a mixed curse/blessing. Sometimes I have to put my writing down because it gets too vivid. Erich Maria Remarque, in All Quiet on the Western Front unknowingly, of course, described my approach to history best when he wrote:

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure. For death is not an adventure with those who stand face-to-face with it. It will try, simply, to tell of a generation of men, who even though they may have escaped its shells but were destroyed by the war.”

Timing IS Everything

            One of the persisting problems within the Civil War community is that “modern” historians insist that unreliable time pieces created the discrepancy in times recorded in the hundreds of battle accounts, including the Official Records [ORs], and therefore the times cited are not reliable. With the plethora of information now available to the historian, I believe it is possible to verify the accuracy of the times cited by the various participants.

When researching my new project, I encountered a problem trying to establish when Wadsworth’s Division, Army of the Potomac, actually marched and arrived on the field. I had a difficult time reconciling the various sightings of Maj. Gen. John F. Reynolds on the field. Therefore, I decided to develop a system to verify the accuracy of the veterans’ accounts which I have used throughout this work to determine to some degree when the various units arrived upon the field. It is a system which I developed by accident while developing a miniature wargame over the last couple of decades.

Basic “Givens”

1.      Not every timepiece, even today, will have the same time, despite the global usage of GPS and cell phones.

2.      Armies, once watches appeared on the scene, ran on more precise time schedules than during the age of sundials and hour glasses. Adjutants in their diaries often listed the times for all of the bugle and drum calls required to run their regiments, brigades, divisions, and corps on a regular schedule. The time for “Reveille” varied based upon the time of sunrise, which was often determined by almanacs, and by whether an army was in camp or on campaign. The following is the typical Artillery schedule. Infantry calls were not that different.

Reveille – Sunrise

Breakfast – Immediately after Reveille

Sick Call/Stable Call – half an hour after breakfast

Guard Mounting – 8:30 a.m.

Boots and Saddle (Section or Battery Drill) – 9:00 a.m.

Watering Call – 11:30 a.m.

Dinner Call – 12:00 p.m.

Drill (Standing Gun or Marching Drill – 2:00 p.m.

Recall – 4:00 p.m.

Stable Call, water before grooming – 4:00 – 5:00 p.m.

Retreat Sunset

Tattoo – 8:00 p.m.

Taps – 8:30 p.m.

            Times had to be accurate to make the Army function properly. The responsibility for keeping accurate time rested on the Army commander and filtered down to the regimental adjutants and their musicians.

       3.  Many of the farmers and the outdoor laborers in the military had learned to judge the time, give or take about 15 minutes, by observing the position of the sun in the sky. As a construction worker, decades ago, I could do the same thing.

       4.  Almanacs, for instance, established sunrise and sunsets by locales: New York City to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC to Baltimore, Maryland, and, Staunton, Virginia. Everyone who had a watch depended upon them to establish a standard time based upon their geographic region.

Using Drill Manuals to Establish Rate of Movement and Distance to be Covered When in the Field

According to Hardee’s Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics, Vol. 1, 1861, and Silas Casey’s Infantry Tactics, Vol. 1, 1862  the infantryman marched at three distinct rates – Common Time  (90 steps per minute), Quick Time (110 Steps per minute), and Double-Quick (165 steps per minute). The length of the step for Common Time and Quick Time was a prescribed 28 inches from heel to heel and for the Double-Quick 33 inches from heel to heel. Therefore, a soldier at the Common Time could cover 210 feet in one minute (2.4 mph); at the Quick Time: 256.7 feet per minute (2.9 mph); and at the Double-Quick: 453.75 feet per minute (5.2 mph). Both manuals stressed that once the recruits learned to march at the Common Time, they should immediately transition to the Quick Time for all maneuvers.

Phillip St. George Cooke’s Cavalry Tactics, Vol. 1, 1862 explained the following gates for mounted cavalrymen: Walk (3.75 mph), Trot (7.5 mph), and Gallop (10 mph). George B. McClellan’s, Regulations and Instructions for the Field Service of the U.S. Cavalry In Time of War, 1862 sets the paces at: Walk – 100 yards per minute (3.4 mph); Trot – 240 yards per minute (8.2 mph); Gallop – 300 yards per minute (10.2 mph). The Canter and Charge do not appear in either manual. According to www.speedofanimals.com/animals/horse, the Walk is 4 mph The Trot is 8.1mph – 12 mph; the Canter is 12 mph – 15mph; the Gallop is 25 – 30 mph. It seems that in the 1860’s the modern Canter and Gallop would be considered a Charge.

Because gaits vary from horse to horse based upon size, age, and physical condition, I averaged the rates between McClellan’s and Cooke’s regulations. The Walk becomes 3.57 mph. The Trot amounts to 7.85 mph, and the Gallop equals 10.1 mph. The modern Canter and Gallop (Charge) would fatigue or possibly kill a horse if extended beyond 2 miles. When casually riding a horse over extended distances the pace could alter between all three paces, unless the urgency of the moment required the riders to maintain a faster pace. At that point, the rider could alternate between the Trot and the Gallop which would bring the horse’s approximate speed to 8.975 mph. However a sound animal could complete the entire 10 miles at the Gallop without getting fagged out. Attempting to calculate departure and arrival times on the field are, at best, estimates. By calculating the estimated times of departure and arrival, the researcher can somewhat accurately determine if the “official times” cited in the military records are reasonable or not.

The Time to March from the Bridge on Marsh Creek to the Peach Orchard

            Nearly every regimental account from Wadsworth’s Division said they halted at the Peach Orchard then went to the Codori Farm where their columns turned northwest and cut cross country to get to Seminary Ridge. Therefore, using the Peach Orchard as the marker point, I had to calculate how long it took the infantry to traverse the distance from Marsh Creek to that point at the Common Time. It is 3.4 miles from Marsh Creek to the Peach Orchard. To reach the approximate time of arrival, I had to divide the distance (3.4 miles) by the rate of march at Quick Time (2.9 mph) which translated into 1.17 hours (1 hour 10 minutes) to get to the Peach Orchard.

Witnesses said that Cutler’s Brigade, which led the advance, got at least a 1 mile to 1.5 mile lead on the Iron Brigade. Cutler’s men left their bivouac around 6:45 a.m. They would have reached the Peach Orchard around 7:55 a.m. Rounding it up to 8:00 a.m., places Cutler at the Peach Orchard at the time that Meredith’s Iron Brigade left its Marsh Creek bivouac. This created a 3.4 mile gap between the two brigades, not a 1 mile – 1.5 mile lead. Cutler halted at the Peach Orchard, according to the men to get a breather and, by my undocumented conjecture, to probably allow time for Meredith to catch up.

The 19th Indiana received word around 7:30 a.m. that the division would march at 8:00 a.m.. Meredith’s Westerners left the bivouac at Marsh Creek on schedule but at what some referred to as a leisurely pace. More than likely, they were at the Common Time rate but in Route Step. The men kept their intervals and pace but not in step and with their weapons at the carry which they preferred, and they were allowed to talk while on the move.  Being, at the least, 2 miles further north, within sight of Big Round Top, the brigade would not reach the regiment until around 8:50 a.m. (Colonel Samuel J. Williams 19^th Indiana recorded that the regiment was on the march before 9:00 a.m..) Allowing 5 minutes for the regiment to take its place in the column, it would take another 35 minutes to reach the Peach Orchard around 9:30 a.m., by which time Cutler’s men were in the swale west of the Seminary and out of sight.

I also had to estimate how long it took Reynolds and his staff to reach the Peach Orchard from Marsh Creek. Moving at a Trot/Gallop (8.975 mph) to make good time and not overtax their animals would put them at the Peach Orchard within in 22 minutes. If Reynolds and Wadsworth left Marsh Creek around 7:30 a.m., they could have overtaken the head of the column by 8:00 a.m., which would have given them time to dismount, examine their maps and give the infantry a much needed rest. Colonel Hofmann (56th Pennsylvania) saw Reynolds and his staff dismounted in the road at the Peach Orchard studying a map.

From there, Reynolds and his entourage, without Wadsworth, took the Emmitsburg Road into Gettysburg. They traveled north on the Emmitsburg Road to the Taneytown Road-Washington Street intersection. They stopped momentarily at the George George house to ask for the most direct route to Seminary Ridge. They took Washington Street north to York Street.  Turning west, they rode to the Chambersburg Pike intersection and followed it northwest to the seminary building. The General did a short inspection with Buford to the west to McPherson’s Ridge to the position held by Calef’s Battery – a distance of 2.73 miles. They then returned through Gettysburg by shorter route than he took into the town.  At the Gallop that would mean that Reynolds left the Peach Orchard around 8:15 a.m. 

            The general, before returning to Wadsworth’s Division, made a preliminary reconnaissance of McPherson’s ridge, and stopped in a field near to Seminary to dispatch his aides to various corps commanders and to Army Headquarters. He then rode to the John Burns House on the southeast corner of York and West Streets, where he turned south on West Street.  The corner of West and High Street, he went east to Washington Street. He took Washington Street to the Emmitsburg Road where he encountered Major Henry E. Tremain, General Sickles’s aide de camp, and stopped briefly to scan Cemetery Hill and the surrounding field before riding to Codori’s at which place he sent Cutler’s Brigade through the field to the northwest. Adding an estimated .6 miles on his return route the distance works out to 2.66 miles, which he could have covered in about 20 minutes. At the minimum gallop, had he left McPherson’s Ridge at 8:40 a.m., he could have reached Codori’s about 9:00 a.m., the time most of Cutler’s witnesses said they started cross country. At a faster gate, Reynolds and his staff could have stayed until 8:50 a.m. and still arrived at Codori’s by that time.

            Cutler’s Brigade reached Codori’s around 9:00 a.m..  Pioneers went forward to widen the fence openings which Company L, 1^st Maine Cavalry had created to make the advance. A couple of the regiments used the delay to load their weapons. They crossed the field at the Double-Quick the rate for which could vary from 5.2 – 5.625 mph. The distance from Codori’s to the college lane is 1.42 miles. At that speed, the head of the column would have reached the lane within 15 to 16 minutes. Interestingly enough, G. B Garrison, Buford’s scout, jotted the infantry’s time of arrival at 9:15 a.m.

This is the time line of departure and arrival as I understand it and Reynolds’s activities upon the field. Being the proverbial “work in progress,” these times could vary as the research progresses.

1.      6:45 a.m. Cutler’s Brigade leaves the Marsh Creek bivouac, with Cutler at the head of the column.

2.      7:00 a.m. Meredith’s Iron Brigade forms in the Emmitsburg Road at Marsh Creek.

3.      7:26 a.m. Cutler’s brigade passes the 19^th Indiana at the Alexander Currens place. (2 miles from Marsh Creek)

4.      7:30 Reynolds, Wadsworth and their staffs leave the Marsh Creek bivouac.

5.      7:45 a.m., the generals pass the 19^th Indiana at Alexander Currens. (2 miles from Marsh Creek)

6.      7:55 a.m. Cutler’s brigade halts at the Peach Orchard. (3.4 miles from the Marsh Creek bivouac.)

7.      7:55 a.m. Reynolds, Wadsworth and their escorts arrive at the head of Cutler’s brigade at the Peach Orchard.

8.      8:00 a.m. Meredith’s brigade marches out of the Marsh Creek bivouac.

9.      8:00 a.m. Biddle’s Brigade heads north on the Nunemaker Mill Road.

10.  7:55 a.m. – 8:10 a.m. The generals dismount to study their maps.

11.  They dismount to study a map for about 15 minutes – 8:10 a.m. – before mounting up to reconnoiter the situation west of the town.

12.  8:10 a.m. – 8:35 a.m. Reynolds and his officers, without Wadsworth and his staff ride through Gettysburg. He meets Buford at the seminary and they ride out to McPherson’s Ridge, where Buford redeploys Calef’s Battery. (3.19 miles)

13.  8:35 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. Reynolds takes in the situation, rides back to the Chambersburg Road, halts briefly to disperse several aides to Howard, Sickles, Meade, and Wadsworth . He then rides back by West Street to High Street to the Emmitsburg Road where he meets Major Tremain.  He momentarily stops to study the surrounding terrain. From there he rides to Codori’s and meets Wadsworth who is leading Cutler’s Brigade north. He orders Wadsworth to move Cutler across the fields to Seminary Ridge. (2.66 miles)

14.  8:50 a.m. - 8:55 a.m. The 19th Indiana joins the Iron Brigade near Alexander Currens’s place.

15.  9:00 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.  Reynolds and Wadsworth with their staffs ride back through town and west on the Chambersburg Road to the McPherson farm.

16.  9:00 a.m. – 9:15 a.m. The remainder of Company L, 1^st Maine Cavalry cuts north across the fields to tear down fences for the passage of Cutler’s brigade. Infantry pioneers follow in their wake to widen the gaps in the fences, with the infantry in column in their wake. 

17.  9:15 a.m. The 76^th New York, at the front of Cutler’s brigade, halts at the eastern base of Seminary Ridge while the pioneers clear an opening in the fence along the Chambersburg Road to allow the passage of Hall’s Maine Battery. (1.42 miles from Codori’s to the Seminary Lane at the Chambersburg Road.)

18.  9:15 a.m. Biddle’s Brigade crossed Marsh Creek at Sach’s Bridge on what is now the Water Works Road.

19.  9:15 a.m. - 9:30 a.m. Cutler’s brigade, in column, has ascended Seminary Ridge, south of the seminary and is moving north through the low ground east of McPherson’s Ridge. It cannot be seen from the Peach Orchard at the Emmitsburg Road. (.13 miles)  

20.  9:15 a.m.- 9:30 a.m. Reynolds has ordered Hall’s Battery B, 2^nd Maine Artillery to replace Calef’s two sections of horse artillery on McPherson’s Ridge, north of the Chambersburg Road.

21.  9:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Reynolds rides into the low ground south of the pike and leads the 95^th New York and the 14^th Brooklyn onto the ridge south of the guns. In so doing, he sees the part of the 5^th Alabama Battalion skirmishers slowly working through the woods toward the right flank of the 14^th Brooklyn with the rest of their brigade not too far behind.

22.  9:30 a.m. The 2^nd Wisconsin reaches the Peach Orchard and finds Cutler’s Brigade is nowhere in sight, which leaves the men with the impression they are at the head of the division and are therefore the first troops on the field.

23.  9:30 a.m., Double Day’s column, consisting of Wainwright’s I Corps Artillery Brigade (three batteries), followed, respectively, by Stone’ Brigade of Rowley’s Third Division, then Robinson’s Second Division, starts its march north on the Emmitsburg Road.

24.  9:30 a.m. Doubleday dispatches Lt. Charles Marten to contact Reynolds and get instructions for his deployment.

25.  9:35 a.m. – 9:40 a.m. Doubleday sends Lt. Eminel P. Halstead and Meredith L. Jones to get orders from Reynolds.

26.  9:30 a.m. – 9:45 a.m. Meredith quick time marches to Codori’s. (.72 miles)

27.  9:45 a.m. – 10:00 a.m., the 2^nd Wisconsin, leading the Iron Brigade at the double-quick, reaches the Seminary Lane on the Chambersburg Road. (1.42 miles)

28.  10:00 a.m. – 10:05 a.m., at the double-quick, the 2^nd Wisconsin reaches the campus main street, where it encounters General Reynolds, who urges them forward. (.13 miles)

29.  10:00 a.m. – 10:05 a.m. Lt. Marten meets Reynolds at the Seminary and gets orders for Doubleday to protect the Fairfield Road.

30.  10:05 a.m. – 10:10 a.m. the 2^nd Wisconsin double-quicks into the Rebs on McPherson’s Ridge.

31.  10:05 a.m. – 10:10 a.m. Lieutenants. Halstead and Jones arrive at the Seminary. Reynolds orders Halstead to bring up the rest of the I Corps quickly and Jones is told to fetch Wainwright’s artillery.

32.  10:15 a.m. Biddle reaches the Fairfield Road at Henry Meals’s place.

33.  10:25 a.m. (estimated) Marten delivers his orders to Doubleday.

34.  10:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Meredith’s Brigade is rounding up prisoners and gathering weapons on the west side of Willoughby Run.

35.  10:35 a.m. (estimated) Halstead and Jones reach the head of the Artillery Brigade about .5 miles southwest of the Millerstown Road intersection.

36.  10:35 a.m. Doubleday turns back to bring up the rest of the Corps

37.  10:35 a.m. Wainwright put his guns in motion at the trot and he heads toward Gettysburg.

Miniature Wargaming

           Five years have passed since I last posted something about miniature wargaming. One of my several hobbies, I enjoy playing games with my toy soldiers, painted or unpainted. At the same time I try to simulate the tactics of the historical time period to make it accurate and playable. It is equally important to create a game which is challenging and, depending upon how many players I can accommodate, as loud as possible.  I used historical simulations in the classroom to motivate students and to get them excited about history.

      The following photos are from a current solo game. The playing board is a Civil War battlefield in my basement on a series of 2.5’ X 6’ tables. The playing area is divvied into 10 distinct areas of entry, randomly numbered from 1 -10. A corresponding deck of 14 cards numbered 1 – 10 with 4 No Entry cards, when drawn by the players determine the time and points of entry on the board.

      The following photos represent 7 turns of play in which the Confederates have committed all of their forces (36 regiments numbering 200 -300 men each on the board) and 4 artillery pieces (1 battery) on 6 0f the 10 entry points. The Federal forces have 6 brigades, numbering 27 regiments of 400 men each and six guns. By this time in the game, they have committed 17 regiments and 2 guns on the field.

     In this particular action a Union regiment, in the foreground, despite incoming small arms fire and case shot screaming overhead has driven a Confederate regiment from the rail fence to their front through another Confederate regiment coming on the field. (Note the Confederate flag in the right foreground heading away from the fighting.)

    While that action is going on, one Confederate regiment has successfully disrupted and flanked two Union regiments while one of them is engaged in a firefight with the Confederates along the rail fence. Simultaneously, in the foreground a small Rebel unit is flanking the Union position unobserved.

     A short distance to the right, in front of the same road (previous photograph), 2 Yankee regiments have successfully halted 2 Confederate regiments trying to break their lines in a charge by column of fours.Note that the Confederate regiment moving by the oblique has come under fire from the stonewall on the left.

     This is an overview of the  field including all of the previous photos. It gives the player an idea of how complicated a battlefield could be. Note the creek with the pole bridges in the foreground. The individual figure on the opposite side behind the rail fence among the trees are Rebel skirmishers. They are taking pot shots at Yankee officers.

     From the opposite end of the field looking toward the creek which is marked by the bridge and the tree line to the right behind the log buildings. The two puffs to the right of the cabin in the right are from two Rebels guns firing at the two Yankee guns to the left of the cornfield. A Union regiment has flanked the Rebel regiments in the valley below while Rebel skirmishers are popping rounds at the Union officers in that regiment. Also note the cavalryman just to the right below the cornfield.

         A fresh Confederate brigade has flanked the Union line near the church and the school house.

     The casualties are what one would expect from frontal assaults and regiments getting hit by flank fire. Union losses: 1 artillery lieutenant, 2 aides de camp to a brigadier, 10 regimental line officers, 400 enlisted men to the Rebels' 11 regimental officers and 350 rank and file and the action has just gotten started. The Union forces still have 10 regiments and 4 guns to commit to the action.

     Lessons learned: skirmishers, when used effectively are hard to eliminate and costly to officers. Regiments can break at inconvenient times. So far and additional 200 men (1 Confederate regiment) has quit the field with their commanding officer in addition to the other casualties. A Union regiment of similar size will probably run from the field if it cannot be rallied by its officers. Nothing is predictable and the outcome it "up in the air." It is a nasty brawl with large caliber weapons beyond the control of the commanding generals, who are not on the field.

How Did They Do That?

            Watching World War II movies and TV shows were mandatory in our household. Dad, being Marine Corps veteran of the Pacific Theater, never left the Marine Corps or Guadalcanal. Watching a movie with him was a participation event. Every time John Wayne pulled a grenade pin with his teeth, Dad would yell, “You cain’t do thet!” (He was right. Grenade pins were bent to keep them from accidentally slipping out when carrying them.) Every time a grenade actually exploded and on target, he would growl an expletive, usually in two syllables, because as a rural Tennessean he could not say one syllable words. I remember one time while we were watching “Combat,” starring Vic Morrow, Cage, the BAR man (Browning Automatic Rifleman), charged a German machine gun emplacement while firing the weapon from his hip. “You cain’t run an’ fire thet gun like thet! Lie down!” (The recoil from a BAR could knock the shooter down if it was not properly braced.)

            His running commentaries inadvertently taught me that details are important. Accurate portrayals are important. Writing about a Civil War battle on the ground level that I do requires me to read the drill manuals and to know the weapons and how they operated.

            One thing that has always puzzled me could soldiers fire three aimed shots a minute and, could they really load while running at the “double quick.” I shoot black powder rifles and sidearms. Using a patch and ball and starting loading, I can get off two rounds in a minute and a half. When using an Enfield with a greased minie ball which was not in a cartridge I averaged about the same. Considering that I am no means an expert, and that no one was firing back at me, I do not consider that bad timing.

            So how could a man get off three aimed rounds a minute as prescribed in some of the manuals during a drill where no one was under fire? I think I found the answer. The types of cartridges used determined the rate of fire. During the Civil War the armies used a variety of packaged ammunition such as round ball, minie balls, Enfield cartridges, and patent cartridges. In the movies the infantrymen tear cartridges with their teeth and load by putting the entire round down the bore, which they could do if armed with a smoothbore musket and not the rifled musket.

            The smoothbore paper cartridge was greased. The shooter did not have to unwrap the ball to load it because with the cartridge paper still around it, it could fit down the bore. A musket (shot gun) had no lands and grooves in it to grip the round. Theoretically, a person could get three to four rounds off a minute, as long as the weapon did not foul from the coarse powder. Once the weapon was loaded the soldier had to cap it, which could be done while moving, but probably not at a run.

It could also be loaded while marching at the common time (90 steps per minute), quick time (110 steps per minutes) and possibly at the double quick at (120 steps per minute) because the soldier could charge the cartridge without and ram it home without having to unwrap the bullet. The Prussian army, I believe under Frederick the Great, actually drilled in loading while advancing. The men were armed with muskets.

The conical minie ball used in rifles muskets (rifles) came in a self contained cartridge with two paper wrappings. The powder was in one wrapper and the greased minie ball sat on top of that wrapper with the cone (tip) of the round pointed upward. A separate paper went around that and the wrapped powder charge. In theory the grease from the round would not affect the powder and the extra wrap made the cartridge stronger. However in practice, it slowed the rate of fire and made it virtually impossible to load while at a steady walk. The shooter could charge the powder while walking but then had to halt to unwrap the minie and thumb it into the bore before drawing the rammer to push the ball home. Unwrapping the ball under fire consumed time particularly when a fellow was under fire. While writing this, it occurred to me that this is why so many “dropped” bullets have been found on battlefields,

The British Enfield conical round was a bit smaller than the .58 caliber minie- .577 as a rule. It was placed on the powder point down then lubed on the outside of the cartridge. The rifleman tore open the cartridge and charged the powder, then inverted it and placed the round with the ball in the muzzle.   The wrapped bullet was small enough to fit in the bore without unwrapping it. The man then tore off the empty paper, threw it aside and rammed the cartridge home. This increased the loading and firing time and theoretically could be done while moving. 

The patent cartridge consisted of a combustible cartridge with the minie ball inserted base down but without a separate wrapper. The round was small enough that men said they could load at least the first round by inserting the entire thing in the muzzle and thumping the rifle butt on the ground. It loaded the fastest of any of the pervious ammunition types which I described. Of the four, a soldier could load and fire a patent cartridge faster than the minie or the Enfield round and could conceivably load it on the double quick.

When loading while at the double quick, as some of the Civil War veterans said they did, they more than likely halted to load then double quicked into combat. Loading while at the double quick probably meant they loaded and charge their in four steps, not nine (depending upon which manual they used) and then marched at the double quick with some of them still having their ramrods in the bores of their weapons. I have communicated with Mr. Joseph Bilby, a nationally recognized expert on Civil War rifles and muskets and Mr. Phil Spaugy, an historian of the 19^th Indiana, and a very active member of the North-South Skirmish Association who also has a tremendous working knowledge of Civil War muskets and rifles and both concur that the men would have had to halt to load the weapons before or after running to their objective.

What I would really like to know if there is anyone who has seen a re-enactment unit load and fire live rounds while at the common time, quick time, or double quick step. I would welcome any additional documents information about loading while on the move in formation. I genuinely want to know “How did they do that?”