Worst Civil War Battle

[Pastfinder]

I've been watching the Ken Burns THE CIVIL WAR series this holiday as I do every December holiday season. The one question I always seemed to have was which battle was the most horrible. Fredricksburg in my mind seems the worst, for the Union side. Gettysburg was the worst for the Confederates in my eye. Any opinions, comments?

 

[cxim]

depends on how you define worst...

Vicksburg was a hell hole. people starved to death...

All of the War was hell... more people died from disease than from battle wounds...

the MORTALITY of gunshot wounds was 50%... that means shot anywhere, not just 'bad' wounds. Trunk wounds mortality was higher...80 to 90 %

 

[GreenBeret]

Dam yankees.

 

[jimmygates]

I don't know which battle was the worst but I was amazed that during the Civil War, they had navy units that closely resembled submarines. Technology...





-Jimbo

 

[GreenBeret]

Don't forget the Merrimack and the ______. (I forgot the name! )

 

[ElFenix]

the monitor and the merrimack, two iron clads. met at hampton roads, slugged it out all day, neither taking any real damage. the hundley was a confederate submarine that was the first submarine to actually sink an enemy warship. it went down later in rough seas with all hands. the civil war was very much a preview of the changes that would come with wwi, large citizen armies entrenched against one another taking large casualties.

heres something horrific: in those battle lines that characterized gun-warfare from the early 1700s until the retiring of the smooth-bore flintlock in the mid 1800s many casualties were secondary. that is, when the ounce (~28 grams) of lead smacked into one soldier it deformed ("exploded&quot causing bone fragments to injure soldiers around him.

back to the topic, the most damaging battle to the south was probably the early one where grant took the forts in tennessee/kentucky that controlled the tennessee river. if i were at home i could look up the name. those let union troops into the heart of the south, the iron mines in alabama and into georgia. of course, theres the big "what-if" lee hadn't lost gettysburg? could have wheeled into washington, perhaps forcing an end to the war.

 

[Netopia]

It blows my mind to think that almost as many Americans died at the battle at Antietam Creek as died in the ENTIRE VietNam war! My brother-in-law is an historian (actually works for the National Archives as an archivist) and we went for a weekend trip camping near Antietam. He took a bunch of us on a person tour of the battle field... it was pretty nasty thinking about what he was describing.

One of the more wierd events were a number of (Union, I believe) soldiers passing by a farm house where honey bees were raised. They didn't know it and disturbed them and the bees attacted. The screaming alerted the enemy to the soldiers presense and they calmly picked most of them off from long range.

Sad time in our history.

Joe

 

[Pastfinder]

The USS Merrimack was Union warship that was burned to the waterline to prevent the Confederates from capturing the ship. The Confederates raised the hull and built it into the CSS Virginia, which fought the USS Monitor at Hampton Roads, VA in 1862. Changed naval warfare forever.

 

[Windogg]

The naive attitude of the two side before and during the First Battle of Bull Run has always surprised me. I remember learning that both sides had a pretty cavalier attitude about the whole affair. In fact many well to do got into their Sunday best and sat near the battlefield just like someone today would goto a baseball game and sit in the bleachers. Everyone expected the two side to go out, fire a few shot, and then go home. Of course all hell broke loose and it turned into a fierce battle. When the Union lines broke into full retreat, there was a mess of soldiers, wounded, and civilians trying to escape anyway they could. We all know what happened the next four years.

Windogg