A Season of Slaughter by Chris Mackowski

Author:Chris Mackowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War II
Publisher: Savas Beatie
Published: 2013-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

“Lee to the rear!”

Then Gordon gave the command: “Charge!”

“All saw that a crisis was upon us,” a soldier later wrote. “If we failed, the consequence would be disastrous to the extreme.”

Gordon’s reserve line runs parallel to the park road along a path that roughly cuts off the base of the Mule Shoe.

* * *

With Gordon leading reinforcements forward, Lee turned his attention to the larger situation. He knew he couldn’t hold the salient, so he needed a fallback position. He directed Martin Luther Smith and his engineers to construct a new mile-long line across the base of the salient. With the survivors of Johnson’s shattered division available as a labor force, Lee had the men he needed, but he desperately needed more time. To get that time, he chose to buy it with lives.

Had Grant’s grand offensive unfolded as it should have, things might have turned out very differently. Burnside’s feeble efforts against the eastern face of the Mule Shoe successfully tied down most of the Third Corps, but did little else. At the other end of the line, Warren remained inexplicably silent. The man who had been too eager to jump the gun two days earlier now dragged his feet—and would do so for four more hours—which gave Lee a free hand to draw reinforcements from that sector of his works.

As Lee began patching together other counterattacks, Gordon’s men pushed through the interior of the salient toward its eastern face. “Onward they swept, pouring their rapid volleys into Hancock’s confused ranks, and swelling the deafening din of battle with piercing shouts,” the brigadier recalled. His brigades struck those of Nelson Miles, Thomas Smyth, andJohn R. Brooke, forcing the Federals back. “[The Confederates] seemed determined to gain back at any cost what had been lost, and the most severe close fighting of the war ensued,” said a Union staff officer.

Gordon’s men linked up with Lane’s men, still mounting a stout resistance, and their combined effort recaptured the eastern face of the salient. Federals didn’t retreat far, however; just outside the Confederate works, they constructed works of their own, just yards away, sometimes piling dead bodies atop one another for added protection.

On the western face of the salient, Brig. Gen. Cullen Battle drove his Alabamians into the fight like “a solid wedge driven into the very heart of the enemy.”

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