Pickett's Charge

[viper37]

In regards to your original question, which seemed to be "Where was everyone else????",  take a look at this:


https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/A-Cutting-Edge-Second-Look-at-the-Battle-of-Gettysburg-1-180947921/

that's a great site!

[Valmy]

Of course, it's easy to judge from my armchair general's position, but it's not saying he was a bad tactician that he committed a mistake at some point.  He committed it at the worst possible time, but mistake happens.  Longstreet had had a better view of the field and of the opposing force than him, and he should have taken his advice under consideration.

This was not some aberation though. Lee was constantly wanting to launch attacks like this and did. Look at the Seven Days Battles. Most of them were just frontal attacks by the Confederacy that freaked out McClellan so he would retreat despite successfully beating back the attack. Then at Chancellorsville he was getting ready to launch a suicidal attack against Hooker's dug in army but fortunately for the Confederacy Hooker retreated back across the Rappahannock River.

He just finally launched the big attack and the Union commander wasn't spooked.

[grumbler]

So in summary...in the portion of Cemetery Ridge the Union attacked, the Union had the II Corps (3 divisions) and some beat up remains of a couple divisions of the I Corps.

You don't want to speculate regarding the amount of those forces that could have been redeployed before the attack to other parts of the battlefield with the line still holding, so are just going to keep saying the attack was doomed to fail as it actually happened. Never mind there have been studies to examine just this point.

The study that claims Lee would have won if the Union just had one fewer brigade in the line against Pickett's charge is dumb, if it actually yielded the results reported in your link.  It assumes that everything else would have remained the same.  With less men, for instance, Hancock may not have allowed his guns to duel with the Confederate batteries, and they'd have had the ammunition to cut down Picket's men in an enfilade fire.  Or, Hunt could have moved more guns out of the reserve because there was now room for them, resulting in far more Confederate casualties and an earlier repulse of the attack. 

That the Confederates would have been likelier to succeed had they had more men or the Federals fewer is a mere truism.  That a disastrous attack could have been converted to a successful one by relatively minor changes in the numbers is highly doubtful.

I have a great deal of sympathy for Lee's decision to launch the attack.  He was aware that the attack was unlikely to succeed.  Longstreet told him as much, and, I believe, so did his own instincts.  But, while he knew that to launch the attack and fail meant the loss of the war, surely he understood that to not launch the attack would also mean the loss of the war.  If there was even a chance of pulling off a "Second Saratoga" he needed to take it.  He'll pulled off greater attacks against worse odds, he had to believe.

His situation was like that of Napoleon at Waterloo; things looked like they were unraveling, so the temptation to win it all on a big splashy attack was irresistible.

[11B4V]

Sums it up rather nicely.

Now on to Hood and Franklin....

[grumbler]

I don't understand the insult--to my knowledge there isn't a professional military historian participating on the forum.

*Raises hand*

(Former) professional naval historian is probably more accurate, but I've been paid to research, write, and teach purely military history.

[The Brain]

I've been paid to collect my own poop. BFD.

[grumbler]

I've been paid to collect my own poop. BFD.

You may eve have been paid to collect my poop, but I couldn't be sure given that gimp mask you would have been wearing.

What happened in Russia stays in Russia.

[viper37]

Of course, it's easy to judge from my armchair general's position, but it's not saying he was a bad tactician that he committed a mistake at some point.  He committed it at the worst possible time, but mistake happens.  Longstreet had had a better view of the field and of the opposing force than him, and he should have taken his advice under consideration.

This was not some aberation though. Lee was constantly wanting to launch attacks like this and did. Look at the Seven Days Battles. Most of them were just frontal attacks by the Confederacy that freaked out McClellan so he would retreat despite successfully beating back the attack. Then at Chancellorsville he was getting ready to launch a suicidal attack against Hooker's dug in army but fortunately for the Confederacy Hooker retreated back across the Rappahannock River.

He just finally launched the big attack and the Union commander wasn't spooked.

Well, prior to the 7 days battle, he did reinforce Richmond's defenses first, digging trenches.  And once he retreated South after Gettysburg, I think he was way more cautious.

Chancellorsville, I don't know enough of the specifics to argue, but since he won, I guess it made him overconfident in his troops.

But his strategy prior to Gettysburg did work, and it would be mirrored by Grant later in the war.  He kept pushing despite not winning or even "losing", and it worked, even with mass casualties, because he could replenish his troops, something Lee couldn't, however.

On a purely militaristic point of view, Longstreet was absolutely right that establishing a strong defensive position and waiting for the ennemy to attack you was the best course of action.  Reading on him, his overall strategy of defending the east and attacking in the west with more troops was probably an ideal situation (my knowledge of the specific military situations everywhere is still limited).  However, from an overall point of view, it's difficult to arguee Lee's reasoning of replenish their supplies in the North and demoralizing the civilians was a bad strategy.  It shouldn't have been necessary, but it was. 

The Confederate States were a mess of governance, where every State was in it mostly for itself.  They had problems with supplies, they had not enough men, not enough ammo, not enough cannons and guns for a successful long term conflict.  They were all rebels at heart, but when it came down to organizing the fight, they were extremely bad.  It took the death of Jackson for Lee to be able to reorganize his army into something more manageable.

The strain on the finances of the Confederation was real, and Lee needed to relieve that strain.  The invasion of the North was probably a necessity if the Confederation wanted to pursue the war.  They couldn't count on much help from European countries, due their use of slaves, it had become morally unacceptable in most of Europe.  No country was willing to openly associate itself with a slaver state.

Onto the specific, did he need to attack at Gettysburgh, did he need to do things as he did it, I don't know.  It's hard to argue that after failing to obtain the high ground on the 1st day he needed to keep pushing.  But once there, could he have retreated safely?  I'm not enough knowledgeable in the subject to tell.  Pickett's charge couldn't succeed, even with a little less troops on the North's side, they were way too well entrenched and the logistics on the South's side was utterly deficient. 

Even if successfull, they had no reserve to keep on pushing after suffering 50% casualties and they would have faced the Unions' reserve being moved to the front lines.

[Berkut]

If you spend any amount of time reading about Civil War battles, there is a pretty common thing that happens.

One side or another (honestly it seems more often by dumb luck than anything else) gets a local battlefield superiority and launches an attack the forces the particular units being attacked back. Maybe just pushes them back, maybe they even actually break and you get an actual hole in the enemy line. They "winning" side wants to take advantage, and the troops press on. But the troops pressing on are usually the same troops who made the break in the first place, and are tired, disorganized, and not well supported. So they get counter-attacked, and pushed back themselves. Sometimes this happens over and over again, with particular pieces of ground changing hand several times over a half day or a day. (This happened just the day before in the Peach Orchard).

Nobody says "Oh, that attack totally worked!" in those cases. An attack works when it takes the ground it is targetting, holds it, and then is able to use that success to actually achieve whatever it was that the commander was trying to do in the first place with that ground. If by some stroke of luck Pickets attack actually takes that spot in the Union line - say someone screws up and pulls troops away at just the wrong time, the battle doesn't end the moment they grab The Angle.

[The Brain]

If you spend any amount of time reading about Civil War battles, there is a pretty common thing that happens.

One side or another (honestly it seems more often by dumb luck than anything else) gets a local battlefield superiority and launches an attack the forces the particular units being attacked back. Maybe just pushes them back, maybe they even actually break and you get an actual hole in the enemy line. They "winning" side wants to take advantage, and the troops press on. But the troops pressing on are usually the same troops who made the break in the first place, and are tired, disorganized, and not well supported. So they get counter-attacked, and pushed back themselves. Sometimes this happens over and over again, with particular pieces of ground changing hand several times over a half day or a day. (This happened just the day before in the Peach Orchard).

Nobody says "Oh, that attack totally worked!" in those cases. An attack works when it takes the ground it is targetting, holds it, and then is able to use that success to actually achieve whatever it was that the commander was trying to do in the first place with that ground. If by some stroke of luck Pickets attack actually takes that spot in the Union line - say someone screws up and pulls troops away at just the wrong time, the battle doesn't end the moment they grab The Angle.

Depends on the settings. Look under Options.

[Habbaku]

 

[alfred russel]

In regards to your original question, which seemed to be "Where was everyone else????",  take a look at this:


https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/A-Cutting-Edge-Second-Look-at-the-Battle-of-Gettysburg-1-180947921/


It is a pretty nice, interactive battle map through time.


The answer was that everyone else was, well, right there in the battle. The number of men available to Meade on the third was something around 60k or so, after the losses of the previous two days, disorganization, wounded, missing, etc. That number is rather hard to really pin down, of course. But the 7 Corps were all in line. It was a long line, to be sure, and Lee thought it might be thin in the center. But Meades position was actually pretty compact, and he could (and did) shift troops using his interior lines effectively.


The reason so few union troops were "involved" in Pickets Charge is that the number of troops attacked were the number of troops in position at the time of the attack...and they defeated the attack so quickly and thoroughly there wasn't even time for the battle to develop such that more troops would be brought in to reinforce them. Depending on how you count them, somewhere between 13k and 18k Confederate troops attacked, and were soundly crushed by a bit more than 1 union corps. But they weren't really crushed because the Union had some number of troops, they were crushed because they had to mount an attack across open ground while being hammered from both flanks by artillery and canister fire, and then once they got close enough to actually mount the assault (I think Confederate lines by the time they reached rifle/ musket range had contracted from about 1 mile long to less then half a mile) by massed rifle and cannister fire to their front.


That is why I don't like talking about "If the union was 25% weaker". The problem with the attack was not that there were so many Union troops, it was that attacks that require your men to march about a mile across largely open terrain into a held enemy position where they will be exposed to artillery fire the entire way, then once they get halfway are going to be exposed to flanking artillery fire, and the amount of flanking fire and direct fire they are exposed to increases radically as they get closer....culminating in a final need to charge with whoever is left into massed rifle fire and cannister from artillery and infantry that has been observing your entire attack from the beginning....


The problem with this plan isn't about how many men the Union had. It's a terrible, hopeless, desperate plan regardless of whether there are 1x Union troops are 0.75x Union troops.

I wasn't ignoring the responses, I wanted to come up with a well thought out post, but didn't have the time, so I'll offer a half baked one.

First, the actual article is here:

http://dr.library.brocku.ca/bitstream/handle/10464/9359/ArmstrongSodergren_PickettsCharge_AcceptedManuscript.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

In summary, the model does seem to be using a threshold of success that I was thinking of: that Pickett's Charge establishes a Confederate position on Cemetery Ridge. I understand that the objective for the men making Pickett's Charge is poorly documented and a source of continued debate, but the general consensus seems to be for the attack to take an area centered on the Copse of Trees/the Angle. Obviously with the number of men involved, the area taken would extend beyond that point.

I don't think it is fair to hold the attack to a standard to then roll up Union troops and take Cemetery Hill, or even hold against counter attacks late in the day. There were reserves to reinforce those efforts, though the reserves were further away and less than the Union's.

It would be interesting to see a general framework for a mathematical model of the Civil War developed and applied to other battles, so a baseline of expectations could be established. It seems like an objective way to evaluate "what if" scenarios, but unfortunately the interest in the war has probably waned at this point, and future wars are going to be much more complex to model.



The point to this map is that, while the Confederate supply line was very tenuous (extending back to Virgina), by virtue of holding Gettysburg (where the roads converged), the Union was limited to just the Taneytown Road and Baltimore Pike. If the Confederates took a position in the vicinity of the Angle on Cemetery Ridge, the Union would be limited to Baltimore Pike, and even that was troubled--the Angle is less than a mile from the Pike at that point. In addition, Jeb Stuart's Cavalry position was in position to interfere with transit on the Pike.

Suppose Meade had deployed several brigades from the center to his flanks. If Pickett's Charge was successful in establishing a position on Cemetery Ridge, and were able to organize themselves, you would have 9k or so men there at 3:30 in the afternoon. Mahomes and Posey's Brigades could be brought up from reserve, theoretically Wright, Wilcox, and Lang as well (those three were shot to hell the day before, and Wilcox and Lang were called up in the actual event).

On the other hand, the Confederate position was the mother of all salients, the Union had a fresh VI Corps of about 13k men (though dispersed on the battlefield), many other troops beyond that (including the theoretically redeployed brigades), and good nearby artillery positions.

But it was 3:30, with sunset at 7:30, and organizing a counterattack at the corps size level in that short of a timeframe would be an epic undertaking. If night fell without the salient being reduced, all bets are off. The conservative decision, for a commander understanding the enemy to exeed his number, was to attempt to withdraw in the night.

[alfred russel]

In regards to your original question, which seemed to be "Where was everyone else????",  take a look at this:


https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/A-Cutting-Edge-Second-Look-at-the-Battle-of-Gettysburg-1-180947921/

I don't want to be mean to the map, but, map sucks (or at least falls short).

It looks like someone started with a very ambitious project and it stalled short of completion.

For example, it looks like the map goes down to the regimental level, but only identifies units at the brigade level. As someone who doesn't know all the brigades, that is frustrating. But while I can cross reference brigades with a listing of the order of battle (painstakingly), the existence of "unknown" brigades is perplexing. If the mapmaker didn't know what the unit was, how did he/she include a unit there in the first place?

For artillery, it is worse--the cannon represented are often in "unknown" brigades. I assume the cannon represent batteries, but the number of cannon in each is unlisted.

[Berkut]

Your "suppose" that a successful attack would see 9000 men "able to organize themselves".

No, they would NOT be able to organize themselves, because nobody was ever able to organize themselves in that manner during the ACW. Successful attacks did not see the attackers all fresh and organized, it saw them with their brigades and regiments hopelessy mixed up, officers dead and wounded, the men exhausted, and most importantly....out of ammunition.

And the union would have, well, hours to respond. A counter-attack does not need to be organized "at Corps level", because it isn't going to be just a series of singular events, but rather a constantly evolving battlefield where both sides are desperately trying to feed in whatever reinforcements they can as quickly as they can. And the Union has several advantages here:

1. Their troops are less tired from the last two days fighting.
2. Their troops can move to the point of decisions (this salient) without any ability of the rebels to interfere, while ALL confederate reinforcements have to traverse that mile of space under artillery fire that destroyed the actual attack to begin with, and did so in a matter of minutes, not hours.
3. The Union also has interior lines, and more available troops at the point of decision.
4. The Union is not running out of ammunition.

Jeb Stuart's cavalry WAS engaged on the third day, and the Union cavalry fought it to a standstill south of the battlefield. No reason to imagine any different outcome there, so no, they don't actually cut off the Union. Nor would being reduced to one road "for supply" matter for the Union all that much anyway, at least not compared to the South's problem of being basically out of ammunition regardless of how many roads they could move ammunition they didn't have on.

[alfred russel]

Your "suppose" that a successful attack would see 9000 men "able to organize themselves".

No, they would NOT be able to organize themselves, because nobody was ever able to organize themselves in that manner during the ACW. Successful attacks did not see the attackers all fresh and organized, it saw them with their brigades and regiments hopelessy mixed up, officers dead and wounded, the men exhausted, and most importantly....out of ammunition.

The day before, there was obviously a very significant attack and a couple of brigades reached cemetery ridge, with a couple more in striking distance. To keep them from organizing, Hancock sent in the 1st Minnesota that lost 80+% of its men in 15 minutes. Hancock traded a regiment to keep the enemy disorganized while he could bring up reserves. You know the story.

The attacks on the Union left July 2 involved more men than Pickett's Charge. They would not have been able at the base of Cemetery Ridge and 1st Minnesota was thrown away needlessly? Hancock didn't think so.

Look--if you've got 9,000 men on Cemetery Ridge after pushing Union troops off the center, how many men do you need to push them off?

Whatever you number you say, the Union had that number. They also had 4 hours to put the assault together and pull it off. Look at how long it took the Confederates to pull off the July 2 and July 3 attacks. The timing of the orders of July 2 are a major point of controversy, but suffice it to say they were at some point in the morning and the attack on the Union left didn't step off until 4:30 PM. On July 3 they were ordered at 8 AM and didn't step off until about 3 PM. There was a non trivial chance that the attacks couldn't come off in time, or if they did would be blundered.