Fatal Crossing: Tragedy at Fredericksburg, 1915

The Kiat

The Kiat

As with the other two Great War battles, the battle occurs after 1900 but the PoD is before...

Fatal Crossing
Tragedy at Fredericksburg, 1915

Prelude
To add to their problems, rain began to fall upon the battered landscape. Captain Dwight Eisenhower and the survivors of his lay faced down in the freshly overturned soil of Marye’s Heights. Eisenhower dared not raise his heads to look up the hill. The last man to do so had his head sliced in half by a machine gun. His company pulled out entrenching tools and dug as frantically as possible while stuck prone.

After a half-hour of work, Eisenhower managed to throw up enough dirt from his shallow pit to keep out of the line of fire. Today was turning out to be a very bad day. Crossing the Rappahannock was easy enough; a rolling barrage from Union guns suppressed much of the Confederate artillery and machine guns that may have otherwise torn the III Corps of the Second Army to pieces. Behind him, not much was left standing of the town of Fredericksburg. After sitting in no-man’s land for more than a year, it would be a miracle if one brick still sat atop another.

Eisenhower had thought his plan a good one. The bulk of his company would open up on the nearest machine gun bunker while a platoon of men flanked the position. It was a solid plan, one that had worked for his friend Clive Arnold on the Columbia Front. It would have worked, had a large machine gun nest not covered the flank of the bunker and virtually annihilated the platoon. Four hours of combat and he suffered twenty-five percent casualties. As cruel as it was to say it, Eisenhower knew he was one of the lucky ones. The charge up Marye’s Heights saw entire companies were wiped out and battalions reduced to platoon strength in a matter of minutes.

The bloodiest battle in American history had its beginnings, like many of the battles against the Confederate States, fifty years back in the War Between the States. Virginia seceded from the Union with one of the lowest votes in favor, only North Carolina’s passage percentage was lower in the Upper South. Unlike North Carolina, not all Virginians were reconciled with leaving the Union. In its five decades of existence, the Confederate States had a difficult time controlling the population west of the Appalachian Mountains.

In the western part of the State, the population was staunchly pro-Union. An attempt by the west to secede from Virginia was stopped only by a flood of Confederate soldiers following the end of the States’ War. Like pro-Confederate Kentuckians moving south, the pro-Union Virginians who could afford the trip headed back to the Union. Most of them settled in the Midwest, swelling the population of Nebraska and Kansas. The remaining pro-Union population did their best to obstruct the Virginia State Assembly. Their numbers was one of the reasons why slavery ended with the 1892 Slave Code. Virginia compromised on a code that required compensated manumission over the course of five years. Many of the freedmen moved to the western part of the State, where they were not exactly welcomed by the abolitionists.

The Union made its greatest gains in the western, coal-rich part of Virginia in 1913 and 1914, reaching deep into the mountains. In the same amount of time, the Second Army only managed to push back the Army of Northern Virginia from the Potomac to the Rappahannock at the cost of three times as many soldiers as the liberation of the west. Even without the conquest of eastern Virginia, the loss of the coal fields in western Virginia, and later eastern Tennessee, would have a devastating impact on the Confederate States.

The war in the east was largely driven by political factors. The first factor was keeping the Confederate Army away from Washington, the traditional American capital. Both the USA and CSA claimed the city as rightfully theirs. As it sat on an international border, it was no longer eithers capital. The United States’ federal government returned to Philadelphia after the War Between the States.

Confederate soldiers capturing Washington would be a huge boost to Confederate morale and would gain the Army of Northern Virginia a toe hold north of the Potomac. Capturing Washington was a Confederate goal in its war plans, however, the United States Army hit eastern Virginia the hardest of all front at the start of the war despite its minimal gain after two years of war.
 
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Leaders
While the leaders in the battle had similar career paths, they were in person as different from each other as North was from South. Commanding the Second Army was General Clarence White Water. White Water was born in the State of Iroquois in 1862. He was the highest ranking Indian in the history of the United States Army. He enlisted with a band of volunteers from Iroquois during the Third Anglo-American War and fought bravely along the Canadian border. From his volunteer company, he was elected Captain after several skirmishes with Canadian militia in Ontario.

His service in the war won him the attention of Iroquois Senators and Congressmen as well as an appointment to Fort Arnold. He was not the first Indian to be appointed to the Academy but he was the only one in his class. He graduated at the top of his class in 1889 and was assigned to the western frontier where he participated in the tail end of the Indian Wars. Despite his racial kinship with the Plains Indians, they showed White Water or any other Indian wearing the blue any mercy. White Water narrowly escaped capture at the hands of Sioux warriors in Lakota Territory.

With the West pacified, White Water served in the Colombian intervention. In 1901, he was assigned to General Staff and promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. There, he aided in formulating the various color-coded war plans of the United States. His service was instrumental in developing War Plan Red. He expected to fight against the British again should war come, but in 1909, he was transferred to the Second Army and placed in command of the 19th Infantry Division based at Fort McHenry.

He entered the Great War with a promotion to Brigadier General and command of part of the III Corps. His further elevation along the ranks occurred on April 8, 1914, when Second Army commander General Phillip Milton suffered a grievance wound while visiting the trenches. White Water served as acting commander, and earned the permanent command following the Battle of Manassas when he turned a Confederate counter-offensive into a twenty-one mile gain for the Union.

His opposite number was also lifelong military, however Albert Henry Stevenson Jr. was appointed to the Virginia Military Institute through the maneuvering of his father, Albert Henry Stevenson Sr., wealthy plantation owner and Senator from Georgia. Stevenson was born before the States’ War and had a vague memory of a parade sending of men in gray from the nearby town of Macon to fight.

Upon graduation in 1884, Stevenson had the opportunity to be placed on the Confederate General Staff, an opportunity he turned down in favor of assignment out west. Like White Water, Stevenson had his own close encounter with death fighting the Indians. Unlike his Union opponent at Fredericksburg, Stevenson did not escape unscathed. He led a cavalry charge through a hail of Apache bullet, one of which struck him in the leg and required surgery. He kept the leg, which was a feat many men wounded as such could not claim.

After the Apache were defeated, Stevenson returned home to a hero’s welcome. His father expected him to resign his commission at the end of his term and start dabbling in Georgia politics. Stevenson Sr. was shocked to learn his son would not become a State Assemblyman but would make a career out of wearing the gray. Despite the disappointment and temporary falling out, the Stevenson name aided Stevenson Jr. in his climb through the ranks.

At the start of the Great War, Stevenson served as an instructor at the VMI. As professor of military history, Stevenson was one of the few Confederate instructors who understood what a fully industrialized war meant for the soldiers. When he was a child, there was still glory to be won and war was seen as an adventure. When any student brought the subject of glory up in his presence, Stevenson answered ‘glory in combat died when war industrialized’. Though he did not teach tactics, he did use his history course to explain the effect of machine gun fire on cavalry charges. He declared that when the next big war came, cavalrymen would either fight dismounted or be dead.
 
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The Kiat

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Opposing Forces
More than half a million Union soldiers waited in trenches along the northern bank of the Rappahannock divided into five corps. Participating in the crossing at Fredericksburg was III and XI Corps, numbering two hundred seven thousand men that would swarm a piece of the front no more than twenty miles wide. Fredericksburg would be the largest of the crossings for it was near there that not only the Army of Northern Virginia held its headquarters but the old main road and rail lines that once linked Richmond and Washington.

On the south bank, the Army of Northern Virginia held four hundred thousand soldiers in twelve Virginian divisions, six North Carolinians, one from South Carolina and another from Tennessee. Around Fredericksburg, Stevenson placed the 2nd and 19th Virginia, 33rd South Carolina and 46th Tennessee. Three were infantry divisions and the 2nd VI. a dismounted cavalry division. These eighty thousand soldiers were backed up by the 35th North Carolina and 91st Virginia (militia) held in strategic reserve.

Opposing Plans
With the thawing of the snows, Stevenson expected an American offensive was in the works. Observation balloons and aircraft reported a massive of soldiers in several locations along the Rappahannock. White Water’s 1915 Spring Offensive called for crossing the Rappahannock in multiple locations. One corps would cross near Culpepper; two Corps would cross at Fredericksburg, one corps at Port Royal and the last at Tappahannock. His goal was to land half a million soldiers on the south bank of the Rappahannock and push the Confederates south of the next river, the York.

He hoped for a smashing success at Fredericksburg, with a paper strength of two hundred thousand soldiers poised to slice through a number nearly half of its own. In wars long past, an attacking force with a five-to-three advantage was almost guaranteed a victory. Like the Colt revolved for the individual, the machine gun equalized all regiments. White Water strove for a breakthrough and march on Richmond, but expected a costly advance towards the next river. As the focal point in most histories on the Potomac Front is the Battle of Fredericksburg, this history will also focus solely on the tragedy.
 
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March 21
Unlike previous battles on other fronts, White Water did not open up his offensive with several days of bombardment. He learned over the course of the war than the largest difference between three hours and three days of bombardment tended to be the amount of munitions expended. At 0400 on March 21, 1915, he gave the order for thousands of guns along the front to open fire. More than three hundred guns sat on Stafford Heights, opposite of Fredericksburg. The guns focused on known trenches as well as fortifications in the highlands south of the city where White Water expected to suffer the greatest loss.

At 0730, the bombardment began to roll south away from the trenches nearest the river as III and XI Corps began their crossing along a fourteen mile wide expanse of the front. The crossing of the Rappahannock was a largely bloodless affair. The bombardment might not have done much against overall numbers of foot soldiers, but it did permanently silence over a hundred Confederate guns. Stevenson spoke with his War Department, requesting naval support in defending the Rappahannock.

The navy did attempt, on several occasions in the previous year, to move river monitors to ports up river. On each occasion, they were turned back by heavy Union firing. A night rush was attempted only once and that was by the CSS James. Their voyage up the river took place on a cloudy night with poor visibility. Union gunners had a hard time tracking the ship, almost as hard of a time as the ship had navigating. In the early morning hours of October 8, 1914, the James ran aground on a sandbank. The noise it made trying to struggle free resulted in a dozen flares being shot into the sky. Once illuminated, the stranded ship was destroyed by Union guns. 75mm field pieces did little against the ship, but a pair of twelve inch railroad guns in the area blew it apart. After that, the Confederate Navy was very reluctant to send ships up heavily defended rivers.

The primary bombardment fell silent at 0800, though batteries continued to fire throughout the day. White Water assigned his artillery the job of silencing any Confederate guns. The first regiments had already crossed the Rappahannock and two pontoon bridges were hastily assembled under the cover of the early bombardment. Keeping those bridges in one piece would decide the fate of the battle. White Water planned to march a division across the bridge every hour, adding twenty thousand more men to the attack.

The ruins of Fredericksburg fell with minimal opposition. The town somehow managed to survive being stuck in no-man’s land for nearly a year, only to be leveled on March 21. The capture of the city was not cause for any celebration. The ruins made excellent cover for the tens of thousands of soldiers of the III Corps poised to storm the fortress known as Marye’s Heights. Since the day the front stabilized along the Rappahannock, Stevenson began work on a series of fortified hills along the length of the river. Some hills were small and could be bypassed. Marye’s Heights was no such hill.

In order to advance down the road towards Richmond, the Height would have to be taken. Only a fool of a general would believe bombardment along would silence the hill. The tactic worked nowhere else in the Great War and White Water was not about to believe himself to be the first. Intelligence placed Marye’s Heights’ strength at regimental level. Based on the numbers, he believed that the 19th Infantry Division would be enough to take the Heights. When they charged uphill, they found not a stunned regiment but the entire 2nd Virginia Division dug in and waiting.
 
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