Tragedy on the Rappahannock: Fredicksburg, 1915

[The Kiat]

Continuing the Great War arc, I'm returning to the Battle of Fredericksburg where the US Army attempts again to cross the Rappahannock and regain momentum against the CSA.


Prelude
To add to their problems, rain began to fall upon the battered landscape. Captain Dwight Eisenhower and the survivors of his company 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.

It was all supposed to be so simple. With three divisions spearheading the Fredericksburg sector, the Union Army should have stormed the Heights, taken Fort Stuart and begun the offensive towards the York River. The plan called for the river to be reached and breached before the Confederates could throw up sufficient defenses. In Richmond within by the middle of April. Eisenhower heard it all before; once at the start of the war and again in 1914. Like before, somebody in the War Department neglected to inform the Confederate States Army of the roll it was supposed to play. Like so many other carefully planned attacks, it did not survive contact with the enemy.

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 two years, it would be a miracle if one brick still sat atop another.

Eisenhower had thought his plan in his little stretch of the battle to be a sound one. The bulk of his company would open up on the nearest machine gun bunker while a platoon of men flanked the position. It 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 Kiat]

The bloodiest battle in American history had its beginnings, like so many battles against the Confederate States, fifty years prior in the War Between the States. Virginia seceded from the Union with one of the lowest votes in favor, North Carolina being the only State with a narrower margin. 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 rural populace west of the Appalachian Mountains.

In the western counties of the State, the population remained staunchly pro-Union. An attempt to secede from the Virginia failed only when a flood of Confederate soldiers crossed the mountains following the end of the States’ War. Like the pro-Confederate Kentuckians moving south and pro-Union Cubans moving north and west, pro-Union Virginians who could afford the trip headed west, most settling in the Midwest and swelling the populations of Nebraska and Kansas.

Many of the remaining citizens of western Virginia were poor and formed the backbone of the working class. Large coal deposits were discovered in the western counties, requiring tens of thousands of miners to unearth the resource. Following the abolition of slavery by the Virginia Assembly in 1892, many freedmen moved west to partake in the coal rush. While western Virginians were not fans of slavery or even of the compensated manumission, which they viewed as a tax break for the wealthy, they were not thrilled to be living next door to freedmen.

Not only did the rigid caste system of the South apply there but the White miners saw the cheaper Black laborers as a threat to their livelihoods. In 1897, following an attempt to organize, the White workers of the Pocahantas coal field found themselves locked out and watched as Black miners took their place. This transition of the workforce led to the Pocahantas Riots, where the White miners attempted to seize control of the mine. So violent was the action that the Virginia Militia was called out to crush what was viewed in Richmond as an attempted Red Revolution.

The Union made its greatest gains in the western, coal-rich regions of Virginia in 1913 and 1914. Despite the strategic importance of the region, the Confederates placed greater concern in holding the east. As such, in the same amount of time, the US Second Army only managed to push the Army of Northern Virginia from the Potomac to the Rappahannock at the cost of three times as many dead as in the western sector.

While the was in the western half of the State was driven by strategic goals, those in the east were driven by political factors. The first of these factors being keeping the Confederate States Army away from the city of Washington, the traditional American capital, one claimed by both American nations. As it sat on an international border, it served as capital of neither, with the Confederates ruling from Montgomery and the US Federal government returning to Philadelphia after the States’ War.

While capturing Washington would be a huge boost to Confederate morale, it would hardly be a game winning move. The second factor was more symbolic in nature. Virginia was home to the greatest Confederate generals and statesmen. While conquering it would not be as glorious as South Carolina, the State’s whose secession began the tragic rift between Americans, it would be a blow to Southern spirits. As a third factor, Virginia was home to the Confederate Navy’s Atlantic Fleet, or what was left of it after the Battle of Grand Bahama, as well as the Norfolk Shipyards.

 

[The Kiat]

Leaders
While the leaders in the battle followed similar career paths, they were as different from each other in person as North was from South. Commanding the Second Army was one General Charles Harbor. Born in 1861, Harbor attended Fort Arnold, graduating in time to see action during the Third Anglo-American War. His service in the war was less than glorious as his commanding officer surrendered Fort Vancouver to the Royal Navy, landing Harbor and three thousand comrades in a prison camp until 1885.

Almost in an attempt to compensate for the humiliation, Harbor led several successful and brutal campaigns against the Plains Indians that chose to rise up while the United States Army was distracted by a stronger foe. Commanding an infantry regiment, Harbor fought at Wounded Knee along side the Lakota Territory militia against the regenade Crow and Plains Cree. The battle ended in a massacre when the surrounded rebel Indians refused to surrender, forcing a battle to the death where three thousand soldiers and braves were killed.

His participation in New Grenada was less violent. As a Lieutenent Colonel, he commanded the regiment that captured Balboa, the future Pacific terminal of the Panama Canal. New Grenada was the last time Harbor saw combat until 1913. For ten years he spent his career first as a Colonel and then a Brigadier General in the General Staff. When war broke out, he was awarded command of the Second Army. The bloody stalemate along the Rappahannock turned a formerly rash commander into the most cautious and conservative commanding officer since States’ War George McClellan.

One of the many generals serving under him in 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 Cree warriors in Lakota Territory.

With the West pacified, White Water served with Harbor in the New Grenada 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 July 2, 1913, 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 of III Corps following the Battle of Manassas when he turned a Confederate counter-offensive into a twenty-one mile gain for the Union.
Their 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 White, 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.

 

[The Kiat]

Opposing Forces
In 1915, more than half a million Union soldiers faced off against nearly four hundred thousands Confederate soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia. Unlike the United States, and Confederate Army was a temporary construct, in the case of the ANV, revived from its previous incarnation when the Confederate States faced a great threat. Nominally, Confederate divisions were loyal first to their State and secondly to the Confederacy. This division of power between governors and presidents was always a weak point in the Confederate System. Despite the struggle for ultimate control, the ANV fared well against a larger foe in the guise of the US Second Army.

The Union soldiers on the Potomac Front were divided into five Corps. Opposite of Fredericksburg sat XI Corp and part of XII Corp. Three of the Corps would participate in the upcoming crossing, the largest being at Fredericksburg itself. The city sat on an important railroad leading from DC to Richmond. In times of peace, commerce flowed between the two American nations, despite politically cool relations.

The Army of Northern Virginia consisted of twelve divisions from Virginia, six North Carolinian, one from South Carolina and one from hard pressed Tennessee, which at this point in the war was in no position to aid other States. Around Fredericksburg, Stevenson placed the 2nd and 19th Virginia, 33rd South Carolina and the 46th Tennessee. All save the 2nd Vir. were infantry divisions; the 2nd being a dismounted cavalry division serving in reserve along with the 35th North Carolina and the 91st Virginia Militia.

 

[The Kiat]

Opposing Plans
With the thawing of the snows, Stevenson expected an American offensive was in the works, similar to the attempted crossing in 1913 and two attempts, one in April the other in August, of 1914. Observation balloons and aircraft reported the massing of soldiers in several locations along the Rappahannock, with the largest cluster behind the Union lines across from Fredericksburg. The city was long since abandoned and partially pounded flat by the previous attempts. The ANV expected nothing to remain of the city by March 1916.

Harbor’s 1915 Spring Offensive called for crossing the Rappahannock in multiple locations, from Cheasapeake Bay to the Appalachians. The August 1914 offensive did succeed in capturing a great deal of territory south of the Rappahannock along the coast. However, being unable to capitalize on his gains coupled with the unexpected appearance of what remained of the Confederate States Navy, forced him to abandoned his tenuous hold. Bottling up the Confederate fleet in the bay aided the war at sea but caused Harbor nightmares. Plans for landing on the peninsula between the James and York Rivers was called off permanently due to the threat out of Norfolk.

III Corp would cross at Culpepper with the goal of flanking the ANV while XI Corp and the bulk of XIII Corp would participate in the main event. Two divisions of XIII Corp would cross down river near Tappahannock in an attempt to flank and draw off some of Stevenson’s forces. Harbor’s goal was to land three hundred thousand soldiers on the southern bank of the Rappahannock permanently before driving the Confederates back to the York River.

He hoped for a smashing success with a paper strength of eight divisions forming the spearhead on a stretch of land with less than half that number. His biggest obstacle sat atop Marye’s Heights in the form of Fort Stuart. Without it, Harbor’s five-to-three advantage would almost guarantee victory. Like the Colt revolver for the individual out West, the machine gun equalized numbers between opposing armies. Harbor expected a breakthrough at great cost, with the most optimistic projections putting his army at the York in a month and possible in Richmond by Christmas.

 

[The Kiat]

Fatal Crossing
Unlike many previous battles on this and other fronts, Harbor did not open his offensive with several days of bombardment. Aside from the fact that 1915 saw an ammunition shortage for field guns, such long bombardments gave the enemy days to prepare for an attack. Instead, he ordered a stop-and-go bombardment between 0300 and 0600 of March 21, 1915. The bombardment would proceed for forty-five minutes, pause for fifteen and continue for another forty-five. Planners in Harbor’s headquarters hoped the lull would lure Confederate soldiers out of their shelters, expecting an attack after the first forty-five minutes. By the end of the third bombardment, local Confederate commanders began to doubt if an attack would happen. Nonetheless, they had little choice but to emerge each time, assuming the attack was coming.

By 0545, the bombardment began to roll away from the enemy trenches towards the enemy artillery many kilometers behind the line. Despite being a short bombardment, Harbor managed an impressive fireworks display, with three hundred guns alone on Stafford Heights opposite of Fredericksburg, firing as many as six rounds a minute. Rear echelon soldiers performed near heroic deeds in keeping the rapid firing guns supplied. Even after the hectic early morning hours, many from the all Black supply battalion volunteered to aid in the upcoming push.

At 0530, fifteen minutes before the next lull, tens of thousands of soldiers began to climb out of their trenches and make a made dash towards the river. Engineering regiments, under the bombardment, moved forward boats and sections of pontoon bridges. A few of engineers were killed when a single one hundred fifty-five millimeter round fell well short of the Confederate lines, landing in front of their truck. Even the vast majority of shells that did find their targets failed to silence them as effectively as a truck load of engineers. Instead of falling silent, the 0500 round of bombardment crept slowly away from the trenches, bringing suppressive fire down upon Confederate artillery that would soon try top open fire on the crossing Union soldiers. By 0550, a few brave Confederates poked their heads over the top to watch divisions worth of Union soldiers make their mad dash across the Rappahannock.

 

[The Kiat]

Stevenson spoke to the Confederate Navy Department in an attempt to bring the navy into the battle. The Rappahannock was not the ideal location for the brown water navy, meaning any form of naval support would be sparse and in the form of shallow-bottom gun boats. The navy did heed the call, sending a river monitor to Fredericksburg. More than two hours passed before the CSS James appeared on the scene, firing into the steady stream of barges, rafts and row boats.

Attempts to station ships nearer key cities on the river were long since abandoned. Any ship trying to make Fredericksburg a home port quickly drew the fire of all Union gunners in range. The James had better luck as the Union gunners had a hard time targeting the ship while it was in the middle of the crossing. Artillery that did fire upon the James inevitably missed, striking barges crammed with infantry.

The James had an equally difficult time maneuvering in the thick of the crossing. It drew small arms fire from infantrymen in the barges, forcing its crew to remain indoors. Rifle rounds would do little to the steel ship but it was murder on any exposed sailor. The ship’s luck ran out at 1012, when it ran aground on a sand bar just off the southern bank of the river. As soon as it stopped moving, every available Union gun opened up on it. Even with a hit ratio of one-out-of-a-hundred, the ship was reduced to scrap metal in a matter of minutes. The bulk of the damage was not caused by the 75 mm guns close to the front but rather a pair of 12 inch railroad guns some thirty kilometers away. After thirty rounds fired, one found an vulnerable area in the monitor’s armor, penetrating and exploding within the ship’s magazine. The spectacular death of the ship showered the crossing and new front with shrapnel, wounded hundreds of Union soldiers.

The primary bombardment fell silent at 0800, though batteries were called upon to support the advance up Marye’s Heights throughout the day. Harbor’s assignment was largely fulfilled as the Confederate guns were of little problem for the rest of the day. For once in the war, they actually succeeded in knocking out a significant number of Confederate artillery batteries. Harbor looked upon the results as a good omen. This time the crossing would be successful.

Second Army headquarters continued with its positive attitude as the first regiments reached the bank, securing it for hastily constructed pontoon bridges, a project delayed by the intervention of the now dead James. Two of the bridges were in place by 1020, with an addition three under construction. For the defenders in Fort Stuart, the division worth of soldiers funneled across the bridges were targets out of a dream. Instead of firing immediately, the fortress commander Colonel Edward G. Fairfax (19th Virginia) waited until the better part of a division crossed before giving the order to open up on crowded bridge and bridgehead.

 

[The Kiat]

Hopes of a quick victory continued as Union soldiers marched into a desolate and unresisting Fredericksburg. Many soldiers, in letter to home, recalled their wonder that any brick was left standing atop another. After two years as no-man’s land, the city was long since abandoned by its civilian inhabitants. Capturing the city was hardly worth the celebration that Union newspapers proclaimed. It was nothing more than ruins. However, that rubble did offer excellent cover for the tens of thousands of soldiers from XI Corps poised to storm Ft. Stuart atop Marye’s Heights. Since the day back in 1913 when the front stabilized along the Rappahannock, Stevenson began work of a network of fortress along the length of the river. To head south, invaders must head through hardened defenses.

Not even the biggest fool in the United States general staff believed the fortress could be reduced through bombardment. The tactic worked nowhere else in the Great War and Harbor was not about to believe himself to be the first. Intelligence placed the defenders of Ft. Stuart at the regimental level. Harbor, after years of faulty intelligence, took the report with a grain of salt. He assumed twice as many defended the Heights, inside and outside the reinforced concrete walls. It would be a costly battle and he knew many in the 19th Infantry Division that would spear the climb would be killed or wounded. He saw no sense in forcing his men to wait. The attack would begin as soon as the division crossed the river. When they charged up the hill, the survivors would all have the same level of contempt for Union Intelligence. Instead of a regiment the better part of the 2nd Virginia Division was dug in and waiting.

By 1000, this fact became self-evident. As the 19th Infantry moved out from their long and narrow beachhead, they quickly found themselves bogged down by superior defensive fire from the Heights, fire that was held until the enemy was within range. It was not quite ‘the whites of their eyes’ range but it was close enough that the 19th Infantry was unable to easily withdraw. Instead, they dug in quickly at the base of the hill, a move that angered Harbor greatly. He did not cross the river simply to gain a few miles. Worse still, he did not cross the river to have Union trenches dug right beneath the guns of the Confederate Army.

 

[The Kiat]

He knew the cost would be great and that he had little choice in the matter. The Second Army could not advance further south at Fredericksburg while an intact fortress remained on his flank. Instead of throwing everything he had at a full frontal assault, one he knew would grind entire divisions to dust, he settled for a hastily devised three-prong assault on Fort Stuart. It was a plan developed on the fly, written on scrap paper over the period of fifteen minutes. Harbor thought it very unprofessional, though would later admit he planned on omitting that detail from his memoirs.

Three divisions of XI Corps would launch the assault up the hills, covered by a regiment of armored vehicles. Most of these vehicles were semi-mobile, for they had the habit of breaking down in the less than ideal conditions of the front, were little more than mobile machine gun nests with two inches of armor. A few held 37 mm cannons that were somewhat successful in taking out bunkers, depending on the thickness of the walls. Against Fort Stuart, the rounds were as likely to bounce off the thick walls as to cause any damage. Most served as targets for howitzers on the Heights.

When it came to climbing the Heights, soldiers found they were largely on their own. Marye’s Heights were not the steepest high ground taken in the war, nor were they the largest. They were, however, some of the costliest real estate in American history. Armored cars attempted to aid the advance but found themselves stopped by enemy trenches. Even unoccupied, these armor traps brought vehicles to a stand still, making them easy targets for artillery. The magnetic attraction of the armored vehicles to Confederate mortars saved a great many infantryman’s life that day.

At 1041, the first Confederate bombers appeared over the battlefield. Instead of carpet bombing large formation of hastily entrenched soldiers, they targets the vulnerable pontoon bridges spanning the Rappahannock. None of the bombers scored a direct hit, though near misses managed to snap one of the bridges, sending sections of pontoon adrift and slowly the flow of men and material.

By the time the Union soldiers slugged their way up the Heights, Confederate soldiers on manmade cliffs began to drop grenades, sticks of dynamite and even bottles of flaming gasoline down on them. They wrecked havoc on those in the lead, the first men to mount the siege ladders. Those that evaded the bombs were greeted by machine gun fire off to one side or another in a murderously effective crossfire.

It was not until past 1100 when the first Union soldiers scaled the walls and dropped into Confederate fortifications. Later accounts of the battle would have the veterans swearing that they only managed to climb the wall on the bodies of the dead. The first of the Union soldiers to land in Confederate trenches did not live long enough to express shock at the sight of thousands of dug in soldiers waiting for them.

Obviously, they knew the enemy awaited them. What surprised the 19th Division and others to follow were the number of enemies waiting to greet them. Again the advance ground to a halt as Union soldiers scrambled for cover. Attempts to captures sections of Fort Stuart by overwhelming the enemy in sheer numbers were bloody and only marginally successful. Company commanders, those that survived the first few hours of battle, desperately called down Union artillery on their position, hoping to blast a hole in the defenses. Many of these rounds fell short, killing and maiming thousands of XI Corps soldiers.

 

[The Kiat]

While the central assault found itself trapped in murderous crossfire between friend and foe, the southern prong of the assault swung south of the hill and began their ascent from the southwest. Confederate planners anticipated such an attack. The fortifications of Marye’s Heights comprised of ring after ring of trenches, pill boxes and obstacles around Fort Stuart, tracing the hilly topography. For every five meters in altitude stood another line of trenches awaiting the attackers. The southwestern assault proved as costly as the central charge.

Worse still, in order to attack from that direction, Union soldiers funneled through a gap in the highlanders were Hazel Run flowed into the Rappahannock. As with passes in the mountains, this gap was easily held by a small number of survivors from the early morning bombardment. Post battle estimates placed the number of Confederate soldiers in the gully at three hundred, none of which survived the Union surge through the gap. A pair of heavy armored vehicles supported the advance with 37 mm cannon. Neither managed to reach the Heights and climb to where they would have provided useful support but before they were knocked out, the managed to pry open the gap. A few Confederates tried to surrender only to be shot dead by the rush of Union soldiers.

Similar events would play out across Marye’s Heights, especially concerning enemy machine gun crews. Few of them were ever taken prisoner. To the north, XIII Corps was forced to gut the Rappahannock and cross a series of irrigation canals, each flooded trenches in their own rights, before they could ascend the hills. The ditches prevented armored support from aiding the northern assault. To cross the first ditch alone cost the Union more than two thousand dead in exchange for five hundred Confederate casualties.

By noon, the situation grew desperate. Harbor faced the distinct possibility of yet another failed crossing. He still had one weapon in his arsenal that he had yet to use. Unlike other generals on others fronts and continents, Harbor was not a fan of poison gas. His definition of weapons was something that could be controlled. Once unleashed, chlorine flowed with the wind. If the breeze shifted towards the Union lines then it was worse than useless.

Runners cris-crossed the ruins of Fredericksburg, bringing orders to company commanders to prepare their men for bombardment with chemical munitions. Sharp-eyed Confederate snipers watched the Union soldiers don their gas masks and knew exactly what was coming. Word reached Brigadier General Morris Edwards, commanding officer of the 2nd Virginia just as the first rounds burst within Fort Stuart. Exhausted soldiers took cover, expecting more high explosive rounds. They fell as did the hollow sounding explosions of chlorine shells.

Union soldiers advanced again under the cover of the greenish gas. They wasted no mercy on the enemy, bayoneting choking Confederate soldiers in the front most trenches. By 1300, Edwards knew he faced the possibility of encirclement. With enough men and ammunition, he could hold Fort Stuart for days, perhaps even weeks until the Union reduced it to gravel. He requested permission to retreat and save what remained of his division.

Stevenson knew that pushing the US Second Army back across the Rappahannock was out of the question, at least for the day. In order to do so, he would require the bulk of his forces in the region intact. It was a hard choice for him, one that would haunt him until his dying day. He refused Edward’s request, ordering him to hold Fort Stuart. He would sacrifice the 2nd Virginia in order to save the 19th and 91st Virginia, 33rd South Carolina, 35th North Carolina and 46th Tennessee. Despite the glorious tales of the States’ War, Stevenson always viewed heroic last stands as wasteful. Yet, that was precisely what was expected of the 2nd Virginia.

The five divisions saved fell back to prepared secondary lines twelve miles south of the river. The largest Confederate guns were still within rang of the Rappahannock and wasted no time in firing eight inch shells north of the river, into staging areas for the continued crossing. Two more waves of bombers, each about as successful as the first, struck at the Union forces surrounding Marye’s Heights.

Marye’s Heights fell as 1750, when Morris gave the order to surrender. Only four thousand Confederate soldiers remained capable of resisting. They fell victim to frustrated Union soldiers who spent more blood than anticipated in taking the hill. Machine gun crews were especially vulnerable to Union retribution. None of them lived to arrive at the POW camps in the Michigan Panhandle.

One of the surviving officers of the battle, Eisenhower, wrote in his diary of the bloody conquest of the hill. He witnessed a sergeant in an adjacent company gun down three machine gun crews, an event that Eisenhower took to the sergeant’s surviving CO. The Lieutenant in charge of said company only shrugged. Despite the carnage of the day, not all soldiers serving under the Stars and Stripes forgot they were soldiers or that even war had rules.

The survivors of the 2nd Virginia faces a rough reception at the POW camps. Like all Confederate prisoners, they were treated harsher than Canadian or British prisoners. The guards reserved a special hatred for the wayward Americans. After all, to them ‘Tories’ and ‘Limeys’ were foreigners whereas the Confederates were sons and grandsons of traitors. A few of the more rabid politicians in the Union wanted to hang them all. They were promptly reminded that the C.S.A., as well as British Empire had a number of Union prisoners who would receive retaliation in the even of mass execution of prisoners. For the Confederates’ parts, most of the POWs were relieved to have survived the war, though it did not stop them from plotting to escape and rejoin their comrades.

 

[The Kiat]

Advances Undermined
On March 23, Stevenson issued the order for the five divisions that escaped Fredericksburg were to retake Fort Stuart. For two days, Confederate guns relentlessly bombarded the wrecked fort as well as the ruined city and the pontoon bridges that served as the vital artery. The morning of March 25, saw one hundred thousand Confederate soldiers rush over the top. Though March 21, was one of the bloodiest days in United States Army history, seeing the destruction of an entire division in hours, Harbor still had more than enough men to hold his new gains.

During the bombardment, hundreds of Union guns were moved forward. Despite high costs, nearly a third were destroyed by falling shells and Confederate bombers, they were in place to answer the human wave of gray. After two years of war, Stevenson grew obsessed over Fredericksburg. Now that it lay in his hands, he refused to allow the Confederates to regain Fort Stuart. XI and XII Corps were not enough to keep the Confederates at bay in his opinion. He began to transfer reserves to the new front. When those ran dry, he reached into the pockets of his generals.

White Water managed impressive gains of his own without the massive loss of life. He did not lose forty-three thousand men when he advanced on a crossing fifty kilometers wide and thirty deep. Given enough men and material, he believed he could flank the bulk of the ANV, roll them up and possibly destroy them. Once in a pocket, the ANV would be hard pressed to escape. Even if they did, they would lose a great many soldiers in the process.

Instead, he was forced to wait at his new headquarters in Jefferson. With only one more division he knew he could press all the way to Culpepper. From there, it would be a matter of swinging southeast, as per the original plan. Without more men, III Corps had little choice but to sit tight and wait. White Water fumed over the loss of men, swearing in his memoirs that he could have rolled up Confederates and knocked Virginia out of the war a year earlier than in reality.

Unlike Harbor, Stevenson was not a man obsessed. When it became clear that the southern walls of Fort Stuart were as thick as the northern walls, he called a halt to the attack. For five thousand men on both sides of the front, it was too late. Not wanting, or being able to afford to throw away more lives, Stevenson settled for bombarding the fort and reducing it to rubble. It was a task easier said than done.

Union airplanes began to take to the sky as spring arrived. Their emphasis was to silence Confederate guns while Union engineers worked to repair Fort Stuart. Flights of Curtiss Condors and Wright Tomahawks dropped hundreds of tons of bombs over the course of a month on Confederate artillery emplacements. The Tomahawks proved surprisingly effective, hitting what they aimed for one time out of twelve tries which was far better than the two percent accuracy of the smaller Condors.

Confederate pursuit planes intercepted the first waves of bombers, making short work of them. In turn, the next bombing sortie saw Union pursuit planes escorting the bombers. To the men below, combat in the air turned into a daily display of aerobatics. Each side of the trench would cheer when one of their opponent’s aircraft spiraled towards the ground. Some continued to cheer up to the point they realized that the enemy was going to crash into their section of the trench. Most crashes were fatal, though a few pilots did manage to survive in controlled crash landings in no-man’s land.

While the air forces battles above, shells continued to fill the sky between heaven and earth. Aside from artillery duels, the front grew quiet in April 1915. With Stevenson unable to evict the Yankees and Harbor unable to push further, the two generals settled down for another year of deadlock. Or so it appeared. While Harbor continued to plan his next offensive, Stevenson sought any means possible to take or destroy Fort Stuart.

One way that was open to him was the myriad of tunnels running beneath the front. Tunnels linking Fort Stuart to points further south were either destroyed or flooded. The bombardment of Fort Stuart caused others to collapse, sealing away store rooms deep beneath Marye’s Heights. The Confederate Corps of Engineers believed they could reopen the tunnels but for what purpose? Any attempt to enter the fort via the underground would be easily stopped. Machine guns would inflict far more grizzly damage in the confines of a tunnel than under open sky.

Major Eugene Madison suggested that perhaps soldiers should not charge the Yankees from below. If one of the old store rooms could be reached, it could be packed with explosives. One touched off, such an explosion would bring down the fort around the enemy’s ears. Whether or not it would force them north of the river again, Madison would not say. It would open a rather large gap in the front, perhaps room enough for Stevenson to exploit.

The order was given on April 18, to begin mining Fort Stuart. It was not as simple as Madison first believed. Though he did not think it a cake walk, the engineer hoped he could dig from one tunnel to another and through a roundabout way reach beneath the fort. It all assumed that any store rooms were completely sealed, a fact that was far from proven. Even if not, the engineers could simply dig out a new cavern.

The trick was to mine without the Union suspecting anything. While it was extremely dangerous, Madison planned to dig while the surface was under bombardment. He hoped the sound of exploding shells would cover his advance. It proved dangerous and fatal to a number of engineers when one of the tunnels collapsed atop them. Out of forty in the April 29 collapse, only one survived. The private from North Carolina survived pinned beneath rubble for three days while engineers tried to clear the passage. The private was in surprisingly good cheer when the doctor announced his leg was broken but he would keep it. For him, and for the time being, the war was over.

 

[The Kiat]

It was not until June 11, that construction was complete. To everyone’s surprise south of the border, the Union failed to notice the construction. The combination of bombardment from above and the periodic collapse of a tunnel dulled their alertness. For many of 84th Maryland Guard that held the trenches south of the fort, a week did not pass when some portion of the underground or another collapsed. For the 45th Infantry, XI Corps holding the fort, their vigilance declined over the weeks.

Union engineers rebuilding the fortress under bombardment discovered a number of tunnels and passages beneath Forth Stuart, all leading to the south. Those that were not naturally collapsed were brought down by placed charges. Harbor did not fear an invasion from below as much as he was concerned about spies infiltrating his lines. After all, a great many Confederate officers attended universities in the North and could disguise their Southern accents long enough to slip past sentries.

A few did try to slip past. It is believed all were captured or killed, though one Confederate officer claimed to have slipped north of the Rappahannock during the spring of 1915. Those passages already collapsed were not seen as a threat and ignored. What lay beyond did not concern Union engineers or commanders.

For two months Confederate engineers worked in connecting collapsed tunnels and excavating new passages. They finally reached a storage room beneath the southern wall of Fort Stuart. It was primarily used for the storage of rations; munitions bunkers were far heavier fortified and deeper underground. One plan to use a buried munitions depot was abandoned when engineers calculated the depth too great to make for an effective mine. Better to use a chamber closer to the surface.

Smaller chambers and halls adjacent to the supply depot were also mined. Confederate engineers placed more than two hundred tons of high explosive beneath the southern wall. Stevenson called off bombardment for the duration, not wanting to accidentally set off the explosives before his soldiers were in place. He planned to detonate the mine on June 20.

On the morning of June 20, Union soldiers in Fort Stuart took advantage in the apparent lull in combat. For five days, not a single shell fell upon them, though Confederate bombers still tried to attack the pontoon bridges over the river. Anti-aircraft guns were put in place, mostly in the form of .30 machine guns that did little but scare Southern pilots. A few artillery pieces firing timed shells succeeded in bringing down two bombers that morning.

At 0850, the lull was shattered with the detonation of two hundred tons of explosives. For eight thousand men in the 45th Infantry death came without warning. Most likely never knew what hit them as the ground beneath erupted in a titanic blast. An addition four thousand in the 84th Maryland were killed instantly by the blast. The remained of both divisions were showered with debris, some buried alive, other pummeled by falling concrete. Thousands of each division suffered permanent hearing loss.

The explosion was so massive that even Confederate soldiers suffered as the forward most trenches came under assault by raining earth. Attempts to exploit the explosion were delayed as forward commanders waited for the dust to settle. It would do neither side any good to fight in the middle of a dust storm. When the dust finally did settle, it revealed an unreal scene. Half of Marye’s Heights was simply gone, collapsed into a crater half a mile wide. Part of the northern slope of the Heights slid into the Rappahannock, diverting the river slightly to the north.

Thousands of Confederate soldiers poured over the top and into the crater, a move that turned out to be a costly mistake. The crater was deep enough that climbing out proved problematic, especially after Union soldiers shook the cobwebs out of their head and set up new defenses. Through a sheer numbers, Stevenson broke through the gap, retaking what remained of Fort Stuart, which was very little. The fortress was in ruins, no longer of any use to either side.

Though he recaptured the ruined fort, Stevenson did not take all of what remained of Marye’s Heights. Harbor rushed all of his spare soldiers, including rear echelon support, to the new front overlooking the city that was once Fredericksburg. Union and Confederate divisions fought fiercely over the scraps of the once picturesque highlands.

By June 22, the Union position started to grow untenable. Confederate artillery pounded the Rappahannock relentlessly, severing all of the pontoon bridges and trapping more than one hundred fifty thousand Union soldiers south of the river. Harbor watched the battle from across the river, wondering if his third attempt to cross the Rappahannock would be his last. For more than a hundred thousand Union soldiers, they already made their final crossing.

 

[The Kiat]

Aftermath
On June 28, with the battle still hanging in the balance, President Roosevelt sacked Harbor. Roosevelt explained, using the old baseball analogy, three strikes and you are out. Harbor was removed from command. Roosevelt did not have to look far for a replacement. Upriver, White Water gained more ground and held it with fewer men. Roosevelt promoted him to command of the Second Army with his first order being to save XI Corps.

Saving the Corps was not easy or cheap but White Water managed to reopen supplies. Through intensive bombardment and by using every aircraft on the Potomac Front, he silenced Confederate guns long enough to rebuild the pontoon bridges. Two more weeks of brutal combat lay ahead before the new front finally settled south of Stuart Crater, leaving the Rappahannock River outside of the range of Confederate 75 mm guns as well as other small artillery pieces.

Larger, eight inch guns still rained down destruction, occasionally severing one of the many pontoon bridges for the remainder of 1915. With the Union now firmly in control of Fredericksburg, Stevenson settled into a new defensive perimeter running from Chancersville south to Spotsylvania and west towards Port Royal. From March to July 1915, more than a quarter of million Americans on both sides of the front gave their lives fighting over a small pocket of territory.

It was this very bloodletting that convinced Roosevelt as well as Congress that the ultimate goal of the Great War could be nothing less than the full restoration of the Union. To settle for anything less would mean American boys died in vain. Never again did the President want to see the American nations at war. Of course, this effective call for unconditional surrender lengthened the war. Before he made his announcement, the Confederate Congress began to debate whether or not they could reach a settlement with their cousins in the North.

During the last year of the war, many Union dead were buried on Marye’s Heights, turning it into a de facto national cemetery. After the war, its status was made official. As for the town itself, attempts to rebuild often ended tragically as thousand of unexploded rounds still remain within the former city limits, even into the 21st Century. By 1940, the Federal Government and Reconstructed Virginian Government decided to declare the ruins a national monument.

Aside from the giant monument built and dedicated to the war dead of both sides, much of Fredericksburg went fallow. Tours are given of the battlefield, with paths clearly marked. Wandering off the marked path is strongly discouraged. As recently as 1993, a tourist was maimed when he tripped a long forgotten mine after wandering off the path. Whenever regional tensions rise in the United States, as they occasionally do, and talk of leaving slips the lips of the extremist, their opponents simply point to Fredericksburg and ask if political squabbles between States is really worth the cost.