frontpaged at My Left Wing
Okay, so there are a few things I need to clear up before we get into this one.
This is not a new work, in the sense that I just today sat down and wrote it. A year ago today I was probably engaged in writing this, since it was the final paper for a class. As such, you may notice that the style is somewhat more academic than is my usual wont. I hope you will still enjoy it regardless. I got an "A" on it, so my professor did at any rate.
Also, I chose not to include the 40-odd footnotes that were scattered throughout the paper because to do so would have caused me nightmarish headaches. Just please believe me that everything was properly cited in the correct style. However, I am the the type that likes to include side observations and comments in my footnotes. Several of these I wanted to bring to your attention and have folded them into the paper set off by plus signs to designate the fact that they were originally footnotes. Just a heads up there.
Oh, well. Now that we've got preliminaries out of the way, go read and enjoy.
The American Civil War is the most tragic story in our nation's history. The grim statistics are well known to many-of the more than 3 million men who served in both militaries from first to last, 625,000, or one out of every five, never returned home. Of the countless sad and heartbreaking tales to come out of that cruel war few, if any, are more depressing or misunderstood than the story of Cold Harbor.
To those who know of the Civil War only through their vague and highly imperfect high school history courses, Cold Harbor is a battle far outside their realm of knowledge. For those with some degree of interest in the war, Cold Harbor is encompassed only in the disastrous assault of June 3, 1864. (Even this, the most written about and well known part of the battle, is frequently seen through the wrong lens.) As is most often the case, however, there is much more to the story.
The Battle of Cold Harbor encompassed twelve terrible days, two bloody, full scale assaults, and seemingly endless hours of sniping, skirmishing, and sweltering under the fierce summer sun of central Virginia. And yet, for all its slaughter, the battle represented much more than that. It is not until recently that Cold Harbor's true legacy has begun to be understood. Cold Harbor represented the culmination of all the lessons that had been learned during Grant's Overland Campaign. Indeed, it is in the trenches at Cold Harbor can one at last begin to see the true beginnings of the horror of World War I. In many ways, the battle is the Western Front in microcosm.
The parallels are dramatic and striking. Cold Harbor marked the first systematic use of mortars, the first true appearance of a battlefield deep trench system, a prolonged stalemate, nighttime trench raids, mass "over the top" rushes on opposing trenches, the rotation of soldiers in and out of those trenches, the process of gaining ground yard by yard, the slaughter of green troops, government disinformation and coverup, and fractious high command failures, to name just some. Most ominously, "the casualty rate was roughly similar as well." For any student of the Great War, that is truly a chilling statement. To be sure, some if not all of these had been seen in previous episodes during the war. The Army of the Potomac first deployed mortars during the fighting at Spotsylvania, the government had been disseminating blatant propaganda for some time, and high command blundering had been endemic in the Union army since the first days of the war. At Cold Harbor however, all of these things and more were at last synthesized into a panoply of death and misery.
How then, did the war evolve to this point? What brought the Civil War out of the age of Napoleon and Wellington and toward the age of Joffre and Haig? Why did it happen? What effects did it have on those of both high and low rank who served in the opposing armies? What truly happened at that dusty Virginia crossroads? The answer is both long and complex. It begins in the lovely rolling countryside of south-central Pennsylvania, continues in the burning, vermin infested trenches along the Chickahominy River bottomlands, and ends in the gory, hellish battlefields of early 20th century France.
At the start of the war, Napoleon Bonaparte was almost universally recognized as the greatest military genius of the last century. So much so, indeed, that the entire period of military his strategies would influence was dubbed the "Napoleonic Era." Napoleon's campaigns, tactics, and thinking were all "a central influence in the military education of certain Civil War commanders", specifically those with West Point educations. Indeed, the U.S. army, viewed as a single entity, could be called a bit of a Francophile. The military "was quick to adopt anything French, from Captain Claude Minie's bullet...to the gaudy uniforms of the Zouaves and the handy 12-pounder Napoleon fieldpiece." Therefore, it makes sense that the common battlefield tactics of the greatest French leader of them all would be quickly adopted by the army.
It is in Robert E. Lee's grand, famous assault of July 3, 1863 at the battle of Gettysburg that would signal the climax and end to the Napoleonic Era. That assault, indelibly but inexactly impressed on the popular imagination as "Pickett's Charge" would, in all its grandeur and horror, demonstrate that tactics such as Napoleon and Wellington had used were no longer feasible on a large scale. The basic outlines of the attack are well known to those with even a passing familiarity with the war. Following a long, intense artillery barrage, 13,000 Confederate troops, massed shoulder-to-shoulder in the perfect tradition of Napoleon, advanced three-quarters of a mile across a wide, open valley toward Union infantry and artillery. When the survivors stumbled back under an hour later, they left behind well over 5,000 of their comrades dead and wounded on the ground.
Pickett's Charge would gain significance in the popular imagination as the "turning point of the war," a designation that perhaps overinflates its importance. Such arguments are outside the scope of this paper, but Pickett's Charge does have another significant point that only in the past ten years or so has been extensively commented on. It is perhaps fitting that such a legendary assault would signal the end to the Napoleonic Era. Whether it consciously shocked the participants into not wanting to attempt such a thing again or not, Pickett's Charge marked the climax of the Napoleonic Era. Rarely, if ever, again would soldiers advance shoulder-to-shoulder at a steady walk as if on the parade ground across an open field-and certainly it would never happen again with such great numbers of troops. Clearly, it was time for the commanders and the soldiers in their charges to begin exploring other ways to gain battlefield successes.
Although the Civil War has been called the "last Napoleonic War," this is an oversimplification. It is true that the war would be the last demonstration of widespread Napoleonic tactics of massed firepower; however, by the end of the war, a new style of warfare had emerged. That new style was birthed during Ulysses S. Grant's famous Overland Campaign of the spring of 1864. At Cold Harbor, both the campaign and its fighting style would reach their logical and horrifying conclusion.
Neither Ulysses Grant or Robert Lee could have ever dreamed their armies would end up facing each other down at the crossroads hamlet of Cold Harbor. There were some ramshackle farmsteads in the immediate area, as well as "a moldering wayside tavern" from which the crossroads-and the battle-would take its name. Indeed, right up until June 1st, the first day of major action at Cold Harbor, the Union high command was not concerned about the place except " as a way station to prevent rebels from interfering with [reinforcements] march[ing] to join the Army of the Potomac." ++As a visitor to the battlefield today can see, the roads may be paved and the buildings done in modern style, but the overall character of the area remains largely unchanged. It is sinister and overall rather depressing.++
Interfering with those reinforcements was precisely what Robert E. Lee had in mind. As early as 3:15 p.m., May 30th, he telegraphed the War Department from his lines confronting the Army of the Potomac along Totopotomoy Creek that Union steamers were "conveying [Major General William F.] Smith's corps to Grant" and requested reinforcements of his own. "Smith's corps will be with Grant tomorrow. [Major General Robert] Hoke's division, at least, should be with me by light tomorrow." Lee greatest fear involved Smith's troops disembarking from their transports and making a rapid march to seize the Cold Harbor crossroads, thereby endangering his right flank and rear. Grant actually intended no such thing, but a glance at the map seemed to confirm Lee's apprehensions. From Cold Harbor, a good road led directly Richmond, less than a dozen miles away. Further seeming to reinforce Lee's fears, some of his cavalry had spent most of May 30th fighting with Union troopers for possession of the crossroads.
On the morning of May 31st, Lee sent a brigade of infantry to reinforce his cavalrymen and gave orders to take full possession of the crossroads. All day back and forth fighting raged, but as darkness closed in the Union cavalry held full and firm possession of the Cold Harbor crossroads. Major General George Gordon Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac, realized that if the Confederates were to gain possession of Cold Harbor-and they would undoubtedly try to do so again in the morning-Lee could mass a powerful force below the Union army's flank and proceed to crush it, taking time to divert a force to smash Smith's troops before they could join the Potomac army. Consequently, Meade directed the Union 6th Corps to march to Cold Harbor on the morning of June 1st and join with Smith's 18th Corps to secure the area.
Predictably, Lee sent infantry reinforcements on the morning of June 1st to strengthen his bid to seize the Cold Harbor crossroads. Despite a superiority in numbers over the Union cavalrymen, the Rebel infantry assault suffered from poor leadership, worse co-ordination, and never really got off the ground. Thanks to some heroic, stubborn fighting by Union cavalry troopers, Cold Harbor would remain under Grant's control.
Had the 6th and 18th Corps been up and in position by then, they could have launched a prompt counterattack and a smashing victory may have been won. The Confederate high command, however, was not the only one bungling on that hot June day. Thanks to orders that went awry and then were misunderstood when they arrived, the Federal infantry did not begin straggling into Cold Harbor until around 3:30 p.m. Orders quickly came from high command to Smith and Horatio Wright, commanding the 6th Corps: An all out assault was to be launched promptly at 5 p.m.
A member of Meade's staff, Colonel Theodore Lyman had written home some weeks ago to his family describing the Confederates system of fortifying their lines, "It is a rule that, when the Rebels halt, the first day gives them a good rifle-pit; the second, a regular infantry parapet with artillery in position; and the third a parapet with an abattis in front and entrenched batteries behind." He added, somewhat ominously, "Sometimes they put this three days' work into the first twenty four hours." In truth, the Confederates were often able to put that "three days' work into the first twenty four hours" much more often than he was probably willing to admit. In general, though, Lyman's assessment was accurate enough.
The Confederates who had attacked and been repulsed earlier in the day, however-they were from the divisions of Hoke and Brigadier General Joseph B. Kershaw-did not have twenty four hours. They had, at best, about one-third of that amount of time to make their dispositions. Lee was hurriedly readjusting his lines so as to form a solid line of battle, but it seemed as if Hoke and Kershaw would have to face the storm by themselves. Denied the chance to construct the intricate breastworks they had been using with such success the past four weeks, the Confederates resorted to the only option left open to them.
They began to dig down.
* * *
On September 7th, 1914, just before the Battle of the Marne, a "young German infantry commander" named Erwin Rommel wrote in his diary, "Our recent experiences indicated but one way of keeping casualties down-the deep trench." That deep trench that sheltered Rommel and millions of soldiers on both sides during the Great War found its first large scale practical application during Cold Harbor. The Confederates who first scratched out the crude prototype of what would eventually evolve into the incalculably intricate trench network on the Western Front had, at first, no conscious idea of what they were doing.
Entrenchments of various sorts had been seen throughout the war. Excluding the fixed, permanent fortifications such as the network of forts that protected Washington, Richmond, and various other cities important to both nations, the sort of entrenchments used by soldiers had been limited to two varieties: accidents of terrain and above ground breastworks. The first category included the famous stone walls at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg and the unfinished railroad bed at Second Manassass.
The second category had been seen at various times throughout the war-most notably the Union positions on Culp's Hill at the battle of Gettysburg-but in Grant's Overland Campaign they would gain particular significance. Building breastworks became as much of a fact of life for an infantryman as marching. It was this sort of entrenchment system Colonel Lyman had been referring to in his letter home. The remains of those entrenchments can be seen by any visitor today to the Wilderness or Spotsylvania National Military Parks. In most places, they consist of a small line of heaped up earth running along a tiny ditch line. Such melancholy remains, however, belie their formal lethal characteristics.
The notorious Confederate entrenchments of the "Mule Shoe" and the "Bloody Angle" were photographed after the conflict had moved on. Such pictures make plain the frightening task the soldiers whose job it was to assault them faced. Constructed of logs and dirt, built about chest high-hence their being dubbed "breastworks"-the fortifications were anywhere from three to five feet thick with innovations dubbed "traverses" built in. Traverses were log barricades placed at right angles to the main line every twenty feet or so to guard against flanking fire and shrapnel explosions. Across the top of each section of breastwork was placed a "head log"-a log raised six to eight inches that provided a covered firing slit for an infantryman.
The picture a visitor gets at the Cold Harbor battlefield today is one of an altogether different nature. Gone are the decaying remnants of the once formidable log and earth mounds. Instead, there are remains of confused, chaotic trench lines only. Some of them are remarkably well preserved and give an excellent window into the past. The trenches that still maintain most of their 1864 appearance run anywhere from six to eight feet deep. This might seem strange until the observant tourist will noticed the remains of a "firing step"-a raised mound of a foot or two of earth that allowed a sheltering soldier to see over the lip of the trench when fighting. These trenches also had "head logs," though instead of being mounted on top of a huge breastwork, they were installed a few inches from the ground itself.
To a British, French, or German soldier stuck in the trenches of the Western Front, the whole world appeared to be endless yards of barbed wire in front of "ditch[es], dug deep enough to shelter a man, narrow enough to present a difficult target to plunging artillery fire and kinked at intervals into `traverses' to diffuse blast, splinters or shrapnel and prevent attackers who entered a trench from commanding more than a short stretch with rifle fire." Except for the barbed wire, the scene would have been sadly familiar to any soldier present at Cold Harbor.
It was this system of defense that the dazed, exhausted soldiers of the 6th and 18th Corps ran headlong into when their attack went forward at 5 p.m. As a Pennsylvanian would write home to his sister with homespun understatement, "Many a poor fella bit the dust." Particularly unfortunate was the fate of the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery. These men had never seen serious combat before and they had just recently been snatched from the easy life of the Washington, D.C. garrison and sent into the field as infantry reinforcements. Advancing with no artillery support and displaying the innocence of green troops, the Connecticut men were slaughtered. A survivor remembered, "The storm of leaden rain that was poured into us cannot be described." The untried rookies milled about in confusion and their losses mounted steadily. Many of those who gave into the impulse to run were shot down as they fled. Finally, the Second's brigade commander restored order and the men managed to return a semblance of fire. In minutes, 386 of the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery had been killed or wounded. Their fate was all too common for untried soldiers at Cold Harbor, as will be discussed in further detail later. ++The 2nd Connecticut's story has gained great prominence; a memorial has recently been erected for them on the battlefield. It is a minimalistic stone block with great emotional power-the list of the regiment's casualties inscribed on the marker is heartbreakingly long.++
The Confederates would have precious little time to savor their victory over the Second. Their hastily prepared defensive line now paid a bitter dividend. A ravine that had been unnoticed or ignored funneled directly from the Union lines into the Confederate position. It did not take some enterprising Federals long to take advantage of that and come storming into the Rebel lines. The Confederates broke and ran, then re-organized and counterattacked. Bitter fighting raged back and forth until darkness brought an end to the struggle and the Confederates slipped quietly back from the front lines to prepare a new, stronger position.
Up until this time, with the exception of the highly important innovation of the deep trench, there had not been much to distinguish the fighting at Cold Harbor from any other during the past month or so. However, beginning the morning of June 2nd and ending on the night of June 12th, that would change drastically. Most of what had come before would be prologue; from here on out would begin the slow, inexorable march toward the Somme and Verdun.
* * *
Throughout the First World War, the Allied military commanders constantly deceived themselves about the state of the German army. They were convinced the Germans were constantly on the ropes, had suffered crippling losses, and needed only one more strong push to collapse. In reality, things were entirely different. The German army had suffered large losses, but not nearly so much as the Allies had. The German army also remained strong and largely intact, right up until late 1918.
It was much the same with Grant and his view of the Confederate army. It is true that Grant's relentless hammering on the Army of Northern Virginia had taken its toll. Lee's army had taken large losses, and had lost much of its legendary offensive punch. Grant was convinced it was a beaten force that one last determined blow could shatter. "Lee's army is really whipped," Grant wrote to a subordinate in Washington, "The prisoners we now take show it, and the action of his army shows it unmistakably. Our men feel that they have gained the morale over the enemy and attack with confidence. Our success over Lee's army is already ensured." Grant's remarks conceal as much as they reveal and show that Grant was very similar with regard to the Allied generals of World War One in that both were perfectly willing to misrepresent the true state of affairs at the front to their governments. Firstly, Grant's contention that the Union soldiers were gaining the upper hand in morale over their Confederate counterparts is simply nonsense. Reading the various correspondence of the rank and file of both armies, one gets the general but unmistakable impression that the real state of affairs was exactly the opposite. The Rebel soldiers show unflappable confidence in their cause and in Robert E. Lee. The Federal soldiers, by and large, display a growing disgust and weariness with the war. Of course, both sides were eminently war weary at this point, and many Union soldiers tried to put the best face possible on events for their loved ones at home, but the general trend is unmistakable and clear.
Grant's belief that Lee's army was already a beaten force was to have dire consequences. Since he had ordered the great assault of May 12th at Spotsylvania that had culminated in the nightmare of the Bloody Angle, Ulysses Grant had been convinced that one more great push would be the last one Lee's army could stand. Though there had been ample evidence to prove him wrong over the course of past three weeks, he had clung to that conviction with all of his famed bulldog tenacity. Also, Grant continued to represent to Washington that Lee's army had suffered as badly if not worse than his own. This, however, was not correct. By daylight on June 2nd, the Army of the Potomac had taken some 44,000 casualties in twenty-seven days while inflicting roughly 27,000 on the Army of Northern Virginia in that same span of time. ++It is true the numbers presented are in absolute terms. Grant could easily replace his losses, while Lee could not. This argument, however, has been given more weight than it probably deserves. For one, Lee had been largely reinforced by now, though these were the last significant reinforcements the Confederate government had to send him. Most critically was the fact that the average quality of the individual Confederate veteran was staying consistent, while the quality of the typical Union soldier was dropping, since Grant's reinforcements were largely completely inexperienced, drafted men, or worse. Nearly every Union officer and veteran held these new men in utter contempt.++
On the night of June 1st, Grant decided he wanted one more grand assault made and ordered Meade to make the necessary preparations. Meade decided he wanted to use his elite striking force to lead the assault-specifically, Major General Winfield Scott Hancock's 2nd Corps. The problem with this was that Hancock's men were currently on the Army of the Potomac's extreme right, and they needed to be on the extreme left in order to lead the assault. This called for a night march and a speedy one-Grant's orders specified the attack was to take place at dawn. Luck, however, was not with Union arms this night. The guide Meade sent to show the way promptly got the 2nd Corps lost. A member of Hancock's staff, Francis Walker, described what happened, "The night had been intensely hot and breathless, and the long march through roads deep with dust, which rose in suffocating clouds as it was stirred by thousands of fee...had been trying almost beyond the limits of endurance. It was not till between six and seven o'clock on the 2nd of June that the troops began to arrive at Cold Harbor...in an exhausted condition...General Meade postponed the attack to 5 p.m., and then put it off until half past four the next morning."
Thus June 2nd passed in relative quiet, except for sniping and desultory artillery firing, both of which had been ubiquitous since the beginning of the campaign. The lack of intense, large-scale fighting, however, did not mean the opposing armies were idle. Both sides, especially the Confederates, had been using the time to great advantage. A Confederate artillery officer called the trenches on the morning of June 2nd, "mere little ditches that a calf might run over." By nightfall, however, the story had changed dramatically. All day Lee, his engineers, and his subordinate commanders supervised the construction of the trench line and the placement of the supporting artillery. Their work was masterful. The trench line zig-zagged, not only to provide traverses, but also to provide interlocking fields of fire; in other words, no matter which point Union forces assaulted, they would find themselves trapped in a crossfire. They also contented themselves with not just one trench line but, "two and in places three, following the uneven terrain, snaking in and out of gullies and clumps of woods...They placed their cannon not just behind their main line but also in works projecting forward, sited to fire across the front of attacking forces." In other words, attacking infantry would not only meet a musketry crossfire, but an artillery one as well. Basically, "by dawn on Friday, June 3, most of the Confederates would be more thoroughly dug in and ready than on any morning since the spring campaign began."
This recognization of the desirability of defense in depth was particularly ingenious, since even by the spring of 1918, many Allied commanders had not yet figured out it was the best way to hold a position. Indeed, it was the folly having all of one's strength in the main trench line that allowed the German army to virtually sweep away the British and French armies at this time until the Americans stopped their drive toward Paris. The deep trench system gave the Confederates another advantage, this one psychological. Every Rebel infantryman crouched in his lines knew how deadly their system of defense was. To the average Union soldier-and more importantly, his officers-who was used to confronting log and dirt monstrosities when he assaulted, the new Confederate line looked perfectly weak. In fact, as would be soon tragically proved, the true state of affairs was the polar opposite.
* * *
There have been gallons of ink expended by participants and historians attempting to describe the precise events of what happened at 4:30 a.m. on the morning. Generally, the picture has been of a grand assault of three Union corps-2nd, 6th, 18th-who climbed out of their trenches and surged forward, only to run into a storm of fire and have their attack broken in anywhere from seven to twenty minutes. This, however, is untrue. In some places it took nearly an hour before the final decisive assault got underway.
Whatever the nature of the assault itself, the results have never been in dispute. Nearly everywhere, the attack was stopped cold, as the trenches the Confederates had worked so hard on now paid off. A Rhode Island officer would give the best summation as he scrawled in his diary that evening, "We have had a terrible battle today and the killed and wounded number in the thousands." The picture of Cold Harbor has always been one of slaughter, insofar as the new reinforcements to the Army of the Potomac were concerned.
The veteran regiments who had been with the army for years had bled down to almost nothing by this point. Consequently, most commanders chose to use the converted heavy artillery regiments and other new units to lead their attack. A glance at the casualty list tells the sad story: among the heavy artillery regiments, the 8th New York lost 505; the 7th, 418; the 9th, 148; the 2nd, 215; the 1st Vermont, 173. The inexperienced standard infantry units lost just as badly and sometimes proportionally worse: the 5th New Hampshire lost 231; the 164th New York, 157; the 184th Pennsylvania, 111; the 155th N.Y., 154, the 139th N.Y., 153; the 188th PA, 171.
The contrast with the veteran infantry units is striking. For instance, the 14th Connecticut had lost only some ten men all day, a number not much smaller than most of the other veteran units in the attack. There were a few reasons for this. For one thing, these battered veterans had not spearheaded the assault the way the rookies had and were consequently exposed less to fire. Another, and probably more important reason is that the veteran Union soldiers knew how to charge entrenchments by now. A bold dash might be a fine thing to talk about, but they had learned that it led to slaughter. Instead, the battlewise infantrymen would advance until the fire became heavy, then drop to the ground and begin to dig in, consolidating what they had managed to win at minimal cost.
From top to bottom, the fighting of June 3, 1864 was a World War I style engagement. At early dawn, the waves of attacking soldiers went "over the top" and ran into devastating fire that resulted in massacre. The parallels with the experiences of British and French soldiers at the battle of the Somme could not be more apt. In that battle, launched jointly by the British and French, the first day British losses came to 19,240 killed and missing and 38,230 wounded, making it the single worst day in British military history. French casualties that day were barely a quarter of that figure. The reason for the staggering difference is simple-the French army was experienced and the British were not. A Britisher, observing both armies advance, described the difference, "[In the French attack], tiny groups taking every advantage of cover swarmed forward. Meanwhile...long lines of British infantry, at a few yards interval and in perfect order, were slowly advancing. Wave after wave spring forward from the trenches, joining in the parade, for that is what it looked like. And they provided magnificent targets." The French infantry, used to the realities of combat, attacked sensibly and suffered acceptable losses. The British, completely unused to trench warfare, had attacked in formation and been butchered. Thus was also the case for the veteran and inexperienced soldiers of the Army of the Potomac on June 3, 1864.
The only place where the Federal attack met with even the slightest success was on the far left of the line. Here the Confederate position ran through lower and rather swampy ground and thus was far less defensible. The local commander dealt with this situation by devising what would become the standard system of German defensive fighting on the Western Front. He placed a thin line of defenders in the main position with orders to hold out as long as possible, then fall back. Then, back on more defensible ground, he placed reserves that could quickly be ordered forward to eject any breakthrough. This was exactly what occurred. The massive Union tide overwhelmed the skeleton Rebel line, but the breach was promptly sealed and the attackers thrown back by the Confederate reserves when they were committed.
Though the June 3rd assault was the last day of large scale fighting at Cold Harbor, the armies would not leave the area until the night of June 12th. For nine days there reigned a perfect stalemate-the Western Front in miniature. Over the course of that period of time, the trench complexes of both armies became more and more elaborate, until there was nothing at all to distinguish them from the trenches of the Western Front, barbed wire excepted. To the front line was added anywhere from three to four reserve lines of trenches that the troops were rotated out of, each regiment taking its turn on front line duty. Lieutenant Colonel Caleb Hobson, of the 51st North Carolina described the routine in his diary. "Saturday June 4. We moved to the second line of works...just before daylight we moved back to the third line of works. Sunday June 5. Co. C and B sent to the front line...Monday, June 6. Co. G and E was sent to the front line to assist Co. C and B. I went in charge of the four companies. Wednesday June 8. Cos. B, C, E, and G was relieved by the balance of the Regt. and reported back to Col. McKethan on the second line to rest." On the Federal side of the field, the routine was much the same.
Also making their appearances were "communication trenches," narrow trenches that ran backwards from the main lines allowing soldiers and supplies to move back and forth between the front and rear. These were not dug as low as the main trench line, thus all those using the communication trenches had to crawl flat on their stomachs to avoid being picked off by sharpshooters. To a soldier detailed to bring supplies forward from the rear, moving along the communication trenches was like becoming "some unholy cross between a pack mule and a snake." ++Though not nearly so well preserved as some of the main trench lines, the communication trenches are still visible in places. A visitor gets the distinct impression that to crawl along them in the heat of a Virginia summer would be unpleasant in the extreme.++
First appearing in any kind of systematic use was a weapon that would, in a more refined form, revolutionize combat on the Western Front-the mortar. The Civil War era mortar-the Coehorn-was a curious contraption. One is today on display at the battlefield visitors center and it consists of nothing more than a small barrel pointed at a high angle attached to a sturdy piece of wood. The purpose of the mortar is to drop shells at a high angle directly into an enemy trench line-"plunging fire" it is called. This not only can be extremely devastating, but also tremendously demoralizing to an army suffering under intense mortar bombardment. The Army of the Potomac used its Coehorns to great effect in this regard-particularly since the Confederates had no Coehorns of their own to respond with. A Pennsylvanian described the typical aftermath of a mortar attack to his kinfolk at home with obvious delight, "You would laugh to see the gray scamps run when our mortars open on them. They say that the Yanks are all drunk, for they know nothing." On the Western Front, both armies would use mortars to great effect, particularly the Germans since their tactics and technology with regard to the weapon were far more advanced than the Allies.
Another tactic found in common use during Cold Harbor that would gain even wider employment by the British during World War I was the idea of the nighttime trench raid. In almost every extant account, Union and Confederate, letters and diaries speak of huge twilight and darkness assaults by the enemy that were decisively repulsed with heavy loss to the attackers. In truth, this was nothing more than the overactive minds of young men feeding on fear and tension magnified by the uncertainty of night. There were no major assaults by either side after June 3rd. There were, however, a continuous series of short rushes by a regiment or two done under cover of darkness. These were designed to harass the enemy, keep him uncertain as to his opposite numbers intentions, and incidentally to grab whatever prisoners and loot came to hand. On the Western Front, though the French never practiced the tactic to a great degree, the British were to make a science of it, and the Germans did not take long to copy it.
Eventually, the armies would move on from Cold Harbor. Stalemated trench warfare was not Ulysses Grant's preferred method of fighting. He prized the freedom to maneuver just as much as Robert E. Lee did. On the night of June 12th, he skillfully slipped the Army of the Potomac out of its trenches and began a march for the James River and the strategic town of Petersburg just beyond it. Lee would follow, and though Grant would win the race, the fractious Union high command would bungle again and allow Petersburg to become a siege that would grind on until the closing weeks of the war.
The armies left behind them much more than a scarred, undulating landscape of now abandoned trench mazes. For one thing, the Army of the Potomac left behind forever over 2,000 of their comrades to rot under the boiling Virginia sun, or lie in poorly dug, mostly unmarked graves. Many were later reburied when the government established a national cemetery at Cold Harbor after the war. Doubtless soldiers of both sides, blue and gray alike, still lie in anonymous graves somewhere on the battlefield. ++The numbers and fate of the Confederate dead are impossible to determine with any significant degree of accuracy.++ Something else was left behind, though, besides bodies and trenches. It was a legacy, one that would not make itself readily apparent for fifty years. It was the legacy of a new and terrible style of warfare, one hitherto unknown in military history. Trenches had been dug before and would be dug again, it is true, but almost exclusively when an army was besieging a city or fortress. The tactical use of a trench complex on a battlefield to minimize losses and maximize defensive capability would continue to be developed before reaching ultimate and horrible fruition in August 1914.