Despite a lifetime of fascination with battle and military history, I’ve come to the conclusion that battle proper is too ghastly for my taste, even if I was magically guaranteed to survive.
Historian Shelby Foote was once asked which US Civil War battle he would go back in time to see, and he thoughtfully specified only battles with good open views – there’s no point in going back to “see” the Wilderness battle, or Chickamauga, which were largely confused groups of men isolated in dense underbrush filled with black-powder smoke. He settled on Antietam, and one other, maybe Fredericksburg or Missionary Ridge, as offering enough visual perspective to be worth seeing. Since Antietam was the bloodiest single day’s fighting in the entire Western hemisphere, and Fredericksburg was a frustratingly stupid one-sided slaughter, that leaves Missionary Ridge, I guess, although casualties were not especially “light” there either. But you would get to see a stirring assault carry an “impregnable” position.
I used to daydream about the longbowmen at Agincourt. Knowing as I do now that the main casualties at Agincourt were produced by hand-to-hand mass butchery of almost-helpless class-enemies mired in cold mud, I’ve lost my taste for it.
Another approach is to pick a “battle” that lasts a long time, so as to get one’s “money’s worth,” like the Battle of Britain or the Battle of the Atlantic. I think flying a Spitfire against the Hun might be worth risking death for, and air war was less gruesome than mass infantry collision.
Although it might not count as “battle,” I like to imagine what it would have been like to be in the infantry under Sheridan on April 9, 1865. By relentless demand for action, Sheridan had finally managed to get infantry and cavalry blocking Lee’s retreat. The Confederates came on hard, driving the cavalry, until they saw the long lines of Union infantry and realized the game was up. For their part, the Union infantry had marched hard for days and skipped breakfast this morning, and now realized they were going to bear the brunt of absolutely desperate attack by the infamously dangerous Confederate infantry – and risk death on what might be the last day of the war. Their empty stomachs were not in this fight. The rebels slowed and dressed their lines, the Federals hung on, waiting for the worst…
And a single rider suddenly galloped out of the Confederate lines with an improvised white flag.
No battle to speak of, but what would it have been like to stand with comrades in that stunned silence?
As far as the worst, well, there’s a laundry list of unendurable hells I’d avoid at all costs. Stalingrad, the Somme, Guadalcanal? Okinawa, Berlin, Cannae? All of WWI? The entire Eastern Front in WWII? Too many to list.
One largely-forgotten but particularly haunting hell that comes to mind is the Bloody Angle/Mule Shoe at Spotsylvania. Grant had been driving against Lee, then flanking him and driving again, as part of the murderous Forty Days campaign. When the outflanking attempt was thwarted again at Spotsylvania, he attacked. One part of the attack was led by a young man with big ideas, Col. Emory Upton, who decided to try massing his men in a column and having them hold their fire and rush against a bend in the breastworks (the intention being that it would be harder to mass fire against them since the line on both sides angles away). The salient was held by 22 guns. Despite the cannon and breastworks, Upton’s men split the line like an axe stroke, and only withdrew because of lack of support from other units. Grant liked the partial success, and ordered it to be repeated by an entire corps the next day.
During the night, Lee had the 22 guns withdrawn from the Mule Shoe.
Next day in pre-dawn darkness, the Union hurled men in huge numbers into the line on a narrow front. Seeing this attack develop, the Confederates realized they would be cut in half and defeated unless they did their utmost – which they were prepared to do. The fighting became the worst savagery in the Civil War – all day men slammed into each other at point-blank range, fighting with guns, bayonets, and hand-to-hand with extraordinary effort and bitterness. Description abounds of screaming madmen clawing at each other before being shot down and trampled underfoot by new waves. The emotional level was remarked on by all survivors.
That’s one I’d skip, but one among many.
