Sunday, October 08, 2006
Civil War Battlefields--Petersburg
This is what's left of The Crater in the extensive battlefields east of the city of Petersburg, 25 miles south of Richmond, VA. By the time Grant and Lee were fighting here, the Civil War in Virginia was largely fought from trenches and redoubts (forts with cannon). As was done without success in WWI, the Yankees dug a 511 foot shaft from their trenches to under a Confederate fort and blew it up on July 30, 1864 with four tons of gunpowder. The Confederates were onto them before the explosion, and countermined, but missed. If you recall the scene in Cold Mountain, with a crater seemingly a hundred feet deep, this remnant is a disappointment, as I have low spots in my lawn deeper than this.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 5:51 PM 
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There was a lot of tunneling in WWI. The Brits brought in Welsh (?) miners, after the Germans blew up an entire Scots line. Metal poles were driven into the ground, and outposts set up to listen for digging. There were stories of tunnels crossing tunnels, with armed men running through the tunnels. Also, one explosion was significantly larger than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. (See "Iron Men with Wooden Wings", which does include info on the war in the trenches. One of my brothers just read the book - for about the third time)
oldeForce
oldeForce
# posted by 
: 7:21 PM
: 7:21 PM
Thanks for the info. The historical novel Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks?? has a lot of mine warfare in it as well.
You might want to take a look at the Wikipedia page on the Battle of Messines. According to that page, approximately 10,000 German troops were killed by the explosion of 21 mines filled with about 1,000,000 lbs. of explosives.
Yeah, the Germans blew up the Brits and French and were blown up in return but neither side could ever exploit the gaps--something to do with ability to move the necessary numbers of troops in a timely manner--so it was just more pointless slaughter. I really hate WWI.
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