Tanks for the Memories: Camp Command Brought Eisenhower to Gettysburg for the First Time
More than 8,700 Confederate Army veterans lived to attend the 50th anniversary reunion of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1913. They camped on the field where General George Pickett and his men had made their brave charge more than mile across an open field into the cannons on the Union Army in July 1863. Veterans of that charge would have been among the old men attending the reunion. They would have looked at the field covered with tents where the veterans camped during the reunion and remembered that the ground had been covered with bodies 50 years earlier. In that desperate charge, many of the unprotected soldiers had been felled by bullets. Had the veterans returned five years later, they still would have seen tents on the field where so much Confederate blood had been shed. They would have also Read more…
Excerpt from "The Last to Fall"
Here is the preface from my upcoming book, “The Last to Fall: The 1922 Marine March, Battles, & Deaths at Gettysburg.” It is due out in early April. Confederate M1917 tanks lumber across the fields, moving on the Union position behind a stone wall on Cemetery Ridge in Gettysburg, Pa. The Union soldiers fire machine guns not so much at the massive metal vehicles approaching them, but at the Confederate soldiers using the tanks as cover in order to make their way across the open ground. In the face of an unstoppable weapon, the Union soldiers begin falling back. Hearing loud buzzing sounds from above, the Confederates stare upward as Union DeHavilland DH-4B biplanes fly out of the clouds. The airplanes level off safely out of range of the Confederate rifle fire. Then the explosions commence as the bombs rain Read more…
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