Author: Fred Ray
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Review: Civil War Infantry Tactics by Earl Hess
Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness by Earl J. Hess Hardcover: 368 pages 6.1 x 9.4 inches ISBN-10: 0807159379 ISBN-13: 978-0807159378 Publisher: LSU Press (April 13, 2015) Earl Hess has added yet another tome to his ever-growing list of Civil War books. His latest is devoted to infantry tactics, which I must […]
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Civil War Fought by Grasshoppers
A friend send this from the recent NC State Fair. Funny, but even funnier is that both flags are Confederate. Made by a school kid, don’t know what grade.
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Pegler on Sharpshooting, Capandball on Lorenz and Needle Gun
Martin Pegler, prolific author and former Senior Curator of Firearms at the Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds, has published a series of articles in American Rifleman on sniping and sharpshooting. The first starts with the introduction of the rifle and goes into the early 19th Century. The next one covers the period starting roughly with the […]
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Blackford at Seven Pines
Johnston continued to retreat until he was literally under the spires of Richmond. On May 31 he finally made his move at Seven Pines. The flooded Chickahominy River had split the Union army, leaving two corps isolated south of the river, which Johnston planned to strike with nearly his entire force. While the plan was […]
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Retreat from Williamsburg
McClellan continued to bring up his heavy siege guns to the Yorktown line, and on the night of May 3, 1862, Johnston withdrew toward Richmond rather than risk a battle. Blackford wrote his mother: At 8 o’clock the whole Army moved quickly out of the works. I, with my company, was left to support the […]
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Sir Joseph Whitworth and His Deadly Rifles
My article about Joseph Whitworth and his rifles is up on the Shock Troops web site. It originally appeared in the December 2010 issue of Civil War Times. In 1854, at the request of the British Board of Ordnance, Whitworth turned his attention to firearms, specifically the Enfield P53 .577 caliber service rifle, which he […]
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Blackford at Yorktown
Johnston’s army arrived on the Virginia Peninsula and established a line at the Warwick River to block McClellan’s advance. Blackford and his men scrambled to adjust to the novelty of a continuous contact with the Federals. On April 22nd Blackford wrote his parents from “Curtain to Redoubt No. ‘4’ near Yorktown, Va.”, first apologizing for […]