Bullwinkle58
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The Minneapolis Star-Tribune today published a long 3-page article with maps and photos on a Minnesota soldier at the battle. He was detailed to the field hospital and only witnessed the slaughter of the 1st Minnesota in the action that held the Union line on the second day and probably swung the battle's outcome. This action resulted in the highest casualty percentage of any Union unit in the entire war.
He wrote two diaries through the war; one survives and the article prints extensive portions of the Gettysburg sections. He stayed there for weeks afterward, helping the wounded and burying hundreds of dead. This is a portion of the battle not often dealt with by historians more interested in the movements of the two armies in the days and weeks after the fighting. Worth a read.
http://www.startribune.com/local/212817551.html?page=1&c=y
An excerpt:
"About 4 p.m. on July 2, Southern forces mounted a ferocious attack on Union soldiers under the command of Gen. Daniel Sickles, who shifted his men to higher ground near some peach trees west of Little Round Top, a move that left his flanks vulnerable.
Soldiers, their guns too hot to hold, resorted to hand-to-hand combat. Some even threw cobblestones at their enemy as control of a nearby wheat field changed hands a half-dozen times during two hours of relentless fighting.
Confederates swarming in from three sides finally broke Sickles’ line and his soldiers retreated in panic past the First Minnesota, standing by on the crest of a ridge.
Gen. Winfield Hancock, overseeing a corps that included the First Minnesota, moved his men a quarter-mile to fill the gap on Cemetery Ridge. The Minnesotans looked down the gently sloping pastureland to a marshy swale known as Plum Run.
About 262 Minnesotans on the ridge were all that stood between more than a thousand Confederate soldiers and the disaster they would cause if they managed to pour over the ridge and split the Union line.
With dead bodies punctuating the field, Hancock needed reinforcements. But first, he had to plug the collapsing line for five minutes to delay the Confederate advance until help could arrive.
“What regiment is this?” Hancock asked. Col. William Colvill, a lawyer and publisher from Red Wing, responded: “First Minnesota.”
“Charge those lines!” Hancock ordered. “Take them!”
William Lochren, an Irish-born soldier who would become a federal judge in Minnesota, heard Hancock’s order.
“Every man realized in an instant what that order meant — death or wounds to us all, the sacrifice of the regiment to gain a few minutes time and save the position, and probably the battlefield — and every man saw and accepted the necessity for the sacrifice.”
Marching at double-quick time with bayonets fixed, the First Minnesota charged down the incline into the whistling bullets, screeching shells and dense smoke unleashed by some 1,600 Alabamians.
“Bullets were coming like hailstones,” Sgt. John Wesley Plummer wrote to his brother back home, “whittling our boys like grain before the sickle.”
Stunned by the Minnesotans rushing toward them, the Confederate soldiers grew disorganized in the Plum Run bog. The five-minute charge had indeed thwarted the Southerners’ advance and saved the Union line on Cemetery Ridge."
< Message edited by Bullwinkle58 -- 6/30/2013 7:45:51 PM >
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Gettysburg 150th - 
.. some unsubstantiated rumors say i turn 40 on thursday. Time pass fast... its been 8 years since i last spend a 4th of July in the US. 
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