American Civil War
During the Siege of Vicksburg, in 1863, Union troops led by General Ulysses S. Grant tunnelled under the Confederate trenches and detonated a mine beneath the 3rd Louisiana Redan on June 25, 1863. The subsequent assault, led by General John A. Logan, gained a foothold in the Confederate trenches where the crater was formed, but the attackers were eventually forced to withdraw.
A more famous instance occurred during the Siege of Petersburg: Union troops dug a tunnel under the Confederate lines at Elliott's Salient and packed its end with vast amounts of gunpowder. When set off, the resulting explosion killed about 300 soldiers. It might have been decisive if not for the faulty Union tactic of storming into, rather than around, the resulting crater, allowing the defenders to shoot down onto attackers unable to climb the steep crater sides. The combat was accordingly known as the Battle of the Crater. The horror of this engagement was portrayed in the Charles Frazier novel, and subsequent Anthony Minghella movie, Cold Mountain.
Read more about this topic: Mining (military)
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, american, civil and/or war:
“The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“If the American people don’t love me, their descendants will.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man’s yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
—Flora Tristan (1803–1844)
“Of course in war all madnesses come out in a man, that is the fault of war not of a man or a nation.”
—Frieda Lawrence (1879–1956)