Cross Training

[hoosier]

Maybe some of our re-enactors can answer this one for me.

In the movie "Gettysburg," Gen. Armistead crosses the stone wall and approaches a battery of Union cannon whose gun crews have been eliminated. Just before receiving his mortal wound, he exhorts his men to turn the cannon around, so that they can use it against the enemy.

Under optimum conditions, of course, artillery pieces are manned by crews of men who have specifically defined duties. The crews have practiced the drill of loading and firing the cannon many times.

The men Armistead was asking to turn these cannons around, however, would have been his own infantrymen.

I wonder just how effective those infantrymen would have been if suddenly called upon to perform the duties of trained artillerists.

Was it common to give Civil War soldiers cross training, so that infantrymen would have at least some nodding acquaintance with what artillerists had to do in order to load and fire a cannon? Or was Armistead basically trusting to luck that someone in his command would know what to do?

[johan_steele]

It was not uncommon for Infantry to serve the guns if a Battery needed some help. In the CS Army there were far more batteries of Arty raised than there were guns to equip them, many artillerymen were trained as Infantry and thus utilized until the battery received guns. And Grants Overland Campaign put to use many Heavy Arty units that had never seen a shot fired in anger.

It doesn't take long to train a man how to operate a gun... aiming and hitting something at range is a whole different matter. Armisted was likely thinking of Canister... any soldier can load a tin can w/ a powder bag into the muzzle of a 12 pounder and shove it home; at under fifty yards range aiming isn't needed to do a whole lot of execution among the enmy ranks.

Untrained canoneers will be loading and firing such a piece considerably slower than their better trained compatriots and if longer ranged firing was called for they would likely not have fared well when paired off against trained artillerymen.

[scone]

My re-enacting unit has a battery attached to it and last year during our training camp all those that wanted to trained on the field peice as well.

The plan is to one day be in a scenario where we capture the peice and it around and fire it.

The koading procedures are basicly the same except a cannon has a crew while the infantry man is just one person.

At antietam Longstreet himself took charge of a field peice had his staff dismount and fired it several times.

regards, Steven

[gary]

Serving a cannon isn't hard. It's the aiming and timing of the fuse that may pose difficulty for the infantryman.