War Elephants

I read somewhere that mahouts would carry a hammer and spike to kill their elephant if it went out of control. In the Civil War era a revolver might do the trick if one knew where to aim for the brain.

The problem is that if you miss, you will be pancaked before you are able to reload...
 
I think if the elephants survived the crossing of the ocean. They would be at best support beast varring and moving heavy itrm around. On the a civil war battlefield they would have been slaughtered...
 
Elephants wouldn't have made it to the battlefield because they are too smart. I think Kipling wrote/documented this. Elephants would pull guns and heavy loads so far to a battlefield but would stop and refuse to go further when they heard battle noises. Then oxen had to be used to pull artillery towards the actual battlefields.
 
The King of Siam offered to supply elephants to Abraham Lincoln, who politely declined his offer. What if Lincoln had accepted? Would elephants have made a difference? In what way?
Elephants are quite resilient and with the right amount of care could have survived quite happily, I don’t think they would have been much use in combat but they could have been used as heavy haulage and I’m sure they could have been put to good use when bridge repairs and major engineering work was required.
 
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https://listverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/8-civil-war-elephants.jpg

Was this taken during the Atlanta Campaign? Just kidding...:wink:
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Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
Was this taken during the Atlanta Campaign? Just kidding...:wink:

You'd better be. We don't tolerate that sort of slipshod shenanigans around here when it comes to history, swabbie.

Everyone who's anyone knows that the Norton's Mounted Culverns never made it east of the Rockies.

The Valiant History of Captain Norton's Mounted Culverns

"President Lincoln's polite refusal was slow making it's way from Secretary Seward's desk to the Siamese capital, and King Somdetch Phra Paramendr Maha Mongkut, having found a suitable vessel to convey them to America, dispatched two pairs of gifted pachyderms to America. The ships apparently passed each other somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean around June 1861. By the time these noble animals were landed in San Francisco, events in the East cast their arrival under the dreaded shadow of obscurity and subsequent embarrassments ensured that they would remain under the pale.

Their arrival caused much consternation among the political and military leadership of the city, the least of which was how to feed them and where to house them, much less how to employ them best in preserving the Union. The first hurdle was that the great animals' effectiveness was immediately halved, when it was discovered that the males could be nowhere near the females when they were in heat.

Due to a lack of education and probably sobriety, no consensus was reached on what their mission should or could be until our ever-resourceful J.A. Norton stepped forward to accept the leadership of the Battery. Lacking ordnance, he took his enthusiasm down to the docks and procured four 'insurance guns' from the rotting inland fleet, through several 'lucky' turns of the cards. The next hurdle was finding stalwart gunners for the popguns worthy of Lewis & Clark, along with handlers for these foreign creatures, which ultimately he found in a dozen and a half underemployed Carnies.

Sadly, with no unit diary being kept their wartime record can only be reconstructed from police blotter excerpts published in this esteemed paper. In addition to intimidating the secesh at Nob Hill on July 4th 1862, Norton's shining glory came on that dark night in March, 1863 when his men and animals allowed the United States Navy to seize the schooner JM Chapman
."

California Police Gazette. February 29th, 1865. p.1.c.4 & p.5.c.7.

Detail (woodcut) of the 6lb mount, sans firing platform.
Presumed to have been sketched in the later half of 1864.
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Battery Commander Capt (Brevet'd) Josh. A. Norton, Esq.
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King Mongkut & his favorite wife
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