TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Frequent blog readers probably know that I and a couple of others like Joe Bilby are always trying to confirm CW battle ranges. I recently came across an account of the battle of Corinth (Oct. 3-4, 1862) that talks about it. A soldier in the 2nd Iowa wrote: The Rebel batteries silenced ours, and about […]

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The question of just how much rifle practice the average Civil War soldier got has been the subject of much discussion, much of it speculative. I recently came across a Federal order on the subject issued by General Dan Sickles: General Orders No. 7, Headquarters 3d Army Corps, March 9, 1863 The attention of Commanding […]

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Earlier this year I posted some excerpts from an Army study (once classified Secret) from the early sixties, “Operational Requirements for an Infantry Hand Weapon,” which was instrumental in the military’s decision to adopt the smaller caliber M-16 rifle. Other militaries did essentially the same study and came to the same conclusions, adopting reduced power […]

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Last week I looked at a study by a serving US Army officer, Maj. Thomas Erhart, about the need for longer range infantry weapons in Afghanistan. While looking at some of the supporting material I came across a fascinating study the Army conducted in 1960 (once classified secret) that led directly to the introduction of […]

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The range at which an enemy soldier can be engaged on the battlefield is a factor that has occupied both soldiers and pundits since the invention of firearms. In Civil War circles much of the recent controversy has centered around Paddy Griffith’s revisionist work Battle Tactics of the Civil War, in which he argued that […]

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Drew Wagenhoffer has a short review up of Earl Hess’s The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth. Although he calls it “the best single volume treatment of the subject so far,” he does raise some significant questions, including one I hadn’t thought of (showing, again, the value of distributed intelligence). There is […]

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