GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT

I think to truly understand the programmer's axiom, “garbage in, garbage out”, you have to go back before computers, back to 1933, when two British chemists, Reginald Gibson and Eric Fawcett, were trying to do two things at the same time - get rich inventing a substitute for rubber, and avoid blowing up their lab. See, natural rubber comes from Pará rubber trees grown in hot , humid places like Malaysia, Vietnam and Burma, which are also places that grow malaria infested mosquitoes, and which tended to be politically unstable. Lots of chemists were looking to make a molecule that would act like rubber but avoid the bugs and the angry locals. But it was dangerous and expensive work

Dangerous because Gibson and Fawcett were working with a hydrocarbon, meaning it contained combinations of carbon and hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen makes all hydrocarbons flammable, and this particular one, ethylene, or C2H4, and made from either alcohol or petroleum, is more flammable than most. But Gibson and Fawcett figured if they heated the ethylene in a pressure cooker, that would break the bonds binding the ethylene atoms together, and when they cooled they would recombine in a way that would imitate rubber. Most of the time, the experiments ended with an explosion, which is why it was expensive. But in 1933, somehow they avoided the boom and got, instead, what looked like a lump of coffee colored sugar. So they tried it again, and this time got nothing – no explosion and no “lump”. Now they were confused.. They wanted to try it a third time, but the Imperial Chemical Company, which employed them, decided it was too expensive, and even if it did work, it would never show a profit until long after the current executives had retired. So they told Gibson and Fawcett to move on.

Well, Fawcett figured he was being cheated out of a Nobel Prize, and in 1935, this ambitious, bitter chemist started telling anybody who would listen what he and Gibson had done. Two other ICC chemists, Michael Perrin and John Paton, decided to duplicate the experiment, and got the same lump. But in checking their data, Perin and Paton discovered their pressure cooker had leaked, which is what must have happened to Fawcett and Gibson. When they fixed the leak, Perrin and Paton got no “lump”. So, figuring the missing element was the oxygen in the air that had leaked in, they added a drop of almond oil, or benzaldehyde, which has seven carbon atoms, six hydrogen atoms and a single oxygen atom. They heated up the ethylene and benzalheyde in the pressure cooker and they got the “lump”. They could now make artificial rubber anytime they wanted. They called their artificial rubber polyethylene, or PE for short.

Now, PE is better than rubber because it is a thermoplastic polymer, meaning it is a chain of chemically stable molecules, each exactly like the others, like rubber, but when PE is re-heated under normal pressure, it can be easily injected or extruded into molds. The first idea ICC had was to use PE to insulate underwater telegraph cables. They had been using the sap drained from Gutta-percha trees, native to northern Australia and many of the same unpleasant places (for Englishmen) that rubber came from. Now they had a way to avoid those places. So they built a plant on Wallerscote Island in the middle of the Weaver River, just upstream from the Liverpool docks. They planned to produce 100 tons of PE a year. But on the day the Wallerstcote plant opened, September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, setting off World War Two.  And nobody could think of anything to do with PE to aide the war effort, so they did nothing with it.  Flash forward five years.

Britain won the Second World War, but they went $50 billion in debt doing it – the equivalent of $500 billion today. To repay that debt British corporations held industrial yard sales, including selling the formula for polyethylene (above) to the American company Dow Chemical. And this is where Harry Wasylyk comes into our story. He was born on the Canadian prairies of Manitoba to Ukrainian immigrants, and was just as ambitious as Eric Fawcettt. After the war Harry was living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and he knew the Winnipeg General Hospital was facing a big problem. Their admissions had increased by 50% in the previous ten years, and the post war baby boom was promising even bigger growth in the near future. What were they going to do with their swelling medical wastes?. It was an increasingly important question, and an old one.

It is an evolutionary artifact that before humans came down from the trees, our thinking was strictly “out of sight out of mind”. Thanks to gravity, anything we dropped, from our hands or our butts, magically disappeared. And we have often suffered from this elevated view. In 1887, when the Prefect of Paris tried to require all citizens to use “sanitary” metal garbage cans, libertarian landlords justified blocking the measure not because of the expense, but - so they said - because their “right” to throw garbage in the street was being infringed. The argument that living surrounded by garbage was unhealthy did not impress this early Tea Party logic. As John Ralston Saul pointed out in his 1993 book “Voltair's Bastards”, “The free market opposed sanitation. The rich opposed it...That is why it took a century to finish what could have been done in ten years” In short, public hygiene remained stubbornly “out of sight”.

Six years after Parisians had rejected metal garbage cans, the Boston Sanitary Commission reported, “The means resorted to by a large number of citizens to get rid of their garbage and avoid paying for its collection would be very amusing were it not such a menace to public health. Some burn it, while others wrap it up in paper and carry it on their way to work and drop it when unobserved, or throw it into vacant lots or into the river.” About the same time a visitor described New York City as a “nasal disaster, where some streets smell like bad eggs dissolved in ammonia.” City dumps were established to allow rag and bone men to simplify their jobs, and usually next to pig farms (below), as 75 pigs were able to dispose of a ton of garbage a day. None of this, of course, solved the problem of disease spreading flies, cockroaches, and mammals, all drawn to the aroma of rotting garbage produced by an average human household.

Only because of high insurance rates were the thousands of small smokey fires in the ubiquitous backyard trash incinerators, finally extinguished And as living space in cites shrank, so did room for compost kitchen waste. By the middle of the twentieth century, in most of the first world, trash and garbage were now lumped together and left at the curb to be removed by the modern day rag and bone men - now called garbage men. Anyone who thought about public health, like the directors of the Winnipeg General Hospital, expected the post World War II population boom would lead to an explosion of plagues, brought on by garbage spilling out on the streets.

And that was where Harry Wasylyk came in. In 1949, in his Winnipeg kitchen, Harry melted pellets of polyethylene. He chose PE because it was cheap, available in large quantities, easy to work with, water proof and air tight. He squeezed it between rollers into thin twin sheets, cut and sealed it into bags, and in a stroke produced the world's first plastic garbage bag. The directors of Winnipeg General saw it as the hygienic solution to their growing waste problem, and made garbage easy and safer to handle. The hospital eagerly signed a contract. By 1951 Henry Wasylyk had leased a warehouse, installed equipment, and was mass producing garbage bags for Winnipeg General, and a few other local industrial customers.

At about the same time, the Union Carbide PE plant in Montreal, Quebec, had a back log of pellets.

Larry Hanson, at the UC facility in Lindsay, Ontario, about 60 northwest of Toronto, was assigned to find something profitable to do with them. He quickly hit upon the same idea of making garbage bags, and they proved so popular with the janitorial staff, that management adopted the idea. Doing patent research Dow found out about Harry a thousand miles to the west, in far off Manitoba, and decided to buy his factory and his process. In the end, the patent for the plastic garbage bag is held jointly by two Canadians, Harry and Larry.

Every year humans produce 4 to 5 trillion polyethylene bags, mostly the flimsy supermarket shopping bags. And every year those discarded bags kill a billion seabirds, reptiles and sea mammals, making them one of the most deadly materials in the 4 billion year history of our planet. Less than 1% of 380 billion PE bags discarded each year in the United States are properly recycled. The obvious answer would be to ban the production of all PE bags. But, of course no problem is that simple

According to a 2011 study by the British Environmental Protection agency, the average cotton tote bag has a life span of 52 trips to and from the supermarket, and replaces less than 2% of the “fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity” of 350 PE bags. And PE bags themselves make up less than 1% of American landfills. What fills the landfills, is what's in the bags. Concern about the environmental impact of plastic garbage bags is a case of not being able to see the garbage for the garbage bags. They solved a problem, but not THE problem. As Beth Terry writes in her “My Plastic Free Life” web page ““The fact is, there is no magically perfect way to dispose of garbage since the whole concept of garbage itself is not Eco-friendly. The best option is to try and reduce the amount of waste we generate in the first place.”

Less garbage, fewer garbage bags. But the constant remains – garbage

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THE EMPEROR'S OLD CLOTHES

I know where this particular version of the Emperor's New Clothes begins - in a two story white stucco building outside of Montgomery, Alabama. I know when it began - in the wake of the combined tragedies of World War One and the Great Depression. And I know who its prophets were, men known for their ideological devotion as the “Bombing Mafia”. And I know when the denouement of this tale was reached, not in a child's harmless observation of an obvious truth, but between noon and three on the Thursday afternoon of 14 October, 1943, in a frozen bloodbath. It was the day some of the best brains in the United States military had a “come to Jesus moment” and were forced to face the results of their own hubris.

It was just after four in the morning when the lights were switched on in metal huts at 14 airfields across southern England, awakening any of the 2,900 young men who had been able to sleep. They had half an hour to wash up and dress before breakfast, and another hour to eat and then report for their briefings. It was in those chilly rooms they learned their assignment for this day, mission number 115, was to again attack the ball bearing plants in the southern German town of Schweinfurt.

In August of 1931 Austin Hall (above) on Maxwell Air Field, outside of Montgomery, was dedicated as home for the United States Army Air Corps Tactical School. Tasked with training the next generation of pilots and planners, and facing dwindling depression era budgets, the ACTS saw the salvation of their new service in technology. General Oscar Westover decreed, “Bombardment aviation has (the) defense fire power...(to) effectively accomplish...its assigned mission without support.” Thus was born the Air Force's “father, son and holy ghost”: bombers will always get through, a well trained crew can “drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet”, and pinpoint shock and awe bombing of the “industrial web” by itself would destroy an enemy's ability and will to resist. The temple where this faith was practiced was the Boeing B-17 bomber.

In the cold and damp the ten mechanics assigned to each bomber had been struggling through the night to prepare for the mission. All four 1,200 horse power Wright “Cyclone” turbo charged radial engines were serviced. The manual control services (there were no hydraulic assists) on each 74 foot long bomber were tested. The tanks in the 103 foot wings were filled with 100 octane aviation fuel. The armament team loaded and armed 3,880 pounds of bombs in the bomb bay, and loaded and checked the eleven .50 caliber machine guns that gave each “Flying Fortress” its nickname. Close to 55,000 pounds of weight now depressed the two rubber tires on the concrete. At about 7:30 that morning the flight crews arrived to bring the aluminum behemoth to life.

First introduced in 1936, the Boeing B-17 was the embodiment of General Westover's creed. The commander/pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit were backed up by the flight engineer, sitting directly behind them. He controlled the fuel mixture and monitored the performance of all four engines, as well as manning the twin .50 caliber machine guns in the electrically powered top turret. Below and behind him was the bomb bay. Forward and below the cockpit, crouched in the nose of the aircraft, worked the navigator and bombardier, who also manned a single .50 caliber machine gun each. Behind the bomb bay sat the radio operator, who also manned a single fifty caliber gun. Rear of the radio compartment was the new (in the “F” model B-17) electrical ball turret, which was lowered after take off. With his knees level with with his head, this gunner fired twin .50 caliber guns, as well as reporting on the bomb strikes. Behind him two waist gunners, each manned a single .50 caliber machine gun. And crouched on his knees, beneath the 19 foot high tail, was the rear gunner, firing twin 50. caliber machine guns.

The concept preached in the ACTS was that the a porcupine-like cone of fire around the bomber would destroy any attackers foolish enough to approach. But survival above 10,000 feet in the un-pressurized plane required a heavy electrically heated suit plugged into the plane's electrical system, thick insulated boots and gloves, an oxygen mask and hose tied to a heavy tank, a bulletproof vest, a steel combat helmet and goggles to keep the crewman's eyes from freezing in the ten degrees below zero air . All guns not in power turrets had to be manhandled against a 150 mile wind howling across the aircraft. It was quickly apparent that no one, burdened in such bulky gear, could track a heavy machine gun in three dimensional space, fast enough to accurately shoot at a single engine fighters closing with the bombers at up to 500 miles an hour. German fighter pilots were terrified by the heavy tracer rounds reaching out for their planes, and sometimes they were killed. But they attacked anyway, and they were horribly effective.

In the three missions just prior to Black Thursday, the U.S. Eighth Air Force had lost 90 B-17's to enemy action and accidents - 900 highly trained crew killed or captured in just three missions.   American production and population could quickly make good the losses. But survivors were already doubtful of living through the 25 combat missions of their tour of duty. And at 8:15, as the engines were started, there were few who did not dread what was coming. Four days earlier, the medical officer for one of the 17 groups taking part in mission 115 noted “moral is the lowest that has yet been observed.”

At 8:30 the 12 to 16 bombers in each squadron rolled forward, and followed the leader down their taxi ways. By nine each of the big bombers had powered its way into the sky, climbing to 7,000 feet, and then began flying six or seven loops, each 15 miles long by 5 miles wide, until a group of four squadrons (48 to 60 bombers in total ) would be staggered vertically and horizontally into a three dimensional combat box, 3,000 feet top to bottom, over a mile deep and half a mile wide and moving at 140 miles an hour. Each group then flew to an assembly point over southwest England, where the seven groups were formed into two wings. Then the complete formation the 350 bombers started the 25 minute climb to their operational altitude of 22,000 feet, while setting off for the Belgium coast. It was by then just about 11:15 in the morning.  And for most of this time the Americans had been clearly visible on radar screens in German occupied France.

The “experts” at ACTS had reduced the problem to numbers. At best a 600 pound bomb dug a crater 2 feet deep and nine feet wide, and was lethal out to 90 feet. And in prewar training each individual bomb, dropped from 23,000 feet at 160 miles an hour, had only about a 1% chance of landing within 100 feet of the aiming point. And that was without anybody shooting at the bombers. In essence, the United States Air Corp, using the most complex weapons system yet designed, was reduced to Napoleon's 300 year old strategy of maneuvering massed men to put the maximum metal in the general target area, and rely on the rule of averages to destroy the target. The prewar devotes at ACTS figured it would take at least 220 bombers to destroy any individual industrial target. .

Joining the bomber formation over southern England were the “Little Friends”, British Spitfires, and American massive P-47 Thunderbolts (above) and the twin engine twin tailed P-38 fighters. Technological advances now allowed the fighters to match the bombers for altitude, and more than double their speed. But these escorts could only reach the German border at Aachen, before they had to turn back. By then 26 bombers had already aborted the mission because of mechanical problems.  The remaining 250 B-17 bombers were now alone in the sky, surrounded by a swarm of 700 German fighters. It was about two in the afternoon.

Almost immediately, closing at 500 miles an hour, six waves of ME-109 (above) and FW 190 fighters swept toward the American bombers, firing rockets, and with their machine guns and 20 millimeter cannons blazing. After the last fighter wave hurtled through the lead formations, 37 Flying Forts had been shot down or forced to turn back for England. There are now fewer than 225 bombers to complete the mission..

The coordinated attacks continued for half an hour, coming at the bombers from all sides. Some multi-engine German aircraft even flew above the bomber stream, bombing the bombers. As the B-17's approached the target, the fighters pulled away and the ground based anti-aircraft guns around Schweinfurt began firing. Every black, blue and red puff and white star burst marked the center of thousands of shards of metal that sliced apart aluminum, ripping control and fuel lines and flesh. Between 2:40 and 2:57pm the bombers dropped their loads. As they pulled away, the fighters, which had landed, refueled and rearmed, returned.

It was now a vicious melee in the cold sky, as the German pilots, desperately defending their homes and families, formed up with any available formations to press their attacks. One surviving navigator recalled, “The fighters were unrelenting; it was simply murder.” The desperate situation for the bombers was made worse because fog in England had prevented the Little Friends from launching to protect the B-17's on their homeward leg. The mauling did not end until the bombers staggered over the English channel.

All five ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt had been damaged, and production was cut by 40%. Two hundred seventy-six civilians had been killed. In addition just under forty German fighters had been destroyed and another 20 damaged. However the factories were soon returned to full production, and dispersed across Germany to make them a less tempting target. And the cost to America had been staggering.

Only 33 bombers landed without damage. 77 B-17's were lost. Sixty had been shot down, one had ditched in the channel, and five had crash landed back in England. One hundred thirty-three planes were damaged, 12 so badly the had to be cannibalized to keep the others flying. Out of 290 crew members who had flown the mission, 59 had been killed and 65 survived to be taken prisoner. In addition a single P-47 fighter had been shot down.

The British Bomber Command called the second Schwienfurt raid “America’s Waterloo.” And General “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Eighth Air Force was forced to admit that his bombers had no clothes. For the rest of the war his  “war winning” bombers were reduced to being sacrificial lambs, used as bait to draw German fighters up to defend their homeland, where they could be destroyed by the long delayed long range P-51 Mustang fighters, which Arnold finally began shipping to England two months after Black Thursday.

Like the pre-World War One theory that French spirit could over come German machine guns, the pre-World War Two theory that battleships would always fight off airplanes, and that knights in shinny armor could never be defeated by commoners using bows and arrows,  the theory that bombers could win a war by themselves, was just another fantasy. And the American military continued insisting that the Emperor had new clothes that bombers could defeat intercontinental missiles  for at least another half a century.  

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CLIMBING MISSIONARY RIDGE

I think most Americans know about Picket's charge in July of 1863, when 15,000 rebels attacked across a mile of open ground outside of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. But few know that four months later 18,000 Midwestern farm boys in blue crossed half a mile of open ground to storm rifle pits filled with rebel veterans, and then clambered, grasping and panting, 500 feet up a 45 degree slope and threw themselves against even more rebel veterans and fifty cannon in what came to be called “The Miracle of Missionary Ridge”.

In late September of 1863, the 60,000 man federal Army of the Cumberland under General William Rosecrans, was ambushed along Chickamauga Creek in the the mountains of northern Georgia by a 65,000 man rebel army under General Braxton Bragg. The first day of the assault left Rosecrans, in Lincoln's estimation, “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head.”

But through the second day a single union corps under General George Thomas (above) stood like a rock against the rebel assaults, even as Rosecrans scampered 20 miles back to the union supply base at Chattanooga.

The city of Chattanooga (above), perched on the south bank of the Tennessee River, was then placed under siege by Bragg's army .The Appalachian mountains touched the river south west of town at the 2,400 foot tall Lookout Mountain (above - background), which Bragg's left wing occupied. That closed the union supply line to the south. 

The rebels also entrenched along the crest and the base of the two mile long Missionary Ridge (above), which loomed directly over the city.

And rebel artillery on three 400 foot high mounds north of the city - Alexander's Hill, Tunnel Hill and Billy Goat Hill (above) - closed the river to supply boats there as well. It looked like the Army of the Cumberland would be starved out. After the defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, this was the South's “last chance at independence.”

Two men in the north saw the truth that the Army of the Cumberland (above) was trapped only if it was willing to be. The first was President Lincoln, who insisted Bragg's army could only “eke out a short and feeble existence, as an animal sometimes may with a thorn in its vitals.” The other optimist was General George Thomas. As the federals staggered back into Chattanooga, “The Rock of Chicamauga” replaced Rosecrans. In addition, fifteen thousand federal reinforcements under General George Hooker were dispatched from the Army of the Potomac, and 20,000 more under General William “Uncle Billy” Sherman were on their way from Vicksburg. And commander of all troops west of the Appalachians, General Ulysses Grant was ordered to Chattanooga as well.

By the time Grant arrived, Thomas already devised a plan to relive the besieged city. Grant gave the go ahead and a narrow switchback road across Moccasin Point,  the Cracker Line, was opened to the north bank opposite Chattanooga, so basic supplies could be ferried into the city. And on 23 November, Hooker's corps pushed across the Tennessee and forced the Rebels back from Lookout Mountain. That opened the river to union supply and troop transports (above)  to come up from the south. 

Then on 24 November General Sherman threw his reinforced corps across the river above the city. That bold movement should have outflanked the entire rebel position. But Sherman became the goat after capturing and fortifying what he thought was Tunnel Hill at the northern end of Missionary Ridge, only to discover the next morning it was only an isolated mound, which is how it earned the name “Billy Goat Hill.” (above, center)

That night the moon rose cold and bright and clear and then darkened, as it fell into the shadow of the earth. Many of the soldiers on both sides, camping above and below Missionary Ridge (above), saw this total eclipse of the moon as a bad omen. The only question was, bad for which side?

The next morning, 25 November, the sun rose bright and clear, without a cloud in the sky. Sherman threw himself against the real end of Missionary Ridge, Tunnel Hill, with a vengeance. But the rebels under Clebourne had been reinforced over night. After a morning spent in a badly executed attack, the Union Left flack was about where it started. At 12:45 pm Sherman sent a desperate message, why were Thomas' men in the center were not attacking?  Thomas was unperturbed. He replied, “I am here, my right (Hooker) closing in from Lookout Mountain on Missionary Ridge.” But Grant had seen Sherman's message, and about 2:30 with nothing still happening, suggested “General Sherman seems to be having a hard time. It seems as if we ought to go help him.” He then ordered Thomas to send two of his divisions to “carry the rifle pits at the foot of Missionary Ridge, and when carried to reform his lines on the rifle pits with a view to carrying the ridge."

Grant saw the attack on Bragg's center as a diversion, to discourage Bragg from reinforcing the rebels in front of Sherman. But Thomas was not thinking of a diversion. He chose to wait. It was not until after 3 that afternoon when the sounds of Hooker's fight on the left flank of Missionary Ridge at the Rossville Gap were growing louder, that Thomas finally ordered all four of his divisions into woods in front of the rebel center, to attack..

Major James Connolly, the topographical engineer in General Hazen's division, noted, “The enemy could see us from the top of the ridge, and quickly...commenced to shelling us, as our long line of regiments filed along.” When his own regiment was ordered to halt and shift into line of battle, Connolly confessed he was staggered by the challenge in front of him. “We could never live for a moment in the 600 yards between the strip of woods in which we were formed and the line of rifle pits at the base of the of the mountain, exposed as we would be to the fire of the 40 cannons massed...five to eight hundred feet immediately above us.”

Nervously he rode down the line. “I found Woods division, formed on our right and facing the ridge just as we were. I rode on and came to Sheridan's Division, formed on Woods right and facing the same. Here was a line of veteran troops nearly two miles long, all facing Missionary Ridge...The purpose at once came plain to me” At about 3:30 six cannons fired in rapid succession behind Union lines. It is the agreed upon signal. “”Forward” rings out along the long line of men and forward they go...”

A rebel officer on the crest thought the union advance a “grand military spectacle.” Grant, watching from a small rise behind the attack described it as a “grand panorama”. General Sheridan, riding in front of his division, called the three deep ranks with glittering bayonets a “terrible sight.” As the rebel artillery opened up the word was given and the union soldiers broke into a run. 

The 9,000 rebels in the rifle pits (above)  got in one shot before the blue crowd overwhelmed them. The rebels threw up their arms or began scrambling up the slope in retreat. The union forces paused to catch their breath and reform. Five minutes after taking the rifle pits, it happened.

One historian described the beginning this way: “They came out of the trenches in knots and clusters, with ragged regimental lines trailing after the moving flags and a great to-do of officers waving swords and yelling.” 

At the top, in charge of 14,000 rebel soldiers, Georgian William Hardee immediately sent for reinforcements. 

Below him Union General Sheridan was waving his hat in one hand and his sword in the other, screaming, “Forward, boys, forward! We can go to the top! Give 'em hell! We can carry that line!” When he came to a narrow dirt road climbing the ridge in switchbacks, he followed it up, and his men followed him.

Some union troops found shallow ravines, which protected them from rebel fire as they climbed. A union officer remembered, “Each battalion assumed a triangular shape, the colors at the apex. ... a color-bearer dashes ahead of the line and falls. A comrade grasps the flag. ... He, too, falls. Then another picks it up ... waves it defiantly, and as if bearing a charmed life, he advances steadily towards the top “

Far below, Grant demanded to know who had ordered the attack up the ridge. Thomas said he had not, and after a moment Grant realized there was nothing to be done. He chewed on his cigar and mumbled, “Someone will suffer for it, if it turns out badly.” Grant expected a disaster, a slaughter of the advancing 18,000 federal troops when the rebel gunners on the ridge top began blasting grape shot into the faces of the clambering, out of breath union men slowly struggling up the 45 degree slope.

That did not happen for four reasons, three of which could not have been predicted or expected. First the rebels behind the breastworks could not fire down because in front of the federals were their own men, who were retreating from the trenches at the foot of the ridge. Secondly, even before the general advance, some union troops left the rifle pits they had just captured because they found shelter hugging the slope. The union brigade in the attack which suffered the highest casualty rate (22%) had been ordered back to the rifle pits,  where they were easy targets. In fact the veteran union soldiers knew the closer to the crest they got, the better the slope protected them. And thirdly, the rebel commander, General Braxton Bragg, was an unpleasant and argumentative man.

Many of Bragg's (above) own subordinates despised him, and nobody liked to make suggestions to him. Back in early October, when the positions along Missionary Ridge had been laid out, they had been placed along the top of the ridge, in military parlance the “actual crest”. But the “military crest” was a few yards forward of the actual crest. Bargg's topographical engineers had left his soldiers with a blind spot directly in front of them. Most of Bragg's veterans saw this at a glance, but in almost two months that the rebel army had occupied this position, nobody had felt it worth suffering  Braxton Bragg's surly insults and moral degradation to point it out..

The fourth reason for the “Miracle of Missionary Ridge” was that after being delayed by a swollen creek, George Hooker's corps had resumed its attack forward from Lookout Mountain, and was now bending back the rebel left flank. General Thomas could hear the success of that attack, which is why he finally released the assault on the rebel center. And from the top of Missionary Ridge, the rebel troops could not only hear it, they could see the smoke of battle on their flank coming closer and closer.

As the great historian Bruce Catton put it, the rebels' problem was they could see too much and not enough. The rebels on Missionary Ridge could see the union army in its many thousands, arrayed before them, and now clawing its way right at them. They could see and hear the approaching federal army outflanking them. But of their own army, they could only see the men immediately around them. Even 14,000 men, trying to cover a two mile long front, were stretched very thin, with seven to eight feet between each man. The rebel positions on Missionary Ridge, the very center of the rebel defense, suddenly felt very, very lonely.

As Sheridan's division approached the rebel lines 19 year old first Lieutenant Arthur MacArthur (above) grabbed the regimental flag from a decapitated bearer, and carried it over the crest, planting it firmly in the ground. One rebel wrote later, “The Yankees were cutting and slashing, and the cannoneers (sp) were running in every direction. I saw Day's brigade throw down their guns and break like quarter horses. Bragg was trying to rally them. I heard him say, "Here is your commander," and the soldiers hallooed back, "here is your mule." Confederate Sam Watson remembered how he “retreated down the hill under a shower of lead leaving many a noble son of the South dead and wounded on the ground...” Sheridan promoted McArthur to major on the spot,  and nominated him for the medal of honor. Arthur's son Douglas would follow his father into the army, reaching the rank of general and leading American troops across the Pacific in World War Two, and then in Korea.

On the crest, with the rebel army broken and retreating, union soldiers straddled enemy cannon and cheered themselves horse. Said one Army of the Cumberland veteran, “"The plain unvarnished facts of the storming of Mission Ridge are more like romance to me now than any I have ever read in Dumas, Scott or Cooper." And a witness from the War Department in Washington said, “No man who climbs the ascent by any of the roads that wind along its front (today) can believe that men were moved up its broken and crumbling face, unless it was his fortune to witness the deed."

When I saw the ridge fifty years ago that was still true. And it is still true, even today.

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