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Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego: our first day

 Our first day in boot camp began at 0500 on 14Sep63. It had been a short night, but reveille sounded (via bugle) on the base at that hour.  Taps sounded at 2100 (9 p.m.). The uniform of the day prescribed for us green recruits consisted of the regulation utility cover (hat), yellow sweatshirt (with the Marine Corps emblem on the chest), web belt, green utility trousers, black socks, and tennis shoes. Someone must have marched us to chow. You never miss a meal in boot camp. I believe our new platoon went to the mess hall of 1st Battalion, Recruit Training Regiment, near Receiving Barracks. The other two battalion mess halls…

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Fifty years of the Marine Corps

 On September 20, 1963, a day which  lives in memory, I started boot camp.  I boarded a flight in Houston bound for Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego.  With me were Privates Danny L. Palermo and Kelso Bennett. Danny was a rodeo cowboy and Kelso a waiter.  I was a newspaper reporter.  We had all three enlisted, for some reason, in the Marine Corps Reserve.    Our enlistments obligated us to six months of active duty for training followed by five-and-a-half years of drills in a reserve unit, subject to mobilization by the President.  This was the peacetime Marine Corps.  President Kennedy crowned the chain of command. Vietnam was two…

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Internet history needs footnotes

 There’s a saying, never believe everything you read in the newspapers. That applies to the internet. Last week we spent in Seattle, so we ascended to the home of Will Henry Thompson, now a city landmark. The house sits at the top of Mount Baker Ridge.  The address is 3119 South Day Street.  The street lies in the southeastern part of the city. The house overlooks Lake Union from the third-floor observation tower on the front corner. A woman entered the house while we were there. The place seems occupied and in good repair. Trolling through Google, I came across a century-old picture of the house. The man who posted the…

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Legacy of a soldier poet

 The most lasting contribution of the poet Will Henry Thompson turns up in a popular phrase, the “slippery slope.” Logicians decry it, politicians warn against it, people set foot on it. The late great columnist William Safire, who for three decades until his death wrote the column “On Language” in The New York Times, found 2 million citations in Google to the term “slippery slope.” By now, the phrase has itself slid down from poetic imagery to cliché. Safire went hunting for the origin of the phrase in a 2006 column, “From the Slippery Slope to the Jaws of Defeat.” After quoting a few utterances as far back as 1894,…

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Did Will Henry Thompson fight at Gettysburg?

 Will Henry Thompson (March 10, 1848 – August 12, 1918) published his poem “The High Tide at Gettysburg” in 1888. But did he fight in the battle? I reprinted the poem because of Thompson’s reported service in the 4th Georgia Infantry. But I got it wrong. He and Crab and Judge never fought side by side.  Here is what I pieced together about the author. A web post I relied on claimed Thompson had served in the 4th Georgia and taken part in Pickett’s charge (http://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/4405). But the 4th Georgia did not fight in Pickett’s charge. They watched from the town. And the regimental history, published in 1903, does not…

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Gettysburg: a personal note

 The site where Doles’s Brigade swept the field at Gettysburg began my trek through the battlefields of my great-grandfather. None of the family – that I know of — had ever made the pilgrimage to his battlefields. His grandchildren talked about him all the time. Helen Pannill Ramsey presented all us great-grandchildren with a hand-colored photograph of Lt. William C. Cherry in his uniform. A box of letters he received while in the Union prison camp  rested in a large ornate bookcase in my grandparents’ home in Fort Worth on Lipscomb Street. I saved that box when the house was closed in 1973. I have been transcribing the letters, which…

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Under fire at Gettysburg

 The death of Crab’s fellow officer by cannonball you cannot forget. I have tried to find the officer’s name. Lt. Cherry does not say in his memoir. The official report of General Doles states that the 4th Georgia lost two officers on July 1.  Doles names one of the officers killed, Lt. Col. D. R. E. Winn. Colonel Winn commanded the regiment. His wife had a premonition of his death: “It was said that on the morning of 2 July the wife of Lt. Col. David R. E. Winn, commander of the 4th Georgia, entered her parlor in Americus, Georgia. To her horror she saw that the portrait of Colonel…

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II Corps, Army of Northern Virginia

The first day at Gettysburg

 At dawn on July 1, 1863, Doles’s Brigade, Army of Northern Virginia, began its march south towards Gettysburg. The brigade – a part of Rodes’s Division – consisted of four veteran Georgia infantry regiments.   The brigade mustered 1,403 men on June 30.  Crab wrote: We were idle but a short time after Gen’l Hooker retreated…

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A footnote to Chancellorsville

 This blog has so far covered none of the actions of the extended Pannill family during the Civil War except to note our relationship with the likes of General J. E. B. Stuart, Lee’s great cavalry commander and the son of Elizabeth Pannill Stuart. Many books take up Jeb Stuart, and it seems surplusage to add much about him. But one observation sticks in my memory. After the wounding of Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville, Jeb Stuart took over command of Jackson’s Second Corps as the senior general on the field. Stuart commanded the Second Corps throughout the remainder of the battle. On the morning of May 3, Stuart’s corps assaulted…

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In the first wave at Chancellorsville

 On the last day of April, 1863, the Union army opened its fourth major invasion of Virginia. In 1861, the Confederates had routed McDowell at First Manassas. In June and July 1862, Lee had clubbed McClellan’s army off the Peninsula before Richmond. In August 1862, Stonewall Jackson had chewed up Pope’s Army of Virginia from the rear at Second Manassas. In December 1862, Lee had decimated Burnside’s river crossing at Fredericksburg. Now another new commander, General Joseph Hooker, had taken over the Union army. Hooker had the greatest advantage in numbers of any Union general who faced Lee – 130,000 men to 60,000, more than twice the number. Half of…

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