CARNAGE AT THE CRATER

7/30/1864 - Hoping to end the stalemate of trench warfare in Virginia and break through the Confederate lines of Robert E. Lee to take the southern railhead of Petersburg, members of 31-year-old Lt. Colonel Henry Pleasants' 48th  Pennsylvania Infantry explode the mine they have spent weeks digging under a heavily fortified position known as Elliott's Salient ... with disastrous results.

General Robert E. Lee - Petersburg, 1864

Pleasants

Confederate Works Near Elliott's Salient

Mind inventively engaged when he hears one of his men exclaims, "We could blow that damned fort out of existence if we could run a mine shaft under it," Pleasants, the Buenos Aires, Argentina product of an American father and a Spanish mother who moves to the United States when he is 13- years-old and becomes a railroad and mining engineer, soon comes up with a plan that goes up the chain of command of the Union Army, and in turn is approved by division commander, Brigadier General Robert Porter, IX Corps commander, Major General Ambrose Burnsides, Army of the Potomac commander, Major General George G. Meade (the victor at Gettysburg), and overall commander of all Union forces, Lt. General Ulysses S. Grant..   Approved, but not at first actually believed ... most that know of the plan believe it can not be done (there are breathing issues in tunnels of 400 feet at the time) and is just a way of keeping the troops busy while the next offensive is planned.
 
Potter & Burnsides
 
Meade & Grant

Green lit but not believed, Pleasants puts his men to work around the clock on June 25th, making due with what is available, improvising the impossible into reality ... picks are created by the regimental blacksmiths, hardtack boxes are converted into wheelbarrows, a nearby wrecked sawmill and an old bridge are used for timber to shore up the gallery walls and roof of the tunnel, and a theodolite for measuring angles in the horizontal and vertical planes is procured all the way from Washington when Meade's engineers refuse to loan one to the operation.  Technical problems are also resolved, the biggest being ventilation, achieved by using a system of airtight canvas doorways, wooden ducts, and a continually burning fire that produces a chimney effect in which bad air is drawn out of the tunnel and replaced with fresh air from outside.  Foot by foot, burrowing through clay and sand, the volunteer soldiers familiar with mining for anthracite in Pennsylvania's Schuylkill County before the war began advance the tunnel ... 18,000 cubic feet of earth is moved to create a small gallery five feet high, four feet wide at its bottom and only two feet wide at its top that stretches 511 feet forward.  At its terminus, twenty feet below Elliott's Salient, creating a "T," perpendicular tunnels go 75 feet in either direction.  By 7/23, the digging portion of the operation is complete and then the mine is prepped for destruction ... 320 kegs of black powder, weighing 25 pounds each, 4 tons of explosives, are moved forward, linked, packed with dirt to direct their detonation upward (11 feet of dirt in the side galleries, 32 feet of earth in the main gallery), and when insulated wire and a galvanic battery can not be procured, armed using two 50 foot long lengths of mining fuse.  The big boom is ready to go by 7/28.

The Work

Placing The Gunpowder 

Tunnel complete, explosion and attack okayed to coordinate with other movements of the Union Army (Major General Hancock's II Corps movements remove four Confederate divisions from the area, leaving only 18,000 Southerners to defend the line, Major General Warren's V Corps is to support the breakthrough to its right, and Major General Ord is in support on the left, additionally, elements of Major General Sheridan's cavalry are to launch a secondary assault southwest of Petersburg, and the guns of Brigadier General Hunt, 144 field pieces, siege guns, and mortars, more artillery than was massed by either side at Gettysburg will pound the center of the Confederate lines), Burnside makes his final plans ... his most rested division, two all-Negro brigades under Brigadier General Edward Ferrero will get their baptism in fire by leading the attack, sweeping along each side of the breach, and then the rest of Burnside's three other divisions will follow, making a direct beeline for Petersburg itself.  out of sight of the Confederates, two miles behind the lines, for over a week Burnside's soldiers practice their assignments ... as the Fates laugh at the efforts.

Ferrero

In high spirits anticipating a successful attack and the vindication of his military career (from commanding the Army of the Potomac at the Battle of Fredericksburg), less than 24-hours before the assault is to begin, Burnside is stunned to receive orders from Meade, approved by Grant, that Ferrero's black troops are not to lead the charge and another division is to be selected ... a decision based on unstated racist worries on how the troops will perform, and the politics of how it will look if they are slaughtered at the front while white troops remain safe behind (Meade is not a favorite of his Abolitionist critics).  Angry, Burnside tries to get the order reversed, and is basically told to pound sand ... and pound it he does, leaving the decision of who should replace Ferrero to the drawing of straws by his other division commanders (a drawing that Brigadier General James H. Ledlie loses), and by not following through on any of the prep work that is still required so that his men can charge forward (openings in parapets and and abatis are not done, entrenching tools are not distributed, and engineers are not allocated to advance with the troops).

Ledlie

Explosion scheduled for 3:30 in the morning, at 3:15, Pleasants enters the tunnel and lights the fuse ... at 3:30 nothing happens though, at 3:45 there is still no boom as the colonel becomes more and more aggravated, as do the generals above him in the chain of command (watching, Grant considers calling the assault off completely ... and will later regret he didn't).  Finally, at 4:15, Peasants allows two volunteers, Sgt. Harry "Snapper" Reese and Lt. Jacob Douty to climb into the tunnel and investigate what is wrong (many believe the men should have both been awarded Medals of Honor).  Using a lamp to guide them, the men find the problem, the fuse has burnt out at a splice ... using a jackknife, Douty cuts out the bad fuse, provides ignition again from a match, and the two men scurry to safety 150 yards away, clearing the mine just moments before it erupts at 4:44.
 
Douty & Reese

As if an earthquake is beginning, the earth tremors for a second, and then erupts in a thunderous explosion that mushrooms into swirling columns of dirt, smoke, fire, stones, broken timbers and equipment, and blackened pieces of human beings.  No one has ever seen anything like it before, and to the men on both sides near the detonation, it seems as if it is the end of the world ... for the 278 Confederate soldiers of the 18th and 22nd South Carolina infantry and gunners stationed at Elliott's Salient, it is. Boom, the explosion creates a crater in the Virginia soil that is 170 feet long, 100 to 120 feet wide, and has walls 10 to 30 feet tall.  Briefly, in the chaos that ensues (Northern artillery has now opened fire on the Southern lines), the way forward to Petersburg is open ... the aggressive reaction of Confederate Brigadier General William Mahone, Major General Bushrod Johnson, and Lee's arrival at the site, coupled with mistakes and a lack of Northern leadership, however, soon insure that the breach is closed instead of being exploited.

Watching The Explosion
 
Mahone & Johnson

Uncertain of their changed role in the attack, confused by the chaos at their front, and lacking leadership (a known coward and drunk to the men of the Corps, Ledlie spends the battle in a bunker behind the Northern lines, swilling rum he has procured from a staff surgeon), the assault elements instead of fanning out around the crater, instead, thinking of it as a huge gun pit, enter the massive hole ... and are soon followed by more and more Union soldiers, transforming the hole into a fish barrel, in which they are the fish, three waves of Burnside fish.  Counterattacking just as Ferrero's leaderless black soldiers (he joins Ledlie in the bombproof, hitting the rum) now join the fray in a fourth wave of madness, the Southerners fire down into the crater (bayonets, knives, shovels, and hammers are also pitched down on the men milling below), where bodies compacted and exits not available, they don't even have to aim to achieve hits.  Carnage already immense (in some places on the battlefield, the Union dead are piled eight bodies deep), the butcher's bill is increased even more when the Confederates, incensed at the sneakiness of the early morning blast and involvement of black troops, gun down Northerners trying to surrender.  By 2:00 in the afternoon the battle is over and the Union has suffered another defeat (Grant will wire back to Washington D.C. that, "It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war.  Such an opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect to again have.").

Counterattack To The Crater's Rim

Carnage

Fish In A Barrel
 
For no real gain in real estate, creating a scar in the Virginia countryside that will never really heal, the Union suffers 3,798 casualties (504 killed, 1,881 wounded, and 1,413 missing or captured), while the South has casualties of 1,491 (361 killed, 727 wounded, and 403 missing or captured).  Court of Inquiry convened afterwards to assign official blame, Burnside, Ledlie, Ferrero, Medal of Honor holder (for valor during the First Battle of Bull Run), Brigadier General Orlando B. Willcox (commander of one of Burnside's divisions), and Medal of Honor holder (for valor during the Battle of Fredericksburg), Colonel Zenas R. Bliss are all censured for their behavior in the battle.  While after the war, the Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War will exonerate Burnside, and instead, condemn Meade for his change the plan of attack less than 24 hours before its execution.  Only Pleasants comes out of the battle untainted, for his idea and its execution, he is brevetted to Brigadier General of Volunteers by President Andrew Johnson, confirmed by Congress as of March 13, 1865.

After
 
Willcox & Bliss

7/30/1864 ... The Battle of the Crater

Then

Now

HOLLYWOOD HORROR

7/23/1982 - In the early morning darkness at the Indian Dunes of Santa Clarita, California, a popular 600 acre film park of hills, flat plains, dense woodlands, and creek and river beds near Los Angeles that features a 30-mile zone where photography can take place without any city lights being seen, and that can stand in for distant locations like Brazil, Afghanistan, Africa, Germany, Central America, France, Burma, and Vietnam, 31-year-old director John Landis calls for action ... and gets more than he bargained for, action that kills three actors, injures six people, sets off almost a decade of criminal and civil law suits, and changes the way Hollywood makes pictures.

Dukes Of Hazard Stunt - Indian Dunes

John Landis

Born into the Jewish family of Shirley Levine Magaziner and Marshall Landis on 8/3/1950 in Chicago, Illinois, Landis gets the movie bug after his parents relocate to Los Angeles, and in 1958, he sees the Ray Harryhausen classic, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, for the first time and hooked, the young boy decides he wants to become a director.  Beginning as a mailboy at 20th Century Fox, Landis moves from a studio "go-fer" through various other production jobs until he gets his big break while working on Kelly's Heroes in Europe, stepping in to the role of assistant director when the man assigned the job becomes too ill to continue and is sent home.  One step away from his goal of directing, he works on Sergio Leone's epic spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West, John Guillermin's El Condor, while also writing, acting, and doing stunts.  In 1973, at only 21, he gets the green light to film and act in the horror comedy he has also written, Schlock ... which is exactly what the film is. 

Schlock Movie Poster - And Yes,
Landis Is The Monster

Schlock a dud, Landis acts in Battle of the Planet of the Apes and Death Race 2000, before getting his next chance to direct, helming the anthology comedy film, The Kentucky Fried Movie in 1977 ... a modest success that gets Landis the recommendation to film a comedy about warring college fraternities for Universal Pictures, and when 1978's National Lampoon's Animal House hits (filmed for $2.8 million, the film gathers a gross of over $141 million on its first theatrical release) ... Landis hits too, becoming Hollywood's latest wonder kid.  Moving from success to success, Landis directs, writes, and acts in The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London, directs, produces, and writes a documentary about Universal's legendary movie monsters narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis called Coming Soon, and has yet another comedy hit when he directs Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places.  For his next project, Landis decides he wants to produce (along with Steven Spielberg) and direct an anthology movie based on one of his favorite TV shows when he was growing up (and also write the prologue and one of the tales) ... a big budget, Hollywood production of Twilight Zone: The Movie (it stars Vic Morrow, Scatman Crothers, Kathleen Quinlan, John Lithgow, Dan Aykroyd, Albert Brooks, features narration from Burgess Meredith, and has sections directed by Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller).

National Lampoon's Animal House

Three old Twilight Zone episodes told again and a fourth new tale, Landis takes on the new story, writing, producing, and directing a story of racism, changed identities and time travel he calls Time Out, starring 53-year-old Vic Morrow (a veteran of both TV and movies, his most famous role is on ABC-TV's 60s show, Combat, playing Sgt. Chip Saunders).  Moving from the present time, back to Nazi Germany, on to the rural American South of the 1950s, then into the Vietnam War, before returning to present times, the Bull Connor racist character played by Morrow is redeemed when he saves the lives of two Vietnamese children ... at least that was the plan.  Violating numerous labor laws for the state of California (ignored required permits, under the table payments, no special wavers for night work by children), and shrugging off warnings about the danger of the special effects he wants on screen, at around 2:30 on the Friday morning of 7/23/1982, it is time to film the big rescue (and mocking the Fates, that don't like to be mocked, Landis makes a joke about maybe losing the chopper he is flying in).  

Movie Poster

Morrow As Sgt. Saunders

Morrow escaping across a river with two Vietnamese children in tow (child actors, seven-year-old Myca Dinh Le and six-year-old Renee Shin-Yi Chen ... with the parents nearby on the set, and told not to tell any of the firefighters present that children are involved in the scene), mortar effects are set off with the helicopter filming the scene (a Bell UH1 Iroquois only 25 feet off the ground piloted by Vietnam veteran, Dorcey Wingo ... at trial, there will be testimony that Landis calls for it to go even lower right before the carnage takes place) overhead, but too close to the explosions and the blast of pyrotechnics causes the chopper's tail rotor to first fail, and then fall off ... and in falling, it's blades cut off the heads of Morrow and Le, and crush Chen to death (incredibly, Morrow is scripted to say, "I'll keep you safe, kids.  I promise.  Nothing will hurt you, I swear to God.")  Meanwhile, the damaged chopper spins out of control and crash lands on the bank of the river, injuring the six occupants aboard, including Landis.  Disaster ... and there are two many witnesses to cover up what has happened, and also, it is all on film.

A Bell UH1 Iroquois

Le (L) & Chen (R)
 
Seconds Before

Morning's Light

Three dead and six people injured in the "accident," the incident sets off almost ten years of criminal and civil actions that result in settlements out of court for the heirs of Morrow and the parents of Le and Chen, and Landis, Wingo, associate producer George Folsey, Jr., production manager Dan Allingham, and explosives expert Paul Stewart all being tried (it takes nine months) and somehow acquitted of manslaughter charges (District Attorney Lee D'Agostino, the losing prosecutor, will accuse Landis over believing he is above the law) ... just a big ooops for those involved and lets move on, the director makes more Hollywood bucks by directing another Eddie Murphy comedy in 1988, Coming to America as he puts the tragedy in his rear view mirror (the tragedy however ends his friendship with Steven Spielberg).
 
Call Out The Big Guns And Get Me Off

Charming

Culpable cleared, there is a silver lining though ... determined to tighten up the industry's safety standards, Warner Brothers Vic President, John Silva, convenes a committee to create safety standards for every aspect of filmmaking, and the committee includes every Hollywood union and guild.  The committee's codicils were then collected into a set of employee bulletins known as the Injury and Illness Prevention Program by which the industry would police itself (the standards are re-evaluated and updated every time there is an accident ... for instance, when stuntman Dar Robinson ruptured his spleen and died at a remote filming location of the Million Dollar Mystery, guidelines were changed to mandate on-set ambulances),with insurance companies giving blessings and okays before production and on sets each day of filming (the Screen Actors Guild will create a 24-hour hotline and safety team for its members).  And there are now risk managers on sets who can evaluate the risks in a scene, and stop them if they deem it necessary ... whether the director likes it or not.  As Steven Spielberg will relate while remembering the tragedy and his lost friendship with Landis, "No movie is worth dying for.  I think people are standing up much more now than ever before to producers and directors who ask too much.  If something isn't safe, it's the right and responsibility of every actor or crew member to yell, 'Cut!'"  Amen to that!

Spielberg