Alan J. Pitts
Rhea's Battle of the Wilderness....
Mon Apr 9 10:41:12 2001


You are to applauded for your efforts to cover the service of the 5th Battalion. I have Rhea's book and was a bit disappointed in this passage. He repeats the description you already have and then takes us inside the Federal line of battle to show the amount of confusion caused by contact with a line of "skimishers". The three companies of this battalion might well have been deployed in skirmish order here for maximum effect. Rhea mentions Col. Stone's injury due to a fall from his horse in the confusion, his brigade comes to a halt and Wadsworth's Division abandons its advance a quarter miles short of the Orange Plank Road.

Nothing in the notes to indicate where he derived the tidbit about the 5th Battalion.

During a battle provost guards were occupied with the collection of prisoners of war. There would have been hundreds of captured Federals in their hands by the end of the day. An unanswered question: what happened to all of these prisoners when the 5th Battalion reverted to a combat role?