Travel Battle Miniatures

    I checked on the Perry Miniatures website. They have released the different plastic components from Travel Battle for individual sale. The figures are molded in grey instead of either blue or red. The stands for the figures are sold separately; just something to keep in mind if you are going to order them. They have also released the boards and houses for sale separately. I am thinking of ordering some for use with other wargame rules. Using Battle Cry units, an infantry unit would consist of 40 infantrymen, and a cavalry unit 9 figures. I think that could look quite impressive on a small wargame board.

The Antietam Battlefield and a Sad Farewell

    My wife and I were invited down to Maryland for our grand nephew's graduation from High School. His mother passed away a little over a year ago. My wife and her niece were very close, so we took the week off to go. Besides his graduation, his father retired from the Aberdeen Police Department after 26 years service.  As his son plans to join the Air Force, Larry has decided to move back to Mississippi to be close to his family. In the years we visited them, I came to love the area. And while there I would visit a bookstore in Havre De Grace that was mainly a history with a very large military history section.  When I went to visit it this time, the store was no longer there. The building was completely empty, not even any bookcases. At that point the finality of my time visiting Maryland hit me.

    I did tell my wife that one day I was going to visit the Antietam battlefield. When we did go, besides Donna, Larry, his son, and another grand nephew came along.  When we arrived, the first thing that struck me is the undulating ground of the entire battlefield. It makes it quite easy to realize why the battle tended to have units blundering into each other. Also, it is easy to see that commanding an army on this ground would be extremely difficult to control. Of course, the fact of how far McClellan's HQ was from the field itself wouldn't help the matter.

The Dunker Church. This is a replacement; the original blew down during a storm in 1921.

The line where 1st Corps lined up on at the start of the battle.

"The Cornfield" from where the Union troops would have entered it from.

The Pennsylvania monument in the West Woods. Larry stands at the base of it.

The ground the 2nd Corps crossed when approaching "the Sunken Road". Between the two trees can be seen a black line. That is the fence line delineating  the Sunken Road.

The Sunken Road. The photo doesn't do justice to what a great defense line this was.  The road  is about five feet deep.  The left side of the road is the direction the Union troops came in from.

The Burnside Bridge, from the Confederates vantage point.

Donna stands at the end of the bridge. You can see the ridge line the Confederates  fired from in the background. The bridge is wide enough for 4 men to cross abreast.

Unfortunately I forgot to bring my good camera and had to use my cellphone to take the pictures.

Larry is a big history buff, and I got to play tour guide filling him in with "interesting information". He seemed to be totally engrossed in the entire story of Antietam; unfortunately everyone else lost interest once they realized they were going to be looking at pretty landscape, and not seeing a reenactment.They spent the time playing on their cellphones!