A Little History: Battle of Antietem - Sept. 17 1862

Found this while perusing the web. I'm home today, hoping to visit the L.A. County Fair, but it's already close to 90 degrees outside so I'm having second thoughts...

Anyways, as I said I found this short piece over at The Catholic Thing (...I wonder who thought that name up?)

This lead me to do a little more research on the topic of the article, so you'll see a few additional links below...

Remembering The Dead
One of the great privileges of living in Washington, D.C., is having ready access to many of the important places in American history. From Mount Vernon to Fort McHenry, our past is everywhere.

I was reminded of this near the end of the summer when I took what was supposed to be a fishing trip. It turned into a pilgrimage.

If someone asked you to name the bloodiest single day in American military history, you might guess D-Day, when the troops invaded the Normandy beaches in World War II, a desperate and brutal assault stunningly portrayed by Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan. Or perhaps you would think of Okinawa, the last island taken by the Marines on the way to Japan in World War II, a battle in which over 100,000 Japanese and 15,000 Americans died. That battle convinced the U.S. military that an invasion of Japan would likely result in a million U.S. deaths. Or maybe you think of World War I and the flower of Western civilization destroyed in seemingly endless trench warfare, engulfed in clouds of poisonous gas.

If you suspected that the bloodiest day was during the American Civil War, when Americans were dying on both sides, I’d bet you would guess the bloodiest battle was Gettysburg, which broke the back of the Confederate Army on Seminary Ridge and Little Roundtop.

But the truth is that Antietam was the worst of all. At Antietam, in one day, 3600 soldiers were killed and 17,000 were wounded. That is one person killed or wounded every two seconds for twelve straight hours.

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Additional Links:
Battle of Antietam
Burnside's Bridge
Father William Corby
D-Day, WWII
Battle of Okinawa, WWII