Hey everyone, thanks for downloading episode 47 of our Civil War podcast. My name is Rich.

And I'm Tracy. Hello y'all. Welcome to the podcast. After last week's show, listener

Jeremiah T messaged us on Facebook and said, in your episode next week, concluding the

discussion of infantry, could you please talk about bayonets? How often they were used?

Did it come to hand-to-hand much, etc? I've read conflicting reports and I was curious

if there's any hard evidence. Thanks so much for considering this suggestion.

Well thank you for getting in touch with us, Jeremiah. And we probably should have

mentioned bayonets last week when we were talking about rifle muskets, but to be honest,

neither Tracy nor I even thought of it then, but we're happy to make up for that oversight

now. Well, the short answer is that bayonets seem to have been used fairly often as far

as the soldiers actually affixing them to their muskets, but it's for how often they were

actually used in close combat to stab an enemy soldier. Well, that appears to have been

relatively rare occurrence during the Civil War. That's not to say it didn't happen,

it just doesn't seem to have happened very often.

The figure you most often hear connected with this subject is that 1% of the casualties

during the Civil War were caused by bayonets, but we think even that small percentage may

be too generous since it seems to include both bayonets and swords. Admittedly, we didn't

have time this past week to do exhaustive research on this, but we did find that in the

medical records of the official records of the 246,712 cases of wounds reported in the

Union armies, only some 400 wounds are reported to have been caused by bayonets. So even if

you double that figure to account for battlefield deaths, and for those with wounds that were

unreported, and then add on a few more for good measure and to round it out to an even

...