"Knife on a Stick: The Rise and Fall of the Bayonet" Topic

"Three hundred and eighty five men of Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain's 20th Maine Regiment held the Union Army's left flank on July 2, 1863. Posted on a hill called Little Round Top they were repeatedly attacked by Confederates of the 15th and 47th Alabama. Ammunition was running short. The next Rebel assault might overrun the position. Chamberlain's order rang out, "Bayonets!" In a downhill charge depicted in the 1993 film Gettysburg, the Yankees routed the Rebels, capturing 400 prisoners. Probably the most famous bayonet charge of the war, it was one of the few that succeeded.

The origin of the bayonet lies 200 years earlier in France. Bayonne, in the Basque country, produced a hunting knife called a bayonette. According to legend, in 1647, German cavalry charged a regiment from Bayonne. The musketeers jammed their tapered knife handles into the muzzles of their weapons, making improvised pikes to fend off the attacking horsemen. Jean Martinet (died 1672) whose name became an epithet for harsh drillmasters, is credited with issuing bayonets throughout the French Army. By the 1660s most European armies carried "plug bayonets."

At Killiecrankie in 1689, a wild charge of Scottish highlanders fighting for James II routed a larger force of Royalists fighting for King William III because the Royalists delayed fixing their bayonets. The plug bayonet was a short-lived innovation; it had to be pounded out of the barrel to fire the weapon, and it is surprising so many survive in pristine condition in museums and arms collections…"

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