During The Battle of Cold Harbor, in only one day (June 3), approximately 6,000 Union soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured.
When the orders for a full-scale assault in the Battle of Cold Harbor began to filter through the army on June 2, many Union officers were gravely concerned. Neither Grant nor George Meade, his second-in-command, had personally observed the heavily fortified Confederate line. Furthermore, the orders did not specify a particular target of the attack and they did not appear to coordinate the efforts of the different parts of the army. Major General William F. “Baldy” Smith, commanding the 18th Corps, was “aghast at the reception of such an order, which proved the utter absence of any military plan.” Colonel Horace Porter remembered infantrymen attaching name tags to their uniforms for later identification if killed on the field—a precursor to the official G.I. dog tags introduced in World War I.
When the attack went forward at 4:30 a.m. on June 3, the soldiers “went down like rows of blocks” under crushing Confederate fire. The scene was chaotic and terrifying—successive lines mixing into pushing, shoving crowds as tens of thousands of men tried to stay alive in the open fields in front of the seething Southern breastworks. Grant suspended the offensive at noon, and would later claim to have “always regretted that the…assault was ever made.” The Confederates suffered about 1,500 casualties, losing one man to every four fallen Federals.
