Preface 

February 2022 is the beginning of the 5th year of work on this Animated Battle Map that we fondly refer to as "the APP". Since the beginning it has been a two pronged effort, the first being the development of the tool to do the animation, and second, simultaneous with the first, the use and constant improvement of the features and function of that tool to create the animation of Gettysburg - Day 2. That took 2 years (Feb 2017- Feb 2020)! Then we moved on to create the animation of Gettysburg - Day 1.  That one took just 18 months (Feb 2020 - Oct 2021)!

The "Tool" can be used to animate any battle; and hopefully will find its way to other interested historian/animators to work on other Civil War battles.

The "APP" itself was conceived while standing in the Gettysburg Peach Orchard, listening to a Licensed Battlefield Guide tell the story while watching him gesture with his hands to distant points in all directions. I said to my associate, "There ought to be an APP for this."

Since that time I have stood on that very same spot, with friends and family, describing what I've come to know so well about the details of the 1863 fighting, gesturing East and West, but also showing my interested party exactly what I'm describing by using this APP.

I have read and re-read my copies of Harry Pfanz's 3 masterful works while simultaneously using the APP to "see" the movements that Mr. Pfanz is describing in his narrative. It has taken four plus years and over 240,000 placements of troop units, encompassing over 40-hours of clock time to get to this point.

The biggest thing I've come to know, that many people tried to explain to me at the beginning, is that the tens of thousands of pages of history about the battle are not 21st Century friendly to "the clock" or to "the map". The description of time frequently reads "around mid-day", "in the early morning", "not too long after dusk", etc.; while descriptions of locations read "just south of the orchard", "in the wheat field behind the fence", "south of the white farmhouse", etc. Such descriptions when used in a written narrative paint the picture, but are far less meaningful when attempting to construct a minute-by-minute accounting where positions become subject to the laws of time vs. distance.

The second biggest thing, again that many people tried to explain to me, is that seemingly no two narratives on any given aspect of the battle agree on all the details. Within the primary historical documents (i.e. Official Reports) the firsthand accounts of the same engagement frequently differ, logically depending on the perspective of the reporter. As such, the secondary reference sources over the ensuing 150+ years are highly interpretive, and thus also frequently not the same on many key points.

And thus, fairly early on in the creation of the actual animation, since the animated story can only have one story line or time line, much like a movie screenplay, it was decided that this animation would follow the details as described by a single author.  The primary source chosen was Mr. Pfanz's three books. Virtually every sentence in these books that referenced a position or movement was documented, computer logged, and subsequently incorporated into the animation.

In 2021, I discovered an additional work authored by James A. Woods, entitled "Gettysburg, July 2: The Ebb and Flow of Battle". The author told me that he worked on researching and creating the detailed maps for the book over a 35-year period!  While the work contains his interpretations of the mainstream narratives, most the same as Pfanz but some different, it also contains literally hundreds of descriptions of lesser recounted narratives of movement and conflict. Where Pfanz was silent on a particular subject, I eagerly used the narratives of Mr. Woods to fill out the scope of the animation within the APP.

On behalf of the entire development team, we hope you enjoy moving anywhere on the battlefield at any time of day, on July 1 and July 2, 1863.