Fusiliers (8 page)
Light companies and grenadiers, or flank companies, the ‘flower of the army’, would be deployed as elite battalions, a strike force under the hand of Major General William Howe. They landed at about 2 p.m., which coincided with high tide, so the boats could clear the sand banks. Four regiments of the line (the 5th, 38th, 43rd and 52nd) had been ordered to support them.
There were only enough rowing boats to carry 1,100 men across at once, so two trips were needed before the two flank battalions and four regiments totalling about 1,550 men were assembled on the tip of the Charlestown peninsula, some 500 yards from the top of Breed’s Hill with its rebel earthworks. In addition to leading the flank battalions, Howe would have to take personal charge of the entire unfolding operation.
General Gage, commander-in-chief, did not intend to lead his troops on the field. This poor personal example was naturally followed by his staff, which gave rise to Captain Donkin of the 23rd’s absence, he having been appointed as Gage’s aide-de-camp.
Howe at least brought the reputation of a fighting soldier to the enterprise. He had commanded Wolfe’s light infantry, playing a key role in the capture of Quebec in 1759. He was a big man, over six feet tall and broad too, and projected a considerable presence. Howe had gone over to Charlestown with a definite plan of how to take the rebel position. The landing of his first wave complete, he began to study their lines at close quarters.
As he looked up, the town of Charlestown was on his left. The ground rose just over a hundred feet from the fenced gardens of that settlement to the crown of Breed’s Hill, where the main rebel redoubt stood. The gap between the houses and that fort was about 200 yards, and much encumbered with obstructions; too tight, Howe reasoned, for his battalions to manoeuvre. As for the main rebel work, shot lobbed at it during the course of the morning had done little damage. A similarly thick rampart – Howe called it a breastwork – with a ditch in front extended for about 80 yards to the right of this redoubt, covering what remained of the hilltop. To the right of this, below the hill and a couple of hundred yards further away from the British, ran another defence line, which extended about 300 yards from the side of Breed’s Hill down to the Mystic River. This area, on the right of the general’s view, was where Howe intended to win the battle.
The general’s instinct was good in one particular at least – the works on that side of the peninsula were far less formidable, allowing a chance to bypass the main defences. American commanders there had simply pulled down some pickets, piled them on to an existing rail fence and filled in the gaps with brushwood and clods of earth. As he stood making his final appraisal, though, Howe overestimated the strength of this rush job, thinking it cannon-proof. There were also some additional small works, called flèches (because they resembled arrowheads) that connected the enemy line at the rail fence with the position on top of the hill. Since these flèches were aligned perpendicular to the hilltop breastwork and the rail fence, troops manning them would be able to shoot right down the line of any regiments attacking the rail fence, or, in military parlance, enfilade them.
Whether or not Howe grasped the importance of this extra element of fortification (since it would have been largely hidden from him by Breeds Hill itself), he soon reckoned that the force he had brought over was insufficient to the task. The general might also have readily observed that there were two or three times as many Americans as British troops. So, with his first-wave troops standing impatiently in line, Howe sent a messenger by boat back across to the city to ask for reinforcements.
On top of the hill, the defenders watched these comings and goings with bemused nervousness. ‘When we saw our danger,’ wrote Peter Brown, a soldier in Prescott’s Massachusetts Regiment, ‘being against ships of the line, and all Boston fortified against us, the danger we were in made us think there was treachery and that we were brought there to be all slain.’ Brown’s commander, Colonel William Prescott, had placed his soldiers inside the main redoubt.
The colonel, a veteran of the Seven Years War and Indian campaigns, was noisily seconded by his nominal superior, Major General Joseph Warren. The Presbyterian minister fully intended to be at the hottest part of the action. Warren’s type of spirit was all very well, but something more thirst-quenching was needed too, as Private Brown noted: ‘We began to be almost beat out, being fatigued by our Labour, having no sleep the night before, very little to eat, no drink but rum.’
To their right (or the British left) were more Massachusetts regiments, others from Connecticut and, down on the rail fence, two strong regiments from New Hampshire. These were placed under Colonel John Stark, perhaps the most impressive leader on the lines that day, a one-time member of Rogers’ Rangers, the elite American battalion of the French and Indian Wars. Stark moved his men on to the peninsula shortly before Howe’s troops landed. As they approached Charlestown Neck, the thump and whoosh of British cannon balls increased in pitch. They claimed lives too, one shot cutting three men in half. ‘The veteran and gallant Stark harangued his regiment in a short but animated address,’ wrote one New Hampshire officer, adding that their colonel ordered them through the gauntlet of enemy fire, ‘directed them to give three cheers, and make a rapid movement to the rail fence’.
Once Howe’s reinforcements were in place – some additional flank companies as well as the 47th Regiment, field artillery and 1st Marine battalion – the general began his attack in earnest. There were more than 3,000 British troops in play. He had placed the 38th and 43rd centrally,
in front of the redoubt, under Brigadier Robert Pigot. The recently landed elements were put initially behind Pigot’s brigade, and formed a reserve of kinds, for it was still Howe’s intention to take the position by attacking the rail fence rather than frontal assault on the redoubt itself.
Howe ordered the light infantry to move up the beach, on the shore of the Mystic River, in a column. The grenadiers would move up next to them, forming line and attacking the rail fence frontally at the same time. Howe trusted that although the light infantry would only have a matter of feet to work in, they would break through the enemy at the waterside, and then ‘take them in the flank’. In expectation of a rebel collapse, the 5th and 52nd would be drawn up in line, moving up behind the grenadiers in order to exploit their success.
At about 3.30 p.m., the flank company men began to move forward. The soldiers who ought to have been Howe’s steadiest troops were skittish and nervous; the light infantry in particular knew an unpleasant truth – that they had run away during the fighting at Lexington and Concord. They and the grenadiers had been standing under arms for more than an hour, and wanted to get the business over with. The grenadiers did not wait for orders, but started off on their own initiative, some men crying out ‘Push on! Push on!’ As they got closer to the rail fence, they heard the odd crack and whine of a musket ball, but the rebels were under strict orders. Stark had placed himself near the flèches where ‘his men were directed to reserve their fires until they could see the enemy’s half gaiters’.
Tramping forward, the grenadiers ran into some fences. The battalion stalled momentarily as men clambered over or tried to kick their way through. When they got closer to the line of the Americans at the rail fence some of the grenadiers and light troops ‘began firing, and by crowding fell into disorder’. This was an obvious violation of the very sound tactical advice given by Humphrey Bland and others, for he directed that the enemy should be encouraged to give the first fire. In the moments that followed, pretty much every feature of his ideal attack was disregarded too.
The redcoats advanced a little further but when the New Hampshires let go their first crashing volley, it was terrible. One of Stark’s officers saw that his enemy ‘received a volley which mowed down the whole front ranks’. With the flank battalions staggered under this heavy fire, the 5th and 52nd advanced into the back of them, causing further confusion.
Rushing forward through the hail of musket balls to see what was wrong, Howe had an awful realisation. His favourite corps, the men sent along the beach, were actually falling back: ‘The Light Infantry … being repulsed there was
a moment that I never felt before
.’ The general’s plan had been foiled and he did not have another.
One disaster followed another, for the light troops, rallied by Mecan and their other officers, pulled up behind the grenadiers. Turned back towards the Americans, but confused by the smoke and fear all around them, the light infantry opened fire on the grenadiers to their front left. The officer commanding the grenadier battalion and many of his men were thus killed by British fire, as they struggled to organise themselves for a further attack to their front.
Bereft for the moment of any new directive, grenadier and light infantry officers had halted their men in confused huddles and were trying to lead them forward again. They came on in small clumps rather than the neat lines of the parade ground. There was an answer to this kind of ragged attack and the Americans soon realised it: ‘Our men were intent on cutting down every officer they could distinguish.’
Several failed attempts separated the brave soldiers from those who hung back. Captain Blakeney, commanding the 23rd’s grenadiers, was shot, as were both of his subalterns. Mecan somehow made it through unscathed, but both of his light company subalterns were also hit. Around two-thirds of the Welch Fusiliers engaged that day became casualties. Two serjeants, one drummer and eleven men were killed by the American fire, and thirty-six wounded by it. Only five of the grenadier company remained fit at the end.
The Americans meanwhile loaded and fired into the crowd in front of them. For those aiming down from the flèches, enfilading the British, pretty much any shot where the musket was levelled right had a good chance of finding a target, for if it went to the left or right of some fellow immediately to their front, it would travel another 200 yards, parallel with the rail fence, through the floundering mass of redcoats. Some of the British tended their stricken comrades, others gave vent to their fury, loading and firing for all they were worth. But this kind of shooting, in the midst of smoke and mayhem, had little effect. One New Hampshire man noted contemptuously, ‘The fire of the enemy was so badly directed, I should presume that forty-nine balls out of fifty passed from one to six feet over our heads.’
It took some time – perhaps half an hour - for Howe to conceive a
new plan and put it into effect. If his attempts to go around the works on top of Breeds Hill had failed, then he would have to force the strong-point itself. Two of his aides were shot down next to him, slowing the delivery of orders. But eventually word reached Brigadier Pigot. While an intense battle had been going on in front of the rail fence, Pigot had already move a little closer to Charlestown and the redoubt. He had been greeted by sniper-fire from the edge of the town that had killed, among others, Major Pitcairn, the marine officer who had commanded the light companies at Lexington. The British had, by way of response, pulled back and got their warships to fire carcass (incendiary shells) into the town, and it was soon burning fiercely.
On a hillside in Boston Major General John Burgoyne and numerous other sightseers were watching. The soldier-dramatist was alive to the awful grandeur of the unfolding scene, writing that the
prospect of the neighbouring hills, the steeples of Boston, and the masts of the ships as were unemployed in the harbour, all crowded with spectators, friends and foes, alike in anxious suspense, made background to the piece; and the whole together composed a representation of war that I think the imagination of Le Brun never reached.
Under the new orders Pigot was to skirt around the inferno of Charlestown and Howe would pull together the 5th and 52nd, extricating them from the confusion in front of the rail fence and attacking the hilltop from the right. Major General Henry Clinton, who had been watching events alongside Burgoyne, was so worried by what he could see that he made his way to the quayside and crossed by boat. There he put himself at the head of some further companies of men who had been sent across from Boston as reinforcements.
As the British threw new forces into the bloody struggle for a little hill that hardly any of them would have previously noticed, the Americans too brought new companies to bear. Although the troops earmarked to defend the peninsula may have numbered as many as 3,000 early that morning, many had decided they would rather be elsewhere, particularly once the British cannon had begun bombarding in earnest from around 11 a.m.
It was not simply a matter of desertion by startled individuals here and there. In some cases, the officers ordered entire companies to march off, across the neck towards the backcountry. Peter Brown, in the redoubt, watched in contempt as one artillery captain, possessing
the only American guns deployed on the hilltop, ‘took his pieces and returned home to Cambridge with much haste’. Brown wanted court martial and the death sentence for such a coward.
Worried by the hundreds of men streaming off the peninsula, American commanders called forward additional men from the outlying villages. Captain John Chester led his company of militia from Wetherfield, Connecticut, and marched his men on to the peninsula at the height of the battle. He saw frightened groups running in the opposite direction ‘retreating, seemingly without any excuse, and some said they had left the fort with leave of the officers’.
This produced fury in Chester, who prided himself on the steady discipline and smart appearance of his own volunteers wearing blue coats with red cuffs and lapels, unlike the great majority of Americans that day who simply came in working clothes. The captain was particularly angry when he saw groups of men marching away from battle under the leadership of their officers. Exasperated at trying to reason with one such hero, he wrote, ‘I halted my men and told him if he went on it should be at his peril. He still seemed regardless of me. I ordered my men to make ready. They immediately cocked, and declared that if I ordered they would fire.’ The threat of oblivion at last convinced the fleeing commander to do his duty.