Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (5 page)

Perhaps the most infamous incident of this early terror war was the French-inspired raid, fomented by a fanatical Jesuit priest, that led to the Deerfield Massacre of February 1704. In this horrible action, fifty-three colonists were killed and more than a hundred taken captive and marched through the snow from their homes in Massachusetts to locations some hundreds of miles away in Canada. The raid and its aftermath were recounted in heartbreaking detail by a survivor, Pastor John Williams, ransomed after two years of captivity, in his tale
THE REDEEMED CAPTIVE RETURNING TO ZION
. This atrocity, and countless others like it, drove the rise of rangers. What Rogers was able to do, half a century later, was to elevate bush fighting to a completely new way of war.

Where rangers had come into being largely for defensive and deterrent purposes—to protect frontier settlements—Rogers saw their offensive and punitive possibilities. He envisioned companies of green-clad woodsmen reporting every enemy movement, raiding small outposts, even striking deep into French territory to chastise the Indians for the atrocities they had committed. Throughout the war he and his rangers did all these things, their most famous action being the retaliatory raid on the Abenaki village of St. Francis, depicted so vibrantly in Kenneth Roberts’s classic
NORTHWEST PASSAGE
. This attack required Rogers and his force of fewer than two hundred to infiltrate well over a hundred miles behind enemy lines, on foot and by canoe, then strike swiftly and make their way back. All this was done with French and Indian forces chasing them on the way to St. Francis—the rangers’ canoe cache having been discovered at an early point—and harassing them almost all the way back. This action alone highlights two of the most important elements of modern irregular warfare today: “long-range penetration” and the ability to “observe, orient, decide, and act” more quickly than one’s foes. Today this latter phenomenon is commonly called the “OODA loop” and is recognized as a key element in military effectiveness. Although it is generally associated with a twentieth-century fighter pilot, John Boyd, it may really have begun with Robert Rogers.

While British military leadership in this era has often been portrayed as hidebound and unwilling to innovate—Braddock being the iconic figure for this point of view—the truth is more complex. Braddock may only have stated the need for improvement with his dying breath, but other British soldiers had come to this conclusion earlier and had a far more complete grasp of the fundamentally irregular nature of warfare in the wilderness. The first senior officer to embrace bush fighting was a thirty-three-year-old general, George Augustus, Viscount Howe. British prime minister William Pitt had made him second-in-command of the force advancing on Fort Ticonderoga in 1758, under Major General George Abercromby, an older and much more traditional officer. Pitt teamed them because Howe “had all the vigor, youth, and dash that Abercromby lacked.”
9
Lord Howe was completely taken with the idea of an army replete with irregulars. He often went about in ranger garb, accompanying advanced patrols and joining in the thick of the fight. In one action, however, as his forces were reconnoitering in the vicinity of a small French detachment near Ticonderoga (Fort Carillon to the French), Lord Howe was shot dead in a confused firefight. Abercromby, his command no longer enlivened by Howe’s presence, soon led his army—which outnumbered the French by about four to one—in a disastrous frontal assault that cost nearly two thousand dead and wounded in a single day.

This marked the low point of the war for Rogers and his rangers. After all his efforts to forge truly elite units—which two centuries later would become the model for the formal establishment of U.S. special operations forces—the command establishment had insisted on using them as cannon fodder in a fruitless frontal assault against a strongly fortified position. And so, as the 1758 campaigning season came to a close, there were few hopeful signs that the war against the French could be won.

But it turned out that Lord Howe was not the only British general to appreciate the need to develop greater capacities for waging irregular warfare. Others began to call for rangers as the need to counter the terror raids on English frontier settlements soon grew critical. For the French strategy early in the war of complementing their mannered conventional operations with a relentless irregular campaign was soon ratcheted up. Indeed, one of Montcalm’s aides-de-camp, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville—better known to us today for his achievements as a scholar and explorer—went along with the raiders on one attack and was appalled by what he saw. As he put it in his
JOURNAL
shortly after the Indian raid he witnessed:

The ferocity and insolence of these black-souled barbarians makes one shudder. It is an abominable kind of war. The air one breathes is contagious of insensibility and hardness.
¹⁰

If even French officers responsible for conducting such a campaign were horrified by it, the British sense of urgency should come as no surprise. At the start of the war there had been but one company of rangers, a few hundred soldiers. By the next year there were seven. All were under the command of Robert Rogers, and all had gone through his “ranging school.” More were to come, as by war’s end there would be ten companies all told. Selected Redcoats too would study ranger tactics, the hope being that they would learn these new ways and take them back to their own regiments, spreading bush-fighting skills throughout the army. Thus the true genius of Rogers may have been made manifest in his role as educator and trainer.

Yet he must be given high marks also for seeing the many and diverse roles that his rangers could play in the field. Yes, they improved frontier defenses and deterred terror raids by paying French-aligned Indians back in kind with offense-minded punitive actions. And just as Native Americans acted as sensors for columns of French regulars moving through the wilderness, so too the rangers served as eyes and ears for the British and colonial conventional forces. But beyond these functions the rangers also began to undertake commando-style field operations in support of various campaigns.

They did this first in assisting amphibious operations in 1758 against Louisburg, a great island fortress and naval base that commanded the approaches to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In 1759 it was rangers who found the path up the cliffs and spearheaded the advance from the St. Lawrence River to the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec. As the final campaign against Montreal began to unfold in 1760, a three-pronged convergent assault, Rogers would use his fertile brain to find even more uses for his rangers—at one point employing them as “combat swimmers” in a lightning attack on five French warships that were blocking the British advance along the Richelieu River.

More than all this, the rangers would point the way to transforming the British army in North America. No longer would the Redcoats be subject to the sort of ambush that had destroyed Braddock’s force. No longer would they move so slowly, be so loud and visible. Instead of remaining in massed formation when under fire, they would come to respond to such new commands to take cover as “Tree all!” Soon Lord Howe’s successor, Jeffery Amherst, found himself in command of an army that would scarcely have been recognizable as British had the king come to inspect it. As Fred Anderson has described this startling transformation:

Since 1758 they had routinely cut the tails of their coats back almost to the waist; had trimmed the brims of their hats to within a couple of inches of the crown, and had worn them slouched, not cocked; had had their hair cut to a length of just an inch or two. At least one Highland regiment had given up their kilt in favor of breeches. Officers now seldom wore the gorgets and sashes that invited the attention of enemy marksmen; some had taken to wearing ordinary privates’ coats. A few had even begun to carry tomahawks.
¹¹

Amherst himself was a highly deliberate general, almost Roman-like in his insistence on fortifying every position to which his army had marched, and on hacking out one stretch of road after another through the wilderness. Yet, like Howe, he saw the great value in cultivating a capacity for irregular warfare. He agreed with the colonial governor of New York, Lord Loudoun, whose view was simply that “it is impossible for an army to act in this country without rangers.”
12
But this did not preclude rangers from acting without a regular army. And if Amherst’s major field operations were achingly slow-paced, he was nonetheless willing to give Rogers his head by setting him loose upon the French and their Indian allies. It was Amherst who ordered the ranger raid on the Abenaki Indian village of St. Francis, still one of the greatest acts of long-range penetration in the history of irregular warfare.

Traditionally, military campaigning came to a halt during winter. This was certainly true in the harsh North American climate in the eighteenth century, and generally holds true even today in wintry places like the mountains of Afghanistan. But throughout the French and Indian War, as the main British and colonial American forces hunkered down during the months of snow and ice, the rangers remained active. Rogers led them in a series of patrols, raids, and skirmishes that saw them turn up in the least likely places, at the most inopportune moments—for the enemy. Snowshoes, a technology borrowed from the Indians, gave the rangers mobility overland, allowing them to do reconnaissance, take prisoners, and strike at supply columns. As rivers commonly froze over during winter, the French used sled convoys on them to move needed goods and ammunition between their forts and outposts. While they could move swiftly in this fashion, the rangers were able to outpace them by using their ice skates. Soon nothing became more ominous for those running the convoys than to hear the sound of blades scraping the ice, looming nearer and nearer. Given that it was often too cold for firearms to work, these were grim fights with knife and tomahawk.

But the rangers didn’t have things entirely their own way. As the war dragged on, the French and their remaining Indian allies—the latter diminishing in number in the wake of the ranger raid on St. Francis, and as a sense of the impending British victory began to take hold—continued to mount patrols and raids of their own.
13
Rogers and his men found themselves, even at this late point in the war, engaging in some sharp fights and getting the worst of matters on more than one occasion. Returning to Crown Point with a dozen new ranger recruits the winter after the raid on St. Francis, Rogers was ambushed by a roving enemy war party that killed five and took four prisoners. Somehow he and a few others escaped.
14

This wasn’t the only time Rogers and his men had been in grave personal danger. From time to time throughout the war Rogers found himself cut off, pursued, or engaged in running fights on long retreats when patrols and raids went bad. In these situations his indomitability and endurance were the keys to survival for himself and his men. In this kind of war even a victorious action could quickly turn about. Coming back from the raid on St. Francis, for example, Rogers was pursued by large numbers of French and Indians for more than a hundred miles. Only his iron will and the fitness his drills and training had forged kept his hundred-odd rangers moving at a faster pace than the sizable groups of pursuers tracking them. That they eluded capture and were able to come back, albeit having lost about a third of the raiding force, is perhaps the most powerful evidence that Rogers had created truly elite troops, the first of such quality, purpose-built, that the world had seen.

Rogers, not yet thirty at the time of the St. Francis raid, had given birth to a type of military unit and enlivened a way of war that made possible huge improvements in British military practices. Even skeptics among the king’s officers came to see this, and the British soon multiplied the number of “light” and “flank” companies of their own infantry units, arming many of them with the accurate, longer-ranging rifles that were coming into use and which a few rangers had employed during the war. Yet what Rogers had achieved in the realm of irregular warfare not only helped win a continent for the British Empire; he had also forged an instrument that would soon imperil much of the Crown’s North American holdings in a full-throated revolution. The hard-pressed Redcoats, who would barely hold their own against an Indian uprising just after the fall of the French, would lose the war designed to maintain control over their American colonists—largely because of the colonials’ masterful irregular operations. As to Rogers himself, the great architect of wilderness warfare, in middle age he would choose to become the enemy of his own people and end his days in defeat, exile, and ignominy.

*

The fall of Montreal in 1760 to Jeffery Amherst’s converging columns—each of which Robert Rogers and his rangers had done so much to guide and empower—was a high point for the British. After that almost all the going proved to be downhill. Amherst, so patiently skillful in defeating the French, proved to be a colonial administrator of indifferent qualities. And in the immediate wake of the war the Native Americans quickly realized that without French backing their situation had worsened dramatically. Only broad unification of the tribes and concerted action would give them any chance of holding on to their homelands. At this point in 1763—the same year the Treaty of Paris concluded the Seven Years’ War—a broad insurgency erupted. Pontiac’s War was named after the visionary, semi-mystic Ottawa leader who sought to unite the tribes by helping spread the idea, first advanced by Delaware Indian prophets, that the Almighty had brought down grave troubles upon them because of their consumption of alcohol. Purification of the people, via the embrace of abstemiousness, was the only way to rekindle past successes. The example provided by such personal discipline, it was thought, would so impress the king of France that he would send his forces once again to fight alongside the Indians.