The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [4]
Wrote James Thacher, a local doctor who was an eyewitness, “[The British] immediately commenced a tremendous cannonade from their shipping, their floating batteries, and from all their fortifications. Bombs and shot were incessantly rolling among the provincials during the forenoon ’til the Royal Grenadiers and light infantry could be prepared to make their formidable attack.”1
Private Peter Brown, a company clerk in Prescott’s Massachusetts regiment, had fought at Concord. He watched the sea of Redcoats in their immaculate uniforms swarm off the barges and prepare for the attack. It was an awesome sight. Brown wrote that the British had so many men that they appeared ready to surround the provincials. “They advanced toward us in order to swallow us up. But they found a choky mouthful of us, though we could do nothing with our small arms as yet for distance and had but two cannon and nary a gunner. And they from Boston and from the ships a firing and throwing bombs, keeping us down ’til they got almost round us.”2
Howe ordered his men to march slowly in the direction of the newly dug breastworks on Breed’s Hill. He sent the Royal Welch Fusiliers on a trot across a beach near the rear of the hill, toward a low stone wall and wood fence below the breastworks that seemed lightly defended because there was no firing coming from it.
Howe and his officers did not realize that Colonel John Stark and others had instructed their men behind the wall to withhold their fire until the Redcoats were close enough to hit with some accuracy. They were also instructed to shoot the officers to cause confusion and prevent orders from being heard.
When the intimidating Fusiliers, four abreast, bayonets fixed, trotted within fifty yards of the wall, the Americans opened up. The sound of the volley—it seemed that every musket was fired at once—could be heard throughout Boston.
The fury and force of the gunfire stunned the British. Stark had been right. At that close distance the muskets were lethal. Officers were hit and went down. The first line of men, instead of continuing up the slope toward the Americans, halted and tried to exchange fire with their muskets; this caused the second line to walk right into them. They were all easy targets for the Americans. Some of the British soldiers pitched forward, dead, and the men next to them fell backwards, musket balls lodged in their heads and chests, blood spurting everywhere. Those behind and around them were hit and killed or wounded and went down. Screams filled the air. Howe’s vision of one single charge to drive the Americans off the hill and back to Charlestown evaporated in a roar of muskets, the air filled with the flames of the guns discharging and a rising cloud of smoke. Howe’s own trousers were splattered with the blood of his men.
On the southern side of the hill, a similar outcome occurred as the Americans unleashed a thunderous musket volley that cut into the British army approaching the earthworks and the redoubt, a wooden wall that protected them. The British were decimated. Their regulars were not only easy targets, but Howe had so many of them, 1,550, and they were positioned so close together that musket balls missing one soldier hit the man next to him or behind him.
The British were also advancing through grass that hid large rocks and deep holes. Soldiers tripped on the impediments and fell, sometimes bringing down those near them. Others tripped over their bodies as they tumbled. Their formations came apart in minutes and their legendary ability to maneuver on the battlefield was thwarted. As they tried to stand or help each other, they were hit with yet another volley of fire from the provincials behind