The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [5]
The Americans had held. The enlisted men, especially, felt satisfaction in repulsing the first charge of the British up the slope with, as a spectator said with some pride, “a hot fire.”3 First Lieutenant Samuel Webb, fighting on Breed’s, wrote that “cannon and musket balls were flying about our ears like hail” but that the Americans did not flinch and that, in fact, “our men were in fine spirits.” Captain Samuel Ward, too, was proud of himself and his men, writing that he had been “where the bullets had flew several times without showing many marks of fear.”4
Robert Steele, a drummer boy, wrote after that assault that “the conflict was sharp, but the British soon retreated with a quicker step than they came up, leaving some of their killed and wounded in sight of us . . . came up again and a second battle ensued which was harder and longer than the first. [There] was great noise and confusion.”5
That was Howe’s second assault, that he ordered with newly arrived Sir Henry Clinton, another general, at his side. The general had underestimated the Americans but he was certain that a second charge would succeed. It did not. His second attack only resulted in more dead and wounded British soldiers. A third charge was ordered late in the afternoon.
The third thrust up the hill was similar to the first two, but this time the British, with the right ammunition, used cannon that helped to soften American defenses. Again, the British were raked with a loud volley of musket fire followed by more throaty cheers from the Americans despite cannonballs exploding around them. Again, the English went down like red-colored dominos. On this occasion, earlier faulty planning caused the Americans to run out of ammunition and they could not continue to defend the hill. The Americans did not run out of powder slowly, but abruptly, moving a British officer to write with surprise that the provincial’s fire “went out like an old candle.”6
The British, with no resistance from the Americans, climbed to within the shadows of the redoubt, earthworks, and fences. The English, angry, were now the ones screaming in triumph. Colonel Prescott decided to abandon the fort to save his men from what he knew would be a massacre. He wrote, “The enemy, being numerous, surrounded our little fort, began to mount our lines and enter the fort with their bayonets.”7
Out of gunpowder, the Americans fled amidst gritty hand to hand combat. Putnam unsuccessfully tried to direct them up to Bunker Hill, where others had waited. Then they also fled. Private Brown had stayed on Breed’s until the last moment, and then departed. He wrote later, “I jumped over the walls and ran for about half a mile where the balls flew like hailstones and cannons roared like thunder.”8
Those who viewed the action said the retreat was orderly and saw it as a great moral victory for the Americans, who had fought courageously all afternoon. The enlisted men firing away at the Redcoats that day believed that in killing 226 enemy soldiers and wounding another 828, nearly half the attacking troops, with far fewer losses of their own—140 dead, including Dr. Warren, whom the British contended was the head rabble-rouser in Massachusetts, and 301 wounded. They had showed both the country and the Crown that they were a resilient foe. “We . . . sustained the enemy’s attacks with great bravery and resolution,” wrote Amos Farnsworth, a corporal at Breed’s, “and after bearing for about two hours as severe and heavy a fire as perhaps ever was known . . . we were overpowered by numbers and obliged to leave the entrenchment.”9
And without enough gunpowder there was little more to be accomplished that terrible day. “Had our troops been furnished with a sufficient supply of ammunition, the