The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (64 page)

he saw the morning of June 17 on the Charlestown peninsula gave him confidence.
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Whether Gage said his prayers in the morning is not known, but he did appeal for counsel from the trinity at hand -- Howe , Clinton, and Burgoyne. They gave him what often issues from military advisers and staffs -- conflicting advice -- with Clinton proposing a landing in the rear of the redoubt and the use of the navy to keep reinforcements from coming down the Neck. A second landing at the foot of the peninsula would allow the British to squeeze the Americans to death. Clinton's plan would have made effective use of the navy's control of the water, but it violated the convention which held that an army should not allow itself to be trapped between two enemy forces. Gage objected to Clinton's plan on this ground, and the others backed him. After further discussion they planned a landing on the southeastern corner, Moulton's Point near the hill of the same name, movement along the side washed by the Mystic River, and an assault from the rear. Although this plan showed intelligence, the decision to land at Moulton's Point did not. The tide was out and Gage had to wait until early afternoon to put Howe, who commanded the landing force, ashore. Landing at the Charlestown wharves might have been accomplished at any time and at small cost since they were lightly defended. By the time Howe's force stepped on Moulton's Point, the Americans had realized that their left flank was still vulnerable and had acted to defend it.
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Howe's force included ten companies of light infantry, ten of grenadiers, four regiments, and parts of a fifth -- about 1500 men in all. His reserve, around 700 rank and file from two regiments and two battalions of marines, was to remain at the battery until it was needed. Brigadier General Sir Robert Pigot served as Howe's second in command.
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The troops embarked on twenty-eight large barges around noon and were rowed in two lines to Moulton's Point. They made an awesome picture: sitting erect and motionless on the barges, their red coats raucous in the sunlight, muskets butt down with bayonets affixed, glittering and flashing as the sun blazed down. As the barges approached the land, the men-of-war intensified their bombardment, concentrating on the Neck to isolate the troops on Bunker and Breed's, seeking also to soften

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up the redoubt and finally to clear the landing area itself. The ships alone could fire eighty guns, and Gage had augmented their fire with several floating batteries and with additional guns on Copp's Hill. The smoke from all these guns drifted over the water accompanied by a nearly constant roar and flash.

Howe put his troops ashore at Moulton's Point about one o'clock. No one contested this landing, and the soldiers were quickly placed in the conventional formation for attack: three long lines. Just as they arranged themselves, Howe ordered them to fall out and rest while he brought over the remainder of his 1500 men and a part of his reserve. The breastwork which bad not been there when his plan of attack was approved now gave him pause and so did the movement of a column from Bunker Hill toward Breed's -- seemingly, he thought, reinforcements for the redoubt.

Had Howe known that Prescott was about to strengthen the American left flank even more, he might have struck at once. Prescott guessed correctly from Howe's choice of a landing site that the main attack would be against the American left. And the uncovered ground east of the breastwork worried him so much that he sent Captain Knowlton and about 200 men to defend it. Their defensive line was not an extension of the breastwork, but rather a rail fence 200 yards northeast of it and roughly parallel to it. Knowlton's men tore down another fence, rolled stones up against the first, and covered rails and stones with newly mown hay. This "work" appeared more formidable than it actually was. Shortly after Knowlton aligned his men behind the rail fence, the column of troops Howe had observed marched up and joined Knowlton's men. These reinforcements were the two New Hampshire regiments Ward had so reluctantly dispatched, led by Colonels John Stark and James Reed. Stark showed immediately that he had brought brains and initiative as well as troops, for not only did he place troops with Knowlton at the fence, but he also set up a breastwork of stones along the water's edge. There a beach ran along the Mystic, shielded from the fields above by a dropoff -- or bluff -- of around nine feet. Though narrow, this beach was wide enough to permit a column of four or five files to pass along it.
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So punctilious in observing the convention which forbade placing troops between two enemy forces, Howe nevertheless threw out the rules in attacking the redoubt.
The old casual feeling of superiority that

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puffed up imperial heads when they dealt with the "provincials" may have clouded his judgment. In any case, he ignored standard military doctrine which held that fortified positions should be attacked by columns, not by the extended lines he now chose to use in deploying his troops. An attack in columns permitted rapid movement and a concentrated assault by a mass of men. The theory was Wolfe's and had made its way into manuals of tactics. The intention was to deprive defenders within entrenchments of the advantage of picking off attackers-in-line before they could close for bayonet work. Wolfe had recommended that small parties of sharpshooters be placed between columns with orders to fire at the top of the parapet so as to divert the defenders' fire. The columns would rush the entrenchments quickly and overpower the defenders by sheer mass.
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On Howe's far right along the beach skirting the Mystic, he did use a column for the attack -- he had no choice -- placing eleven companies of light infantry in a column of fours. Above the beach, he had another twenty-six companies in two lines, the front rank composed of grenadiers. This force was to attack the rail fence; Howe joined the soldiers himself and braved American fire with them. He may have lacked skill and imagination; he did not lack courage.
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These thirty-seven companies composed the British right. Howe gave Pigot the left and thirty-eight companies, including three companies each of light infantry and grenadiers, the 38th, 43rd, and 47th Regiments, and the 1st Marines. These units on the left were deployed in three lines just as Howe's division was. All together the attacking British had 2200 rank and file, six field pieces, two light 12-pounders, and two howitzers.

Howe's plan called for a coordinated movement forward, with the main attack to be delivered from the British right by the light infantry on the beach and the grenadiers and supporting infantry above them against the rail fence. Pigot would move from the left, but his initial attack was apparently to be diversionary, occupying the attention and fire of the Americans in the redoubt. Once the light infantry and grenadiers broke through on the right, they would turn their attack inward away from the river. The breastwork and the redoubt lying isolated and exposed could then be taken by a flanking attack.

The plan ran into trouble because of its complexity and its need for timing and coordination.
The troops moved forward together, but the

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fences, high grass, kilns, swamp, and clay pits which broke the ground on the British right disordered the lines almost immediately. The need to slow the march while the artillery fired, then hooked up to be rolled forward, caused more confusion and disorder. The artillery soon proved almost useless as most of its ammunition turned out to be of the wrong size. On the left Pigot also ran against fences and high grass and, in addition, fire from Americans hiding in the buildings of Charlestown, 200 yards from the redoubt. A carcass, a shell carrying hot iron or combustible material, soon landed in Charlestown and the place began to burn, driving out the defenders. Still, Pigot had trouble gaining momentum.
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The light infantry, led by those from the 23rd Regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, met no obstructions from grass or fences, since the beach, though narrow, was smooth and flat. The Fusiliers advanced rapidly, bayonets at the ready, for they were not to fire but simply to Overrun the provincials by sheer drive and mass. Stark watched them come from behind the barrier of stones and kept his men silent. When the column of scarlet got to within fifty yards of his position, he ordered his troops to fire. At that range, fire into a dense column could not miss, and the front ranks of the Fusiliers disintegrated, pitched about by the heavy musket balls. They were brave men and bravely led; their officers urged them forward despite the massed fire from Stark's soldiers. "Our Light Infantry were served up in companies," a British officer commented a few days later, and were devoured by musket fire until ninety-six died on the beach where, as another sadly noted, they "lay as thick as sheep in a fold."
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Not even the highly disciplined Fusiliers could stand this slaughter for long, and in a minute or two they pulled back; some said they broke and ran.

Above them in the fields before the rail fence the grenadiers also fell in thick grotesque piles. They too were allowed to approach well within effective range before the Americans poured musket balls into them. The grenadiers had come forward with "laudable perseverance" in Howe's understated phrase, "but not with the greatest share of discipline, for as soon as the Order with which they set forward to the attack with bayonets was checked by a difficulty they met with in getting over some very high fences of strong railing, under a heavy fire, well kept up by the rebels, they began firing, and by crowding fell into disorder,

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and in this state the 2d line mixt with them." The sight of his troops entangled in fences, high grass, with one another, and chopped into a disordered crowd by the hot lead from the rail fence produced in Howe a "Moment that I never felt before," a moment of horror and -- though he did not admit to fright -- surely of fear that his command was about to be defeated and perhaps destroyed.
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Howe wrote later of the gallantry of his officers, who in this extremity rallied the troops for a second assault which, joined to another attempt led by Pigot on the left -- "a 2d onset" -- carried the redoubt and breastwork.
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His memory may have led him to compress two attacks into one in this account, for the evidence we have suggests that a second charge was made against the rail fence and the breastwork by the grenadiers and that Pigot led his troops on the British left up against the redoubt at the same time. Both failed, encountering, as a British officer reported, "an incessant stream of fire."
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Incessant but carefully concentrated, he might have added, because in the redoubt Prescott had hoarded his troops' fire as mindfully as the fabled miser hoarded gold. The shortage of powder and lead had concerned him from the start; his men had not been trained to fire by volleys -- many had not been trained to do anything -- but they could be made to conserve their ammunition until the enemy came close. Prescott saw to that.