Here's to the Losers

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Here's to the Losers
The battle of Bunker Hill.

By Carol McCabe


	General William Howe commanded the British attack.

Standing at the base of the country's best-known and perhaps most revered battle monument, park ranger Matthew Walsh wades right into the hard facts. "First off, the Battle of Bunker Hill never took place on Bunker Hill," he tells his audience, a mix of vacationing American families, an English couple, several stylish young Japanese, and a tumult of pre-teens from a suburban Hebrew school. Although the 221-foot obelisk is indeed the Bunker Hill Monument, he explains, it stands on Breed's Hill, which is where the battle of Bunker Hill was fought.

"Okay?"

Okay, but the faces around him suggest it's puzzling nonetheless. The ranger directs their gaze toward the true Bunker Hill, which lies a half mile to the northwest, its streets untrodden by tourist feet.

So how did "the first pitched battle" of the American Revolution come to be fought here and not there? "We don't know why," the young ranger says. A simple mistake, perhaps. Some maps of the time misidentified Charlestown's hills. Although Bunker's Hill (its correct name) was higher than Breed's, Breed's was closer to the British troops besieged in Boston, therefore perhaps the better choice strategically.

The ranger is inclined to accept the theory that American Colonel William Prescott "came to fortify Bunker Hill in the middle of the night and picked this hill by mistake.... Then, after the battle, soldiers went home and said they'd fought at Bunker Hill. Everyone just became accustomed to calling it that."

But a second point of confusion must also be dealt with. The monument here does not commemorate an American victory. "We lost the Battle of Bunker Hill," Walsh says.

By we, he means the motley Grand American Army, which historians have described as no army at all. Writing in 1818, John Adams observed that it "was not a National Army, for there was no Nation: It was not an Army of united Colonies; for it could not be said in any sense that the Colonies were united, the center of their union, the Congress at Philadelphia, had not...acknowledged the Army at Cambridge. It was not a New England army, for New England had not associated.... Massachusetts had her Army, Connecticutt [sic] her Army, New Hampshire her Army, and Rhode Island her Army. These four Armies met at Cambridge and imprisoned the British Army in Boston. But who was the Sovereign of this united or rather congregated Army and who its commander in Chief? It had none."

Soldiers were undisciplined, disobedient, often intoxicated.

The army of each colony would take orders only from its own leaders. Soldiers were undisciplined, disobedient, often intoxicated. Still, after the encounters at Lexington and Concord, these ill-fitting pieces of a military machine held the land around Boston. The city itself was occupied by British Regulars commanded by General Thomas Gage.

On June 15, 1775, word reached the Americans that the British intended to occupy the Charlestown peninsula between the Charles and Mystic Rivers. Bunker's and Breed's Hills on the peninsula overlooked both Boston and its harbor and were considered critical vantage points. In order to beat the British to the high ground, Prescott and 1,200 men moved out from Cambridge on the night of June 16 to dig in at Bunker's Hill.

When dawn broke, the British were surprised to discover that Breed's Hill had been fortified overnight with a 160-by-30-foot earthen redoubt. Gage dispatched 2,300 troops under the command of Major General William Howe to take the hill.

The day opened with shelling by the British frigate Lively. "And about half after five in the morn, we not having above half the fort done, they began to fire," Peter Brown later wrote to his mother from safety in Cambridge, "...pretty briskly a few minutes, and then stopt, and then again to the number of about 20 or more.... We began to be almost beat out, being tired by our labour and having no sleep the night before, but little victuals, no drink but rum."

At about 3:00 p.m., the British having been delayed by a shortage of boats and an unfavorable tide, Brown wrote, "There was a matter of 40 barges full of Regulars coming over to us; it is supposed there were about 3,000 of them and about 700 of us left not deserted, besides 500 reinforcements...the enemy landed and fronted before us and formed themselves in an oblong square...and after they were well formed they advanced towards us, but they found a choaky [sic] mouthful of us."

"If you read the British letters and diaries, they expected to march up the hill and scare the Colonials away," the ranger tells his audience. The Regulars advanced with bayonets fixed; many of their muskets were not loaded. Using broad gestures to describe the scene of battle and the roughness of the 18th-century terrain, Walsh paints a verbal picture. Here come the British troops, wearing their bright red wool jackets and weighed down by heavy equipment as they march uphill over farm fields and low stone walls hidden in tall grass. As we watch, a red-clad ghost army advances closer and closer to the American line. The ranger praises the courage and discipline of those British soldiers as well as the coolness of the Americans.

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Carol McCabe is a New Englander whose mother, like Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, could and very often did recite Longfellow's version of Revere's ride from memory. A travel writer for numerous magazines, McCabe considers Boston one of this country's most civil, cultured and enjoyable cities.