Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (6 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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No American had any experience with European diplomatic affairs, and few were interested. Franklin, as the former and returning representative to London of Pennsylvania and a couple of other of the colonies, must have had some curiosity about these events, but his only recorded interest was in the distraction of France in Europe to facilitate its expulsion from North America. Pitt finally forced Newcastle from office in November 1756, and returned to government the following month as secretary of state for all external matters except the main powers of Europe, under the Duke of Devonshire as prime minister, who had no real support and was just a compromise caretaker acceptable to Newcastle, Pitt, and George II. Newcastle remained the principal influence on the government. Pitt was again dismissed in April 1757, because of his opposition to the continental policy, as he wanted a fight to the finish with France and not the temporizing he imputed to Newcastle, and he continued to accuse Newcastle of murdering Byng to cover his own pusillanimity (with some reason).
By this time, Frederick had prorupted into Bohemia (the Czechs), aiming to knock the Austrians out of the war. In May 1757, he laid siege to Prague, next to Vienna and Budapest and Venice the greatest city in Maria Theresas empire, but was defeated in June. Frederick was soon flung out of Bohemia and Silesia was largely recaptured by the Austrians.
With bad news pouring in, Pitt and Newcastle somewhat composed their differences, and formed a new ministry in June 1757. Newcastle was in charge of finances and Pitt of war policy. Cumberland was defeated in Hanover and forced to acquiesce in the withdrawal of Hanover from the war in October. Pitt managed to have this decision revisited at the end of the year (with a huge bribe to the native land of his monarchy, a practice he had always criticized), and Frederick scored two of the greatest victories of his career, at Rossbach against the French on November 5, 1757, and at Leuthen against the Austrians one month later. (This pushed the Austrians out of Silesia permanently, a bitter pill for Maria Theresa.)
In a long and almost unwaveringly unsuccessful military tradition, Pitt organized a series of amphibious “descents” on the French coast. The first of these was at Rochefort in September, and it failed, as did almost all such initiatives up to and including the Canadian landing at Dieppe in 1942 (Chapter 11). The brightest note, early in the war, was in India. Colonel Robert Clive, the deputy commander at Madras, had seized Calcutta, the principal city of Bengal, in early 1757, and made substantial advances from there. And Pitt created a militia, forerunner of the Home Guard, of 32,000, as a back-up force in case England were herself to see for the first time in 700 years the campfires of a real invader. One of the celebrated (but none too bellicose) recruits to this force would be the illustrious historian Edward Gibbon.
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By the end of 1757, Pitt had already energized the war effort.
As 1758 dawned, William Pitt was firmly in control of the British war strategy and was canvassing the ranks of British officers to get aggressive, intelligent commanders for the overseas operations, like the brilliant Clive in India. Frederick’s victories over the French and Austrians, and the return to war of Hanover, had pushed those powers back onto the defensive. In America, the colonies were stepping forward to their own defense more determined than ever to remove the threat to their existence posed by the French. If that goal could be attained, the future of the English-speaking world would depend on whether the war in America forged an unshakable solidarity of national victory between its two great components, or an American recognition that in the new circumstances, colonial subordinacy to Britain was a retardant, and not a spur, to the stirring and increasingly plausible ambitions of the New World. Without the French threat, America’s need for the overlordship of the British would be much less obvious.
William Pitt’s strategy was to tie down as many French as possible in Germany or as they waited for a chance to cross the Channel, which he was confident would not come, while pouring British resources into the Empire he was building. He grasped the importance of sea power and the huge advantage that accrued to Britain with a blue-water policy that put the British flag all around the world while the European powers squabbled and skirmished on their frontiers, as long as none of them became too over-powerful opposite the others. Partly to divert the French and partly, belatedly, to appease King George II, he dispatched the first British troops to the continent in many years, 9,000 regulars under the scion of Britain’s greatest general up to that time (with the possible exception of Cromwell), the Duke of Marlborough, to Hanover.
The Hanoverian commander, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, pushed the French out of Hanover, recaptured the port of Emden in March, and stirred considerable anxiety in France by crossing the Rhine, a bold move for a small state. The French eventually drove him out, but he fulfilled Pitt’s plan of distracting the French on their German frontier while he attacked them around the world. At the behest of an American slave-trader, Thomas Cumming, Pitt sent a force to clear the French out of Goree and Fort St. Louis, near the modern Dakar, and from the nearby mouth of the Gambia, in West Africa, and quickly took over a lucrative slave trade, shipping unfortunate natives to the mercies of the American plantation owners. Following a very modestly successful “descent” at Cherbourg, and the disastrous failure of his third “descent,” at St. Cast, a worse fiasco than Rochefort in 1757, Pitt concluded that the Caribbean would be a more rewarding disposition of these amphibious forces.
Pitt solidified relations with Frederick of Prussia with the Anglo-Prussian Convention of April 1758, and a 670,000-pound annual subsidy to Prussia, at least several thousand times as much in today’s dollars. Frederick demonstrated an astonishing bellicosity as he rushed around the borders of his kingdom battling the Austrians, French, Swedes, and Russians. He showed the advantages of interior lines and demonstrated the weakness of these primitive alliances, as for years there was no coordination at all between the enemies of Prussia. Had they determined to attack from four directions at the same time, Frederick, talented commander though he was, would have been overwhelmed.
Frederick began 1758 with an invasion of Moravia (now the eastern Czech Republic), but the Austrians repulsed him after several months, ending his last attempt to seize territory directly from Maria Theresa. While France fenced with the Hanoverians, Frederick turned against Russia, which had occupied East Prussia, around Königsberg. Frederick drew a bloody battle with the Russians at Zorndorf in August 1758, but the Russians withdrew. In September the Prussians failed to expel the Swedes from Prussia, though Frederick did deflect them from Berlin, which was their target. In October, Frederick was again bested by Maria Theresa’s army, though narrowly, in Saxony, but compelled her withdrawal from Saxony at the end of the year. Pitt’s European strategy worked well in 1758, as Prussia and Hanover were magnets to the powers of the French-led coalition, and absorbed the blows of all, leaving Pitt almost free to bulk up his overseas strategy.
6. THE WAR IN AMERICA, 1758
 
In America, Loudoun had a dismal start to the year, and was horrified at the unco-operativeness of the colonial assemblies, who, while resisting his heavy-handed tyranny, recognized the French threat sufficiently to group ever more closely together, naming commissioners to meet and agree on force levels. Loudoun wrote Pitt on February 14, 1758, announcing what he represented as virtually a usurpation in America of the powers of the Crown by the collaboration of the New England governors. He summoned the governors to meet with him at Hartford a few days after writing Pitt, and revealed his campaign plans for the year: the now customary menu for new attacks on Louisbourg and Fort Duquesne, on Fort Carillon on Lake Champlain (Ticonderoga), and on Fort Frontenac at the mouth of Lake Ontario, near the modern Kingston. These plans were then lengthily debated in the Massachusetts Assembly, to the assured knowledge of the French.
This was the state of disorder Loudoun’s bungling had created when the genius of Pitt revealed itself in letters delivered March 10 and obviously written before Loudoun’s complaints to him of near-insurrection in his letter of February 14. Pitt sacked Loudoun and replaced him with Major General James Abercromby, “to repair the Losses and Disappointments of the last inactive and unhappy Campaign,” and ordered that colonial officers would henceforth enjoy the same rank in the British forces, and the British government would undertake the cost of equipping the colonial forces to a serious standard, in furtherance of an “Irruption into Canada.”
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This was a series of giant leaps forward. The Massachusetts legislature, which had been balkily debating Loudoun’s request for 2,128 men for weeks (and had, in effect refused him), agreed by voice vote on March 11, 1758, to raise 7,000 men. Within a month, the colonies had voted to raise 23,000 men for Abercromby. Only Maryland, divided by other issues, temporarily failed to increase its militia. As the colonies had over 1.5 million people (counting about 150,000 slaves), these levies of forces could be considerably extended, and given the preeminence of the Royal Navy in the North Atlantic, France was not going to be able to maintain a military balance in America. The combination of Pitt’s enlightened policies and the French-Indian outrage at Fort William Henry the previous summer had stirred what amounted to national sentiment in the Thirteen Colonies. This would not subside, and was to endure and grow into a world-shaking historic force.
So also had American affection for Britain been stimulated. The problem with the colonists, which Braddock and Loudoun had not understood, was not that they were such slackers but that there was little unemployment or surplus labor in the colonies, because of the prosperity of agriculture and the requirements for growing trades in the towns to service a growing population settled ever more extensively. As a result, military service for minimal pay, as was the European norm, was not only an uncompetitive living financially but had been a long-term commitment to thankless servitude to overbearing and often corrupt British officers. At a stroke, Pitt had promised pay-levels equivalent to civilian work and the promotion of American officers, for a limited enlistment, in a holy crusade to crush the French and the Indians once and for all. It was an irresistible package to take advantage of the colonies’ demographic advantage over French Canada of more than 15 to one. It was inspired policy, but it also reflected Pitt’s complete lack of interest in administration. It was going to be expensive and was going to whet the autonomist appetites of the locals, but these were delayed reactions that would be dealt with after the immediate French threat had been excised.
The new British commander, Abercromby, was just an undistinguished conduit. Pitt brought in with him as army and navy chiefs of staff Field Marshal Lord Ligonier, and Admiral Lord Anson. Ligonier was 77 in 1757, and had served with distinction in heavy combat in every British war of the eighteenth century, starting with his close proximity to Marlborough in the last great battles against the armies of Louis XIV. He is generally reckoned the greatest British field commander between Marlborough and Wellington. Anson was one of the Royal Navy’s great reformers, after a distinguished career as a combat serving officer, and he and Ligonier worked very smoothly together. Pitt told Ligonier he wanted young, aggressive officers without political influence. He wanted men who would fight to make their careers and achieve position and renown, and who would be dependent on him, Pitt, and not constantly scheming and trading with prominent members of Parliament or the entourage of the royal family.
Ligonier selected accordingly for the four missions that had been the ambitions of succeeding British commanders since before the war officially began. Jeffery Amherst, a 40-year-old colonel and regimental commander, was promoted to “Major General in America” to command the expedition against Louisbourg, assisted by the 31-year-old Lieutenant Colonel James Wolfe. The attack on Fort Duquesne was to be conducted by a 50-year-old Scottish doctor, Brigadier John Forbes; Ticonderoga (Fort Carillon) and Fort Frontenac were to be taken by the 33-year-old acting brigadier, Viscount Howe (though Abercromby himself was the nominal commander). Pitt had strengthened the forces in accord with his plan: 14,000 men under Amherst in the attack on Louisbourg; 25,000 men for the attacks on Ticonderoga and Frontenac and the “Irruption into Canada”; and Forbes had 7,000 men for the attack on Fort Duquesne.
Counting the militia of every able-bodied male between the ages of 16 and 60 (except for the numerous priesthood), Montcalm had 25,000 men in total, though the real total at any time was less than that, or all secular civilian occupations would have been denuded. The Indians, traditionally a powerful French ally, had vanished, either from smallpox, detection of the shifting balance of power, or anger at the debacle following the fall of Fort William Henry. Montcalm thus reaped the worst of two harvests: the spirit of vengeance of both the outraged English and the, as they considered themselves, betrayed Indians. He was also suffering from acute shortages of food, due to a poor harvest, and a shortage of some munitions. Montcalm’s problems were further aggravated by the divisions of the civil administration, led by the governor, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, and the financial director, or
Intendant,
François Bigot, and particularly the corrupt practices of Bigot, who held that office from 1744 on and had embezzled an immense fortune.
Gravely compounding French disadvantages, Louis XV had lost interest in colonial matters and was particularly tired of the military costs of Canada, which did not return him much. The fur trade was no possible justification for such a vast effort, and the French had much less natural disposition for overseas adventure than Britain, a relatively poor island nation with seafaring conducted along its entire perimeter. Pitt was able to blockade the French Mediterranean fleet at Gibraltar, and many of the Atlantic ports, and Boscawen had raised appreciably his interdiction of arriving French ships in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. There were only two avenues for breaking into Canada and strangling the French presence up the St. Lawrence to Quebec, which required disposing of Louisbourg first, or from New York past Ticonderoga-Carillon and Lake Champlain toward Montreal. Pitt and Ligonier had prepared a heavy blow at each door.

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