The Making Of The British Army (22 page)

The British advance in three columns was by no means inflexible, for each regiment now had a light company (thanks in no small part to Wolfe’s experiments twenty years before). These were hand-picked men, chosen for their fieldcraft and intelligence, and though their equipment was weighty enough (they carried the same musket, the ‘Brown Bess’, as the other companies) their role was one of scouting and skirmishing, and they were trained to fight in open (loose) order, as well as in close. For the attack that morning the light companies had been mustered as a single battalion, and with the 24th Foot they formed a brigade under Brigadier-General Simon Fraser, their object to turn the American left flank. Mist delayed the advance for several hours, but in the early afternoon the leading troops of Fraser’s brigade emerged from the woods into the fields of Freeman’s farm. Here they met with spectacularly accurate rifle fire from Arnold’s Virginians. Every officer was hit, and the rest fled back into the forest.

The Americans followed up over-hastily, however, running on to the steady bayonets of the grenadier companies which had been mustered as a battalion under Fraser’s fellow Scots brigadier, James Hamilton. In turn, they fled for the trees south of the farm.

There was now a ‘race for the ground’ – the fields and buildings of Freeman’s farm – with Burgoyne trying to get both Fraser’s and Hamilton’s brigades forward, while Arnold tried to steady his nervous militia by getting the regulars on the heights behind to extend their line towards the farm.

Fraser’s brigade tried again to move round the American left flank, but once more the accurate rifle fire of the Virginia sharpshooters drove them back, this time with even heavier loss. Again the Americans counter-charged, Arnold himself leading, and again they were repulsed.
But despite repeated requests from Arnold, Gates would not reinforce the left, in the end becoming so frustrated with his pugnacious subordinate that he put him under arrest.

Meanwhile in the centre the Brunswickers under Major-General Friedrich Riedesel had managed to forge their way through a ravine which the Americans had thought impassable, and with their support Burgoyne was at last able to take the farm and its surrounding land. But to do so had cost him 600 dead and wounded, a tenth of his force, and still he had been unable to make any impression on the main American defences. On the other hand the Americans had suffered about half that figure – and more militiamen were arriving by the hour. Burgoyne therefore decided to dig in at the farm, leaving Gates to consolidate his position on the heights.

Burgoyne now had to take a long, hard look at his situation, for supplies were getting desperately low again. A letter from Major-General Henry Clinton, commanding the remaining troops in New York City, promised reinforcements by the end of the month, and so, in spite of the worsening odds, Burgoyne decided to hang on. In the event Clinton did not set out until 3 October and turned back after meeting strong resistance in the Catskills, but by then Burgoyne had realized he would either have to withdraw or assault unreinforced. On 7 October he attacked with 2,000 men – a third of his remaining strength – while the Americans, further reinforced in the three weeks since the first battle, had placed their best troops – 4,000 provincial regulars, with 1,200 militia in support – on the left flank, where they expected the main attack.

Burgoyne’s plan of attack, at least in theory, was sound: what it lacked was the troop numbers to prevail. Brigadier-General Simon Fraser, with the light infantry, some rangers, Canadian militia and the remaining Indians (around 700 men) were to make a wide right hook to secure positions for the artillery. Major-General Riedesel’s 1,100 Brunswickers, with support from Fraser’s artillery, would then make the main attack on the American centre. Meanwhile, Major-General William Phillips, a veteran artilleryman and Minden hero, would lead just 400 men of the grenadier battalion, with the lighter artillery, against the American right to try to prevent their reinforcing the extended left flank.

Burgoyne knew the odds were heavily against him, and he timed the attack for early afternoon so that he could use the cover of darkness to
withdraw if necessary. Even so, things began badly. On the left, Phillips’ men were thrown back with heavy casualties, the general himself taken prisoner along with the grenadiers’ commanding officer. On the right, the Americans – the Virginia riflemen to the fore again – stopped Fraser’s brigade moving west by deadly marksmanship and aggressive counter-attacks.

And now came a gift to the revolutionary cause, and in time to Hollywood film-makers. Chafing at his confinement in Gates’s headquarters, Benedict Arnold suddenly rushed from his tent, leaped astride a horse and galloped towards the firing on the far left of the American line. Once there it did not take him long to sum up the situation: despite the British losses, Fraser was rallying his troops with astonishing nerve. Turning to Daniel Morgan, the roughneck colonel of the 11th Virginia, Arnold said, ‘That man on the grey horse is a host in himself and must be disposed of.’

Morgan, who had never forgotten the flogging he had received while serving under Burgoyne as a teamster in the Seven Years War, detailed his best marksman, Timothy Murphy of Schoharie County, New York, to bring down the brigadier. Forty years on, at Waterloo, an artillery officer asked the duke of Wellington’s permission to open fire on Napoleon, whom he had just spotted on the ridge opposite. The duke flatly refused: ‘It is not the business of a commander-in-chief to fire on another,’ he said stiffly. Neither Arnold nor Fraser was as elevated in rank as the duke, but the affair revealed the nature of war with irregular troops, and would show many a British officer what the ruthless pursuit of victory required. Murphy loaded his long double- barrelled rifle, climbed a tree, and at a range of 300 yards fired one round. Fraser fell mortally wounded. The attack at once began to stall, and soon afterwards the light battalion and Canadian militia were streaming to the rear.
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In the centre, however, Riedesel’s Brunswickers were making surprising progress, over-running several strongpoints. Arnold now galloped back to the centre of the heights and managed (not without difficulty) to persuade the shaken American regulars and militia to counterattack. Leading the charge in person, he was struck by a musket ball in the leg, which was then broken when his horse fell on him. But
his counter-attack drove Riedesel’s men back down the hill to their original starting line, and after an hour of heavy fighting all Burgoyne’s men were either casualties or back where they had begun.

Nightfall was their saving, as Burgoyne had foreseen it might have to be, but only for the moment. Over the next two days they tried to get back to Fort Ticonderoga, but Gates’s men moved rapidly to block their escape. Finally the survivors rallied at Saratoga, 40 miles south of the fort, surrounded, hopelessly outnumbered and in no condition to fight. Burgoyne began to parley, and on 17 October 5,791 men grounded arms, more than a third of them unfit for duty. It was not, strictly speaking, an unconditional surrender, but it might as well have been, for the consequences would be the same.

The same and immediate. American confidence at once surged. From here on, although there would be many ups and downs, the Congress could hold out for the supreme goal of complete national independence, knowing that their troops could deliver victory and that the colonists from whom the militias and regulars were raised knew it too. Conversely, loyalist support, which in any case was always over-estimated in London, began leaching away. Critically, across the Atlantic the French were quick to reach the same conclusion, and not three months later they signed a treaty of mutual assistance with the Congress.

Britain was now at war with its old and reinvigorated adversary, and without allies to pin down French troops on the Continent. Indeed, Spain and even Holland threw their lot in with the Franco-American alliance. The outcome was now almost inevitable. Britain was soon no longer master of the oceans, nor, critically, of American coastal waters. British troops could no longer be switched easily from one place to another – from Canada to Boston, from New York to Chesapeake Bay, from Philadelphia to the Carolinas, or to any number of vulnerable points – because the Royal Navy, neglected almost as much after the Peace of Paris as the army had been, found itself drawn south into the Caribbean to protect Britain’s sugar islands, the major engines of wealth.

Four years after Saratoga almost to the day, on 19 October 1781 at Yorktown, Virginia, Major-General the Lord Cornwallis surrendered another army, this time to General George Washington in person. Cornwallis was outnumbered three to one (almost half the opposing troops were French), and reinforcements could not get through from
New York because the French navy controlled Hampton Roads. And although bitter skirmishing would continue for another eighteen months, after Yorktown the war was truly lost. In September 1783 Britain recognized the reality and sought to mitigate wider damage by conceding independence to the Congress and negotiating a peace with France and her allies.

The consequences of the American war for the army were profound. Never again would Britannia
not
rule the waves: in Whitehall all thoughts of the red coat were eclipsed by those of the blue. The Royal Navy would be the prime strategic instrument; the army would furnish a few essential garrisons, the flotsam and jetsam, almost, of global sea power. So thoroughgoing was this strategic vision that within two decades the navy would be consuming two-thirds of Britain’s gross domestic product, while the army would wither and almost die. Soon indeed, as the nineteenth-century historian Macaulay would put it,

And yet the defeat in America had not been wholly, or even primarily, military. Although two British armies (there is no better term, for Burgoyne and Cornwallis were operating independently) had surrendered, this had come about through want of neither courage nor fighting technique, nor even of generalship at the tactical level, for the Americans had frequently been worsted by shrewd and adaptable British commanders. There had, however, been abject failure at the operational (or ‘theatre’) level – the level at which campaigns are planned and conducted, decisions are made which battles to fight (and where and when), at which intelligence is managed and resources are allocated. At the operational level, Burgoyne failed to maintain the strategic object of his march south, namely to meet up with Howe’s army in order to cut off New England from the other colonies. And he failed in the commander’s first duty – the preservation of his force. Similarly, Cornwallis had had the opportunity to slip from the trap by
quitting Yorktown and marching south into Carolina, but he held on too long through faulty intelligence and inadequate cooperation with the Royal Navy.

There were reasons for these failures (and Burgoyne had cause to be bitter about the way he had been abandoned) but they were failures none the less. They were also failures with strategic consequences beyond the loss of the American colonies and the switch of resources to the navy. Saratoga and Yorktown would loom large in the consciousness of the next generation of army officers – most notably Sir John Moore and the duke of Wellington – who in turn influenced not only the generation that followed them but to a significant degree every generation since. When for example in 1989 the army published (effectively for the first time) its concept for the design of campaigns –
The British Military Doctrine –
the illustration on the booklet’s jacket was of the duke of Wellington at Waterloo; and it remains so in its most recent edition. The impact of any surrender is profound, but the British experience in America has shaped the way the country’s generals have thought ever since, if not always consciously. Invariably short of men and materiel (the hardware of war), they have instinctively sought an indirect approach to winning wars (with one exception – the First World War, although even here the politicians hankered after the easier option). Sometimes they have rescued their armies in such dramatic fashion that deliverance has been presented as victory, as at Corunna in 1809 and Dunkirk in 1940; at other times the imperative of avoiding casualties has led to accusations of timidity, as in East Africa in 1941 or Singapore in 1942.

And yet there was another conclusion to be reached about Saratoga and Yorktown. Britain’s strategic and economic position was not in fact gravely weakened by the loss of America. Indeed, if the retention of the American colonies had been truly in the nation’s vital interest, Lord North’s government would have been obliged to saturate them with troops as soon as the reality of the conflict was revealed – which it never did. To George III the colonies were something almost sacred, while to the majority of Parliament (the Commons certainly) they were really no more than a means of increasing prosperity. The war had in fact been prosecuted half-heartedly; it was therefore not surprising if generals in the field, and in turn their subordinate commanders, began to make their own calculations about how much a battle was worth fighting, not just in terms of the duty to preserve the force, but in terms also of the
object of the battle. The Americans – regulars and militia alike – had been fighting for the independence of their country; put crudely, the British had been fighting for a commercial policy. Indeed, in due course the constitutional purpose of the United States Army would be expressed simply as the defence of the Union: whenever it has fought, it has done so in the knowledge of that high principle (albeit ‘defence’ has sometimes been elastically defined – most fatally, of course, in Vietnam). But the British army has not always fought on so fundamental a principle. As a result, the US and British armies have developed differently in character and doctrine – at least until recent years – and their generals have frequently thought differently too. Even in the Second World War, when Britain was fighting for national survival (as well as in the Far East to defend her commercial wealth), there was often a tendency to avoid direct engagement with the enemy’s main force, seeking instead an indirect approach – what others, the Americans especially, derided as ‘stratagems of evasion’.
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Only twice in that war – at El Alamein and on D-Day – was there an acceptance by commanders that no price was too great for the attainment of the goal.