Battle of Bunker Hill
The British took a hill outside Boston in June 1775 at a cost of over a thousand casualties and learned nothing from it. The colonial army besieging the town fortified Breed's Hill on the Charlestown peninsula on the night of 16 June — the wrong hill, since the orders named Bunker Hill behind it — digging a redoubt that was visible from Boston at dawn. Gage could have cut the neck of the peninsula and starved them out. He chose a frontal assault instead, partly because his officers regarded the militia as incapable of standing against regulars and thought the demonstration worth making. Some 2,200 men were landed and formed up in the afternoon in full kit in the heat. The order not to fire until the enemy was close is the part everyone remembers, in various forms including the whites of their eyes, and it was practical rather than dramatic: the militia had little ammunition and inaccurate muskets. Two assaults were stopped with heavy losses, and the third took the redoubt when the defenders ran out of powder and fought with musket butts. Some 1,054 British casualties including 226 dead, and about a hundred officers, out of a force of 2,200. Colonial losses were around 450, including Joseph Warren. Gage wrote that the loss was greater than he could bear and that the rebels were not the despicable rabble supposed. He was recalled. The lesson the British army did not draw is the one that mattered. It repeated frontal assaults on entrenched colonial positions for another two years, and Howe, who had led the attack in person and watched his own staff killed around him, became notably cautious afterwards.
- Year: 1775 CE
- Category: Military
