03:02 PM EDT on Friday, June 16, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

On Sept. 28, 1777, word filtered into Gen. George Washington's camp that the Americans had beaten British Gen. John "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne outside Saratoga, N.Y. Unlike many rumors, this one turned out to be true: American forces had driven the British from the field outside Saratoga, killing, wounding and capturing 600 enemy troops while losing 300.

This marked the second triumph of the northern army in a month -- they'd also killed 200 Hessians at Bennington, in what's now Vermont -- so Washington ordered a celebratory 13-gun salute, followed by a gill of rum per man. A gill measured four ounces; for its capacity to numb the pain of hard living, rum was a staple for an 18th-century army camp. And on this day anyway, the American troops got a good dose of it.

Journal graphic / Tom Murphy

The Americans' main advance pushes through the town, but then falters when they take fire from the Chew house behind them.

Washington openly envied the successes to the north and lusted for a victory of his own. By the 28th, he was spoiling for a fight. On the same day when he ordered the 13-gun salute and a gill of rum for all, he again called a council of war to advise on whether he should order an attack on Germantown, a village of fieldstone houses 5 miles from British-occupied Philadelphia.

Gen. William Howe then camped most of his army in Germantown, about 12,000 men. Even with reinforcements from New York, New Jersey and Maryland, the Americans could muster only about 11,000 men for an attack -- 1,000 less than the British had.

Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene did not like those odds. He joined the majority of officers in telling Washington that the time was not yet ripe for an attack.

Then, things changed.

Eager to fight

Communications between military encampments were always a risky business. Mounted couriers passing along wooded roads were often challenged by armed guards; if they did not know the day's countersign, they faced serious trouble.

On Oct. 2, 1777, the Americans intercepted two letters sent by British couriers; from these, Washington learned that the British encampment at Germantown had just shrunk by 3,000 men. Howe had peeled off those men from his main encampment of 12,000. and sent them across the Delaware to tackle an American fort at Billingsport, N.J.

Washington could barely wait to tell his officers the news. The next day, he called another council of war: Howe's camp at Germantown was now down to 9,000 men; the Americans outside Germantown still numbered 11,000. Did the generals now favor an attack? This time, Greene joined every other general in voting yes.

The American attack on Germantown required marching 11,000 amateur soldiers -- many of them barefoot -- more than 15 miles, at night, to assault 9,000 well-armed professionals neatly arrayed in a 3-mile wide front. Adding to the audacity of Washington's plan was its complexity: he would split his troops into four "wings" that were supposed to march through the night and arrive at Germantown, simultaneously, for a pre-dawn attack.

Before putting his troops on the march, Washington issued a rousing general order. He openly envied the recent victory of the northern army at Saratoga, under Gen. Horatio Gates: "The main American Army will not suffer itself to be out done by their northern Brethren," Washington wrote. "Covet! My Countrymen, and fellow soldiers! Covet! A share of the glory due to heroic deeds!

"Our dearest rights, our dearest friends, and our own lives, honor, and glory and even shame, urge us to fight. And My fellow Soldiers! when an opportunity presents, be firm, be brave; shew yourselves men, and victory is yours."

'If you could see a defeat . . .'

Greene's wing, on the east or left side of Washington's army, had the farthest distance to march -- 17 miles, one way -- so they moved first, pulling out of camp at 7 p.m., into the darkness of Oct. 3, 1777.

Greene had with him some 5,000 men, by far the biggest wing of the four-pronged attack. They got lost. The local man hired to guide them on a back route to Germantown could not find his way in the dark. When he finally did hit on the right route, Greene again moved his men at "quickest step," making up about 30 minutes of lost time. Still, he arrived on the field a good hour after sunrise -- a half-hour late. The wings on the extreme left and extreme right never made it to the field at all, leaving all of the early fighting to the troops under New Hampshire's Gen. John Sullivan.

The fighting began at daybreak, and no sooner than it began, a fog rolled over the village. Smoke from the muskets thickened the fog till men could see no more than 30 yards.

At first, this was good for the American attackers, as it cloaked them from the British lined up behind rail fences waiting to cut them down as they advanced along the pike and through mature fields of buckwheat. What the British could not see, they could not shoot. Sullivan's men kept coming through the fog, driving the British light infantry right out of their camp.

Pvt. Joseph Plumb Martin, then 16 years old, wrote in his memoirs:

"They soon fell back and we advanced. The enemy were driven right through their camp. They left their kettles, in which they were cooking their breakfasts, on the fires, and some of their garments were lying on the ground, which the owners had not time to put on."

About 120 men from the 40th British Regiment ducked out of the line of fire and into a solid brick house recently abandoned by Judge Benjamin Chew.

Henry Knox, the Americans' chief artillery officer, had done a lot of reading about military theory, and he knew that it was bad form to leave an armed "castle" in your rear. He prevailed upon Washington to train the artillery on the Chew House.

For an hour or more, Knox blasted away at the Chew House, with disastrous results -- for the Americans. The walls were impregnable to the three- and six-pound balls Knox fired; meanwhile, the well-fortified troops within blasted away with muskets at the Americans clustered outside. Fifty-three Americans fell dead on the spot.

As Greene's troops arrived late, through the fog, to the field they could hear the commotion of cannon and musketry at the Chew House. One of Greene's commanders, Gen. Adam Stephen, was often drunk and might have been drinking excessively that night. According to his subsequent court martial, he had also been seen "taking snuff out of the Boxes of strumpets." Stephen commanded Greene's western-most troops; without consulting Greene, he marched his men toward the commotion at the Chew House.

Gen. Anthony Wayne also heard Knox's firing on the Chew House, and though Wayne's troops had advanced into Germantown, he turned them around to see what the blasting was all about. While marching back toward the Chew House Wayne's men ran into the drunken Stephen's men advancing -- and, through the literal fog of war, they began firing on each other.

Knox's men were being picked off by sharpshooters barricaded in the Chew House; American troops under Wayne and Stephen were shooting at each other, with great effect; and Sullivan's most advanced troops were calling out that their ammunition was almost gone.

Howe's troops, buoyed by the knowledge that their enemy was low on bullets, rallied. The Americans panicked, running past their officers along the Germantown Pike.

They had a long march ahead of them. Washington gathered his fleeing troops and marched them 5 miles farther north than they had been that morning, a roundtrip of 35 miles. Greene must have had this retreat in mind when he wrote to a brother:

If you could see a defeat, follow a long and tedious nights march, hear the screams of the wounded that are going of[f] the field, see the labour and difficulty of getting them off, have to march forty miles without victuals or sleep, you would hardly think your sufferings worth naming.

Already, the Army's supply systems had begun breaking down -- toward their utter failure that winter at Valley Forge -- so the retreating troops had at best broken shoes, worn blankets and no food.

"I had now to travel the rest of the day, after marching all the day and night before and fighting all the morning," Pvt. Joseph Plumb Martin recalled of the Germantown retreat. "I had eaten nothing since noon of the previous day, nor did I eat a morsel till the forenoon of the next day, and I needed rest as much as victuals. I was tormented with thirst all the morning (fighting being warm work.)"

Riding up the Perkiomen Creek on a "dreary night," Greene and Adjutant Gen.Timothy Pickering stopped to let their horses drink. Around this time, Greene's blue and buff uniform was in need of replacement, he was riding on a badly worn saddle, and he had but one spur for his two boots. That day, according to his grandson, he'd had a lock of his hair shot off.

As the horses drank, Pickering, a Harvard-trained lawyer who had argued against trying to storm the Chew House, said: "General Greene, before I came to the Army, I entertained an exalted opinion of General Washington's military talents, but I have since seen nothing to enhance it."

Greene replied, "Why, the general does want decision; for my part, I decide in a moment."

When Washington settled his troops in camp at Pawling's Mill, he counted losses of 1,111 men: 152 killed, 521 wounded and 438 captured.

The British had lost half that many: 537 killed and wounded. And they held the field at Germantown -- clearly, a victory for them.

Yet, as evidenced by Greene's written orders after the battle, the Americans took this loss as a victory for their morale. They had attacked the British, and had felt -- for the first time since Greene's initial taste of combat, on Harlem Heights -- the momentary thrill of seeing the redcoats run.

gcarbone@projo.com / (401) 277-7434

A continuing series.

Sources for today's installment:

Boatner III, Mark M. Encyclopedia of the American Revolution. Stackpole Books: Mechanicsburg, Pa., 1994.

Clipson, William J. and Symonds, Craig L. A Battlefield Atlas of the American Revolution. The Nautical & Aviation Publishing Co. of America, Inc.: Mount Pleasant, S.C., 1986.

Greene, George Washington. The Life of Nathanael Greene, Vol. 1. New York: Hurd and Houghton. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1871.

Martin, Joseph Plumb. A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier. Signet Classic, Penguin Group Inc.: New York, 2001.

Scheer, George F., and Rankin, Hugh F. Rebels & Redcoats. Da Capo Press Inc.: United States of America, 1987. copyright The World Publishing Co., 1957.

Showman, Richard K., ed. The Papers of Nathanael Greene, Vol. II. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980.

Wood, W.J. Battles of the Revolutionary War, 1775-1781. Da Capo Press: United States of America, 1990.