A BREED APART:

The Decisive Day is Come: The Battle of Bunker Hill (Bernard Bailyn, Mass Historical Society)

"The story of Bunker Hill battle," Allen French wrote, "is a tale of great blunders heroically redeemed." The first blunder was the decision of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety to fortify Charlestown heights and attempt to hold it against the British, cooped up in Boston after their withdrawal from Lexington and Concord. The ultimate aim was, in the abstract at least, sensible enough: to tighten the encirclement of Boston by commanding the heights both north and south of the town—Dorchester as well as Charlestown—and to deny those commanding hills to the British. But in fact the Americans did not have guns capable of reaching Boston effectively from Bunker Hill. And in addition, forces installed there were almost certain to be cut off since the British warships controlled Boston harbor and its confluence with the Charles River, and could easily keep the slim neck that joined Charlestown to the mainland under heavy fire. Nor, once committed, did the American commanders choose their ground wisely. The high point of the mile-long Charlestown peninsula was Bunker Hill—it rose 110 feet, and adjoined the only route of retreat, the roadway back to Cambridge. But the spot chosen for fortification was not Bunker Hill but Breed's Hill, only 75 feet high and 600 yards farther from the neck, controllable from the higher ground at its rear and isolated from the sole route of retreat. And even in the best positions the ill-equipped, altogether untrained troops of the New England army could hardly be expected to hold out against sustained attacks by British regulars led by no less that four general officers experienced in warfare on two continents.

That for two and a half hours of intense battle, greatly outnumbered, they did just that—held out until, their powder gone and forced to fight with gun butts and rocks, they were bayoneted out of the stifling, dust-choked redoubt they had thrown up on Breed's Hill—was the result not only of great personal heroism but also of the blunders of the British. In complete control of the sea, they could have landed troops on the north side of Charlestown neck and struck the rebels in the rear while sending their main force against them face-on. But in an excess of caution they chose instead to land at the tip and march straight up against the fortified American lines. Such strategy as they had was confined to sending a single column along the thin strip of beach on the north shore of Charlestown peninsula hoping to reach the rear of the entrenchments by land and thus begin an overland encirclement. But this effort was doomed from the start. A delay in beginning the attack gave the Americans time to throw a barrier across the beach and to place behind it a company of New Hampshire riflemen capable of stopping the encircling column. The British attack therefore was altogether a frontal one, two ranks moving on a front almost half-a-mile long toward the set battle line, a line formed on the Boston Bay side by the deserted houses of Charlestown, the redoubt on Breed's Hill, its breastwork extension and a fortified rail fence, and completed on the far beach by the New Hampshiremen and their barricade.

No one of the thousands who crowded the housetops, church steeples, and shore batteries of Boston to watch the spectacle ever forgot the extraordinary scene they witnessed.