This op-ed originally appeared in the Keene (N.H.) Sentinel and other New England newspapers.
We stood by the hundreds on the river's east bank, boosting our kids so they could see the redcoats march down to the old North Bridge.
April 21, 2004 was as fair a Patriots Day as I can remember in Concord, Mass., where they re-enact the skirmish Ralph Waldo Emerson called "the shot heard round the world" – the 1775 affray that started our Revolutionary War. A late but vehement thaw raised the Concord River high up the pilings of "the rude bridge that arched the flood," and a surge of tourism all but overfilled the battlefield park.
The King's men -- marching in cadence, festooned with the latest in military hardware -- certainly looked like
world-beaters, the Old World's greatest army. How could they be defeated by the homespun amateurs marching down the opposite bank?
It's worth remembering just what the British were trying to accomplish that day: Troops had been sent to rescue the sensible majority of colonists – at least a third of whom were Tories, and another third neutral – from terrorist groups such as the Sons of Liberty.
Of course, even local Tories understood that England – for all its crusading rhetoric – was serving its own strategic interests. The prime minister's hard line had less to do with colonists' welfare than with British re-election politics. But British generals believed the insurgents could be pacified if top rebels were jailed. The primary aim of the march on Lexington and Concord was to capture radical leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock.
In other words, the British raid had much in common with American soldiers' 1993 attempt to capture a warlord in Mogadishu – and present American attempts to arrest or kill rebel leaders in Najaf, Fallujah and other Iraqi cities.
"What North Bridge showed," the British writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft has pointed out, "was that sheer technical superiority isn't everything in warfare. Historians have been telling us lately that the fabled Minutemen weren't such hotshots after all. ... But then, neither were those Somali fighters, who made up for it with ferocity and sheer numbers."
By the time they reached Concord, the British knew they'd failed to catch Hancock and Adams. They burned rebel supplies – but nearby Minutemen thought the British were torching the village. Enraged, they marched on the North Bridge, receiving a volley that, among other losses, killed their drummer boy.
That was the moment when the British expected victory. Astonishingly, though, Emerson’s "embattled farmers" stood their ground – and fired back. Outnumbered and – more important – outmotivated by men who believed they were fighting for family and freedom, the British turned and ran.
For all the good the next few years' fighting did them, the imperial troops might just as well have marched straight onto their ships in Boston harbor and sailed home.
The essential lessons of the long debacle had already been learned: Overwhelming military might is a clumsy instrument to use on a popular rebellion. Insurgents in faraway countries don't have to beat you to win; they just have to keep fighting. If rebels can't be cut off from supplies and reinforcements, their will to fight will outlast yours. Troop masses can't move as nimbly as individual targets, and troops moving in rebel territory almost never achieve surprise.
But learning lessons and learning from them are very different things.
On Patriots Day 2004, as always, the Minutemen stormed across the bridge and the British – dragging their wounded – scurried away, with our children firing plastic muskets at their backs. We cheered the occupying army's defeat, the insurgents' victory.
But it felt more than a little strange.
--- HistoryBuff
No comments:
Post a Comment