Battle of Bunker Hill

17 June 1775

British Victory 

On the night of 16 June 1775, Col. William Prescott led 1,200 men to fortify Breed’s Hill overlooking Boston Harbor. The plan was to occupy Bunker Hill, but an advance party of militiamen built fortifications on Breed's Hill. Under the direction of engineer Richard Gridley, the troops constructed a redoubt and additional entrenchments. Royal Navy ships in Boston Harbor opened fire on the redoubt at dawn on 17 June while Maj. Gen. Thomas Gage prepared an assault force. Maj. Gen. William Howe led a three-pronged assault against Prescott’s position. Twice the Americans held, but a third assault forced them off the hill as they ran out of ammunition. The British Regulars took the redoubt and drove the New England troops back. However, the British lost 40 percent of their force, including a high percentage of officers. It was a British victory, but the Americans had shown that they would stand and fight.  

Historian Allen French aptly characterized the Battle of Bunker Hill as a "tale of great blunders heroically redeemed." The American command structure violated the principle of unity of command from the start. In moving onto Breed’s Hill, the patriots exposed an important part of their force in an indefensible position. This move violated the principles of concentration of force, mass, and maneuver. Gage and Howe, for their parts, sacrificed all the advantages the American blunders gave them, violating the principles of maneuver and surprise by undertaking a frontal attack on a fortified position. Their gamble to end the rebellion with a single stroke had failed.

Bunker Hill was a Pyrrhic victory, its strategic effect practically nil since the two armies remained in virtually the same positions before. Its consequences, nevertheless, cannot be ignored. Although often depicted as a force of farmers and townsmen, fresh from their fields and shops, with hardly a semblance of orthodox military organization, the New Englanders used their militia training to create forces modeled on the British. Led by officers with, in some case, more direct combat experience than many of Gage’s, the Americans had fought on equal terms with a professional British Army. This astonishing feat had a sobering effect on many senior British commanders. They realized that American resistance was not to be easily overcome; never again would British commanders lightly attempt such an assault on Americans in fortified positions. Many Americans, on the other hand, misread the battle. Bunker Hill, along with Lexington and Concord, created an American myth that the patriotic citizen-soldier is more than a match for the trained professional, a tradition reflected in American military policy for generations afterward.  

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