The Greatest War Stories Never Told

by Rick Beyer

  In January 1795, Conté obtained French patent number 32. And the modern pencil was born.

  Conté saved the day for Napoleon during his invasion of Egypt in 1798. When the French army lost much of its munitions and instruments after one battle, Conté put his genius to work improvising all sorts of machines and tools that enabled the army to keep fighting.

  Conté discovered that using more clay created a harder pencil, less clay a softer pencil. He designed four grades of pencil—the origin of the schoolchild’s no. 2.

  1796

  AMERICA’S WORST GENERAL

  Drunkard, traitor, thief, incompetent . . . and Commander of the U.S. Army.

  We all know America’s great generals: Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower, to name but a few. Chances are, however, you’ve never heard of the man who may well be America’s worst general.

  His name was James Wilkinson, and his résumé is a litany of corruption and treachery.

  • During the American Revolution he plotted to overthrow General Washington. Later he conspired with Aaron Burr to lop off a few states and turn them into an independent country. (He eventually informed on Burr to save his own skin.)

  • While serving as a U.S. Army general he also spied on America for Spain. (Spanish archives show that “Agent 13,” as they called him, was well paid for his reports. He even took an oath of allegiance to the king of Spain.)

  • Appointed “clothier general” of the army, he had to resign the post after an audit suggested he was siphoning off money for himself.

  • He was such a military bumbler that during an invasion of Canada in the War of 1812, his force of 4,000 was repulsed by a mere 180 Canadians. (Of course, he was so high on alcohol and laudanum that he may not have noticed.)

  In spite all the scandals, he rose through the ranks to become commander in chief of the American army in 1796. He was a master of intrigue, an expert at covering his tracks, and a consummate flatterer who cultivated friends in high places. Three courts-martial, several congressional investigations, and numerous boards of inquiry failed to lay a finger on him.

  General James Wilkinson: a scoundrel, a sneak, a spy—and a survivor.

  “A GENERAL WHO NEVER WON A BATTLE OR LOST A COURT-MARTIAL.”

  — HISTORIAN ROBERT LECKIE

  “I WOULD RATHER BE SHOT THAN SERVE UNDER WILKINSON.”

  — PRESIDENT JAMES MONROE

  “THE MOST FINISHED SCOUNDREL THAT EVER LIVED.”

  — VIRGINIA CONGRESSMAN JOHN RANDOLPH

  “A TRAITOR TO EVERY CAUSE HE EMBRACED.”

  — HISTORIAN SAMUEL ELIOT MORRISON

  1801

  BLIND MAN’S BLUFF

  It’s the orders you disobey that make you famous.

  Horatio Nelson. Admiral Nelson. Lord Nelson. Perhaps the most famous and revered officer ever to tread the deck of a British naval vessel, he is best known for his famous victory at Trafalgar in 1805. It was there, aboard the HMS Victory, that he signaled to all his ships that “England expects every man to do his duty.” It was there he defeated Napoleon’s fleet, saving England from invasion, before dying from wounds suffered in the battle.

  But it was at another battle, four years earlier, that he added a colorful phrase to the English language.

  At the Battle of Copenhagen, Nelson was second in command to an elderly admiral named Sir Hyde Parker. Nelson led a squadron of ships on a daring attack against the Danish fleet. Soon he was heavily engaged.

  From his flagship several miles away, Admiral Parker became convinced that Nelson’s squadron was being decimated, that the battle was lost. He hoisted a signal flag ordering Nelson to withdraw. The younger admiral, knowing his ships were inflicting heavy damage on the Danes, paid no attention. When one of his officers pointed it out, Nelson reportedly raised his telescope to his eye and said, “I really do not see the signal.” Then he proceeded with the battle.

  But the officer knew, as eventually everyone in England knew, that Nelson had put the telescope to his blind eye. Thus Nelson was able to claim ignorance of the order without disobeying it outright. Within the hour he had won a great victory, and given birth to a new expression. So the next time you “turn a blind eye” to something, remember the famous British admiral who did it first.

  Danish losses in the Battle of Copenhagen were six thousand killed and wounded, more than ten times the British casualties. The victory earned Nelson a promotion and command of his own fleet.

  “I HAVE ONLY ONE EYE—I HAVE A RIGHT TO BE BLIND SOMETIMES.”

  — ADMIRAL NELSON TO HIS FLAG CAPTAIN DURING THE BATTLE

  1802

  THE FEVER FACTOR

  How an island rebellion and a lowly insect helped remake America.

  Napoleon Bonaparte had big plans for the vast territory that France held in North America. In 1802 he sent an army under the command of General Charles Leclerc, his brother-in-law, to take control of New Orleans and open the door for a new wave of French colonists to populate what he hoped would be a thriving New France.

  Napoleon ordered Leclerc to stop off along the way and reestablish French rule in Haiti, which had been wracked by a bloody slave rebellion. The Haitians were no match for the crack French troops, who won control of the island in a matter of weeks. But then a more deadly enemy emerged.

  The mosquito.

  Spring rains brought clouds of mosquitoes and an outbreak of yellow fever. The local population was largely immune; not so the French soldiers. Tens of thousands perished. Leclerc himself died in October of 1802. Reinforcements arrived, but many of them also succumbed to the disease. Meantime, the freed slaves of Haiti renewed the fight against their weakened enemy, taking a severe toll with persistent guerrilla attacks.

  For France, it was nothing short of a debacle. Between the disease and the fighting, an estimated fifty thousand French soldiers died, and the rest surrendered in 1803. With his army gone and his brother-in-law dead, Napoleon gave up on his dreams for the New World, deciding instead to sell France’s land in North America to the United States.

  The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the young country. But it might never have taken place without the resilient rebels and the unmerciful mosquitoes of Haiti.

  The Louisiana Purchase added 828,000 square miles of land to the United States. The purchase price was $15 million, which comes out to a mere three cents an acre.

  The slave rebellion in Haiti was led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former slave who had established himself there as “Governor-for-Life.” He quickly agreed to an armistice with the French, who showed their gratitude by kidnapping him and sending him off to a French prison, where he died before he could see Haiti achieve full independence in 1803.

  It wasn’t until nearly one hundred years later that U.S. Army doctor Walter Reed proved that yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes.

  1803

  SHELL SHOCK

  The revolutionary weapon that changed warfare forever.

  At the start of the 1800s, a new weapon appeared on the battlefields of Europe. It was the brainchild of an English officer who had spent thirty years perfecting it. A hollow artillery shell was filled with smaller musket balls, along with a charge of gunpowder ignited by a fuse. The shell could be launched long-distance at the enemy’s lines. When it exploded in midair, it spread a deadly carpet of metal shards over a wide area.

  The inventor of the shell devoted all his free time to perfecting it, pouring his life savings into the project. The British army finally adopted the shell in 1803, and first used it in the Napoleonic Wars. It proved frighteningly lethal on massed troops, and so terrified French soldiers that they believed the British had poisoned their cannonballs.

  Sir George Wood, commander of the British artillery, credited the new shell with playing a critical role in the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. “On this simple circumstance hinged entirely the turn of the battle,” he later wrote in a letter to the shell’s inventor.

  Artillery beca
me infinitely more terrifying and the name of the officer who invented the shell became known around the world:

  Henry Shrapnel.

  Napoleon ordered unexploded British shells disassembled so he could fathom their secrets—but he never managed to duplicate them.

  Shrapnel’s shells were the “bombs bursting in air” that Francis Scott Key saw during the bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812.

  1808

  RUM REBELLION

  The conflict that was déjà vu all over again.

  It was a mutiny. There was no other word for it. It happened in New South Wales, a British penal colony in Australia. A new governor had been sent from London, a man with a quick temper and a keen sense of duty. He soon came into conflict with the colony’s officer corps.

  The governor considered his officers inept and corrupt, and moved to shut down the thriving rum trafficking ring that they controlled. The officers claimed he was a tyrant and was acting outside of the law. Eventually they decided to depose him. In what later become known as the “Rum Rebellion,” three hundred soldiers surrounded his house. They captured him at gunpoint and held him prisoner for more than a year.

  Eventually, a dramatic public court-martial in London convicted the mutineers and vindicated the governor.

  It was an experience that would have tested any man, but especially one who must have felt that history was repeating itself in a manner most cruel. For the governor of New South Wales was a British naval officer who was discovering that lightning could indeed strike twice.

  He was William Bligh, the ship captain famously deprived of his command nearly twenty years before . . . in the mutiny on the Bounty.

  Bligh was at dinner when he got word that the mutineers were coming to arrest him. He hid out in a small servant’s room, hoping to escape. The soldiers who found him claimed he was hiding under a bed, which led to much taunting and accusations of cowardice that seem to have stung Bligh more deeply than the rebellion itself.

  The mutiny on the HMS Bounty took place in 1789. Set adrift in a small boat with a handful of loyal seamen and limited supplies, Bligh successfully navigated more than four thousand miles to safety.

  1812

  THE WAR OF BAD TIMING

  It began too quickly and ended too late.

  The main cause of the War of 1812 was Britain’s interference with American shipping, stemming from a British embargo on trade with France. The United States tried for years to get the British to change the so-called Orders in Council that regulated the hated policies, but to no avail. So finally, on June 18, 1812, the United States declared war.

  Bad timing.

  It turned out that the British government had revoked the Orders in Council just two days before. In other words, the main reason for the war had disappeared. President James Madison later admitted that if he had known of Britain’s change of heart, he would have held off declaring war. But it was months before the news reached Washington . . . and by then the die was cast.

  Britain and the United States fought for more than two years. The most famous battle of the war was General Andrew Jackson’s decisive defeat of the British at the Battle of New Orleans, on January 8, 1815. It made Jackson a national hero, and eventually led to his becoming president.

  More bad timing.

  The Treaty of Ghent, officially ending the war, was signed on December 24, 1814. The battle, in other words, was fought two weeks after the war was over.

  The Battle of New Orleans was the most lopsided of the war. The British attack on American lines along the Mississippi proved a bloody disaster. The British suffered more than two thousand casualties; the American forces, only seventy.

  It took two years to fight the war, four and a half months to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, and five weeks to get the documents from Europe to Washington. After all that time, it took the Senate and the president just one day to unanimously ratify the treaty bringing the war to an end.

  1814

  AN ARMY OF TWO

  How a pair of teenage girls outwitted a British man-of-war.

  In June of 1814, the British frigate HMS Bulwark, bearing seventy-four guns, raided the Massachusetts town of Scituate, setting fire to six ships in the harbor. The town promptly formed a militia company to protect itself. The men held their drills by the lighthouse, but as the summer went by without any more incidents, they began to let their guard down.

  In September, the Bulwark came back for another bite.

  Rebecca Bates, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the lighthouse keeper, spotted the British ship sitting offshore. A longboat full of soldiers was setting off toward the harbor, where two merchant ships presented a juicy target.

  Her father wasn’t around. There was no time to get to town to warn of the attack. Then Rebecca noticed something the militiamen had left at the lighthouse, something that gave her an idea: a fife and drum.

  The soldiers had taught them a few songs over the summer. Now Rebecca thought they could use one of them to fool the British. “Keep out of sight,” she warned her sister. “If they see us, they’ll laugh us to scorn.” The two girls hid out behind a dune and played “Yankee Doodle” for all they were worth.

  The British heard the all too familiar tune wafting over the water. It could mean only one thing: American soldiers were gathering to repel their attack. A signal pennant was hoisted and the raiding party aborted their mission.

  Scituate was saved from attack by Rebecca and Abigail Bates, forever known to their town as An American Army of Two.

  “YOU TAKE THE DRUM AND I’LL TAKE THE FIFE.”

  — REBECCA BATES TO HER SISTER ABIGAIL, AS THEY PREPARED TO DRIVE OFF THE BRITISH

  Rebecca Bates lived to a great old age and told many people of the day she saved Scituate. She and her sister even signed affidavits swearing to the accuracy of their story.

  1814

  “THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER”

  Next time you hear our national anthem, tip your hat to the drunken Redcoats who made it possible.

  Washington, D.C., was aflame, thanks to British soldiers who had put it to the torch. With smoke still rising from the ruins, the Brits set out on a march through Maryland. After most of the soldiers had filed peacefully through the town of Upper Marlboro, two drunken stragglers came along shouting and carrying on. One of the town fathers, Dr. William Beanes, was so incensed with this behavior that he personally carted the drunken Redcoats to jail.

  But one of the men escaped, and brought back more Redcoats. They released the jailed soldier, seized the good doctor, and carried him off to a British frigate in Chesapeake Bay. So a lawyer friend sailed out to negotiate the doctor’s release. Just as he got there, the British began shelling nearby Fort McHenry, and detained both men until the shelling was over.

  And that’s how a lawyer by the name of Francis Scott Key happened to observe the flag over the fort still standing amidst the “rockets’ red glare.” His poem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” became an instant hit.

  The music? Key purloined it from a tune called “To Anacreon in Heaven,” which, appropriately enough, was a popular English drinking song.

  Key wrote the poem in a Baltimore hotel room the day after the battle. It was published for the first time less than a week later.

  It took more than forty bills and resolutions in Congress before “The Star-Spangled Banner” was finally adopted as the national anthem in 1931.

  1815

  BAD DAY AT WATERLOO

  Imagine you wake up feeling ill . . . and it costs you an empire.

  Napoleon was ready for battle. He faced a host of enemies: a mighty army composed of British, Belgian, Dutch, and German units that had gathered together for the express purpose of destroying him. But Napoleon was the world’s greatest general. It would take more than cannon and cavalry to stop him.

  It would take an act of nature.

  The mighty emperor was sick. Hemorrhoids and a bladder infection struck him with force and fury a
nd did what no earthly army could—render him im-mobile. In great pain the night before the battle, he took a dose of opium that caused him to sleep late and lose crucial hours that could have made the difference.

  The morning of the battle he was in such pain that he could barely mount his horse. Personal reconnaissance of the battlefield was out of the question. Some accounts say he took more opium, which may have clouded his judgment.

  The emperor was not at his best, and his day went from bad to worse as he suffered an empire-ending defeat.

  If only he could have called in sick.

  Who won the Battle of Waterloo? It depends on whom you ask. The English credit the Duke of Wellington, who commanded the combined British, Dutch, and Belgian forces that battled Napoleon most of the day. Bah, say German historians; they argue instead for Marshal Blücher, who arrived on the battlefield in the late afternoon with a Prussian army that delivered the decisive counterpunch. Either way, Napoleon lost.

  1816

  SPEARHEADING A REVOLUTION

  A simple idea with remarkable consequences.

  When you throw a spear—and miss—you not only disarm yourself, you give a weapon to your enemy. This radical thought entered the mind of a Zulu warrior sometime shortly after 1800, and his response changed the face of a continent.