Bunker Hill

seems to have bounced from distraction to distraction with increasing futility. All agreed that Putnam was as brave and inspiring a fighter as you could find, but focus and strategic thinking had never been his strong suits. He was, an observer wrote, “one to whom constant motion was almost a necessity,” and the Battle of Bunker Hill was not to be his finest hour. “Had Putnam done his duty,” Stark was reputed to say, “he would have decided the fate of his country in the first action.”
    Stark led his regiment into the valley to the south. The British had begun directing their artillery fire toward the swarm of provincial soldiers atop Bunker Hill, and as a consequence, the march south proved to be almost as hot as anything Stark’s men had encountered on the Neck. Up ahead and to his right, Stark could see the redoubt and the breastwork; directly in front, he could see Knowlton and his men building the rail fence; to the left was the Mystic River. Beyond this jagged, uncertain line, about half a mile to the south, were more than two thousand British regulars. Stark could not understand what Prescott had been thinking when he built what looked to be a very puny and poorly sited redoubt and was heard to speak of “the want of judgment in the works,” which he dismissively referred to as “the pen.” Knowlton’s rail fence provided the beginning of a solution to the problem created by Prescott’s redoubt, but it was only a beginning. There were still two glaring weaknesses. Between the end of the breastwork and the beginning of the rail fence was a diagonal gap of several hundred yards. Luckily, the ground in this section was quite swampy, which provided something of an obstacle to the regulars, but more needed to be done. Whether or not Stark suggested it, someone began building three fleches—Vs made of either fence rails or a combination of rails, fascines, and dirt—positioned along the space between the breastwork and the rail fence. In addition to plugging the gap, the fleches would allow provincial soldiers and even Captain Trevett’s cannons to fire on the left flank of any regulars who tried to attack the rail fence.
    It was the other end of the rail fence to which Colonel Stark turned most of his attention. The fence went as far as it had to go to keep a sheep or a cow from straying into the fields above and below it, but it did not extend all the way to the water’s edge, where a steep bank went down to a narrow beach. All General Howe had to do was send a column of soldiers along the beach (where they would be hidden from the provincials by the bank), and he would have rendered useless all their efforts with the breastwork and rail fence. Stark later walked over this same ground with a fellow officer and told how “he cast his eyes down upon the beach and . . . thought it was so plain a way that the enemy could not miss it; he therefore ordered a number of
his boys
to jump down the bank and with stones from the adjacent walls, they soon threw up a strong breastwork to the water’s edge behind which he posted triple ranks of his choice men.” As Stark plugged up this gap, his subordinates worked to fortify the rail fence to the west with fistfuls of hay. Each soldier made sure to create “an aperture in the grassy rampart, through which . . . he could take deliberate aim” with his musket.
    Stark, Prescott, and Putnam were part of the same army, but as far as all three of them were concerned, they were each going to fight this particular battle on their own. With Prescott confined to the redoubt, Putnam preoccupied with building a fortification atop Bunker Hill, and Stark supervising at least the eastern portion of the rail fence, there was no one to synchronize the three of them into a single cohesive unit. Adding to the difficulty of getting these three commanders to work together were preexisting personal animosities. Stark didn’t like Putnam—a feeling that was probably mutual—and as had already been made clear by the interchange about the entrenching tools, Prescott and Putnam didn’t exactly see eye to eye.
    It also didn’t help that the three of them were from different colonies. At this point a continental army did not yet exist, and in the absence of a unifying “generalissimo,” a quite considerable intercolonial rivalry had developed. General Ward might be the head of the provincial army, but only the soldiers from Massachusetts and New Hampshire were