Episode Details

On July 9, 1755, the largest army ever assembled in North America crossed the Monongahela River in perfect order, ten miles from its objective and certain of victory. Three hours later, two-thirds of it was dead or wounded, its general dying, and its survivors running for the river. This is the Battle of the Monongahela — the day a European army met the American forest and could not understand what was killing it. We trace how 18th-century war actually worked, why the finest infantry in the world bunched into neat ranks on a wooded road and were shot down where they stood by an enemy they never saw, and how a French captain stripped to the waist and shamed his reluctant Native allies into a fight they nearly skipped. At the center is a sick, twenty-three-year-old volunteer with no rank and no pay — George Washington, two horses shot under him and four bullets through his coat — watching the regulars who scorned the provincials break while the provincials stood, and writing home that they had been “most scandalously beaten by a trifling body of men.” It is the defeat that opened the frontier, shattered the myth of British invincibility, and began to teach the colonies a hard lesson about the empire they served.