Episode Details

By 1758 the British had been losing the war in America for three years. Then William Pitt took hold of it in London — and instead of bullying the colonies as his predecessor had, he paid them, respected them, and led them, and the war began to turn. This is the story of that turn, and of the bloody exception to it: the Battle of Carillon, where a vast British army of sixteen thousand, having lost its beloved Lord Howe to a single musket ball, was thrown by the plodding General Abercromby straight into the Marquis de Montcalm’s abatis and slaughtered — two thousand men down before a force a quarter their size that never left its wall. We follow Rogers’ Rangers through the winter woods, the death that made the army’s soul “expire,” the Black Watch dying on the sharpened branches, Montcalm’s improbable victory and the cross he raised to heaven for it, and the fall of Louisbourg far to the east, where a young brigadier named Wolfe was making the name that would carry him to Quebec. A year of disaster and triumph drawn in the same breath — and the Ohio still to be won.