Episode Details

On December 19th, 1777, the beaten Continental Army marched into Valley Forge, many of the men barefoot, leaving blood on the frozen ground. This is the story of the winter that nearly killed the American army — and the winter that made it. Only 18 miles from the British in captured Philadelphia, Washington’s men starved in a land of plenty, undone not by the enemy but by their own country’s collapsed supply system, while roughly one in four of them died in the huts of hunger and disease. Through it runs the diary of a surgeon writing down exactly what it was like to freeze and starve, Washington’s blunt warning to Congress that the army would “starve, dissolve, or disperse,” the whispered plot to strip him of his command — and the arrival of a bankrupt Prussian baron with an invented title and almost no English, who got down in the mud with the barefoot privates and turned a ragtag mob into a professional army. What walked out of Valley Forge in June was harder than what walked in.