9.25.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and to
day I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated September
October twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio Eye is
a reading service intended for people who are blind or
have other disabilities that make it difficult to reprinted material.
Please join me now for part one of the underappreciated

(00:23):
true story of the brash Prussian military officer who whipped
the Patriots into shape at Valley Forge. Most Americans think
of George Washington's winter encampment as brutal and deadly, but
Friedrich von Steuben, an out of work military veteran from Europe,
turned it into a fruitful training ground. By Richard Bell,

(00:45):
most American school children have heard the story of Valley
Forge in broad outline. It goes like this. By the
winter of seventeen seventy seven, the Revolutionary War was in
its third year. That fall, the Continental Army had lost
one battle after another, and the British seemed ascendant. On
December nineteenth, thousands of bedraggled and undisciplined Patriot soldiers tramped

(01:10):
deep in the Pennsylvania wilderness, tracking bloody footprints. A never
ending blizzard of snow, ice and rain left these men
starving and shivering in their tents. Then something miraculous happened.
The straggling army, displaying grit and perseverance during the merciless winter,
was whipped into shape drilled in the art of war.

(01:32):
The soldiers who marched out of that crucible and June
were transformed into a formidable fighting force. Within weeks of
leaving Valley Forge. This model army would deploy its new
found skills at the Battle of Monmouth, turning the course
of the war. From that point forward, George Washington and
the Continental Army would never look back. Much of this

(01:55):
story turns out to be met, of course, the sort
of irresistible comforting be thought that seems to stick to
the American Revolution like glue. More surprising, perhaps, is that
some of it turns out to be true, or something
close to it. The war was indeed at a perilous
point for the Patriots by the winter of seventeen seventy seven.

(02:17):
After Redcoat victories at Brandywine on September eleventh and Paoli
on September twentieth, Sir William Howe, the British Commander, had
led his Grand Army to winter quarters in Philadelphia, the
rebel capital. Their arrival forced the Continental Congress to flee
the city and seek safety in the town of York,

(02:37):
one hundred miles west. In October, Washington attacked the Red
Coats at Germantown, trying to dislodge them from Philadelphia, but
they defeated him decisively. Since then, the Continental Army had
been bevoacking at White Marsh, north of the city. As
Washington decided what to do next in camp for the

(02:58):
winter or take the fight to the British. On November thirtieth,
he made the call the Continental Army would find its
own quarters for the winter. His men were in no
state to mount an offensive. They needed time to rest
and recover. Washington himself heeded time to secure reinforcements in resupply,
and the American envoys in Europe needed more time to

(03:20):
secure critical military alliances with the continent's great powers. Ten
days later, Washington announced that the Army would encamp at
Valley Forge, eighteen miles northwest of Philadelphia. It seemed the
best option available, close enough to the city to keep
the British bottled up, but far enough away to see

(03:41):
the Red coats coming if they tried to attack. There
was also decent road access to New York and New Jersey,
and to the mountains of western Pennsylvania. If the army
needed to beat a hasty retreat, the Schulkill River, which
abutted the site, would provide fresh water, and there were
thousands of acres of rich farmland within foraging distance. On

(04:03):
the morning of December eleventh, seventeen seventy seven, the Continental
Army marched out of White Marsh. It took these eleven
thousand soldiers and several hundred women and other camp followers
nearly nine days to cover the thirteen miles to Valley Forge.
Their progress slowed by rutted roads choked with mud. The

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site they found was not what they expected. The two
thousand acre triangle shaped parcel was far from being a
provisioner's paradise. In fact, the whole area had already been
stripped bare by British foraging parties that fall. Still, the
men and women in Washington's column were used to deprivation.

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They had already endured long months of poor supplies. It
is true that morale was low and desertions were rising,
but the soldiers were tough and seasoned. After each defeat
that fall, they had gathered themselves up and gone back
from more. They did not want for courage. The only
thing that they lacked, apart from regular rations and regular pay,

(05:07):
was the discipline and skill that comes with practice. When
the army arrived at Valley Forge, the soldiers set to
work constructing earth floored log huts sturdy enough to keep
out the weather. Washington wrote a memo detailing the dimensions
and instructed them to lay out the huts in a
grid pattern that resembled downtown Philadelphia. Soon the camp was

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humming with activity. Visiting Valley Forge that December, Thomas Payne
said the soldiers appeared to me like a family of beavers,
every one busy, some carrying logs, others mud, and the
rest fastening them all together. Within six weeks, the men
built two thousand log huts. According to Continental Major William Hull,

(05:54):
in viewing it from the hills, it had the appearance
of a little city. Indeed, measured by population, Valley Forge
was now the fourth largest city in the Rebel colonies.
Up close, however, it was a ramshackle place. Most soldiers
had not built wooden structures of this size before, and
it showed. Archaeological evidence has revealed that hut placement often

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deviated from the grid plan, and a shortage of construction
tools and materials frequently forced the builders to improvise. Some
huts had wooden boards for roofs, others had tent cloths
or turf. When the rain came, those roofs leaked. Though
the weather was not nearly as bad as mythology has
made out as winters in eastern Pennsylvania go. In fact,

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this one was quite mild. There were just two serious
cold snaps in which the mercury fell below ten degrees fahrenheit,
one at the end of December, the other in early March.
There were rain showers in January, but only four days
of snow over the course of the entire winter. Generally,

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temperatures were bearable, averaging around thirty two degrees first thing
in the morning in December. By the end of January,
bluebirds were chirping in the trees. Spring arrived in the
second week of March. We know of no officer, soldier,
or any one else who even came close to freezing
to death. The real killer at Valley Forge was disease

(07:27):
enlisted men were packed in bunks twelve to a hut
and slept on straw mats infested with bugs and fleas.
Ventilation was poor. Washington mounted a small pox inoculation campaign,
but other diseases were harder to protect against. As the
weather warmed, soldiers contracted dysentery and typhus. On January twenty fourth,

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Colonel Israel Angel of Rhode Island wrote in his diary,
three more of my regiment died last night and this
day were decently interred. It is a very alarming time
amongst us, as the troops are very sickly and die fast.
All told, nearly two thousand Continental Army soldiers succumbed to
disease at Valley Forge, more than had died in any

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single battle of the war so far. Every other adversity
paled in comparison, but those other miseries were no less real. Blankets, clothing,
and shoes were in short supply. Contrary to mythology, no
one literally went naked at Valley Forge, but British naval
blockades held up delivery of uniforms ordered from France and

(08:37):
the French Caribbean, and most soldiers went without the garments
that would have kept them dry and warm. Some wandered
the camp in little more than hunting frocks and underwear.
Others cut up tents to refashion them into shirts, breeches,
or foot wrappings. During cold spells, many men used tent
canvasses as blankets. When it was their turn for guard duty,

(09:00):
Soldiers would try to cobble together a full ensemble from
whatever items their bunk mates could lend. Still, it was
not always enough. When one century could not find a
single pair of shoes in his hut, he stood on
his hat during his shift to keep his bare feet
off the cold ground. Food, too, was often dreadfully sparse.

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Army regulations entitled Continental soldiers to daily provisions of a
pound of beef or fish, a pint of milk, and
a quart of beer, along with regular rations of peas, beans, rice,
and corn meal. In practice, however, the menu was meager.
Not only had the hinterland been picked over, but local

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farmers also preferred to sell the food they produced at
market in Philadelphia, where the British paid them handsomely, and
requisitioning provisions by force would only make the armies relations
with civilians worse. As food supplies at Valley Forge dwindled,
malnutri spread. The men went for days, sometimes weeks, with

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nothing to sustain them except rations of firecake, a thin,
tasteless patty of flour and water baked over the camp fire.
By February and desperation, Washington called up supplies of salted
meat from storehouses as far afield as Virginia, drawing down
stockpiles intended to see the army through the summer fighting season.

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He also dispatched large scale foraging teams ever deeper into
the Pennsylvania countryside. Those teams succeeded in intercepting British forage
parties and stealing their loot. They also relieved many farmers
of the provisions they were hauling toward Philadelphia. Sometimes they
shot those they caught dealing with the enemy, leaving their

(10:50):
bodies by the side of the road as a warning
to others. The inhabitants cry out and beset me from
all quarters, wrote Continental Major General Nathaniel Greene, after another
brutalizing expedition, But like Pharaoh, I hardened my heart and
foraged the country very bare. On February twenty third, seventeen

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seventy eight, in the depths of that winter of discontent,
a stranger rode into camp. His name was Friedrich Wilhelm
Lodolph Gerhart Augustine von Steuben, and he had come a
very long way. The Baron, as he would come to
be known in America, had been born and raised in Prussia,

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one of the German states. Prussia was not huge, but
it was mighty, and it was home to the finest
military in Europe. Its Royal Prussian Army recruited its officers
from the lesser nobility of the kingdom's ruling class, one
of whom was Sdeuben. He joined the officer Corps as
a teenager and rose steadily over the next seventeen years,

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reaching the rank of captain. It was a formidable edition.
Steuben learned soldiering from the best fighters in the world.
During the Seven Years War, he led an infantry company
into combat at Prague and at Kunersdorf, and was wounded
twice in the line of duty. He also trained new recruits,

(12:17):
drilling them to fire and reload every eleven seconds, faster
than any other army in Europe, and teaching them how
to deliver a thunder of musket fire before charging forward.
In battle. Young Friedrich von Steuben was popular with his
fellow officers and with the enlisted men under his command.

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He was also notably refined and cosmopolitan. He preferred the
theater to brothels, and he read voraciously, devouring military science texts,
classical literature, and everything in between. His favorite book, he said,
was Don Quixote. While still a teenager, he had mastered French,

(12:57):
the language of the Prussian court. To all all appearances, gifted, industrious,
and ambitious, young Steuben seemed on his way to a
glittering career at the right hand of Prussia's warrior King
Friedrich the Great. It must have been agony, then, when
he was forced out of the Prussian army unexpectedly at

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age thirty three. Historians are divided as to why it happened.
Some say it was a personal matter, others that it
was simply downsizing and Steuben never talked about it. But
the ejection left him desperate. Despite his lineage, he had
no money and no land to fall back on. He
left Prussia embittered and drifted around Europe for a while,

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trying to offer his services as a military consultant. Steuben
eventually found work as a mid level courtier for another
German prince, who bestowed upon him the honorific of Freheir
Baron as a gift. Still, he longed to return to
military duty, and in seventeen seventy five he resigned his

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post at court, only to be turned away by both
the French Army and the British East India Company Army.
But in seventeen seventy seven, while staying in Strasbourg, his
luck finally turned when he struck up a conversation with
the Man and the Pay of the Patriots. Apparently, the
rebels in America were looking to hire as many war

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tested European officers as they could find. Stouben raced to
Paris to meet Benjamin Franklin and his fellow American envoy
Silas Dean. The pair had indeed put out a call
for talented European officers to join the Continental Army, but
they had been inundated with more job seekers than they expected.

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I am well nigh harassed to death with applications of
officers to go out to America, Dean told Congress a
few months earlier. Some of their new hires were turning
out to be valuable assets. Among them the Marquis de Lafayette,
Johann DeKalb, Casimir Pulaski, Tatius Kishushko, and Louis du Portailles.

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Yet the pair found it hard to separate the wheat
from the chaff, and many candidates turned out to be
flops or frauds. By the time Franklin and Dean met
Steuben in Franklin's rooms in June seventeen seventy seven, they
were leery of making another bad hiring decision. No wonder
then that Steuben's interview did not go well. Dean asked

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the questions and seemed interested, even impressed, but Franklin sat
and passive, looking bored. He cut the meeting short and
sent Shouben on his way, telling him they had no
job for him. Rejected by the Patriots, Shuben rushed off
to another small German state, where a friend had found
a position for him in the military leadership. But the

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vacancy soon evaporated. The casualty of a rumor that Steuben
had taken familiarities with young boys during his service as
a courier, As John macauley Palmer wrote in a nineteen
thirty seven book about the Baron Shouben's Modern biographers doubt
the rumor's veracity and have suggested that it may have

(16:15):
been part of a political smear campaign. Still, it was
a damaging allegation. Homosexuality was not an absolute taboo in
eighteenth century Europe, even in the ranks of its army.
Frederick the Great himself was widely rumored to be gay,
but the insinuation of pedophilia was explosive, and it left

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Shouben jobless and heartsick. Here was another setback in what
was rapidly becoming a failed career. Now past forty, he
was broke, unemployed, and seemingly unemployable. He could be forgiven
for suspecting that it was the set up to a
cruel joke. Then, when Franklin and Dean suddenly summoned him

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back to Paris. Unbeknownst to Steuben, he had come to
the attention of senior figures in the French War Office,
among them the French Foreign Minister, the Comte de Fergang.
They persuaded the Patriot envoys to change their minds and
had come up with the plan to send Steuben to
America as an unpaid volunteer. Franklin and Dean would not

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hire him themselves. Instead, they would write him effusive letters
of recommendation that members of the Continental Congress could consider
as they decided whether to offer him a paid position.
If things went as they hoped, Steuben would get work,
the Continental Army would get the benefit of his expertise,
and the Continental Congress would have proof that they had

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sympathetic senior French government officials working behind the scenes to
edge France closer to declaring a formal military alliance. For
this odd arrangement to work, however, those letters of recommend
would have to be superlative. Steuben was smart and ambitious,
but on paper he was a nobody, an out of

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work officer for hire whose highest rank had been captain.
For that reason, his patrons in the French War Office
conspired with Franklin and Dean to inflate the baron's credentials.
There three letters to Congress all said that Steuben was
a lieutenant general in the Prussian Army with more than
twenty years service under the King of Prussia. They said

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that he was battle hardened, having served in every single
one of Frederic the Great's campaigns. They said that he
had also taken on responsibility as quartermaster general for the
entire Prussian Army, and had served as aide de camp
to Frederic himself. They said that Steuben was in high
demand across Europe and had recently turned down a very

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important and lucrative post in one of the German courts.
All of these points were falsified, exaggerated, or misrepresented. Yet
when Sjouben arrived in York, Pennsylvania, six months later to
interview with delegates to the Continental Congress, those letters did
their work. It helped, of course, that the military man

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looked every inch the part. He was a little overweight,
perhaps with droopy cheeks and a double chin, but Steuben
had dressed for the job he wanted. He wore a
smart new uniform bought just three days earlier, and he
had pinned a huge star shaped metal to his chest,
lending to his air of Prussian military nobility. The congressmen

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were dazzled. They quickly agreed that Jouben would proceed to
Valley Forge to join the Continental Army as its newest
volunteer officer, and they promised that Congress would pay all
his expenses when the war was won. Shouben thanked them politely,
careful not to seem too eager. Four days later, he

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and the small all entourage of men he had hired
in Paris to serve as his personal staff, arrived at
Valley Forge, bearing fresh letters of introduction from Congress. Strouben's
presence electrified the camp. He turned out each day astride
his horse in full dress uniform, his retinue at his side,

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and Azor, his Italian greyhound patting behind him. To some
to day such posturing might seem pompous more ridiculous. To
the soldiers, he was a wonder, and they came out
of their huts each morning to watch him pass. Never
before or since have I had such an impression of
the ancient fabled god of war as when I looked

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upon the Baron, wrote a young private named Ashbell Green.
General Washington took Steuben into his circle, immediately inviting him
to dinner ten times in the first two weeks. He
encouraged the newcomer to roam the enormous encampment and report back.
Stuben did just that. He took stock of the site's

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security and the soldier's skills and battle readiness, and he
wrote up his findings in memo after memo, filled with
blunt criticism and constructive advice. Having sized him up, Washington
now saw the opportunity to make a transformative new hire.
In March, he appointed Steuben acting Inspector General of the

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Continental Army. The job made the baron personally responsible for
all matters relating to training and discipline, and Washington expected
quick results. It was a weighty charge, yet Steuben was
remarkably optimistic that the malnourished malcontents scattered before him would
rise to the occasion. He seems to understand what our

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soldiers are capable of, wrote Washington's aide de camp, John Lorens,
in a letter to his father. Steuben's days in the
Royal Prussian Army had taught him that drilling was the
key to military discipline. Drilling was highly repetitive and often mindless,
which was precisely the point. Orders could only be implemented

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if soldiers did as they were told, moving quickly into
position along the line of battle and delivering consistent firepower. Constant,
regimented practice dramatically improved a unit's ability to execute these tasks.
It bred obedience and broke down individuality. Turning men into
the component parts of a military machine. The soldiers at

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Valley Forge had all drilled before, but there was no
uniform system of drilling among the different colonial companies. Some
had been trained using British drill manuals, others followed German
or French patterns. Almost everything had been left up to
the company commanders. Steuben considered that a recipe for disaster

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on the battlefield, very antithesis of the Prussian system. It
had been twenty years since Jeuben had led a drill,
but he threw himself into it, knowing that Washington's eyes
were upon him. On March nineteenth, he lined up one
hundred soldiers in a field he dubbed the Grand Parade

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and set to work. He pulled out a sheaf of
notes and began to bark instructions. Because he barked in French, however,
none of the enlisted men understood a word. Lieutenant Colonels
Alexander Hamilton and John Lawns, along with the multi lingual
members of the Baron's staff, had to step in to

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translate for him. Stouben began with the basics, using a
twenty man platoon to demonstrate each maneuver. First, he taught
them the posture of attention, which in the Prussian army
meant putting feet slightly apart, toes spread, and pressing shoulders
back and chests forward. Then he went down the line

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to check the men's poses, correcting them kicking ankles closer together,
and tipping chins up or down, as if he were
arranging scenery on a stage, as his modern biographer Paul
Lockhart wrote. Next, Shtouben taught them the Prussian marching step.
He made them do it over and over until they

(24:22):
moved in unison, each man's heel touching the ground at
the same time, twenty eight inches ahead of where it
had been before. They marched at seventy five paces a minute,
much quicker than the British marching pace that some of
them had learned. One man said he was marching so
fast that it felt like he was dancing. Next, Stoeuben

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taught them to turn as one, first to the right,
then to the left. Then he showed them how to
face about, so that every one turned clockwise and reversed
course at once. They paused for a break at midday.
In the afternoon, the drilling resumed. He divided the men
into squads to practice wheeling, forming them into lines that

(25:08):
could arc around a single pivot like a gate swinging open.
It was hard work, and each error brought down the
Baron's wrath. He sputtered and swore at the more egregious mistakes,
usually in French or German, though sometimes in broken English.
Gout them, gout dam. That left the Americans trying to

(25:29):
stifle their smiles. That was just day one. For the
rest of the week, the baron made the soldiers review
and practice the old lessons before they went on to
the new. Every day he barked more commands and stomped
and cursed in different European tongues. When words failed stoiben completely,

(25:50):
he would summon Captain Pierre du Ponceaux, his seventeen year
old primary translator. My dear du Ponceau, he would growl
in French, come and swear for me in English. These
fellows won't do what I bid them. Each evening, the
Maestro would sit in his quarters scribbling the next day's
lesson plan. He was making most of it up as

(26:13):
he went along, but he kept that secret to himself. Meanwhile,
his drills began to draw attention. Crowds from across the
regiments turned out every morning to watch from the sidelines.
After five days, Washington sent the model soldiers back to
their companies to train their comrades. Stoiben supervised it all,

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riding from one brigade to the next to shout instructions, feedback,
and curses, until the entire infantry force had been schooled
in the basics of his system. It was a continual drill.
Recalled Private Joseph plum Martin, the baron worked at a
breakneck pace, aware that a new campaign could begin any day.

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Three weeks in the program was starting to bear fruit.
Entire regiments now drilled together, forming columns that could wheel
into battle lines on command. Strouben was swearing less and
smiling more. My enterprise succeeded better than I had dared
to expect, he noted in a letter to Congress later

(27:26):
in the year. And I had the satisfaction in a
month's time to see not only a regular step introduced
in the army, but I also made maneuvers with ten
and twelve battalions with as much precision as the evolution
of a single company. By now, morale in the ranks

(27:46):
was rising fast. Drilling together had started to breed pride, cohesion,
and common cause. This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine
for to day. Your has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you
for listening, and have a great day.