Email
Print
FeedThe Dilworthtown Solution
The British army was tough on soldiers who preyed on civilians.
(page 1 of 3)
Democracy is not an unmixed blessing. It does an efficient job protecting civil liberties and motivating business activity. But a democracy’s need to be popular makes it less effective at sustaining military discipline, particularly when the consequences of poor discipline fall on foreigners.
In 1777, Chester County residents were fortunate that the foreign soldiers in their midst reported to a king. When British Gen. Sir William Howe passed through after the Battle of Brandywine, he left two—and possibly as many as five—of his soldiers dangling from local trees. The men had robbed residents in Middletown and Chester townships, and may have also committed several rapes.
Howe was practical, according to local historian Nancy Webster. Whatever the merits of his cause, he preferred to avoid “a hostile populace … rising behind his army and cutting their communications as [he] marched on Philadelphia.” For similar reasons, German soldiers in occupied France during World War II were under strict orders to respect the rights of local civilians. In one case, a Wehrmacht soldier caught stealing potatoes in Normandy was reassigned to the Russian front, a virtual death sentence.
Americans, in contrast, can overlook atrocities committed by their soldiers. In 1971, nearly 80 percent of Americans surveyed disapproved of the life sentence handed down by a military court to Lt. William Calley, who’d been found guilty of murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. President Richard M. Nixon subsequently reduced Calley’s punishment to three-and-a-half years of house arrest.
This difference may be due to the high regard Americans have for their military. A 2008 poll reported that Americans trust the military significantly more than we trust business, police, organized religion, doctors, teachers, banks, Congress or the president. When things “happen” in war, we’re understanding. So governments that ignore popular opinion can actually do more to protect civilians.
The two soldiers hanged for offenses in Aston were Hessians, who comprised about a third of Howe’s 17,000 troops at Brandywine. “Hessians” was a term used (inaccurately) by Americans to describe troops from what is now Germany who fought on the side of Great Britain in the American Revolution. Overall, about 30,000 participated in the war, in which they constituted about 25 percent of all British forces. The Hessian troops included light infantry, light cavalry, artillery and grenadiers (soldiers who specialized in throwing the era’s baseball-sized iron grenades). More than a third of Hessian troops (12,500) never returned to Europe. Of these, 7,750 died. The rest remained in America, blended in, and became U.S. citizens.
The term Hessian stemmed from the fact that a majority of these soldiers came from Hesse-Kassel, an independent principality ruled by George III’s uncle, Frederick II, and Hesse-Hannau, a town near Frankfurt. But a third were actually from Braunschweig, Ansbach-Bayreuth, Anhalt-Zerbst, Waldeck or Hanover, each a small state, principality or district within the Holy Roman Empire. Modern Germany was not formed until 1871, so the Hessians would not have considered themselves German.
About 18,000 Hessians arrived in 1776 at Staten Island. Their first engagement was the Battle of Long Island, in which the Americans lost possession of New York City for the duration of the war. The Hessians fought in almost every battle of the Revolution, and two Hessian regiments were among those that surrendered at Yorktown in 1781.
In American memory, the Hessians were either unwilling draftees or mercen-aries, labels rejected by their defenders. They were acknowledged to be fierce fighters—a fact the Americans attributed to British lies—but also blamed disproportionately for wartime atrocities. Probably, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
