American rebels.
Face the greatest military superpower of the day.
A war against overwhelming odds.
To defeat the British they need secret intelligence.
To conquer disease
And new ways of fighting as revolutionary as their course.
New York City.
Gateway to North America.
(Siren blaring)
Today is the financial capital of the world.
Population: 8 million people.
In June 1776, this is a city of just
20,000.
(Iron clanking)
And it’s preparing to defend against the largest land invasion in American history.
5 km North of Wall Street,
Where 23rd Street crosses Lexington Avenue today.
The Rebels dig in to defend New York
At Kips Bay.
Commander-in-chief of the Rebel Army is General George Washington.
He has already driven the British out of Boston.
A surprise victory against superior forces.
But no one doubts the British will be back.
(George Washington) The hour is fast approaching
On which the honor and success of this army,
And the safety of our bleeding country depends.
Joseph Plumb Martin was inspired to fight under Washington’s command.
The enlisted is just 15...
A farm boy, he joins thousands of untrained volunteers.
Our Revolutionary Army was quite something.
It was-- in a nation that wasn't really a nation yet,
Just starting out,
And we took on the greatest superpower of the time.
Washington's inexperienced recruits rebel to face the best equipped,
And most powerful fighting force in the world.
On June 29th.
45 British warships group off few km. of Manhattan island.
These ships were the greatest war machine of their days.
Built from over 2,000 century-old trees.
Each carries hundreds of soldiers.
They’re armed with up to 64 heavy cannons.
(Man shouting)
Capable of hurling a cannonball to a target nearly 2 km. away.
Another 350 British ships have already set off to join them.
The British plan is to terrify the Rebels into submission.
Instead, it inspire them to resist.
On July 2nd, there call a crisis meeting in Philadelphia.
50 delegates from the 13 colonies,
hold an emergency session of their newly formed Assembly.
The Continental Congress.
Delegates include radicals like Ben Franklin,
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.
They debate nothing less than high treason.
Total independence from Britain.
The penalty is death.
We are in the midst of a revolution,
The most complete
In the history of the world.
It's the birth of American democracy.
We have to expect
A great expanse of blood to obtain it.
Some delegates don't believe the Rebels stand a chance.
We are about to brave the storm
In a skiff made of paper.
(Thundering)
But the doubters are outnumbered nearly five to one.
On July 4, 1776,
The delegates ratify a document
That will change the world,
The American Declaration of Independence.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident,"
"That all men are created equal,"
"That they are endowed by their Creator"
"With certain unalienable Rights."
(Man) Now think about that.
They're saying that your rights come not from the king,
Not from the government, your rights come from God
And furthermore, they can't be taken away from you.
They're inalienable.
(Men cheering)
Every group: blacks, women, gays--
Everybody looks to the Declaration
As a way of saying we are Americans, too.
So the Declaration is the American creed.
(George Washington) " ...that among these are Life..."
"Liberty..."
"And the pursuit of Happiness."
(Men cheering)
You cannot help but be stirred
When you read those words.
And you feel the excitement of being
On the cusp of something so profound.
(Men cheering)
We can be free.
(Men cheering)
Now soldiers like Plumb Martin
Are fighting for Independence.
On July 12th, two British warships
Open fire on New York City.
(Rudolph) It must have been quite a shock
Because New York, up to that point,
Was pretty quiet city.
It was a business city.
So you had significant support for the Rebels
But also significant support for the
People who were still loyal to the king.
A month later, Joseph Reed,
Secretary to George Washington,
Watches the British fleet massing off New York.
Over 400 ships,
The largest British Naval task force until D-day.
32,000 British troops
Prepare to storm Manhattan Island.
They outnumber the rebels two to one.
Reed is over-struck.
(Joseph Reed) When I look down
And see the prodigious fleet they have collected,
I cannot help being astonished
That a people should come 3,000 miles
At such risk, trouble and expense
To rob, plunder and destroy another people
Because they will not lay their lives
And fortune at their feet.
New York City won’t experience another attack like it
Until September 11, 2001.
But the Rebels believe they have right on their side.
The difference for me was that the British Army
Was fighting for a king
And the Americans were fighting for their lives.
Plumb Martin is one of 500 men
Standing guard at Kips Bay.
(Man) Have a look.
(Plumb Martin) The first thing that saluted our eyes
Was all 4 ships at anchor
Within musket shot of us.
"The Phoenix."
I could read her name as distinctly as though
I was directly underneath her stern.
(Man) Pull out your gun!
(Men shouting)
The assault begins.
(Narrator) September 1776.
New York city is under fire.
In one hour 2,500 British cannonballs
Smash the Rebel defenses.
4,000 British troops storm Manhattan.
A British redcoat has on average,
Six times more combat experience than a rebel recruit.
(George Washington) Get back in your lines!
Washington’s army collapses.
(Horse neighing)
Hold the line, men!
They retreat along an ancient Native American path
That will become Broadway.
On September 20th.
British occupied New York burns.
No one knows who starts the fire...
But over two days
It destroys 1/4 of the city.
It gives you a sense of the people
Who wanted to be free,
How much they were willing to endure.
The city being burned, the city being occupied.
Gives you a sense of how much they wanted freedom.
Thousands of rebel prisoners of war,
Are thrown into prison ships in New York Harbor.
The most notorious is the HMS Jersey,
Nicknamed "Hell."
One escaped prisoner, Robert Sheffield,
Recorded his ordeal.
(Robert Sheffield) The air was so foul that at times
A lamp could not be kept burning,
By reason of which the bodies were not missed
Until they had been dead ten days.
Nine in ten prisoners die.
There is a memorial over in Brooklyn
To those that died on British prison ships
In New York Harbor.
Thousands of Americans.
12,000 prisoners will die in these ships,
Three times more than are killed in battle.
The loss of New York is Washington's
First defeat as commander in chief.
Facing overwhelming odds
He takes the battle far inland.
In doing so he will revolutionize 18th century warfare.
With new weapons, new rules of engagement.
And a new types of soldiers.
Let's go kill us some redcoats.
By June, a new British Army of 8,000 men
Heads south from loyalist Canada.
They're led by General John Burgoyne.
An aristocrat, politician, and art lover,
One of the best cavalry officers in the British military.
Burgoyne pushes south,
Following the Hudson River.
His army is like a mobile city.
The redcoats are accompanied by 2,000 women,
Including servants and wives.
200 supply wagons
Carry 84 tons of powder and shot,
As well as silver and porcelain tableware
For the officers' meals.
Burgoyne's plan is simple.
He's traveling from St. John's in Canada
270 km. south to Saratoga,
Deep in the interior of the New York Colony.
From here he'll link up with the victorious British Army
In New York City,
Cutting the colonies into two.
But from the outset
They are going to advance is forked with difficulties.
The problem is they're in..what we might call,
A counterinsurgency kind of campaign,
Where their passage through the land
And the offense that they give to farmers
Creates enemies wherever they go.
Washington now turns to tactics almost unheard of in Europe.
Guerrilla warfare
And men whose skills were learnt on the frontier.
So this army came together--
An army of militia, an army of woodsmen,
An army of sharpshooters,
And we didn't play by the rules.
British redcoats are trained for open battlefields.
Now they face Rebel sharpshooters
Hidden in dense cover.
Leading them, Daniel Morgan.
Appointed by Washington as the colonel of an elite corps of 500 riflemen.
(Richard M.) He was a self-made man
And he was a although not educated at a great school,
Was a smart guy, was a tough guy,
And was ready and willing
To step up when the time called.
He was the perfect guy to show up at the perfect time.
Burgoyne's route takes him through dense forest
Trees once intended to build British ships...
Now become Rebel roadblocks.
The British become sitting ducks.
Their advance slows to just over a km. in a half a day.
The march south is a six-week ordeal.
But the sharpshooters have more than a terrain on their side.
Morgan's men are armed with American long rifles.
Lightweight,
With a slender barrel at least 40 inches long
They fire a 50-caliber shot a half-inch wide.
Based on a German hunting weapon,
The guns have a unique innovation.
Grooves inside the barrel that spin the shot,
Stabilizing it, giving it deadly accuracy.
Armed with this rifle,
A patriot marksman can hit a target
250 yards away,
Twice the range of the British muskets.
(Screaming)
Morgan first takes out Burgoyne's Native American scouts.
400 have allied themselves with the British
To preserve their ancestral lands.
But Morgan and his men now use
Traditional Native American tactics against them.
They attack using speed, stealth,
And surprise.
After three months all the scouts are either dead or deserted.
With them goes their knowledge of the terrain.
The Rebels now train their sights on new targets.
Adapting tactics that will rewrite the rules of war.
(Narrator) 1777.
As the American War of Independence
And is it second year.
New York and many parts of the 13 colonies
Are in British hands.
Driven into the wilderness.
The Rebels now target General John Burgoyne’s army.
His men are under fire from rebel sharpshooters,
Using new and controversial tactics.
(Screaming)
The two armies meet near Saratoga.
Here the Rebels break the rules of 18th-century warfare
And start targeting British officers.
The plan: Leave the foot soldiers leaderless.
Your officer is tended to be your most educated guy.
They understood the communications line,
They understood exactly what the orders were.
They were the source of trying to get
Something done on a battle space.
In Britain's 53rd regiment,
All but one of its 11 officers are killed or wounded.
(Horse neighing)
The British are forced on the defensive.
They regroup under General Simon Fraser.
Who leads the counterattack.
Daniel Morgan,
Commander of the sharpshooters acts fast.
Shimmy on up that tree
And take out the redcoat on his high horse.
His best marksman is an illiterate frontiersman
From Ireland, Tim Murphy.
His first shot misses.
This left.
The second skims Fraser's horse.
Too high! Reload!
Come on, take him out!
The third shot is fatal.
(Richard S.) You could argue
That whoever fired the bullet
That took out Simon Fraser
Did as much as any Founding Father
To establish American independence.
Without leadership, the British lose 1,000 men.
Twice as many as the rebels.
On 17th October, 1777,
General Burgoyne surrenders.
It's a turning point.
The victory persuades Britain's greatest rival,
France, to join the war on America's side.
The French Navy will now force the British
To fight a war on two fronts,
Land and sea.
But as winter closes in,
Washington's army must faces greatest challenge.
At a place called Valley Forge in Pennsylvania.
In freezing temperatures,
His men build 900 huts in just 40 days.
But they are woefully --------
(Newt) He has an army of 14,000 men
And no houses,
And the Continental Congress has failed to
Provide him with resources,
And by willpower, by courage,
By leadership, by cajoling,
He has to hold the army together
In the middle of a terrible winter.
Joseph Plumb Martin,
Veteran of The Battle of New York,
Makes it to Valley Forge.
It's a desolate place.
(Plumb Martin) We are now in a truly forlorn condition.
No clothing, no provisions
And as disheartened as can be.
Our prospect is indeed dreary.
(Man) All right, soldier.
This is gonna hurt a bit, all right?
You just grit your teeth.
Surgeon Albigence Waldo
Watches Washington's army head toward crisis.
(Albigence Waldo) The army, which has been surprisingly healthy,
Now begins to grow sickly from the fatigues
They have suffered from this campaign.
If we don't keep this clean,
You're gonna be right back in here.
1/5 of the soldiers have no shoes.
With little clean water,
Dysentery spreads through the camp.
Within weeks, 2,000 men are sick
And they run out of meat.
Down to their last 25 barrels of flour,
The men survive on "Fire cake,"
A mixture of flour and water.
As many as 60% of recruits are convicts,
Freed slaves and immigrants.
Keeping this unruly army together,
Becomes the defining test of Washington's leadership.
(Colin) What he had was a confidence
That if you want freedom,
This is what it's gonna take.
It's gonna take sacrifice, it's gonna take blood.
It's gonna take cold winters at Valley Forge.
It's gonna take losses.
(William Bodette) General Washington, he was a great general,
To be able to uplift his army during Valley Forge
During that winter and still be able to fight.
I wish I would have been there,
I wish I could have fought for him,
Because I damn sure would have.
But Washington's army faces an enemy more lethal,
Than the freezing cold of the British.
Smallpox.
The revolution coincides with the worst smallpox epidemic in US history.
The deadly airborne virus
Spreads through the British prison ships.
Isolated from the disease for generations,
The American colonists have little resistance to it.
And there's no cure.
Victims break out in blisters and sores.
The virus spreads through the blood,
Invading healthy cells, which it kills,
Producing more of the virus in the process.
Four in ten victims die.
Once smallpox arrives at Valley Forge,
It rapidly spreads through the cramped huts.
Having survived smallpox as a child Washington,
Has decided to take a gamble...
With one of the most daring experiments
In US military history.
His surgeons have learned about inoculation
From African slaves.
They harvest pus from a smallpox victim...
... and smear the live virus
Into cuts on the skin of a healthy patient.
The inoculation spreads the infection,
But at a slower rate.
A week after exposure,
The victim's white blood cells create antibodies.
These attack and kill the virus before the disease can spread.
But it's a dangerous race against time.
To survive, the patient's immune system
Must work work faster than the virus,
Or it will run out of control.
One in 50 of those inoculated will die.
But for most Washington's gamble pays off.
New cases of smallpox
Fall from several thousand to just a few dozen.
(Screaming)
But to win the war against the British,
Washington’s inexperienced troops,
Must be transformed into a genuine fighting machine.
A task that calls on an unlikely hero
(Narrator) 1778.
After surviving an outbreak of smallpox at Valley Forge,
The American rebel army welcomes a new recruit.
Washington hopes who will change the course of the war.
Baron von Steuben is an ex-Prussian Army officer,
An elite soldier
Whose career is said to have been ruined
By his homosexuality.
But Washington makes him
One of the most powerful men in his command.
Washington was a genius in taking people in
Who didn't seem like they could achieve great things,
But under him, they rose to the challenge,
They rose to the occasion.
And that's what great leaders do.
Von Steuben's task:
Reinvent the demoralized rebel Army
So they can take on the British in open battle.
(Baron von Steuben) Our arms are in horrible condition,
Covered with rust.
Our men are literally naked,
Some to the fullest extent of the word.
Von Steuben starts by drilling discipline
Into Washington's recruits.
He finds the men unlike any he has trained before.
(Baron von Steuben) The genius of this nation
Is not in the least to be compared with that of
The Prussians or Austrians or French.
You say to your soldier,
"Do this," and he does it.
But here, I am obliged to say,
"This is the reason why you ought to do that,"
And then he does it.
Von Steuben brings order,
Discipline and hygiene to Valley Forge.
He moves latrines away from living quarters,
Rebuilds the kitchens on the opposite side of the camp,
And organizes housing
According to regiments and companies.
He also writes a training manual,
Parts of which are still used in by the US military today.
(Baron Von Steuben) Faster!
Von Steuben's drills European battle tactics
Into an elite corps of 100 men.
(Baron von Steuben) Up, soldier!
Move!
Each will train 100 more.
He also instructs them a new and deadly weapon.
The bayonet will revolutionize how the rebels fight.
Simply adding a dagger to a rifle,
Makes close hand-to-hand combat
Possible without reloading.
But perhaps most important of all
Von Steuben inspires the Rebels,
With a new spirit.
(William Bodette) You know, we can talk about weapons
And how certain weapons change the face of warfare,
Which is absolutely true,
But the greatest weapon that you can ever have
Is right up here.
Men like Plumb Martin leave Valley Forge
Highly skilled killers.
While they retrain,
Another secret war has been raging
In British-occupied New York.
Here, a network of spies has been busy
Passing information to the Rebels.
Their leader is George Washington himself.
(Richard S.) A man who's come down to us in history
As someone who is incapable of telling a lie,
Succeeds as a commander in no small measure
Because of his capacity for deception.
A British general will later claim that Washington
Did not outfight his enemies, but out-spy them.
This secret war comes to ahead when the Rebels` French allies sail toward disaster.
In New York, an estimated 20% of the population
Is still loyal to the British.
The price of goods are up 800%.
One young woman in five is a prostitute.
To the British, New York merchant Robert Townsend
Is a loyalist.
A member of the loyalist militia,
He writes the loyalist press.
But to Washington's spy network,
His code name is "Culper Jr.,"
By July 1781,
New York is buzzing with rumor.
A French fleet has been sighted off Rhode Island.
News leaks out that the British
Plan to send warships from New York
For a surprise attack.
Culper must get word to Washington
To somehow stop the British fleet.
The spies use invisible ink.
An advanced formula unknown to the British,
Made from garlic acid.
It only reveals its contacts when the paper is brushed with iron sulfate.
(Shouting)
The next link in the chain is Austin Roe,
A tavern owner from Long Island.
His contact, Abraham Woodhull,
Picks up the message and buries it at a secret drop.
Another agent, Ann Smith Strong,
Then uses her laundry as a secret code.
It signals a sailor who picks up the message
And takes it to Washington.
Washington responds by moving troops towards New York,
Threatening the city,
Forcing the British fleet to stay put in New York Harbor.
The French fleet sails out of danger.
It will play a critical role
In the next stage of the war.
Now, backed by French Naval Power.
Washington’s army is finally ready to face the British on the open battlefield
Come on!
(Men shouting)
(Narrator) October 1781.
Six years into a war the British
Thought would last six months,
The American Revolution comes to a head
At Yorktown, Virginia.
In trenches around the fortified city,
Plumb Martin, now a sergeant,
Waits with 8,000 other Rebel soldiers
For the signal to attack.
Washington's army has reinvented itself...
With sharpshooters...
Left!
With training,
Discipline
And new weapons...
And with a spy network that has saved the French fleet,
Giving the Rebels dominance at sea.
What remains of the British Army
Is under siege in Yorktown.
Trapped in the city,
The redcoats wait for reinforcements,
But back in Britain, the war is unpopular
And costing far too much money.
This is a case of hanging on
In the face of the-- The British actions
Long enough to where the British literally
Would grow weary of this
And realize that it was endless.
This is Washington's chance to end the war
With one decisive blow.
(Richard M.) He committed to this idea
Of being able to stand on your own.
See, America is a dream,
And the only way to go get that dream
Is to show up
And bring your very best to that moment
And not stop until you bring that dream into existence.
Plumb Martin is to be one of the first over the top.
Godspeed.
How are you doing, my friend?
Good, how are you?
I better check it out.
Behind Yorktown's defenses,
9,000 battle-hardened British troops are waiting.
They're protected by a series of outlying cannon forts
Called redoubts.
By October 14th, just two remain.
If they're captured and their guns turned on Yorktown,
The British will be forced to surrender.
How's it look up there?
It's time.
(Plumb Martin) All the batteries in our line lay silent.
We lay anxiously waiting for the signal.
(Men shouting)
The Rebels race 100 yards to the British lines
Under fire and a hail of hand grenades.
Come on!
A force of 400 breaks through
And storm the British fort.
Fighting in close combat with bayonets,
They beat the redcoats back.
(Plumb Martin) Immediately after the fighting had ceased,
I went out to see what had become of my wounded friend.
He was dead.
34 of Martin's comrades lie dead or wounded.
But they've breached Yorktown's defenses.
Two days later, the British surrender
And begin negotiations for peace.
After six long years of struggle,
The Rebels have achieved the impossible.
The United States is the only country
To win independence from the British in war.
On April 30th, 1789,
Washington is inaugurated
First president of the United States of America
Under the new constitution.
But liberty comes at a price.
Over 25,000 men have lost their lives
in the battle for independence...
But a new nation is born.
(George Washington) We hold these truths to be self-evident,
That all men are created equal,
That they are endowed by their Creator
With certain unalienable Rights,
That among these are Life,
Liberty...
And the pursuit of Happiness.