Munitions Needed

 

By Jared Gould for Minding the Campus

On January 25, 1776, the first of Henry Knox’s artillery pieces began arriving in Framingham, Massachusetts.

They were the forward edge of what Knox called his “Noble Train of Artillery”—nearly sixty tons of cannon, mortars, and howitzers hauled more than three hundred miles from Fort Ticonderoga through the dead of winter. Oxen strained against reinforced sleds. Iron scraped across frozen rivers and rutted mountain roads. The guns did not arrive all at once, but their appearance marked the beginning of the end for the British occupation of Boston.

The mission had begun weeks earlier. On December 5, 1775, Knox reached Fort Ticonderoga to take charge of the artillery captured there the previous spring. Since the fighting at Lexington and Concord, New England militia had contained British forces inside Boston. But containment was not a victory. Without heavy artillery, George Washington could not force the British fleet and army to abandon the city.

Readers of this series will recall that Knox’s assignment was a logistical nightmare. Cannon broke through the river ice and had to be hauled back to the surface. Roads vanished beneath snow or collapsed into gullies. Storms erased days of hard-won gains. Writing to Washington from Fort George on December 17, Knox admitted how close the expedition had come to failure.

Contrary winds and the advancing season, he warned, had made it “very uncertain whether we could have gotten them over until next Spring.” Still, Knox pressed on. “If that should be the case,” he wrote, “I hope in 16 or 17 days to be able to present to your Excellency a Noble train of Artillery.”

Whether resolve or competence carried the day, by late January, Knox’s artillery was in Massachusetts. On January 27, he reported to Washington in Cambridge that the guns had arrived.

Guns gave the Patriots an edge. Only weeks later, they took Dorchester Heights—a ridge the British had failed to secure that commanded Boston Harbor and the city below. On the night of March 4–5, Continental forces seized the high ground and fortified it overnight with Knox’s cannon. By morning, British troops awoke to find artillery aimed at their army and fleet. Soon after, they evacuated Boston by sea.

It is often the bold attacks that people remember as having secured Patriot victory in the American Revolution. But it was the duller work that proved decisive: building and sustaining a supply line.

Those duller moments deserve more attention, because Americans today are poorly equipped to handle disruption—any disruption. When a winter storm threatens, grocery store shelves empty almost immediately. Bottled water, canned food, batteries, and firewood are stripped bare by those who can get there first. People do this because they know shortages arrive faster than relief.

National defense works the same way, only at a far greater scale. Whether the United States could assemble a Noble Train of Artillery today is uncertain. For decades, America has drawn down its stockpiles of basic munitions and delayed rebuilding them. Years of sustained commitments to so-called allies have further thinned reserves. At the same time, billions in defense spending are lost to fraud, waste, and overcharges—the Pentagon has ensured it has enough toilet paper.

Knox understood that strength cannot be improvised. Washington needed guns, and Knox brought them.

We need a Knox now.

Art by Beck & Stone