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Crossword forge3/20/2023 ![]() Why? Only the highest recommendation would make an impression back home. A letter from America’s diplomats in Paris, Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane, vouched for him and reported that France’s minister of war and foreign minister had done so too.īut Deane and Franklin’s letter also falsely claimed that von Steuben was a lieutenant general and exaggerated his closeness to Frederick the Great-“the greatest public deception ever perpetrated in a good cause,” wrote Thomas Fleming in Washington’s Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge. In September 1777, the disgraced baron sailed from France to volunteer for the Continental Army, bankrolled by a loan from his friend, French playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. So he turned to his next-best prospect: America. The never-proven, anonymously reported rumor destroyed von Steuben’s reputation in Germany. An unknown person there lodged a complaint that von Steuben had “taken liberties with young boys” in his previous job, writes Lockhart. In 1777, he tried to join the army in Baden, but the opportunity fell through in the worst way possible. But Europe’s great armies, mostly at peace, didn’t hire him. Von Steuben, his salary slashed, started looking for a new military job. In 1775, as the American Revolution broke out, von Steuben’s boss, the Hechingen prince, ran out of money. Membership came with a title: Freiherr, meaning “free lord,” or baron. In 1769, the prince of nearby Baden named him to the chivalric Order of Fidelity. Forced to reinvent himself, von Steuben spent 11 years as court chamberlain in Hohenzollern-Hechingen, a tiny German principality. But a vindictive rival schemed against him, and he was dismissed from the army during a 1763 peacetime downsizing. Von Steuben spent 17 years in the Prussian army, fought in battles against Austria and Russia during the Seven Years’ War, became a captain, and attended Prussian king Frederick the Great’s elite staff school. “Its greatness came from its professionalism, its hardiness, and the machine-like precision with which it could maneuver on the battlefield,” wrote Paul Lockhart in his 2008 biography of von Steuben, The Drillmaster of Valley Forge. Enlisting around age 16, von Steuben rose to the rank of lieutenant and learned the discipline that made the Prussian army the best in Europe. “ Steuben’s ability to bring this army the kind of training and understanding of tactics that made them able to stand toe to toe with the British,” he says.īorn into a military family in 1730-at first, his last name was the non-noble Steuben-he was 14 when he watched his father direct Prussian engineers in the 1744 siege of Prague. Ferreiro considers von Steuben the most important of all the volunteers from overseas who flocked to America to join the Revolution. “They went from a ragtag collection of militias to a professional force,” says Larrie Ferreiro, whose recent book, Brothers at Arms, tells the story of foreign support for the American Revolution. In less than two months in spring 1778, von Steuben rallied the battered, ill-clothed, near-starving army. His keen military mind and charismatic leadership led George Washington to name him the Continental Army’s acting inspector general soon after his arrival at its camp in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. A decade past his service as a captain in the Prussian army, von Steuben, 47, filled his letters home with tall tales about his glorious reception in America. Von Steuben had never been a general, despite the claim of the supporters who recommended him. “The trappings of his horse, the enormous holsters of his pistols, his large size, and his strikingly martial aspect, all seemed to favor the idea.” “He seemed to me the perfect personification of Mars,” recalled Ashbel Green years later. To one awestruck 16-year-old private, the tall, portly baron in the long blue cloak was as intimidating as the Roman god of war. And a stranger-former Prussian army officer Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben-was on the scene to restore morale, introduce discipline and whip the tattered soldiers into fighting shape. The Continental Army had just endured a punishing winter at Valley Forge. It was March 19, 1778, almost three years into the Revolutionary War. ![]() When their discipline broke down, he swore at them in German and French, and with his only English curse: “Goddamn!” ![]() He showed them how to march at 75 steps a minute, then 120. He walked among the 100 men in formation at Valley Forge, adjusting their muskets. ![]() “Squad, halt!” he shouted-some of the few English words he knew. The baron wore an eight-pointed silver star on his chest, etched with the word Fidelitas. ![]()
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