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Why the 1775 battle mattered so little-but means so much
On the night of June 16, 1775, a small band of rebel militia from Massachusetts and Connecticut marched quietly from their camp at Cambridge to the hills overlooking Charlestown, Massachusetts. Only a narrow stretch of the Charles River separated these hills from British-occupied Boston; only the impenetrable darkness of the moonless night hid them from the eyes of British sentries posted along the opposite bank of the Charles. And here, right under the redcoats' very noses, the rebels - nearly dead from fatigue, tortured by hunger and thirst - scratched out an improvised, ramshackle little fort with pick and spade in the unyielding, rocky soil. * Their action, supervised by Colonel William Prescott of Massachusetts and Major General Israel Putnam of Connecticut, was intended as an overt challenge to Lieutenant General Thomas Gage and his small British army in Boston. Indeed, the British took it as such. When dawn broke the next morning, revealing the fort on the hill, British warships in and about Boston Harbor responded with a massive bombardment the likes of which had never been seen or heard before in British North America. Hours later, small boats from the fleet ferried a British assault force across the Charles. In the blistering heat of the late afternoon on Saturday, June 17, the redcoats attacked the rebel lines on the heights of Charlestown again and again, ultimately driving the rebels back, but at a ghastly cost in British lives.
Though the fighting centered around a prominence known to locals as Breed's Hill, the clash would become immortalized as the Battle of Bunker Hill, named for Breed's more dominant neighbor. It was an iconic moment, one of the truly enduring images from the story of America's violent birth. Students of the Revolution are undoubtedly more familiar with Saratoga and Yorktown, which were pivotal victories for the colonists. But no other battle in the war can lay claim to as much renown; indeed few battles in American history apart from Gettysburg and D-Day are as familiar.
Yet the plain truth - though it may sound shocking or unpatriotic, even blasphemous - is that the Battle of Bunker Hill wasn't all that important.