Immigrants at Valley Forge saved the American army

Foreign soldiers were equally as important to the survival and ultimate victory of the Continental Army as America’s homegrown officers at Valley Forge. Another of the more enduring myths of the American Revolution is that of the musket-wielding Minuteman blending into a copse of woods and firing into the squared ranks of attacking redcoats. In fact, it was the Continentals’ utter disregard for the linear tactics of what military experts of the era called “fire discipline” that nearly doomed their fight for independence. This discipline, gradually infused into the Continental Army at Valley Forge almost solely by the Prussian volunteer Count Friedrich von Steuben, demanded that infantry battalions on the march be able to change formations while maintaining cohesion and wheel in unison to form battle lines – a concept quite foreign to American units, who tended to march in Indian-file.

Von Steuben was not alone in his contributions at Valley Forge. Much as Washington depended on Lafayette’s sound advice, he relied upon Lafayette’s fellow Frenchman the military engineer General Louis du Portail to erect the defensive parapets that girded Valley Forge and the Polish Count Casimir Pulaski to transform his motley collection of mounted mail riders and scouts into a coherent American cavalry. Pulaski, like scores of other foreigners including the hulking Bavarian volunteer General Johann de Kalb, would ultimately sacrifice their life for the cause of America’s independence.