Fog swallows Washington's attack; his own columns fire on each other at Germantown
Eight days after the British took Philadelphia, George Washington moved to strike back. On October 4, 1777, he sent four columns converging on William Howe's camp at Germantown in a night march timed for a coordinated dawn assault. A heavy fog rolled in as the fighting began, and two American columns collided in the haze, each mistaking the other for the enemy and opening fire before both broke and ran. Howe's men held, and the Continental Army withdrew, the battle lost.
Germantown failed, but it convinced France that Washington's army could still mount an offensive strike against the main British force barely a week after losing its capital. That argument, made in Paris by Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane alongside news of Saratoga, helped tip French ministers toward the alliance signed the following February, which brought a navy and treasury the Revolution could not otherwise win.
QWhat was Washington using as a makeshift IFF system in the fog and dark?
Continental soldiers were told to stick a piece of white paper into their hats before the march began, a crude way to tell friend from foe once the fighting started in darkness and fog. It was a reasonable precaution for a night march, but it did nothing to stop Anthony Wayne's division and part of Nathanael Greene's late-arriving column from colliding blind in the mist, mistaking each other for redcoats, and opening fire on their own army. Paper hat-markers only worked at close range, and the fog that morning put Wayne's and Greene's men well beyond it. Both units broke and retreated from each other rather than from the British.
QWhy did the two militia columns at Germantown barely matter to the outcome?
Washington's plan sent two militia columns against the British flanks alongside the main Continental wings, but the militia never pressed home an attack. They succeeded only in pulling some British attention away from the center, and made no real territorial or tactical progress before withdrawing from the field entirely. Compare that to the main action, where Sullivan's column actually routed British pickets in sharp fighting and Greene's left-center column threw back the British right. The militia wings were supposed to be two coordinated flank attacks; instead they functioned as little more than a distraction that evaporated once the fog and confusion set in.
QWhat finally forced Sullivan's advancing wing to pull back from deep inside British lines?
Sullivan's column had pushed several hundred yards past Cliveden, further into British-held ground than any other American force that day, when it started running low on ammunition. Hearing cannon fire erupting behind them from the direction they had just come, the men grew dispirited and began to withdraw, uncertain whether their own army was collapsing at their backs. That retreat was what put them on a collision course with Wayne's division in the fog, since both forces were now moving back across the same contested ground from different directions. A column that had broken through British pickets pulled back for want of ammunition and the sound of a fight it could not see.
