Decisive Day: The Battle for Bunker Hill

Richard M. Ketchum

Aug 2014 · Macmillan + ORM

About this ebook

Richard M. Ketchum recounts the early developments of the American Revolution in Decisive Day: The Battle for Bunker Hill.

Boston, 1775: A town occupied by General Thomas Gage's redcoats and groaning with Tory refugees from the Massachusetts countryside. Besieged for two months by a rabble in arms, the British decided to break out of town. American spies discovered their plans, and on the night of June 16, 1775, a thousand rebels marched out onto Charlestown peninsula and began digging a redoubt (not on Bunker Hill, which they had been ordered to fortify, but on Breeds Hill, well within cannon shot of the British batteries and ships). At daybreak, HMS Lively began firing.

It was the opening round of a battle that saw unbelievable heroism and tragic blunders on both sides (a battle that marked a point of no return for England and her colonies), the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

About the author

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Richard M. Ketchum (1922-2012) graduated from Yale University and commanded a subchaser in the South Atlantic during World War II. As director of book publishing at American Heritage Publishing Company for twenty years, he edited many of that firm's volumes, including The American Heritage Book of the Revolution and The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, which received a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation. Ketchum was the cofounder and editor of Blair & Ketchum's Country Journal, a monthly magazine about rural life. He and his wife lived on a sheep farm in Vermont. He is the author of the Revolutionary War classics Decisive Day and The Winter Soldiers.