His ferocity at White Plains and Fort Washington reportedly earned him the nickname der Löwe, the lion. If rough-hewn, he was respected as “a born soldier,” in one comrade’s estimation, and as a combat leader. Rall would be caricatured as a drunkard, a martinet, a sybarite, and a military mooncalf, none of which was true. As a soldier of fortune, he had also fought in Turkey and in Russia under Aleksey Grigoryevich Orlov, the reputed killer of Czar Peter III, whose death brought Catherine the Great to the throne. As Wiederholdt observed, “He never could have enough of them.”Ĭolonel Johann Gottlieb Rall had spent thirty-six of his fifty years in uniform, fighting in Bavaria, on the Rhine, and in Holland. The reedy sound of hautboys particularly charmed him. The music often lured the garrison commander from his headquarters in the large frame house west of the street. Michael’s Anglican Church “like a Roman Catholic procession, wanting only the cross and the banner and the chanting choristers,” Lieutenant Andreas Wiederholdt told his diary. As shadows lengthened and the holy night drew near, troops from the duty regiment swung up King Street for the usual changing of the guard at two p.m. Six brass 3-pounders squatted in a neat row outside a guardhouse in the village center, close to the barn where Hessian artillery horses stood harnessed in their stalls, ready for battle at a moment’s notice. Read two excerpts from Chapter 21: The Smiles of Providence, about Colonel Johann Rall’s military leadership and what happened to the three Hessian regiments, stationed at Trenton. As Atkinson’s first volume in the Revolution Trilogy, he presents the first 21 months of the Revolutionary War with insights on British planning from the British perspective. In The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, bestselling author Rick Atkinson characterizes Rall and the formidable forces at Trenton in 1777 in context with military affairs starting with the battles at Lexington and Concord in 1775.

Included among the 900 captured Hessians was a group of oboists (“hautboists”), the favorite entertainment of Colonel Johann Rall, who was described by fellow officers as “an exceptional friend of music” before he was mortally wounded in Trenton, New Jersey, on Dec.

At the Battle of Trenton, General George Washington’s army defeated a force of Hessian troops, German soldiers who fought alongside the British in America.

The british are coming war