Coup de Grasse

DECISION AT THE CHESAPEAKE by Harold A. Larrabee. 317 pages. Clarkson N. Potter. $5.

At the time, no one grasped what had happened on that September day in 1781. George III called it "a drawn battle." To Rear Admiral Thomas Graves, who flubbed the encounter, it was "a lively skirmish"; to his second in command, Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Hood, "a feeble action"; to George Washington, its greatest beneficiary, "a partial engagement." There is not even agreement on its name. Says Author Larrabee: "You will find it called the Battle of the Chesapeake, of Chesapeake Bay, of Lynnhaven Bay, of Cape Henry, and of the Capes of Virginia." To this day not many Americans have heard of it. Yet the Battle of the Virginia Capes, as it is officially called by the U.S. Office of Naval History, was one of the decisive engagements in the history of warfare. It determined the outcome of the American Revolution.

Harold Larrabee, 69, who has taken to history since retirement from teaching philosophy, has a logical explanation for its obscurity. "Everyone concerned," he points out, "had motives for wanting to forget it. The British did not want to call to mind their egregious blunders. Only seven months later the French admiral who defeated them was thought to have disgraced himself. Americans have been understandably reluctant to face up to the fact that their status as a nation was decided by an engagement at which no Americans were present."

"The Pivot." The battle lines for the Capes were sketched while George Washington was encamped in the Hudson Valley in even direr distress than at Valley Forge. Lord Cornwallis had taken Charleston and was moving up to fortify Yorktown.

As Washington recognized in 1780, command of the sea "was the pivot upon which everything turned." The British had that superiority, at least on paper. But the Royal Navy was rotten at the core. Its political admirals, mercilessly vignetted by Larrabee, were boneheads or worse.

The principal architect of defeat, suggests Larrabee, is the man who wasn't there: Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney. A gambler, always in debt, he had enough ships in the West Indies in 1781 to retain command of the /western Atlantic. But first he went off on an orgy of legalized piracy to seize and loot the rich little Dutch colony of St. Eustatius. Then, complaining that he was suffering from "the gout and the gravel," he sailed back to England in the luxury of one of his biggest ships.

Hide & Seek. Rodney had misjudged both the skill and the intentions of an adversary who had just reached the Indies: Francois Joseph Paul, Comte de Grasse, Louis XVI's "lieutenant general of the naval army" (equivalent to rear admiral). De Grasse, who stood 6 ft. 2 in. and looked 6 ft. 6 in. on days of battle, had prepared for his finest hour by getting captured by the British when he was 25. From Washington, Lafayette and Rochambeau went a stream of messages to De Grasse, urging him to assert Franco-American naval supremacy somewhere along the coast. Washington favored New York, to clip General Clinton; Rochambeau favored the Chesapeake, to complete the investment of Cornwallis at Yorktown.

It fell to Rear Admiral Hood, as Rodney's successor, to block De Grasse. But the Frenchman daringly took his fleet the long way around, through the treacherous Bahama channels, on his way to the Chesapeake. Hood sailed a shorter rhumb-line course, missed De Grasse, saw nothing amiss at the Chesapeake and went on to New York. There he fell under the command of Thomas Graves, who happened to be his senior.

Belatedly, the combined Graves-Hood fleet of 19 ships of the line looked into the mouth of the Chesapeake on the morning of Sept. 5, 1781, and saw there a forest of masts. They were De Grasse's. Though outnumbered and outgunned by the 24 French ships, the British still had a huge advantage: they had sea room in which to maneuver and a fair wind.

Graves's Minuet. De Grasse had to weigh anchor hurriedly and beat out through a pass then only three miles wide. If Graves had been a Drake or a Nelson, he would have swooped in close and raked each French ship in turn, "crossing the T" as their line came out. But Graves obeyed the admiralty's standing orders. As though in a minuet, he gave De Grasse time and room to get his ships out in the open, then ponderously moved to engage them, ship by ship. Even worse, he simultaneously flew two signals giving contradictory orders for maneuvering.

After little more than three hours of smoky but unspectacular gunnery, the fleets drifted apart. No ship on either side had been sunk, though three of the British had been badly damaged and one was later scuttled. Casualties were moderate and remarkably equal. But the French sailed back into the Chesapeake and held it.

For Cornwallis, cut off from all hope of relief, the battle proved the coup de Grasse. Six weeks later, he surrendered. Today, Larrabee notes, there are few memorials of American gratitude to De Grasse; it took 100 years to raise a statue of the Frenchman at Yorktown. The British, on the other hand, gave a peerage and a fat pension to Graves. After all, he had lost no battle, no ships--"he had merely lost America."

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