Washington Wept Here

BATTLE FOR MANHATTAN (128 pp.) --Bruce Bliven Jr.--Holt ($3.50).

Bruce Bliven Jr. is a veteran of the Normandy invasion who fell to wondering after his return to Manhattan if it had happened that way at home. He ended up writing the almost-forgotten story of how indeed it had. The two-day "battle for Manhattan" is not the most glorious chapter in U.S. history. But as Author (The Wonderful Writing Machine) Bliven has pieced it together, with the help of period prints and maps showing the fighting in terms of today's streets and landmarks, his compact and lively book may be just the handy companion for cliff-dwelling strollers ready to look for history under the sidewalks of New York.

Defend America? One hot morning just 180 years ago, Britain's General Sir William Howe, having taken Brooklyn with "the largest expeditionary force Great Britain had ever assembled" (32,000 men, 200 ships), sent his redcoats across the East River to a landing at Kip's Bay (34th Street). Under the massed fire of 86 naval cannon, the Connecticut farm-boy defenders ran for their lives. General George Washington, taken by surprise, galloped down from his headquarters at the northern end of the island (now Coogan's Bluff, overlooking the Polo Grounds). "Take the wall," he shouted. "Take the cornfield." When the militiamen rushed unheeding past him, according to some accounts, he wept, hurled his hat to the ground and roared, "Are these the men with which I am to defend America?" Then for a long time he sat on his horse in a daze, so that the British troopers advancing north from Murray Hill would have been on him had not an aide taken his horse's bridle and led the general away.

So disgraceful was the rout that General Howe could easily have pushed west to the Hudson, cut off the half of Washington's forces still posted at the lower end of the island, and, says Bliven, "the chances were that he would have won the war then and there." But pleasure-loving General Howe stopped for "cakes and Madeira" at Mrs. Murray's on Murray Hill. Washington's men got safely away to Harlem Heights with the loss of only about 50 casualties and 300 prisoners, and the next morning fresh Ranger scouts, led by Lieut. Colonel Thomas Knowlton of Bunker Hill fame, started up the action again around the Jones farmhouse (near Riverside Drive and 106th Street).

Not Worth Defending? Feeling a desperate need for some sort of morale-saving fight, Washington quickly sent two small forces of Rhode Islanders, Virginians and Connecticut Rangers south across the Hollow Way (approximately 125th Street), and soon a brisk tussle started for possession of a buckwheat field atop the heights on which Columbia University and Riverside Church now stand. Though Knowlton (after saying, "I do not value my life if we do but get the day") fell mortally wounded, the Continentals fought their way out of the rocks and for the first time "had the pleasure of seeing the backs of British uniforms." "Hurrah," shouted the Yanks as the British broke off action and left the field.

"This little advantage has inspirited our troops prodigiously," wrote Washington. But in spite of this setback the powerful British force soon drove Washington out of the city that General Nathanael Greene had called too Tory to be worth defending. Only after seven years of bitter defeats and hard fighting elsewhere was New York to regain in the peace of 1783 the freedom so quickly lost in the only battle test of its history.

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