The largest battle of the entire Revolutionary War. Howe landed 20,000 British and Hessian troops on Long Island in a meticulously planned operation. While an American force held Brooklyn Heights, Howe sent Clinton on a night march through unguarded Jamaica Pass to strike the American left from behind. The encircled American units were destroyed or captured. Only desperate rearguard fighting by Maryland and Delaware troops — 'The Four Hundred' — bought time. On the night of August 29, Washington secretly evacuated 9,000 men across the East River to Manhattan, using every available boat in a thick fog.
Washington's army survived only by luck and a providential fog. The battle exposed fatal weaknesses in American generalship and coordination. The miraculous evacuation — arguably more important than the battle itself — preserved the Continental Army to fight on. Without it, the Revolution might have ended in 1776.
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On a single day the IRA struck two devastating blows. At Narrow Water near Warrenpoint, a double roadside-bomb ambush killed eighteen British soldiers — the Army's worst loss of the Troubles — catching the survivors of the first blast with a second. Hours earlier, a bomb planted on his boat at Mullaghmore had killed Lord Mountbatten, uncle of Prince Philip and a member of the royal family, along with three others.
The double attack of August 27 was one of the IRA's most spectacular days, demonstrating its reach and ruthlessness — striking both the elite Parachute Regiment and the royal family itself — and it hardened British resolve while shocking the world.
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