How Brest Helped America Be Its Best

Rock, Paper, Scissors helped too

The author’s wife, Peggy, and the Castle of Brest

(Editor’s Note: JEP’s foreign correspondent, Bob Wynne, is on assignment in France and filed this dispatch about a surprising little nook and cranny in the history of the American Revolution.)

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By Bob Wynne

BREST, FRANCE — Hamlets and cities with names like Concord, Lexington, Boston, Bunker Hill and Philadelphia are all closely associated by historians with the American Revolutionary War.

The French city of Brest — not so much.

Also slighted by history is the role the child’s game “Rock, Paper, Scissors” played in helping the Continental Army defeat a vastly superior English Army.

To be fair, those same historians have taught us a lot about the Revolutionary War.

For example, we know British troops killed five colonists who were harassing them in what would become known as the Boston Massacre in 1770. Despite the British soldiers involved all standing trial by jury (most were found not guilty or guilty of manslaughter) the incident served to further incense American colonists weary of British rule.

We know that Paul Revere took his midnight ride to Lexington in 1775 to famously warn his fellow Minutemen that “the British are coming!” Fighting the next day claimed the lives of 49 colonists. The British suffered 73 killed.

And later in 1775, Bunker Hill was where the colonists were first bloodied by the British Army in pitched battle, suffering more than 450 troops killed or injured. British causalities were double American losses. In fact, Bunker Hill would be one of the bloodiest battles of the entire war.

(By sad comparison, it’s estimated that 6,800 Americans were killed fighting in the Revolutionary War. World War II American losses totaled nearly 400,000.)

It was during a visit earlier this year to the Castle of Brest in Brittany (built in the 11th century, 700 years before Paul Revere saddled up) that I stumbled on the site of one of the most pivotal events of the American War of Independence.

World War II history buffs will remember the Battle of Brest (known then as Fortress Brest) as one of the most important and bloody battles of the Normandy Campaign.

The Allies were desperate to take control of the port city to resupply their invading forces. Nearly 26,000 tons of material from toothpaste to grenades needed to be transported every day to feed the war machine.

Before the six-week long battle was over, Americans would suffer more than 10,000 casualties battling hardened, dug-in German troops who were ordered to fight until the last bullet by an increasingly desperate and delusional Hitler.

Low on ammunition, food and morale the Germans eventually surrendered, but only after destroying the port’s facilities and its usefulness to the Americans.

What the German and American troops battling for Brest in the late summer of 1944 most likely did not know was that nearly 200 years earlier, 6,000 sailors and soldiers of the French Expeditionary Force, under the command of Marshal Jean-Baptist Donatien de Vimeur Compte de Rochambeau, set sail for America from Brest intent on helping the Continental Army defeat the British. They succeeded.

It was Compte de Rochambeau and his countryman Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de LaFayette (commonly known in the U.S. as Lafayette) who met up in Virginia to assist General George Washington and the Continental Army at the Battle of Yorktown in the fall of 1781.

With the French fleet blockading the harbor and French troops helping American forces to surround British General Lord Charles Cornwallis’ troops, the Redcoats had little choice but to surrender.

With Cornwallis’ defeat, the British lost interest in the costly effort to break the colonists and began peace talks leading to the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

The Battle of Yorktown would be the last campaign of the Revolutionary War. It was decided at least in part by Frenchmen willing to take up arms so that Americans might live free.

That included being free to play the game, “Rock, Paper, Scissors.”

Apparently Compte de Rochambeau was a huge fan of the game and would play for hours at a time while crossing the Atlantic. It is said the game helped him relax and cleared his mind to develop battle plans, successful ones apparently.

Rochambeau, Washington and Cornwallis reportedly played a quick round to determine who would be the last to leave Cornwallis’ tent after the signing of the British surrender.

It is said that Rochambeau won that all-star match — which is why the game, to this day, is still frequently called “Ro-Sham-Bo.”

And why any decent French sailor knows that rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, paper beats rock.