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was a thirty-three-year-old general, George Augustus, Viscount Howe. British prime minister William Pitt had made him second-in-command of the force advancing on Fort Ticonderoga in 1758, under Major General George Abercromby, an older and much more traditional officer. Pitt teamed them because Howe “had all the vigor, youth, and dash that Abercromby lacked.” 9 Lord Howe was completely taken with the idea of an army replete with irregulars. He often went about in ranger garb, accompanying advanced patrols and joining in the thick of the fight. In one action, however, as his forces were reconnoitering in the vicinity of a small French detachment near Ticonderoga (Fort Carillon to the French), Lord Howe was shot dead in a confused firefight. Abercromby, his command no longer enlivened by Howe’s presence, soon led his army—which outnumbered the French by about four to one—in a disastrous frontal assault that cost nearly two thousand dead and wounded in a single day.
    This marked the low point of the war for Rogers and his rangers. After all his efforts to forge truly elite units—which two centuries later would become the model for the formal establishment of U.S. special operations forces—the command establishment had insisted on using them as cannon fodder in a fruitless frontal assault against a strongly fortified position. And so, as the 1758 campaigning season came to a close, there were few hopeful signs that the war against the French could be won.
    But it turned out that Lord Howe was not the only British general to appreciate the need to develop greater capacities for waging irregular warfare. Others began to call for rangers as the need to counter the terror raids on English frontier settlements soon grew critical. For the French strategy early in the war of complementing their mannered conventional operations with a relentless irregular campaign was soon ratcheted up. Indeed, one of Montcalm’s aides-de-camp, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville—better known to us today for his achievements as a scholar and explorer—went along with the raiders on one attack and was appalled by what he saw. As he put it in his JOURNAL shortly after the Indian raid he witnessed:
The ferocity and insolence of these black-souled barbarians makes one shudder. It is an abominable kind of war. The air one breathes is contagious of insensibility and hardness. 10
    If even French officers responsible for conducting such a campaign were horrified by it, the British sense of urgency should come as no surprise. At the start of the war there had been but one company of rangers, a few hundred soldiers. By the next year there were seven. All were under the command of Robert Rogers, and all had gone through his “ranging school.” More were to come, as by war’s end there would be ten companies all told. Selected Redcoats too would study ranger tactics, the hope being that they would learn these new ways and take them back to their own regiments, spreading bush-fighting skills throughout the army. Thus the true genius of Rogers may have been made manifest in his role as educator and trainer.
    Yet he must be given high marks also for seeing the many and diverse roles that his rangers could play in the field. Yes, they improved frontier defenses and deterred terror raids by paying French-aligned Indians back in kind with offense-minded punitive actions. And just as Native Americans acted as sensors for columns of French regulars moving through the wilderness, so too the rangers served as eyes and ears for the British and colonial conventional forces. But beyond these functions the rangers also began to undertake commando-style field operations in support of various campaigns.
    They did this first in assisting amphibious operations in 1758 against Louisburg, a great island fortress and naval base that commanded the approaches to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In 1759 it was rangers who found the path up the cliffs and spearheaded the advance from