The French and American forces’ attack on the English redoubts 9 and 10 represented the turning point of the Siege of Yorktown. With the capture of these defences the English were completely surrounded on their last line of defense. The second trench, formerly under the protection of the two redoubts, was thus secured. TThe artillery troops could then reach their targets inside the enemy entrenchments at will. The officers in charge of the French attack on redoubt 9 — Baron Vioménil, Guillaume de Deux-Ponts, and Baron de Lestrade — displayed courage that was recognized by everyone. The operation was an undisputed success. Guillaume de Deux-Ponts gave a moving account of this attack: “With troops so good, so brave, and so disciplined as those that I have had the honor to lead against the enemy, one can undertake anything, and be sure of succeeding, if the impossibility of it has not been proved. I owe them the happiest day of my life, and certainly the recollection of it will never be effaced from my mind.”1 Flohr is the only one who painted a bleak picture of this attack, as he evoked a fratricidal combat between the different French units: “The soldiers were so unrelenting against one another that our own men killed one another. The French lashed out at all men wearing a blue uniform and ran them through with their bayonets. But the Deux-Ponts regiment was also wearing blue, this is why many of its soldiers were killed” (diary page 111). How could these troops, so exemplary according to Guillaume de Deux-Ponts, have remained so even under the conditions of the attack?

Robert A. Selig, a historian with the National Park Service,2 published an article entitled “Storming the Redoubts”3 that is so similar to Flohr's account as to challenge the other versions of the attack given in the officers’ diaries. The arguments in this article were reused in a book by Jerome A. Greene called The Guns of Independence, The Siege of Yorktown 1781.4 It presents itself as the benchmark, the most complete study on the Siege of Yorktown, based on the most recent discoveries, among which Flohr’s account. In the preface, Robert A. Selig is presented as “the researcher who found and first used Flohr’s recollections to advantage”.5Jerome Greene takes into account the possibility of a fratricidal combat to explain the fact that the number of losses in the French ranks were larger than those among the American troops in charge of redoubt 10, as well as during the head-on attacks of the French forces during the Siege. Jerome Green also cites Selig who imagines that this episode was disregarded deliberately, because“ if widely known, it would have greatly damaged the image of the professional soldier that the French were anxious to maintain”.6 According to Selig, a true conspiracy of silence prevented the truth from breaking out. The French officers in charge of the attack, as well as the grenadiers and the chasseurs who participated, deliberately hid from their contemporaries, comrades, but also from the readers of their future memoirs or diaries, the fact that soldiers from the Gâtinais regiment killed some of their own in the Royal-Deux-Ponts as much out of heedlessness as of fury or excitement to the point that “the redoubt was strewn with the dead and wounded, so much that we had to walk on them” (diary page 112). In Guns of Independence, the author remains cautious and recognizes that such a scenario could explain the largest number of dead and wounded of the entire siege.7

Since the publication of Jerome Greene’s book in 2005, a webpage entitled “Flohr’s Invention: a revisionist Account of the French Assault on Redoubt 9, Yorktown, 14 October 1781”, which is accessible on the site xenophongroup.com, has taken up the question in a very analytical and well-argued way. Its members hunt down the “bad historians” online.8 The following arguments have been put forth. First, the assertion that “the French lashed out at all men wearing a blue uniform” rests on an understanding of the attack that is not logical. The Gâtinais regiment actually preceded the Royal Deux-Ponts in the immediate man-to-man attack of the redoubt, which lasted about ten minutes. In his account, Florh does not mention the regiments’ actions when faced with the enemies, the English and the German mercenaries from Hesse and Ansbach. So what reasons did the Gâtinais soldiers have for attacking those from the Royal Deux-Ponts, who were behind them, with bayonets, whereas the enemies were in front? The second argument is based on statistics. The Gâtinais regiment that entered the redoubt first suffered more losses than the Royal Deux-Ponts. Thirdly, the conditions described by Flohr at the start of this fratricidal combat must be taken into account: darkness, “the relentless fight against one another”. Only the French from the Gâtinais regiment suffered from this visual handicap, and with tragic consequences. In the account, neither the Royal Deux-Ponts nor the English troops seem to have been affected by the darkness. Flohr does indicate thereafter that the English bombarded the redoubt that the French troops fought hard to take, but only after the fratricidal combat, and that the ground was strewn with bodies. Flohr specifies that because of this bombardment “we had to endure great suffering” (diary page 112) without giving any more details. Was this bombardment so ineffective? Flohr seems more inclined to attribute the number of casualties to the combat between the French and the Germans than to the English defense or the bombardment that followed the attack. The last of these arguments is certainly the most convincing. The author of the webpage quite rightly challenges the status of Flohr’s eye-witness account, and thus his personal participation in the attack of redoubt 9.

This account must be situated within the whole of the war account produced by Flohr, something the author of this text was not able to do. But, as is indicated in the very title of his work, Flohr wrote the “Description of the Land and Sea Expedition in America of the Acclaimed Deux-Ponts Regiment”. He almost consistently used the first person plural in his account of events, in contrast to other war memoirs, such as for example that written by Joseph Plumb Martin, another participant of the Siege of Yorktown. The pronoun "we" is repeatedly used in the manuscript as much to mention actions in which Flohr participated (for example:“On the 6th, we set off again for 14 miles to Wilmington”, page 72) as for episodes where he was not there. This is particularly obvious when Flohr describes how a Royal Deux-Ponts military group was captured at sea by an English ship, and imprisoned on the island of Jamaica (pages 274-281) using this omnipresent “we” even though he had been in Venezuela for several weeks. On the other hand, he uses the first person singular to tell several anecdotes that happened to him personally (“There is also a species of tree here which makes one swell up as much as the skin will allow (...) which I myself saw and was affected by”, page 268. The account of the capture of redoubt 9 is cast in the same mold, it is most likely an anecdote that Flohr integrated into his narration with claims to giving exhaustive detail. If Flohr had really participated in this famous and glorious attack, why would he not have told of this crucial moment in his campaign in the first person as he did in other places?

A second element can confirm that Flohr was not an eye witness to the events on the night of October 14, 1781. As he himself puts it, the grenadiers and chasseurs of the Gâtinais and Royal Deux-Ponts regiments were chosen for the attack on the redoubt, yet on page 75 Flohr mentions: “That day, at noon, the order was given to the grenadiers and Chasseurs of the Royal Deux-Ponts and Gâtinais regiments that they were to assemble, in the evening, on the right wing near the entrance to the trenches on the American side. In the evening they did indeed assemble on the right wing as the order had been given” (page 103). “They did assemble” and not “we did assemble”. Then on the subject of the reward for the attack (page 112): “After our return to France, Count Christian de Deux-Ponts, Colonel of the regiment, asked the Court once more for the permission to have the regiment preceded, when it was marching, by this mortar that they had won during such a perilous assault, which was graciously granted.” The author does not clearly include himself in the group of attackers. Still more clues are scattered throughout the text, for example, earlier in the narrative, on September 7 Flohr notes on page 72 that “we set off again for 12 miles to Head-of-Elk, a small town on the banks of a beautiful river with intense traffic called Elk. There all the grenadiers and Chasseurs of the army boarded ship to go to Jamestown then to Williamsburg”, but he does not specify whether he boarded with them. It is the same thing further down in the narrative, on page 207: “Upon our arrival we were boarded on ships. The grenadiers, Chasseurs, as well as the largest company of riflemen were boarded on the war ship The Brave. The other companies, on a ship christened L’Isle de France”. Flohr did not board The Brave, but Ile de France. Flohr was a mere rifleman, and given his status, he could not have participated in the attack of redoubt 9. Thus it seems that the first readers of Flohr’s manuscript wrongly judged the “we”, referring throughout the account to a changing collective entity, as being sufficient proof to give Flohr the status of eye-witness to an event that he did not experience but that he reported. Reading Flohr’s text too quickly means perhaps missing one of the major characteristics of Flohr’s diary: the fact that it is an expression of collective memory.9

If Flohr was not present at the event, but only heard mention of it, what he reported is not entirely incorrect. In his first published article devoted to Flohr, Robert A. Selig notes: “On April 22, 1780, he transferred to the elite company of chasseurs under Captain Christian Ludwig Phillip von Sundal.”10 The 1995 article by the same author uses this information again,11 which this time is much more useful as it gives proof of Flohr’s presence during the attack. Yet the regiment registers very clearly indicate that Flohr left the army in August 1784 as a rifleman.12 At that time he left the company called “de Sundahl”, after the name of its captain. It was the fourth company of the first battalion. Sundahl was head of this company on a list dated June 26, 1783. Yet, according to Tröss, Flohr was part of the Von Böse company when he entered the regiment. Yet Von Böse does not appear on the list from June 26, 1783. Thus, it is quite likely that Captain Sundhal replaced Von Böse as head of the 4th company between 1775 and 1780 rather than Flohr was transferred to a supposed elite company, the company of Chasseurs which was, for that matter, a distinct company. Considering these elements, what are the sources that allowed Selig to give Flohr the status of Chasseur and thereby that of eye witness?

According to the Society of the Cincinnati of France webpage (the French branch of the former officers’ organization created by George Washington on September 3, 1783), the “1995 critic” — i.e. Selig, who is not named — is judged guilty of “having gone so far as to invent Flohr's transfer to the Chasseurs, and even giving a date”. The summary of the controversy reviews certain arguments from the Xenophongroup web page. However, the goal of this page is different, and according to its author: “The capture of redoubt 9 has become the focus of a local community lobby committed to proving the decisive role of a few soldiers of German origin in the victory of Yorktown. Its aim is to forge a more positive image, in the history of the struggle for independence in the United States, than that of the Hessians for a nation-state that did not yet exist at that time”. As such, the promotion of Flohr’s account on the subject of the fratricidal combat can not be found in one academic publication only, but at the very site of redoubt 9, on the historic site of the Battle of Yorktown. The few lines taken from Flohr’s diary even appear on an explanatory sign “offered to the National Park Service by a generous donor.”13 At the time this notice was put up, a ceremony organized in honor of the “German regiment of Zweybrücken” had been taking place before redoubt 9 since 2006, a ceremony in which the Mayor of the city of Zweybrücken had already participated and to which the French delegation was not invited. To this, the Society of the Cincinnati of France, associated with the Souvenir Français, an association that maintains the memory of fallen soldiers, responded by organizing a counter-celebration for the attack of redoubt 9. Moreover, the society asked the National Park Service to remove certain passages from the notice which, according to these organizations, “give recognition to another country for an achievement that is entirely French”. This debate, which currently has had no further development due to a lack of serious research, nonetheless reveals some of the issues raised by Flohr’s manuscript. This document, whose significance remains little known, cannot be considered on the sole basis of this short passage, nor reduced to this simple function. The readers of its transcription or its translation will see for themselves.