11 May 2021 Two hundred and forty-five years ago, the fate of Washington’s army—in fact, the fate of the entire Revolution—lay on the muscled shoulders of the fishermen and sailors of the Marblehead Regiment. A remarkable amphibious evacuation including a miraculous fog would create one of the greatest escapes in military history. On August 27, 1776, the Americans had lost several significant engagements in Brooklyn. The British and Hessians had Washington’s army trapped with their backs to the East River, and it looked like the Revolution might end just weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The evacuation was set up two days earlier by an epic stand, an American Thermopylae, which initially saved Washington’s army from the British onslaught. An audacious, suicidal charge by a regiment of Marylanders, known as Washington’s Immortals, bought Washington’s army a precious hour. Had the Marylanders not made their stand and General Howe, the British commander, pressed the attack on the American forts in Brooklyn Heights that afternoon, all the circumstances would have been aligned for a crushing American defeat.