Re:[OT] AWI Mercs

From: "John Atkinson" <johnmatkinson@yahoo.com>
> The Hessians employed by the
> British were of questionable reliability.  Many
> (Most?) of them ended up settling in the US with
> American women.

Dietmar Kügler, in his Book "Die deutschen Truppen im amerikanischen
Unabhängigkeitskrieg 1775-1783" (The German troops in the AWI),
Stiuttgart:
Motorbuch Verlag 1998, ISBN 3-87943-738-6 looks at those troops in
considerable detail. Apparently, records had been kept with Teutonic
thouroughness ;-)

Of the 29,867 men sent out, 17,313 returned home. About 8,000 were
killed,
some 5,000 stayed in the States - some uncertainty due to missing
soldiers
etc.

> Of course, that's because they were
> not getting any extra pay--

The men were quite decently paid. They sent home 591,000 Talers to their
families, and many returned home with - for commoners - comfortable
sums.

> the blood money for those
> regiments went to line the pockets of the (insert
> correct title here, Elector?	Duke? Prince?) of Hesse.

All of the above. The British hired troops from 6 different petty states
;-)

The different rulers used the money for different purposes. Braunschweig
paid off its debts, Anhalt-Zerbst and Ansbach-Bayreuth squandered it.
The
others invested it mostly in public works to improve their
infrastructure.

BTW, some 25% of the French troops supporting the revolution were of
German
origin, too. This includes mercenary units such as the "Regiment
Allemand
des Deux-Ponts" (Zweibrücken) and a bataillon of Trier Grenadiers.

A number of German officers, from Steuben down, served with the
Americans,
and could equally be called mercenaries.
Plus, many Germans wo had settled in America before the war fought for
the
rebels, often in distinct units, thigh here the term is hardly
appropiate.

Greetings
Karl Heinz