1. Battle of Trenton. In the Battle of Trenton, Washington defeated a formidable garrison of Hessian mercenaries before withdrawing. A week later he returned to Trenton to lure British forces south, then executed a daring night march to capture Princeton on January 3rd.
2. The Battle of Saratoga. The Battle of Saratoga occurred in September and October, 1777, during the second year of the American Revolution. It included two crucial battles, fought eighteen days apart, and was a decisive victory for the Continental Army and a crucial turning point in the Revolutionary War.
3. The Arrival of Adm. DeGrasse’s Fleet. Washington had long planned to assault the main British force occupying New York City, but French Gen. Rochambeau felt it was a foolhardy plan. Instead he convinced French Adm. DeGrasse to bring his fleet to the Chesapeake. Once Washington received news that DeGrasse was on the way to the Chesapeake, he changed plans and marched his army south, along with Rochambeau’s 5,000 French troops to confront the British under Gen. Cornwallis at Yorktown. The arrival of the French fleet kept the British fleet at bay and prevented Cornwallis from evacuating by sea.
4. The Siege of Yorktown. Siege of Yorktown, (September 28–October 19, 1781), joint Franco-American land and sea campaign that entrapped a major British army on a peninsula at Yorktown, Virginia, and forced its surrender. The siege virtually ended military operations in the American Revolution.
5. The arrivals of Lafayette and von Steuben. Though a number of foreign officers joined the American side, non were more important to the American cause than Marie Paul Joseph, Marquis de Lafayette and Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. Lafayette, though only 19 years old when he arrived, proved to be a brave and able battlefield commander and was popular among the men and officers. Von Steuben was an undistinguished, mid-level Prussian army officer and mercenary who came to the US, possibly to escape debt. Yet he brought with him Prussian discipline and a textbook knowledge of European drills and battlefield tactics including use of the bayonet. During the winter of 1777–78 he trained the Continental troops at Valley Forge, instilling a level of discipline unseen in the American army.
