[Man shouts command] At the bottom of Breed's Hill, General Howe was determined to come at the Americans one more time.

[Gunfire] Up above, Colonel Prescott knew his men had little powder left and that many of their muskets were fouled from so much firing.

This time, in order to make each shot count, he insisted his men wait until their targets were within 30 yards.

[Indistinct shouting, gunfire] "As fast as the front man was shot down, the next stepped forward into his place," one militiaman recalled.

"It was surprising how they would step over their dead as though they had been logs of wood."

[Gunfire] "We fired till our ammunition began to fail," another militiaman remembered, "then our firing began to slacken-- and at last it went out like an old candle."

[Bayonets clang, men shouting] British marines with bayonets began climbing over the parapets.

Some Americans hurled rocks or swung their muskets like clubs.

Others clawed their way out of the redoubt and ran.

It was all over in a matter of minutes.

The Patriots had been driven from Breed's Hill.

115 Americans had been killed and another 305 wounded.

♪ Atkinson: The British succeed in that they drive the Americans off of the Charlestown Peninsula.

They take Breed's Hill.

They take Bunker Hill.

But it has been a pyrrhic victory of the first order.

It's 4 of the most awful hours of combat in American military history.

There are 1,000 British casualties that day.

There are 220-some British dead.

Stephen Conway: 40% of the attacking force was killed or injured.

40%.

That's horrendously high casualty rate.

It is the highest casualty rate for the British Army until the first day of the Somme in 1916.

It is unbelievably bloody.

And that has a really profound impact.

[Gunfire] Narrator: "The loss we have sustained," General Gage admitted, "is greater than we can bear."

During the final struggle, two prominent men had been killed.

[Musket fires] As Major John Pitcairn encouraged his British Marines to climb over the walls, he'd been shot through the chest and fell, dying, into the arms of his son.

He was so hated by New Englanders because he had led the British troops at Lexington Green that at least 4 different men would subsequently claim to have fired the fatal shot.

Dr.

Joseph Warren, the president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, whom the British considered the most "incendiary" of all the rebel leaders, had insisted on joining the men defending Breed's Hill and was shot in the head.

The British officer in charge of the burial detail boasted that they had "stuffed the scoundrel "with another Rebel into one hole and there he and his seditious principles may remain."

Voice: Saturday gave us a dreadful specimen of the horrors of civil war.

You may easily judge what distress we were in to see and hear Englishmen destroying one another.

God grant the blood already spilt may suffice.

But this we cannot reasonably expect.

Reverend Andrew Eliot.

♪ Narrator: When the news of the battle--remembered as the Battle of Bunker Hill-- eventually made its way to London, the King proclaimed "The deluded People" of America were in a state of "open and avowed rebellion."

Anyone who now aided their cause was a traitor.

General Gage had been right-- the rebellion would never be crushed without overwhelming force.

But Gage was soon called home, replaced as commander-in-chief by General William Howe.

For almost 3 years, Howe would lead the struggle to try to put down the rebellion-- and carefully avoid ordering any more frontal assaults against entrenched Americans.

♪ Britain, at the expense of 3 millions, has killed 150 Americans this campaign, which is 20,000 pounds a head.

And at Bunker's Hill, she gained a mile of ground.

During the same time, 60,000 children have been born in America.

From these data, calculate the time and expense necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole territory.

Benjamin Franklin.

♪