IntroductionMajor General Edward Braddock was born in 1695 in Perthshire, Scotland. Braddock's father, also named Major General Edward Braddock, once commanded the British during the War of the Spanish Succession. Following in his father's footsteps, the young Braddock was also commissioned as a major general in 1754, while serving in the British army. A year later, General Braddock discovered North America for the first time, at the age of sixty. “Small in stature and large in build,” perhaps too old for the task of expanding King George's North American borders, General Braddock embarked on his mission to drive the French from the Ohio country.HistoryAu In the summer of 1754, Virginia Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie was feeling panicked by the disarray on Britain's North American frontier. Word spread from the Ohio country that George Washington's mission to the forks of the Ohio River had ended in humiliating defeat. On July 4, 1754, Washington surrendered Fort Necessity, about fifty miles south of Fort Duquesne, to French forces and retreated east to the Potomac. After the loss of Fort Necessity, the French controlled the Ohio country and even the Iroquois Indians sent messengers to restore relations with them. Prime Minister Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of New Castle, declared that "all North America would be lost" unless the English countered what the French had asserted. Major General Edward Braddock would then be chosen for this task. At the age of sixty, he was desperate for a job and General Braddock "was not one to allow tact to interfere with results." There would be four simultaneous attacks on the French border. Given the communications and transportation networks of the time, “simultaneously...... middle of paper...... passing over. The intention was to prevent the Indians from digging up and mutilating the body. One report put French losses at twenty-eight killed and about the same number wounded, while Indian losses were eleven killed and twenty-nine wounded. As for the exhausted British, the next two days were hell of a new kind. Men too badly injured to walk were left for dead as their comrades stumbled down the road without food or water. Once the survivors were reunited with Colonel Dunbar's troops, the British force still numbered two thousand men, with over thirteen hundred men still capable of fighting. . This would have been a large enough force to resume the campaign to take Fort Duquesne, but Dunbar was demoralized and frightened. Colonel Dunbar ordered the destruction of supplies, mortars and ammunition and marched to Philadelphia as quickly as possible...