If grammar school coverage of the Revolutionary War was dull to you, clearly no one mentioned Baron Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben, the dashing and openly gay Prussian general who whipped a ragged gaggle of disheartened and defeated colonial men into soldiers with the cohesion and discipline needed to win.
Born in Magdeburg, Prussia, Holy Roman Empire on September 17, 1730, von Steuben attended military schools and then saw military action, as this was a period when Europeans were killing each other.
This included the Seven Years War (1756–63), where Steuben was wounded and taken prisoner by the Russians. Returning to Prussia in 1762, he became an aide-de-camp to the heroic and openly gay Frederick the Great.
He was then admitted to the King’s personal class on warfare, the world’s most elite institution for learning methods of war and the complicated art of leadership.
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