Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau

Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, was a career French soldier born at Vendôme in 1725. He entered the army as a teenager and gained extensive experience in the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War, earning a reputation for disciplined command and siege warfare. In 1780 Louis XVI chose him to lead roughly 5,500 French troops to North America, with instructions to cooperate with George Washington rather than compete with him for authority.

Rochambeau’s expeditionary force spent its first year at Newport before joining Washington in 1781 for the march to Virginia. French troops, American forces and Admiral de Grasse’s fleet then combined to trap Cornwallis at Yorktown, where Rochambeau’s professional siege experience was crucial to the surrender. He returned to France, became a marshal during the Revolution and briefly commanded the Army of the North. Arrested during the Terror, he narrowly escaped execution and later retired to his estate, dying in 1807.

Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Hurricane’s Eye follows the difficult coordination between Washington, the Comte de Rochambeau and Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse as their forces converge on Virginia, while Nathanael Greene’s southern campaign and Cornwallis’s movements create the opportunity for a final concentration at Yorktown. In William R. Forstchen and Newt Gingrich’s Victory at Yorktown, when news arrives that a French fleet can operate in the Chesapeake and Charles Cornwallis has concentrated his army at Yorktown, George Washington sees a rare chance to force a decisive result. He and Rochambeau conceal their intentions, march the allied army south and attempt to trap the British before the naval opportunity disappears.