Thanks Baron,
I was thinking about getting this book but now I think I'll pass.
Mark
Well, you might still want to look at it, in your local bookstore, and decide for yourself. I'm only a short way into it, but I'm slowed by my decision to make notes as I go. But it certainly is not a book along the lines of Christopher Duffy's excellent books on the armies of Frederick the Great or Maria Theresa; I expected something like those books, based on the title, and on this blurb on the back cover:
"Michael Stephenson's
Patriot Battles is a comprehensive and richly detailed study of the military aspects of the War of Independence, and a fascinating look at the nuts and bolts of eighteenth-century combat"
Imagine how disappointed I was, instead of reading about how a battallion was composed, or why neither side used cavalry that much, I found passages like this:
"One of the leading historians of the War of Independence has called the comparison with the Vietnam war, for example, "overwrought," and there is an understandable instinct to insulate the sanctity of the great war of national liberation from any association with some of the more "awkward" periods of American history. But the comparisons are illuminating because colonial wars share a basic architecture that arises when an occupying power far from the mother country tries to suppress a popular uprising. Also, viewing the War of Independence through the lens of other imperialist wars, particulary America's involvement in Vietnam and Iraq, helps rescue it from the Disney World of history to which it has been consigned." (
Patriot Wars, Introduction, p. xix)
Apart from the fact that I don't expect to read the word "Vietnam" in a work on the Revolution, I disagree completely with the characterization of the War for Independence as a war of national liberation. From my reading of English, British and early American history, it was really a civil war, in fact, a continuation of conflicts that sparked the English Civil War, and carried forward to the 18th century. We were not occupied, we were British. Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Hancock, they all saw themselves as citizens of a British world empire. (I also disagree that the Vietnam war can be characterized as a colonial war, at least, once the French were defeated (in fact, they never should have been allowed back after the Japanese were defeated). It was a civil war, exacerbated by the wider worldwide conflict between the Communists and the West.)
On the next page, Stephenson characterizes the Continental army as an all-volunteer force, like our contemporary Army, and he suggests that those who enlist only do so because of "economic hardship and the chance of betterment". Then he castigates both colonial society and modern American society for a lack of full mobilization and participation in each respective cause:
"The Humvee in the shopping mall is a safer option than the under-armored Humvee in Iraq, and flag-waving in the gated community does not require a bullet-proof vest. Certainly, any idea of sharing the burden more equitably was as politically unacceptable in eighteenth-century as in twenty-first century America." (p. xxi)
Um, where are the color tables of regimental facings?
Oh, then there's this gem, from Chapter 1, "A Choaky Mouthful". After discussing the ethnic background of the soldiers (heavy on Scots, Irish and German immigrants), Stephenson writes this about Von Heer's Provost Corps:
"In a
somewhat more sinister example (italics mine-Brad) of the role of Germans in the Continental forces, the Marechaussee Corps, under the Prussian veteran Captain Bartholomew Von Heer (
"von" shouldn't be capitalized-this guy was an editor for the Military Book Club?!-Brad), was formed on 27 May 1778 (
sic). It was to act as Washington's mounted military police, sometimes being placed behind troops going into battle to prevent desertion, and also to assist the provost marshall in the grisly business of military executions." (p. 30).
"Sinister" Germans?! C'mon! I can picture Otto Prerminger playing Heer in the movie. What is sinister about the provost corps? (Well, if you're in the Army, you probably have a creative answer to that.) This is just crap. Every army had, and has, military police, and just because these were German immigrants, doesn't make them "sinister".
I may just have to get through a little more of this nonsense, to get to some really useful information. But you can decide for yourself. At least it was only sixteen bucks.
Seriously, the biogrpahical blurb on the back cover notes that Stephenson is the "former editor of the Military Book Club and the editor of National Geographic's
Battlegrounds: Geography and the History of Warfare. He lives in New York City." Former editor-probably got fired.
Great, now I'm all het up again about how disappointing this book has been!
