Mackesy P. The War for America, 1775-1783

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XXIII. 'Cornwallis Led a Country Dance' 401

1. Germain and Clinton

2. Bankruptcy of the Southern Offensive

3. The March to Yorktown

XXIV. The Anatomy of Disaster 413

1. Clinton and Washington

2. Rodney and de Grasse

3. The Fight for the Chesapeake

4. The World Turned Upside Down

5. Conclusion

Part Six: An Empire Salvaged

XXV. Saving the Ship 433

1. The News of Yorktown

2. The Loss of Minorca

3. The Work of Salvage

4. The Reinforcement Race

XXVI. The Ship Afloat 446

1. Rodney Away

2. The Race Is Won

3. Victory

4. The Anatomy of Victory

XXVII. The End of the Ministry 460

1. The Departure of Germain

2. The Fall of the Ministry

XXVIII. The New Brooms 471

1. The Sack of the Fortress

2. The Order of Withdrawal

3. The Fleet in Home Waters

4. The Third Relief of Gibraltar

5. The Comptroller Compares

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XXIX. The Sky Suspended 487

1. The Last Autumn

2. Final Operations in the Western Atlantic

3. Hyder and Suffren

4. The Last Battles

Conclusion 505

1. The Peace

2. Reflections on a Lost War

3. The Aftermath

4. The Fates of Men

Appendix: The British Army 523

Bibliography 528

Index 539

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Lord George Germain

Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum facing page 240

GibraltarA Strategic Magnet

By courtesy of the Parker Gallery 241

'Rodney Investedor Admiral Pig on a Cruize'

Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum 256

General Eliott on the King's Bastion at Gibraltar

Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum 257

MAPS

The American Colonies, 1775 3

The Northern Sphere of Operations, 17757 41

Boston and Rhode Island 81

The New York Area 84

The Lower Hudson Valley and New Jersey 92

Howe's Philadelphia Campaign, 1777 127

The European Theatre 191

The English Channel 206

The Caribbean and Central America 226

The Southern Colonies 340

India 495

The World, Showing Principal Shipping Routes and the British Empire 53637

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INTRODUCTION

By John Shy

Remembering a lost war seldom appeals to historians and their audience unless the recollection of defeat serves

some purpose. The American South treasured the memory of Confederate defeat for decades, partly in the faith that

the Old South, lost in battle, had been a glorious cause, and partly in the knowledge that the victorious North, in its

heart, conceded that the South had been right on the underlying dispute about race. With few exceptions, Japanese

historians have shown little interest in the Second World War, and the German attempt to produce a semi-official

history of the war aroused a storm of controversy. American college students continue to pack courses on the

Vietnam War for motives not altogether clear, but surely because that war seems to promise some clues to solving

the puzzle of how America lost its way.

The American Revolutonary War, or War of American Independence as they prefer to call it, has never appealed

strongly to British historians and their readers except insofar as it could be used to prove how wrong King George

III had been to reject enlightened Whig leadership in his government, and instead to try to rule through royal

prerogative. But this essentially political interpretation of the event by Whig historians, like both Trevelyans,

distorts the struggle with the American colonies by making it incidental to the more consequential constitutional

struggle between an authoritarian king and the emerging concept of responsible party government. Between the

Seven Years War, when the great leader William Pitt led the British Empire to victory over France and Spain in

1763, and 1815, when Wellington completed the British-led salvation of Europe from Napoleon, there was a long

gap in serious historical attention to how Britain actually waged war. The work of Piers Mackesy has helped

substantially to close that gap, not only The War for America but also his earlier and later studies of the coalition

wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

Readers should not come to The War for America with misplaced expectations. It is not the rousing battle narrative

that makes up so

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much of what is conventionally termed ''military history." It is also not a complete history of all that accounts for

what is called "The American Revolution," even when viewed from a British perspective. Instead, the author

assumes the legitimacy and the rationality of Britain's decision to wage war in America, and focuses on exactly

how that war was waged. While sensitive to the political context in which strategy was formulated, and to the

political repercussions of military operations, he is primarily concerned with the problems of the war itself,

particularly the problem of deciding what to do with available military resources. The book is essentially a strategic

history of the protracted British struggle over American independence.

It may be helpful to those who come to The War for America with limited knowledge of the broader setting within

which Britain fought this war to review, briefly, crucial aspects of it. Following a decisive victory over France in

the Seven Years War (17561763), Britain had set out to reform the governance of its suddenly enlarged empire. Its

American colonies had expanded with the acquisition from France of Canada and the eastern half of the

Mississippi valley; the acquisition from Spain of Florida and the Gulf coast; and from both powers of valuable

new islands in the West Indies. For the first time, Britain decided to secure its American colonies by deploying a

regular army, and to recoup part of the cost of this expensive new garrison from the colonies themselves. At the

same time, steps were taken to tighten some of the traditionally loose features of colonial administration, such as

irregular application of trade laws. American resistance to these concurrent efforts, to tax and to tighten

administration, raised basic constitutional questions that over the course of more than a decade of conflict led, in

1775, to armed conflict.

Policy toward the American colonies had been the cause of heated political debate in London from 1763 to 1775,

with government attacked by the Opposition for needlessly provoking trouble in America, and also for being too

weak to enforce the measures it adopted. But with the Parliamentary election of 1774, at a time when American

resistance, especially at Boston, had reached a new height of destructiveness, there was consensus, at least within

the restricted circle of British political life, that the Americans required "firm" treatment. Even now, historians

argue about how British leaders calculated the relative risks and gains of using armed force against the rebellious

colonies. Perhaps the most persuasive argument is the one that emphasizes the importance of European affairs in

their decision.

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The historic enemy, on the Continent and overseas, was France, and clearly France was waiting for a chance to

redress its great defeat of 1763. Although waging a war to subdue American rebels had obvious dangers and

disadvantages, the danger of letting the populous and prosperous American colonies slip into the orbit of France

was still greater. Doing nothing about colonial defiance of Parliamentary sovereignty was almost inconceivable.

"Blows must decide," wrote the king to his chief minister on the eve of war, whether the Americans were to remain

part of the British Empire, and almost every informed Briton agreed with him. In the end, not British optimism

about easy victory but British fears about the European balance of power pushed the empire into civil war.

The first British campaign, aimed at Boston and Massachusetts, did more to foment American resistance and unity

than to subdue the rebellion. A year later, in 1776, the main British thrust shifted southward to New York and the

vulnerable Hudson and Delaware valleys. Military results of this move were impressive, but were not achieved

before American political leaders in Philadelphia had formally declared the colonies to be united, independent

states. By the end of the year the rebel army had struck back, scoring local, well-publicized victories over

unsupported British forces in New Jersey. Superior British sea power pushed rebel troop movements away from the

populated coast, and disrupted the maritime trade that had flourished before the war, but it could not cut off

altogether clandestine aid from France. The year 1777 proved critical: while one British army moved south from

Canada along the Champlain-Hudson corridor with the aim of cutting the rebellion in two, the main army in New

York moved by sea against the rebel capital in Philadelphia, expecting to force the main rebel army under George

Washington to a decisive battle in defense of the city. British planners miscalculated the speed and ease of

movement of the two armies, so that, when the army from Canada stalled in the face of heavy resistance, the larger

army to the southward could do little to help it. The consequent surrender of the northern army gave France the

impetus needed to enter the war openly as an ally of the United States.

With French entry, the war changed its character. Subduing the colonies became for Britain secondary to the more

accustomed task of fighting France. Again, the strategic center shifted southward, to the rich sugar islands of the

West Indies and the slave-impacted colonies

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of the southern mainland. Sea power, which had made remarkably little impression on the first phase of the war,

became paramount as the defense of the far-flung maritime empire moved to the top of strategic priorities. At the

same time, Britain undertook a political offensive, offering to concede almost every contested point to the

Americans except independence, and actively began recruiting support among disaffected and war-weary

Americans for the restoration of royal authority. The rebel Congress, wracked by internal divisions and facing the

bankrupting effects of continued war, rebuffed the British offers, but many Americans in Georgia and the

Carolinas proved susceptible when British forces began operating there in 1779.

The rebel cause reached a low point in 1780: finances collapsed, the French alliance had produced few results, one

of the most effective rebel military leaders defected to the British side, American forces in South Carolina suffered

devastating defeats, and congressional authority declined steadily. Speculation arose as to whether the Americans

could hold out another year. But Britain had its own troubles at home: war with France undercut support for

continuing the war against American rebels, whose resilience had defied predictions of early British victory.

Political upheaval in the empire was mirrored in popular opposition movements in Ireland and parts of England. A

governmental attempt to placate Catholics in Ireland triggered anti-Catholic riots in London, the worst in that city's

history. Briefly, the king considered abdication, but good news from the battlefields of South Carolina and a law-

and-order backlash kept him on the throne, more determined than ever to keep the empire intact.

As had happened in 1777, fortune smiled on the rebellion in 1781. Encouraged by American popular response in

the South, but frustrated in its campaign to stamp out the last sparks of armed resistance, the British southern army

careened through North Carolina into what proved to be a trap on the Virginia coast, where a superior French navy

cut it off from relief by sea, while Washington and his French allies swooped down from New York to block any

escape by land. The surrender of a small British army at Yorktown, Virginia, did not end the war, but it brought

down the government in London, and also brought to power elements of the political opposition, which during the

next two years continued the war effectively against France but negotiated a peace with the Americans.

This, in bare outline, is the story whose strategic core Piers Mackesy has reconstructed and dissected from the

archival record and the pri-

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vate papers of prominent British leaders. Why did they do what they did? That is the question running through this

masterful account. Mackesy's analytical scalpel is sharp, but the judgmental gavel is slow to fall. For all their

unfavorable press, then and later, British leaders get full credit for the magnitude of their accomplishment in The

War for America. Sustaining and directing the largest military force Britain had ever sent overseas, for years on

end, was a feat of heroic proportions, however badly it ended. And in terms of Britain's imperial and European

positions, the war did not end that badly. France emerged fatally weakened, less by military defeat than by

economic exhaustion. After a few years, British economic relations with the United States returned to something

very like the old colonial pattern, and American policy under President Washington showed a decidedly pro-

British tilt. Whether the war might have been avoided, or would have been better unfought, is not a question

Mackesy addresses. His concern is with what actually happened, and why. To plumb the complexities and

uncertainties of global strategy in the real world of the eighteenth-century past is surely enough for one marvelous

book.

Piers Mackesy brought to his study of this great war valuable personal experience. As a young subaltern in the

Royal Scots Greys 194445, he was a tank commander and later served on regimental staff during the final

campaign across northwestern Europe. But perhaps equally influential was growing up in an army family; his

grandfather had been a general officer in India, serving in the Crimean War as well as the Indian Mutiny, and his

father had served on the Western Front in the First World War, and afterward with distinction in the Allied

intervention against the Bolshevik Revolution. Major General P. J. Mackesy was chosen to command the

expeditionary force sent by Churchill in April 1940 to invade Norway; the Germans got there first and, when the

British attack on the northern Norwegian port of Narvik foundered, Churchill not only replaced General Mackesy

but in 1947 effectively demolished the general's reputation with a highly colored account of the Narvik affair in the

first volume of his widely read history of the Second World War. Although more careful, less partisan histories of

the 1940 campaign in Norway published after Churchill's version would reveal the extraordinary difficulties under

which its army commander had labored, as well as Churchill's personal responsibility for some of those difficulties,

the event itself marked the general's young son, Piers.

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Much of Piers Mackesy's work as a historian of war would be concerned with both strategic failure (like that at

Narvik and in the American rebellion) and the interaction of politics and strategy. A junior officer in 1944, he

watched the tragic unfolding of Operation "Market Garden," when the Allied attempt to leap the water barriers of

Holland ended in the destruction of the First British Airborne Division at Arnhem. At the end of the war in Europe,

Lieutenant Mackesy took part in the final race to the Baltic, breaking through a disintegrating German army to beat

the Russians to the seathe politics of war in its rawest form.

After the war came Oxford and a first-class degree in modern history. Doctoral training (not then the British norm)

in history at Oxford led to a Harkness Fellowship for study at Harvard University, and in the years that followed

Dr. Mackesy, fellow and later senior tutor of Pembroke College, Oxford, taught and did research in the United

States. His first book, on the British war in the Mediterranean against Napoleon, where land and sea operations

were intertwined with diplomacy, forecast his approach in The War for America, a book that cuts deftly beneath the

surface of familiar military events to find the links to logistical and political realities, and to locate the true springs

of strategic action.

Other books have followed The War for America since its publication in 1964: two on British strategy in the

frustrating struggle of the 1790s against Revolutionary France, and one on the great Anglo-German victory at

Minden in the Seven Years War. The latter work, titled The Coward of Minden, is of interest to readers of The War

for America on several counts. First, although it seems to deal (uncharacteristically for Mackesy) with military

success, the victory at Minden was a near-run thing, and was also marred by the failure of the book's central figure,

Lord George Sackville, commanding the Allied cavalry, to exploit the moment of military success, a failure for

which he suffered disgrace and court-martial. Politics, however, brought Lord George back to prominence as Lord

George Germain. Germain, appointed secretary of state for the colonies at the outbreak of the American rebellion,

would be the chief architect of British strategy in the war for America, 177583, and as such would once again play

the role of scapegoat for failure. In The Coward of Minden, Mackesy explores both the earlier character and

reputation of Sackville/Germain, and the small distance separating victory from defeat in the Minden campaign

itself.

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But The Coward of Minden does much more. Its first six chapters are a brilliant narrative reconstruction of an

eighteenth-century army on campaign, revealing Mackesy's grasp of what warfare was like in an age so different

from our own. Nothing like these chapters of operational history appear in The War for America, whose viewpoint

is steadily maintained at the high level of strategy. But the author's deep understanding of how war was actually

fought with smoothbore muskets, sailing ships, horses, wagons, and very bad roads suffuses his handling of the war

of the American Revolution. How Piers Mackesy came by his remarkable feel for war before high explosive, rifled

and automatic weapons, steam and petroleum power, and electrical communication transformed it, may be better

understood in his own words:

I was brought up in the Army, and remember it before mechanisation began in a big way about 1935: an

army of horses and horsed transport, more akin in that respect to the army of the eighteenth century than it

is easy to imagine nowadays. I have loved horses and riding all my life, and can imagine the time-scale by

which people operated in the days before cars and railways. I remember the Silver Jubilee review at

Aldershot in 1935, and saw a horsed cavalry brigade and battery after battery of horse-drawn guns march

past.

Piers Mackesy would be among the first to acknowledge that histories are neither written nor read in a vacuum.

Our involvement with the present inevitably influences our view of the past. His active service as a young man in

the Second World War, and the deep marks left by that war on his family as well as his country, were too fresh to

be forgotten. Without presuming to know more than can be known, we may reasonably assume that beneath the

surface of The War for America ran the memory of 193945, when Britain, having stumbled into a global conflict,

fought on through defeat and adversity, somehow finding and deploying the resources needed to win. Part of this

memory included the popular belief that Winston Churchill, at first by sheer force of character and then by strategic

vision, pulled Britain through to ultimate victory.

But more recent memories were surely entwined with those of the Second World War. The fiasco of 1956, when

Britain joined France in using armed force to stop Egypt's seizure and closure of the Suez Canal, was undoubtedly

present and painful, another collective memory binding the reader and the author and his subject. To a degree

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