I seem to recall my old history books claiming that the American colonists were able to defeat the British Army during the Revolutionary War because the redcoats were unable to withstand the colonists’s guerilla tactics. Am I correct in thinking that this is a case of oversimplification + crowing by the winner?
IIRC many of the upper-level British officers had also served in the French and Indian War. Surely someone noticed THEN that the Indians were not lining up in rows to fire their muskets, & responded accordingly. It doesn’t make sense to me that a little more than ten years later the British Army was suddenly completely unprepared to deal with a bunch of poorly trained and armed colonists.
Were the British Army’s fighting methods really so inflexible as to not be able to deal with a less “civilized” manner of fighting?
Samuel Eliot Morison in “The Oxford History of the American People” points outs that
“Militia turned out in great numbers whenever the British army marched inland and if properly stiffened with regulars, gave a good account of themselves. The first action of the war, at Concord, was a milita victory, pure and simple and so was Bunker Hill. The surrender of Burgoyne would not have taken place but for the Green Mountain Boys and other militia who swarmed in to help Gates’ regulars.”
“The turning out of an entire countryside to fight was new to the British. European armies marched safely through enemy country until they encountered a hostile army. Peasants and townspeople kept quiet or took the forests and mountains, fighting was for professionals only. This phenomenon of a countryside in arms, both around Boston and in the Saratoga campaign, made British generals very loath to march far from the seacoast, where they were at the end of a logistics line maintained by the Royal Navy. After Burgoyne’s surrender, and until Cornwallis cut loose in the Carolinas, no British army spent much time beyond gunfire of the British fleet.”
Civilian males (not just white, SEM also points out that “There were Negroes in every line regiment”) with guns, the secret weapon, unheard of or even conceived of in Europe. There is just enough time for me to clean my rifles before I go see “The Patriot” again.
It seems to me there were a fair number of colonists fighting with the British during the French and Indian War. I recall that G. Washington was a young commander at the time. Maybe the Brits left the “Indian fighting” to the colonists?
According to Tom Burnam’s Dictionary Of Misinformation
(Balantine press), the idea of Red Coats standing in formation while the colonists pop out from behhind trees, is
indeed a myth. A little common sense bears this out. The British Empire could never have grown so large, if its soldiers stood in the open while their oponents fired from cover.
I had understood that the biggest issue was that no country can fight effectively on two fronts at once. At the same time as the American Revolution, tensions were high between Britain and France. The Redcoats could have easily crushed the insurgents, had they brought their full force to bear, but that would have left the Isles vulnerable to the French, and they couldn’t afford that. In the end, they just decided that the Colonies weren’t worth it.
Of course, there were other factors, such as the militia/guerilla tactics.
A more relevant issue, really, is what strategic objectives the British were trying to accomplish.
To use a modern example, it has often been said that the United States lost the Vietnam War because (pick one)
They tried to fight a conventional war in guerrila conditions
They were up against an enemy with “Centuries” of experience defending their nation
They didn’t try hard enough
These reasons are all nonsense. In actual combat, the American forces in Vietnam almost invariably won. Americans soldiers were just as good and better armed than Vietnamese soldiers. Vietnamese forces suffered horrible losses, lost most piched battles, and were likelier to lose the bigger the battle was. And the force brought to bear was vastly superior.
The truth is that the U.S. lost the war because they had nothing in particular to win. If you can pin down a specific military objective that had any relevance to the real world, you’ll be ahead of me. The United States was quite literally fighting to wrest control of Vietnam from the Vietnamese - an obvious impossibility unless you’re planning to kill everyone in the country.
To some extent, I would submit the Revolution was much the same. The reality is that, in the long run, you cannot rule another country from afar if that country doesn’t want to be ruled - or, at the very least, there’s a limit to how long you can pin them down. In cases where the ruling country enjoys a lot of local support and a big military advantage, maybe you can hold the fort for a long time; in cases where the local populace has a lot of guns and foreign support (as both the U.S. revolutionaries and the Vietnamese did) your time ruling the country will be shortened.
To get back to the topic; if the British were to have won the war, what could they have done? In all likelihood there was no military solution. Sending in more troops likely would have spawned more revolution, or merely would have delayed the inevitable.
RickJay seemed to hit the nail on the head. What would the British have done? Imposed even more Draconian measures on the colonies such as the Intolerable Acts? That probably wouldn’t have helped much. After all, what’s the purpose of having a colony if you can’t exploit it economically?
Canada didn’t join the Revolution because the people there weren’t interested in joining the colonists’ side. They were better off sticking with the deal that the British had given them, especially the Catholic French-Canadians, who would have been most unwelcome in the United States of the 1780s.
Like the US in Vietnam, the British kept fighting because their internal politics demanded that they not give up so easily.
Another factor concerning the war that doesn’t come up so often is the illness of the Commander in Chief back in England. Poor old George III was increasingly suffering longer bouts of “unwellness” (blue urine - not nice) and couldn’t always spare the time to deal with the colonies because the tree’s in the grounds and the Palace’s curtains were such fine conversationalists. "
Going out on a tangent here for a minute: The word guerrilla is Spanish meaning “small war” and was coined during the napoleonic invasion of Spain.
Napoleon had the King of Spain in his possession and the country was formally in his hands but the people and a few army units decided to make war on their own. It was an uncoordinated effort but it cost the French dearly. Isolated units would be attacked, communications were made impossible etc. but the Spanish avoided large confrontations.
The situation was in a way similar to what happened in France in WWII where, technically, France had surrendered and was no longer at war with Germany and yet, the resistance kept fighting.
When the people of Madrid rose against the French on may 2 1808, the French responded by executing civilians the following day. These executions were immortalized by Goya in this painting. The painting is part of this page about Goya and his paintings which is well worth seeing but is huge and takes a while to download.
Anyway, this repression by the French further enraged the people and finally, the French, who were winning the battles, were losing the war and had to pull out.
It is thought that this was was the first large scale guerrilla war (although other factors contributed to the defeat of the French like their invading Russia and the English army that, commanded by Wellington, came to the Peninsula.
I don’t think the idea of guerilla warfare caught the British completely by surprise. As you point out, they certainly had been exposed to it in the French and Indian War. On the other hand, they seemed not to expect that approach to warfare from the colonists, who would surely be too civilized to fight that way. Colonists firing from cover eventually drove the British back in the battle of Lexington and Concord.
Also, the British response to guerilla warfare was ineffective. They responded by pursuing a policy of total war: burning houses and crops, and terrorizing civilians. This approach only had the effect of strengthening the resolve of the colonists, and drawing new recruits to the cause of independence.
Col. Tarleton (of the British dragoons) was given the task of stopping the guerillas in the Carolinas. His brutal tactics earned him the sobriquet “The Butcher.” The evil dragoon in The Patriot is loosely based on Tarleton (while Mel Gibson’s character is loosely based on “the Swamp Fox,” Francis Marion).
RickJay brought up an interesting point about the difficulty of fighting a long way from home. Apart from having trouble motivating one’s troops when they’re fighting for something that doesn’t give THEM a clear benefit, I’d figured that the sheer expense would have brought the war to an end.
I wouldn’t have said that the British had nothing to gain by fighting for this land. After all, they were perfectly willing to fight for the colonies in the French and Indian War. The sheer expense of that endeavor, however, was the trigger for those taxes that got the colonists so riled up in the first place (major simplification, I know). (Samuel Adams’s inflamatory reports of British troop behavior in Boston helped a bit too, of course.) An interesting question is what would have happened had King George decided to repeal the taxes he had imposed. Would the colonists have then settled down and been satisfied to remain in the empire?
But I guess my OP really gets down to fighting tactics. Granted, the colonists were fighting for their homes, which is powerful compensation for any disadvantage in training or munitions (particularly before the French began sending aid). But on a battle-by-battle basis, were the colonists REALLY beating the pants off the British just by firing from the bushes? I thought Washington’s troops weren’t doing so well until after the Battle of Trenton…
sailor - interesting that the first “guerilla” war was fought in Spain. Does that imply that any earlier use of such tactics (like the Revolutionary War) was minor, or were such tactics defined differently?
Oops, spoke-, I missed seeing your post before I posted… I guess I hadn’t thought that the British officers would have found it difficult to respond to tactics they had seen before (even if they were unexpected). Unless it was the very idea of their brothers/cousins/etc. using those tactics against the redcoats that threw them.
Actually, this turns out not to be the case. The relative strength of the opponents must be considered, of course. If you are weak enough to be overwelmed on a single front, then the second front would be moot. But if the forces were more equal then a multi-front war might be a good idea for you, depending on geography.
From a military point of view, being in the middle is an advantage:
Logistically, you have interior lines of communication and supply. The example is Germany in the World Wars. They could move equipment and troops to the fronts faster than the Allies.
Strategically, you have the advantage of maneuver. The classic example of this is during the Punic Wars when Nero, whose army was facing Hannibal Barca but refusing to fight, pulled the majority of his troops north to defeat a relieving Cartheginian army led by Hasdrubal Barca. Hannibal first learned that his brother was in Italy when the Romans catapulted his head into Hannibal’s camp.
Tactically, the advantage also is in maneuver. You need to be careful as your enemies are now close enough to coordinate their attacks. But if you are skilled you can engage each enemy without their allies intervening. People who actually know what they are talking about ( as opposed to me ) refer to this as attacking the enemy in detail. This is why it is not advisable to divide your forces in the face of the enemy.
I think that the British position understood guerilla warfare, but felt they had the resources in firepower, men and equipment to overcome it. The British had more than a century of experience in North America, and it was mostly successful. Guerilla style warfare was effective, but only if the British exposed themselves to it. The British wanted to hold cities and more developed areas - cutting off the source of supplies to the more rural areas. While they did retreat from Boston, it was due to a threat from a conventional army and artillery - they were not driven out by guerillas. And they were never threatened in New York. My take on this issue is that Washington himself did not really want to fight a guerilla war - he wanted to fight like the European professionals he admired, the way the Army of a “real” nation should. This would be more or less what the British wanted, with the expectation that they could defeat him decisively and end the war. He was soundly beaten at this until Stueben was able to train the Continentals. But there were never enough Continentals,even with the militia added in. What Washington et al did do is fight a guerilla war like the Indians - not necessarily in the sense of ambush and from cover. When Washington led Virginia’s little army on the frontier against the Indians, he had better weapons, equipment, organization and discipline (but never near what he needed - great preparation, as it turned out -than his Indian opponents. If things went against the native Americans, the ultimate in light infantry, they simply melted away into the woods - only to turn up somewhere else. He was constantly chasing them endlessly and to little effect. Washington, not by choice, and maybe not even consciously, copied much of this strategy against the British. The British saw an enemy everywhere - as soon as they left an area, it almost always defaulted to the patriot side. While Washington did repeatedly stand and fight like Europeans, he also would withdraw and start all over again somewhere else. He may have lost more battles then he won, but he never acknowledged defeat to the British. The combination of Fabian/Indian/conventional tactics would eventually give the British little or nothing to show for enormous expense of men and money.
Jwg, You say Washington “may have lost more battles then he won.”
I submit that Washington won no battles. Monmouth was a tactical and strategic draw. Yorktown was a siege won by the French army and navy. The closest Washington came to actually winning a battle was at Princeton, after the Christmas raid on Trenton. There, the Continentals gave a textbook display of how to fight a delaying action, but finally withdrew.
but the examples that you cite are based on being in one country and being attacked in two separate places - this only works if you have the time and information to move your army (take England & 1066 - the main army had just been up to Mercia to defeat Harald Arthrada (sp?) - Norse bloke trying to take over) then had to turn round and march back down to the south coast and were reduced in number and exhausted when they got there.
In addition - England did not have internal lines of supply - they had to ship food, munitions, troops etc over & the journeys took a long time - they could not react effectively and swiftly as Germany could in WW2 - & they couldn’t just phone up or telegraph for more supplies. Communications were slow.
From the PBS 6 part docuemtary “Liberty” which aired this weekend, one official count has, over the course of the 8 years of the war, Washington fighting 11 proper battles and winning 3 (Dorchester Heights, Princeton, Yorktown, if I’m not mistaken). An even more interesting statistic is that General Nathanial Greene fought in dozens of battles, and never won a single one, and is considered to be the best military genius of the war. Both Washington(reluctantly) and Greene(deliberately) as well as Marion realized that one need not “win” battles in a traditional sense to demoralize the enemy as if one had won.
A classic example of a Washington loss turning into a morale victory was Washington’s evacuation of Brooklyn. After getting soundly beaten at the battle earlier in the day, both sides retired for the night. Washington gave the illusion that his camp was staying occupied for the night, while quietly and slowly ferrying people across the East River back to New York. In a probably apocryphal acount, General Howe himself is said to have arrived just in time to see Washington himself boarding the last ferry, waving back to the shore. Think about it from the British point of view: You just spent a day in pitched battle over control of the greatest port in the colonies, and after it all, who is currently in control of New York City? The Americans. It didn’t matter much that the british had won the battle on the open field, they were still stuck in the Brooklyn wilderness while the Americans had the advantage of being in control of New York.
Sure, Washington was later driven from New York, across New Jersey, and into Pennsylvania by the start of the winter, but the gain in terms of morale for Washington’s army for the evacuation of Brooklyn is great.
The genius of the Continetal Army was realizing that it needn’t actually win any battles to win the war. All it had to do was the British army ragged, and demoralize it. Greene’s strategic “losses” resulted in him taking control of large swatches of territory in the South as General Clinton attempted to chase him around in circles. The more mobil American army could “hit and run” much easier than the heavily supplied and weighed down British army, which though it never retreated from battle(and thus always “won”), still couldn’t inflict any real damage on the American forces. In any war of attrition, which Greene was successfully implementing, the native forces ALWAYS will eventually defeat the invading forces.
In the Civil War, much later, such tactics were the reasons for the South’s early wins. It wasn’t until the north took up an agressive “Kill’em all” approach (such as Sherman’s March to the Sea) that the tide really began to turn.
