Cromwell's War Machine: The New Model Army 1645 - 1660 Book

An incredibly detailed book that does well in contrasting the New Model Army with its opponents in order to flag up the key differences. The most significant of these being that whilst the recent fashion had been for English, and other, armies to model themselves on Dutch military methods, the New Model Army modelled itself more on Gustavus Adolphus's Swedish army and campaigns, with an aggressive style that surprised foes by aggressively seeking battle even if outnumbered.

There are but two slight flaws with this approach that mean I haven't given the book a perfect review score.

Firstly the contrast with the Royalist forces strays just a little too far from being simply a contrast into becoming a detailed analysis of a range of forces in the Civil Wars, instead of concentrating on the New Model Army itself as the title suggested. I would have like to have read more perhaps about the opinion of individual Royalists, Scots, and the remaining non New Model Army parliamentary forces on what they thought was different, particularly challenging, or (to them) wrong, about the New Model Army rather than yet more detail on those other forces.

An incredibly detailed book that does well in contrasting the New Model Army with its opponents in order to flag up the key differences. The most significant of these being that whilst the recent fashion had been for English, and other, armies to model themselves on Dutch military methods, the New Model Army modeled itself more on Gustavus Adolphus's Swedish army and campaigns, with an aggressive style that surprised foes by aggressively seeking battle even if outnumbered.
There are but two slight flaws with this approach that mean I haven't given the book a perfect review score.

Firstly the contrast with the Royalist forces strays just a little too far from being simply a contrast into becoming a detailed analysis of a range of forces in the Civil Wars, instead of concentrating on the New Model Army itself as the title suggested. I would have like to have read more perhaps about the opinion of individual Royalists, Scots, and the remaining non New Model Army parliamentary forces on what they thought was different, particularly challenging, or (to them) wrong, about the New Model Army rather than yet more detail on those other forces.

Secondly the detail in the book is great, and I wouldn't want any of it cut, but maybe all the lists could have been leavened with a little more narrative based insight into the viewpoints of individuals in the New Model Army as to what they thought made their army better, or at least different, from what had gone before, and different from what they faced across the battlefield and siege lines.