Reviews for Amateurs, to Arms!: A Military History of the War of 1812 - John R. Elting - Hardcover

The average rating for Amateurs, to Arms!: A Military History of the War of 1812 - John R. Elting - Hardcover based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-27 00:00:00 Mark Beam John Elting’s Amateurs, to Arms! is the single most sarcastic book of military history that I’ve ever read. Most historians, when viewing premodern warfare, cut early generals some slack for not knowing anything about war as a science. Elting does not. In Amateurs, to Arms! he gives the military men the Eye of Sauron. The book is filled with many quotable lines, which I’ll get to in a moment. The War the 1812 had four main theaters. 1) The Great Lakes/St. Lawrence waterway, 2) The eastern seaboard of Washington and Baltimore, 3) Florida (think Andrew Jackson and the Redsticks-Jackson won, which is pretty much all you need to know), and 4) New Orleans (Jackson again). The Great Lakes/St. Lawrence waterway battles were not modern battles, but more like the Scottish border raids of earlier times. Armies were small—often no more than a few hundred men on each side—and the fighting seesawed indecisively between wins and losses. What’s more, fighting with the American militia was like fighting with a herd of deer. They startled and ran away at the slightest provocation. Their generals were mostly incompetent, cowardly position seekers with political connections who had not the slightest idea of a battle plan, tactics, strategy, staffing, or logistics. The only thing that saved the Americans in this theater was that the best British generals were in Europe battling Napoleon, and the ones in the US were the B team. The navy functioned somewhat better because they pretty much ignored Washington’s orders and ran their own war, but they too were weighed down by a large percentage of incompetents. When the occasional general like Winfield Scott appears, trying to inject some real science into his plans, it’s a relief to see it. As for the eastern seaboard, Washington burned and Baltimore didn’t, mainly because Baltimore organized its own defense and didn’t depend on officials in Washington to save them. Washington’s chief general William Winder, did not understand that 1) It’s better to fight an enemy at a bridge rather than in an open field behind the bridge, and 2) It’s even better to burn the bridge so your enemy can’t cross it. Instead, the frightened and rattled Winder positioned his forces further back and just let the British stroll across the bridge to meet them at the Battle of Bladensburg. Winder did, however, have the sense to put his men under cover, only to have his dispositions ruined by soon-to-be President James Monroe, who insisted on pulling the men out from their bushwacking cover and having them fight standing in the open (presumably because this is what European armies did—Europeans put much emphasis on elan, or scaring the pants off your enemy with a flashy show of force), and Elting even blames Francis Scott Key for shifting troops from good positions into bad. Washington did not have much of a chance, but when the politicians and lawyers from the city arrived at the battlefield, they made things worse. As Elting points out, men like Jefferson and Madison, though patriots, were not soldiers. Jefferson, as governor of Virginia, was chased out of his state by the British during the Revolutionary War, and his military ideas had not improved during his term as President. Both Jefferson and Madison were more concerned with picking officers from their own political party than with their competence (Lincoln would make this mistake during the Civil War, and like Lincoln, they received a long, messy war as a result.) Winfield Scott called the officers of his day, “Swaggers, dependents, and decayed gentlemen unfit for any military purpose whatever.” One of the generals, James Wilkinson, was a con artist and an honest-to-God spy in the pay of the Spanish. Scott had said in 1810 that serving under Wilkinson was like being married to a prostitute. The next concern of Jefferson and Madison was to save a penny because the US had a big war debt from the last notable punch-up, so they shrank the army and supplied it feebly. Equally notable, three-quarters of all the food supplied to the British troops in the St. Lawrence area was sold to them by enterprising Americans, and nobody tried to stop it. When war was declared, the first US Secretary of War, William Eustis, “For reasons only known to his mouse-skinning mind,” sent the notice by regular mail to the troops near Detroit. When the Cleveland postmaster received the message, he was so shocked that he immediately hired a special courier to hurry the declaration to the troops at emergency speed. Elting’s book contains passages like this: “Smyth summoned all his field grade officers to a council of war as to whether to continue the crossing. The council, doubtlessly studying the general out of the corners of their eyes, decided against it. By way of salvaging his battered ego, Smyth then sent Lieutenant Colonel Bisshopp, the commander at Fort Erie, a demand that he surrender immediately to ‘spare the effusion of blood’--and marched his own men back to camp, probably leaving Bisshopp more than a little bewildered.” “Winchester’s report to the secretary of war remains an outstanding example of uncomprehending asininity: he conceded that his defeat was regrettable, but he was ‘flattered by the belief that no material error is chargeable upon myself.’” “Secretary of State Monroe rode off toward Benedict to count the enemy’s ships and men. By no means a daring scout, he tried to do his counting at three miles’ distance and found he had forgotten to fetch a telescope. After two days of cautious sneak-and-peeping he somehow concluded that Ross must have 6,000 men, and proceeded to inflict this, and other misinformation on Madison, Winder, and anyone else he could catch.” John Armstrong, the Secretary of War who replaced Eustis, eventually managed to get rid of James Wilkinson and promoted men like Winfield Scott and Andrew Jackson, but too late in the war to save his own career after a long series of disasters. As for Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, Elting blames him for having an almost non-existent intelligence network, and gives Jackson’s chief engineer Major Latour much credit for designing very good fortifications that the British decided they could not take, so they went home. Latour, says Elting, was a mysterious character with much war experience who may have been in the pay of Napoleon. (If so, it was the second great French contribution to American independence after French help during the Revolutionary War.) The only flaw I can find in Elting’s narrative is that he covers so many engagements, especially the fights on the St. Lawrence, that they start to blur together a bit. However, the book is recommended if you want to get an idea of how the War of 1812 was really fought. I would also suggest further reading about individual battles if you want greater detail. Available at Open Library:

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-30 00:00:00 walker mccullough In this history, Elting argues that the War of 1812 was the war Americans were least prepared for in their entire history; as the title suggests, Elting emphasizes the amateurishness of US forces and argues that tactical victories made the difference in the end, although, of course, nobody really won the war. The book is almost entirely a military history, as the title indicates. There is little discussion of policy or politics, except to the extent that their incompetence affected military operations, especially in regards to the selection of commanders on the American side. Elting tells the story from both sides, and the narrative is pretty vivid, especially the Washington-Baltimore campaign and the battle of New Orleans. Elting also writes with wit, such as when he describes the duel between American officers Alexander Smyth and Peter Porter (“unfortunately, both missed”). Interesting, vivid, and fairly well written, despite some generalizations here and there.