Reminiscences 1808 1815 Under Wellington

Reminiscences 1808-1815 Under Wellington

William Hay had a varied and exciting military career during the later years of the Napoleonic Wars, which took him to the Peninsula, to Waterloo and, after 1815, to Canada. First commissioned into the crack 52nd Light Infantry - and serving with that regiment in the campaigns of 1810 and 1811 - promotion took him into the 12th Light Dragoons. Afte

There are many books on Wellington’s campaigns during the Peninsular War. Yet very few examine the pivotal year of 1811, when he went on the offensive and forced Napoleon’s armies back over 300 kilometers, from the doors of Lisbon to the Spanish border. For two months he pursued the retreating French, fighting skirmishes and rearguards virtually the whole way. The French finally halted at the Spanish border and turned on Wellington in early May, where an epic three-day battle was fought at Fuentes de Oñoro. The rest of the year, Wellington defended the border while making plans to liberate Spain in 1811. Wellington’s Light Division and the defense of Portugal looks at the famed Light Division as it led the pursuit of the French and was involved in almost every combat and battle fought that year. The book also explores the stalemate of January and February 1811, where the division maintained outposts overlooking French positions in the vicinity of Santarem, as well as the pursuit of the French Army back to Spain in March and April, when the division fought many skirmishes, combats, and small battles, often on its own. These include the actions at Pombal, Condeixa, Redinha, Casal Novo, Foz d’Arouce, Freixada, and Sabugal. May saw the Light Division in a desperate fight at Fuentes de Oñoro, where for much of the battle it held the army’s right flank. For the rest of the year the Light Division was in the vicinity of Ciudad Rodrigo where it occupied ground that it held for much of 1810, where it served as Wellington’s advance outposts. The assumed similar positions and were engaged at Fuente Guinaldo and El Bodon. In addition to these fights, the book will examine the changes in the organization of the division, with the addition of new battalions and release of other units. It will also go into great detail on the problems it had with command and control – with its leading officers exhausted, requesting permission to return home to recuperate. Drawing on diaries, letters, and memoirs, the authors tell the story of the officers and men who fought in the division. Many of these sources have never been published before.

Writing to his mother the day after the fighting, Captain Thomas Wildman of the 7th Hussars described 'a victory so splendid & important that you may search the annals of history in vain for its parallel'. Little wonder, for Waterloo was widely recognised – even in its immediate wake – as one of the most decisive battles in history: after more than twenty years of uninterrupted conflict, this single day's encounter finally put paid to French aspirations for European hegemony. The culminating point of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Waterloo also witnessed levels of determination and bravery by both sides which far exceeded anything experienced by the veterans of Wellington's recent campaigns in Spain and Portugal. Indeed, it was that unconquerable spirit which left over 50,000 men dead on the field of battle and tens of thousands of others wounded. This thoroughly researched and highly detailed account of one of history's greatest human dramas looks first at the wider strategic picture before focusing on the tactical roles played by individual British units – all meticulously examined with the benefit of an extensive array of hitherto unexploited primary sources which reveal the battlefield experience of officers and soldiers as never before. Refusing simply to repeat the same unchallenged accounts and to commit the same errors of previous historians, this work relies exclusively on hundreds of first-hand accounts, by men of all ranks and from practically every British regiment and corps present on that fateful day, to provide a fresh and revised perspective on one of the most pivotal events of modern times.

The outbreak of the Seven Years War saw the formation of new alliances and led to the conduct of military operations in several theaters simultaneously. The campaign of 1757 saw large-scale maneuvers, with their necessary operational corollaries of supply and logistics, as France put an army of 100,000 men into the field. The conduct of the campaign also testifies to the difficulty of exercising command in the face of a court and a government for which short-term results took precedence over means. Notwithstanding such difficulties, the campaign of the French armies in Westphalia saw its climax play out around the village of Hastenbeck on 26 July 1757, where the forces of Maréchal d'Estrées gained a victory that came close to knocking Hanover out of the war. The story of the campaign can be told from the human perspective thanks to the large body of memoirs and letters from officers, both general and subordinate, of cavalry and infantry regiments. Having left their garrisons four months earlier, they had come to battle at the gates of Hanover after having traveled more than 600 kilometers through the Low Countries and into Germany.

Although an army’s success is often measured in battle outcomes, its victories depend on strengths that may be less obvious on the field. In Sickness, Suffering, and the Sword, military historian Andrew Bamford assesses the effectiveness of the British Army in sustained campaigning during the Napoleonic Wars. In the process, he offers a fresh and controversial look at Britain’s military system, showing that success or failure on campaign rested on the day-to-day experiences of regimental units rather than the army as a whole. Bamford draws his title from the words of Captain Moyle Sherer, who during the winter of 1816–1817 wrote an account of his service during the Peninsular War: “My regiment has never been very roughly handled in the field. . . But, alas! What between sickness, suffering, and the sword, few, very few of those men are now in existence.” Bamford argues that those daily scourges of such often-ignored factors as noncombat deaths and equine strength and losses determined outcomes on the battlefield. In the nineteenth century, the British Army was a collection of regiments rather than a single unified body, and the regimental system bore the responsibility of supplying manpower on that field. Between 1808 and 1815, when Britain was fighting a global conflict far greater than its military capabilities, the system nearly collapsed. Only a few advantages narrowly outweighed the army’s increasing inability to meet manpower requirements. This book examines those critical dynamics in Britain’s major early-nineteenth-century campaigns: the Peninsular War (1808–1814), the Walcheren Expedition (1809), the American War (1812–1815), and the growing commitments in northern Europe from 1813 on. Drawn from primary documents, Bamford’s statistical analysis compares the vast disparities between regiments and different theatres of war and complements recent studies of health and sickness in the British Army.

Over two hundred years ago, on 21 June 1813, just southwest of Vitoria in northern Spain, the British, Portuguese and Spanish army commanded by the Duke of Wellington confronted the French army of Napoleon’s brother Joseph. Hours later Wellington’s forces won an overwhelming victory and, after six years of bitter occupation, the French were ousted from Iberia. This is the critical battle that Carole Divall focuses on in this vivid, scholarly study of the last phase of the Peninsular War. The battle was the pivotal event of the 1813 campaign - it was fatal to French interests in Spain - but it is also significant because it demonstrated Wellington’s confidence in his allied army and in himself. The complexity of the manoeuvres he expected his men to carry out and the shrewd strategic planning that preceded the battle were quite remarkable. As well as giving a graphic close description of each stage of the battle, Carole Divall sets it in the wider scope of the Peninsular War. Through the graphic recollections of the men who were there – from commanders to the merest foot soldiers – she offers us a direct insight into the reality of combat during the Napoleonic Wars.

In Women in the Peninsular War, Esdaile looks beyond the iconography. While a handful of Spanish and Portuguese women became Agustina-like heroines, a multitude became victims, and here both of these groups receive their due. But Esdaile reveals a much more complicated picture in which women are discovered to have experienced, responded to, and participated in the conflict in various ways.