Bücher der Reihe Campaigns and Commanders

Intelligence is often the critical factor in a successful military campaign. This was certainly the case for the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War. Huw Davies offers the first full account of the scope, complexity, and importance of Wellington's intelligence department, describing a highly organised, multifaceted network of agents and spies.

One of the most colourful characters in the Napoleonic pantheon, Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher is best known as the Prussian general who, with the Duke of Wellington, defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. This biography by Michael Leggiere is the first scholarly book in English to explore Blucher's life and military career - and his impact on Napoleon.

When war broke out between Great Britain and the United States in 1812, Sir George Prevost, captain general and governor in chief of British North America, was responsible for defending a group of North American colonies that stretched as far as the distance from Paris to Moscow. He also commanded one of the largest British overseas forces during the Napoleonic Wars. Defender of Canada, the first book-length examination of Prevost's career, offers a reinterpretation of the general's military leadership in the War of 1812. Historian Tanya Grodzinski shows that Prevost deserves far greater credit for the successful defense of Canada than he has heretofore received.Earlier accounts portrayed Prevost as overly cautious and attributed the preservation of Canada to other officers, but Grodzinski challenges these assumptions and restores the general to his rightful place as British North America's key military figure during the War of 1812. Grodzinski shows that Prevost's strategic insight enabled him to enact a practicable defense despite scarce resources and to ably integrate naval power into his defensive plans.Prevost's range of responsibilities in British North America were daunting. They included overseeing joint endeavors with Indian allies, managing logistical matters, monitoring naval construction and personnel needs, supervising colonial governments, and commanding the defense of Canada. Tasked with protecting an extensive and complex territory, Prevost employed a mix of soldiers, sailors, locally raised forces, and indigenous people in taking advantage of the American military's weaknesses to defeat most of its plans.Following his recall to Britain in 1815 after the defeat at the Battle of Plattsburgh, Prevost would have been court-martialed had he not died unexpectedly. In carefully examining the charges leveled against Prevost, Grodzinski shows the general to have preserved the integrity of Canada, allowing diplomats to ensure its continued existence.

A year after John Bradstreet's raid of 1758-the first and largest British-American riverine raid mounted during the Seven Years' War (known in North America as the French and Indian War)-Benjamin Franklin hailed it as one of the great "American" victories of the war. Bradstreet heartily agreed, and soon enough, his own official account was adopted by Francis Parkman and other early historians.In this first comprehensive analysis of Bradstreet's raid, Ian Macpherson McCulloch uses never-before-seen materials and a new interpretive approach to dispel many of the myths that have grown up around the operation. The result is a closely observed, deeply researched revisionist microhistory-the first unvarnished, balanced account of a critical moment in early American military history.Examined within the context of campaign planning and the friction among commanders in the war's first three years, the raid looks markedly different than Bradstreet's heroic portrayal. The operation was carried out principally by American colonial soldiers, and McCulloch lets many of the provincial participants give voice to their own experiences. He consults little-known French documents that give Bradstreet's opponents' side of the story, as well as supporting material such as orders of battle, meteorological data, and overviews of captured ships. McCulloch also examines the riverine operational capability that Bradstreet put in place, a new water-borne style of combat that the British-American army would soon successfully deploy in the campaigns of Niagara (1759) and Montreal (1760).McCulloch's history is the most detailed, thoroughgoing view of Bradstreet's raid ever produced.