Fusiliers: The Saga of a British Redcoat Regiment in the American Revolution
By Mark Urban
400 pages, hardcover: $27.95
ISBN 978-0802716477
Reviewed by Dick Weaver
This book isn’t for everyone who shoots a muzzleloading gun. Rather this book is for anyone interested in getting a different take on what military life was really like in the American Revolution, especially from the British side of the coin. Mark Urban, also the author of Wellington’s Rifles and The Man Who Broke Napolean’s Codes, is a British author. That’s obvious in his perspective as well as his writing style.
This author clearly thinks very highly of Earl Cornwallis, for example, whom he portrays as an innovative and intelligent leader who was willing to take risks to prosecute the war in the face of the stubbornness and sometimes outright incompetence of higher command. Urban is frank in his appraisals of other military leaders and groups, whether they were British, American or French. Learning that he thinks that the Patriot partisans in the Carolinas perpetrated more brutality in that bloody arena than did the Loyalists, for example, leads us to acknowledge that perhaps we have only heard part of the story, even if we may disagree.
This book focuses on one British regiment, the 23rd Fusiliers, the Royal Welch Fusiliers. This regiment served from the very first days at Lexington and Concord clear through to the Siege of Yorktown, after which many in the regiment suffered imprisonment as part of the terms of surrender. The author follows the 23rd as closely as he can, using personal journals, military records and even newspaper reports from the day. So we come to know not only the larger picture but also non-coms such as Sgt. Roger Lamb as well as a number of officers both competent and incompetent. Urban pulls few punches in his opinions of these officers.
The author helps us get a more complete picture of British leaders such as Cornwallis and Gen. Howe, also. For example, he portrays Gen. Howe as a reformer of tactics and practices in the British army. Urban holds that under Howe’s direction the British military did in fact learn a great deal from the early disasters of Lexington and Concord and Breed’s Hill and became much better able to meet the “unsporting” American tactics as the war progressed.
I recommend this book not only to those specifically interested in Redcoat reenacting, but also to any student of the American Revolution or indeed to anyone seriously interested in American history. The color illustrations are a bonus and include two sketches portraying the modified uniform proposed and probably worn by the 23rd and other British regiments.
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