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Author: Charles Oman Publisher: AT THE CLARENDON PRESS ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 444
Book Description
In this volume are contained the annals of all the many campaigns of 1811, with the exception of those of Suchet’s Valencian expedition in the later months of the year, which for reasons of space have to be relegated to Volume V. It was impossible to exceed the bulk of 660 pages, and the operations on the Mediterranean coast of Spain can be dealt with separately without any grave breach of continuity in the narrative, though this particular Valencian campaign affected the general course of the war far more closely than any other series of operations on the Eastern side of the Peninsula, as I have been careful to point out in the concluding chapters of Section XXIX. The main interest of 1811, however, centres in the operations of Wellington and his opponents, Masséna, Soult, and Marmont. In the previous year the tide of French conquest reached its high-water mark, when Soult appeared before the walls of Cadiz, and Masséna forced his way to the foot of the long chain of redoubts that formed the Lines of Torres Vedras. Already, before 1810 was over, Masséna’s baffled army had fallen back a few miles, and this first short retreat to Santarem marked the commencement of a never-ceasing ebb of the wave of conquest on the Western side of the Peninsula. Matters went otherwise on the Eastern coast in 1811, but all Suchet’s campaigns were, after all, a side issue. The decisive point lay not in Catalonia or Valencia, but in Portugal. When Masséna finally evacuated Portugal in March 1811, forced out of his cantonments by Wellington’s skilful use of the sword of famine, a new stage in the war began. The French had lost the advantage of the offensive, and were never to regain it on the Western theatre of war. All through the remainder of 1811 it was the British general who dealt the strokes, and the enemy who had to parry them. The strokes were feeble, because of Wellington’s very limited resources, and for the most part were warded off. Though Almeida fell in May, the siege of Badajoz in June, and the blockade of Ciudad Rodrigo in August and September, were both brought to an end by the concentration of French armies which Wellington was too weak to attack. But the masses of men which Soult and Marmont gathered on the Guadiana in June, and Dorsenne and Marmont gathered on the Agueda in September, had only been collected by a dangerous disgarnishing of the whole of those provinces of Spain which lay beneath the French yoke. They could not remain long assembled, firstly because they could not feed themselves, and secondly because of the peril to which their concentration exposed the abandoned regions in their rear. Hence, in each case, the French commanders, satisfied with having parried Wellington’s stroke for the moment, refused to attack him, and dispersed their armies. That the spirit of the offensive was lost on the French side is sufficiently shown by the fact that when their adversary stood on the defensive upon the Caya in June, and at Alfayates in September, they refused to assail his positions. We leave the allied and the French armies at the end of the autumn campaign of 1811 still in this state of equipoise. Wellington had made two successive attempts to strike, and had failed, though without any grave loss or disaster, because the forces opposed to him were still too great. His third stroke in January 1812 was to be successful and decisive, but its history belongs to our next volume. The main bulk of the seven sections herewith presented consists of a narrative of the successive phases of the long deadlock between Wellington and his enemies along the Portuguese frontier: but I have endeavoured to give as clear a narrative as I can compile of all the side-campaigns of the year, in Andalusia, Murcia, Estremadura, Galicia, the Asturias, and Catalonia, and to show their bearings on the general history of the great Peninsular struggle. To be continue in this ebook...
Author: Charles Oman Publisher: AT THE CLARENDON PRESS ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 444
Book Description
In this volume are contained the annals of all the many campaigns of 1811, with the exception of those of Suchet’s Valencian expedition in the later months of the year, which for reasons of space have to be relegated to Volume V. It was impossible to exceed the bulk of 660 pages, and the operations on the Mediterranean coast of Spain can be dealt with separately without any grave breach of continuity in the narrative, though this particular Valencian campaign affected the general course of the war far more closely than any other series of operations on the Eastern side of the Peninsula, as I have been careful to point out in the concluding chapters of Section XXIX. The main interest of 1811, however, centres in the operations of Wellington and his opponents, Masséna, Soult, and Marmont. In the previous year the tide of French conquest reached its high-water mark, when Soult appeared before the walls of Cadiz, and Masséna forced his way to the foot of the long chain of redoubts that formed the Lines of Torres Vedras. Already, before 1810 was over, Masséna’s baffled army had fallen back a few miles, and this first short retreat to Santarem marked the commencement of a never-ceasing ebb of the wave of conquest on the Western side of the Peninsula. Matters went otherwise on the Eastern coast in 1811, but all Suchet’s campaigns were, after all, a side issue. The decisive point lay not in Catalonia or Valencia, but in Portugal. When Masséna finally evacuated Portugal in March 1811, forced out of his cantonments by Wellington’s skilful use of the sword of famine, a new stage in the war began. The French had lost the advantage of the offensive, and were never to regain it on the Western theatre of war. All through the remainder of 1811 it was the British general who dealt the strokes, and the enemy who had to parry them. The strokes were feeble, because of Wellington’s very limited resources, and for the most part were warded off. Though Almeida fell in May, the siege of Badajoz in June, and the blockade of Ciudad Rodrigo in August and September, were both brought to an end by the concentration of French armies which Wellington was too weak to attack. But the masses of men which Soult and Marmont gathered on the Guadiana in June, and Dorsenne and Marmont gathered on the Agueda in September, had only been collected by a dangerous disgarnishing of the whole of those provinces of Spain which lay beneath the French yoke. They could not remain long assembled, firstly because they could not feed themselves, and secondly because of the peril to which their concentration exposed the abandoned regions in their rear. Hence, in each case, the French commanders, satisfied with having parried Wellington’s stroke for the moment, refused to attack him, and dispersed their armies. That the spirit of the offensive was lost on the French side is sufficiently shown by the fact that when their adversary stood on the defensive upon the Caya in June, and at Alfayates in September, they refused to assail his positions. We leave the allied and the French armies at the end of the autumn campaign of 1811 still in this state of equipoise. Wellington had made two successive attempts to strike, and had failed, though without any grave loss or disaster, because the forces opposed to him were still too great. His third stroke in January 1812 was to be successful and decisive, but its history belongs to our next volume. The main bulk of the seven sections herewith presented consists of a narrative of the successive phases of the long deadlock between Wellington and his enemies along the Portuguese frontier: but I have endeavoured to give as clear a narrative as I can compile of all the side-campaigns of the year, in Andalusia, Murcia, Estremadura, Galicia, the Asturias, and Catalonia, and to show their bearings on the general history of the great Peninsular struggle. To be continue in this ebook...
Author: John Grehan Publisher: Casemate Publishers ISBN: 1473852757 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
“This is a well-researched, well-written, closely argued and fascinating contribution to the historiography of the Peninsular War.”—The Spectator In 1809 French armies controlled almost every province of Spain and only Wellington’s small force in Portugal stood between Napoleon and the conquest of Iberia. The French invaded Portugal in the summer of 1810, but found their way blocked by the most extensive field fortifications the world had ever seen—the Lines of Torres Vedras. Unable to penetrate the Lines, the French were driven back into Spain having suffered the heaviest defeat yet experienced by Napoleon’s armies. The retreat from Portugal marked the turning point in the Peninsular War and, from the security of the Lines, Wellington was able to mount the offensive campaigns that swept France’s Imperial armies back across the Pyrenees. The Lines of Torres Vedras is an authoritative account of the planning, construction and occupation of the Lines and of the battles, sieges and horrors of the French invasion. It is also an important study of Wellington’s strategy during the crucial years of the war against Napoleon. “Essential reading for every Peninsula enthusiast, this is recommended highly.”—Military Illustrated
Author: Yale University Press Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 9780300087192 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
In separate commentary sections he evaluates the sources and indicates the inevitable contradictions and gaps in evidence that have emerged during his research. Complete with maps, battleground plans, line drawings and photographs, this compelling book provides acute analysis of a single day in Salamanca that changed European history."--Jacket.
Author: George Watson Publisher: CUP Archive ISBN: Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 746
Book Description
More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 4 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.
Author: Bruce A. Elleman Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136841687 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 242
Book Description
This book examines the nature and character of naval expeditionary warfare, in particular in peripheral campaigns, and the contribution of such campaigns to the achievement of strategic victory. Naval powers, which can lack the massive ground forces to win in the main theatre, often choose a secondary theatre accessible to them by sea and difficult for their enemies to reach by land, giving the sea power and its expeditionary forces the advantage. The technical term for these theatres is ‘peripheral operations.’ The subject of peripheral campaigns in naval expeditionary warfare is central to the British, the US, and the Australian way of war in the past and in the future. All three are reluctant to engage large land forces because of the high human and economic costs. Instead, they rely as much as possible on sea and air power, and the latter is most often in the form of carrier-based aviation. In order to exert pressure on their enemies, they have often opened additional theaters in on-going, regional, and civil wars. This book contains thirteen case studies by some of the foremost naval historians from the United States, Great Britain, and Australia whose collected case studies examine the most important peripheral operations of the last two centuries. This book will be of much interest to students of naval warfare, military history, strategic studies and security studies.
Author: Charles Oman Publisher: AT THE CLARENDON PRESS ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 460
Book Description
It is many years since an attempt has been made in England to deal with the general history of the Peninsular War. Several interesting and valuable diaries or memoirs of officers who took part in the great struggle have been published of late, but no writer of the present generation has dared to grapple with the details of the whole of the seven years of campaigning that lie between the Dos Mayo and Toulouse. Napier’s splendid work has held the field for sixty years. Meanwhile an enormous bulk of valuable material has been accumulating in English, French, and Spanish, which has practically remained unutilized. Papers, public and private, are accessible whose existence was not suspected in the ’thirties; an infinite number of autobiographies and reminiscences which have seen the light after fifty or sixty years of repose in some forgotten drawer, have served to fill up many gaps in our knowledge. At least one formal history of the first importance, that of General Arteche y Moro, has been published. I fancy that its eleven volumes are practically unknown in England, yet it is almost as valuable as Toreño’s Guerra de la Independencia in enabling us to understand the purely Spanish side of the war. I trust therefore that it will not be considered presumptuous for one who has been working for some ten or fifteen years at the original sources to endeavour to summarize in print the results of his investigations; for I believe that even the reader who has already devoted a good deal of attention to the Peninsular War will find a considerable amount of new matter in these pages. My resolve to take in hand a general history of the struggle was largely influenced by the passing into the hands of All Souls College of the papers of one of its most distinguished fellows, the diplomatist Sir Charles Vaughan. Not only had Vaughan unique opportunities for observing the early years of the Peninsular War, but he turned them to the best account, and placed all his observations on record. I suppose that there was seldom a man who had a greater love for collecting and filing information. His papers contain not only his own diaries and correspondence, but an infinite number of notes made for him by Spanish friends on points which he desired to master, and a vast bulk of pamphlets, proclamations, newspapers, and tables of statistics, carefully bound together in bundles, which (as far as I can see) have not been opened between the day of his death and that on which they passed, by a legacy from his last surviving relative, into the possession of his old college. Vaughan landed at Corunna in September, 1808, in company with Charles Stuart, the first English emissary to the Central Junta. He rode with Stuart to Madrid and Aranjuez, noting everything that he saw, from Roman inscriptions to the views of local Alcaldes and priests on the politics of the day. He contrived to interview many persons of importance—for example, he heard from Cuesta’s own lips of his treasonable plot to overthrow the Junta, and he secured a long conversation with Castaños as to the Capitulation of Baylen, from which I have extracted some wholly new facts as to that event. He then went to Aragon, where he stayed three weeks in the company of the Captain-General Joseph Palafox. Not only did he cross-question Palafox as to all the details of his famous defence of Saragossa, but he induced San Genis (the colonel who conducted the engineering side of the operations) to write him a memorandum, twelve pages long, as to the character and system of his work. Vaughan accompanied Palafox to the front in November, but left the Army of Aragon a day before the battle of Tudela. Hearing of the disaster from the fugitives of Castaños’s army, he resolved to take the news to Madrid. To be continue in this ebook...
Author: Martin Robson Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0857723448 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were the first truly global conflicts. The Royal Navy was a key player in the wider wars and, for Britain, the key factor in her eventual emergence as the only naval power capable of sustained global hegemony. The most iconic battles of any era were fought at sea during these years - from the Battle of the Nile in 1798 to Nelson's momentous victory at Trafalgar in October 1805. In this period, the Navy had reached a peak of efficiency and was unrivalled in manpower and technological strength. The eradication of scurvy in the 1790s had a significant impact on the health of sailors and, along with regular supplies of food and water, gave the British an advantage over their rivals in battle. As well as naval battles, the Navy also undertook amphibious operations, capturing many of France's Caribbean colonies and Dutch colonies in the East Indies and Ceylon; this Imperial dimension was integral to British strength and counteracting French success on continental Europe. This book looks at the history of the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815, from a broad perspective, examining the strategy, operations and tactics of British seapower. While it delves into the details of Royal Navy operations such as battle, blockade, commerce protection and exploration, it also covers a myriad of other aspects often overlooked in narrative histories such as the importance of naval logistics, transport, relations with the army and manning. An assessment of key naval figures and combined eyewitness accounts situate the reader firmly in Nelson's navy. Through an exploration of the relationship between the Navy, trade and empire, Martin Robson highlights the contribution Royal Navy made to Britain's rise to global hegemony through the nineteenth century Pax Britannica.
Author: Warren I. Cohen Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316175626 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 398
Book Description
Since their first publication, the four volumes of the Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations have served as the definitive source for the topic, from the colonial period to the Cold War. The fourth volume of the updated edition explores the conditions in the international system at the end of World War II, the American determination to provide leadership, and the security dilemma each superpower posed for the other. This revised and expanded edition incorporates recent scholarship and revelations, carrying the narrative through the years following the end of the Cold War into the administration of Barack Obama. The character of the American political system is explored, including the separation of political powers and the role of interest groups that prompted American leaders to exaggerate dangers abroad to enhance their domestic power. This new edition examines the conditions in the international system from the end of World War II to the present, focusing on the American determination to provide world leadership.
Author: Charles Oman
Author: Charles Oman
Author: John Grehan
Author: Yale University Press
Author: George Watson
Author: Bruce A. Elleman
Author: Susan Wise Bauer
Author: William Charles Foster
Author: Charles Oman
Author: Martin Robson
Author: Warren I. Cohen