With the excellent Rifles Mark Urban provided us with a great insight in to the workings of the British Army during the Peninsular Wars, through the prism of one of Wellington’s elite regiments. With Fusiliers, he has turned his attention to an earlier time: the American Revolutionary War. In particular, he has used the story of one regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, the 23rd Regiment of Foot, which remarkably managed to be present, in some form or other, for all of the key engagements of the war over the course of eight years. By understanding their experiences, and the way they evolved their organisation and tactics to cope with a foe that was fighting in an entirely new style – wherever possible, the Americans fought from behind cover, in loose formation, an approach that the ill-trained British infantrymen were not set up to cope with – Urban provides insights in to the army as a whole.

It’s a military truism that armies always prepare themselves to fight the last war, and at the beginning of their time in America, the Fusiliers were still trained, drilled and equipped for the clash of big batallions in Continental Europe, following British involvement in the Seven Years War. It quickly became apparent to their commanders that fighting the Americans was a different kind of conflict, and they began to gradually evolve assault tactics, uniforms and drill to cope. Many of these lessons were learned the hard way, during British defeats and British victories alike, and for the commanders, there was a dawning realisation that they were fighting an unwinnable war, both politically and logistically. The 23rd were part of General Cornwallis’ column that swept through the Carolinas and Virginia in the Southern Campaign of 1780-81, and were probably entitled to regard themselves as undefeated in battle even after the surrender of the British army following the siege of Yorktown in 1781.

The Royal Welch Fusiliers, or elements of it, managed to be present at every signficant engagement of the entire war in what is now the Continental United States, so you can certainly say that Urban chose his subjects carefully and well. Through his extensive research, he provides us with insights in to the lives and experiences of commanders, officers, NCOs and private soldiers, much of the material previously ubpublished. He covers the politics that beset the officers, the ridiculous system of purchasing commissions that meant the 23rd was for some time without both a colonel (the commanding officer), or a major (the second-in-command), as well as the temptations that beset the men – in an English-speaking country where the population was sparse, land was plentiful and the need for labour was high, some soldiers were induced to desert by the local populace. With the system of discipline a mess, a distinct lack of clarity among the army’s leadership for much of the war, and conditions for Great Britain worsening in many other parts of the world, we get to see how the British Army coped with fighting a war that it did not want and increasingly did not believe it could win.

With a great eye for detail, and the ability to describe battles clearly and succinctly, Urban is perfectly equipped to write this kind of military history. He provides the big picture, but never loses sight of the individual human stories that make this book so enjoyable. Fusiliers as a whole is an exploration of the evolution of the British Army to cope with the changing face of war – and Urban explains how, tainted by the pereception of military defeat, for a time the lessons learned were in danger of being discarded in favour of the rigid military dogmas of the Prussians. As it was not their military tactics that lost them the American war, but the impossible strategic situation, it was to the benefit of the British that they remembered some of the lessons of America in time for their successful campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars – hence the subtitle of the paperback edition, How the British Army Lost America But Learned to Fight. Recommended.

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