Yorktown 1781: The World Turned Upside Down (Campaign) Review

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(More customer reviews)In "Yorktown 1781" Morrissey walks the line of once more capably describing the events of one of the great moments in American history and still somehow managing to completely misinterpret the important elements of the event.
Unlike some of his other titles for Osprey Morrissey does provide an adequate description of the senior commanders on all sides, Army, Navy, French, American and British and the troops involved and how they differed. He also has enough maps without the unnecessary clutter of cameo's that all start to blur together.
He goes into detail about the naval action which most Americans barely know happened, but which was in fact vital to the ultimate victory. The problem with the book comes with the fact he does not go into as much detail about the siege itself and, like in his work on Monmouth, Morrissey seems to fail to understand the importance of what happened on the ground.
He spends much of the early book describing the fighting in Virginia between Lafayette and Benedict Arnold who was raiding along the James River with both sides waiting for Cornwallis' army to march up from the Carolinas. Interesting reading but Arnold's forces had little to do with Yorktown and the space might have been better used to focus on Cornwallis' army and the campaign it was fighting which so ground it down that when it reach Yorktown it had almost 20% casualties from illness.
Once the players are in place Morrissey also seems to rush through the action and in so doing, misses the point. The plan was for the French, who had experience and a siege train to conduct the serious work of the siege from the north while the Americans, unused to a formal siege would just contain the British to the south, allowing the French to do the bulk of the fighting and in effect win the war.
This plan came apart when the French were unable to dislodge the outermost British strong point after 3 assaults with supporting artillery fire from the siege train. That is why to this day that outer defense still holds the name "Fusilier Redoubt" after the Royal Welch Fusiliers who defended it and could not be moved. The failure of the French to force the issue meant that the action moved to the south and it was the American troops who bore the brunt of the fighting and so won the battle. It also explains the bitterness the Americans felt towards the French officers who were happily socializing with their British captives, since they had been unable to beat them in the field and relied on Americans to do what they had failed to achieve.
Morrissey's work does set the stage and explain in excellent detail the key players. He covers the usually neglected naval engagements between the British and French that sealed the fate of the war, but by neglecting the details of the siege itself, he misses, and leads the reader to miss, the key event at Yorktown. That is the failure of the French regulars and the success of the American soldiers, that it was the Americans and not their allies who won the battle, the war and their independence. that in this deciding momment in the life of the nation, it was the American Soldier no longer the militia minute man or the ragged survivor of Valley Forge, who proved he was the equal or better of the European regular.


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By 1781 Britain's struggle to contain the rebels in her American colonies had reached an inglorious stalemate. Six years on from the British defeat by the New England militia at Boston, George Washington's rebuilt Continental Army - with support from the French - now systematically began to seek out and destroy British forces even if protected by seemingly impregnable defences.Yorktown would be a salutary lesson to the British Crown about the odds she now faced in holding on to her colonies.

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