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Chandler’s massive tome on every campaign Napoleon conducted makes a great one-stop shop for a basic military history of any action you may want to look up. This is aided by lucid accounts all the way through, good maps (which are present in the Kindle version too—if a trifle small on my screen), and thoughtful brief analysis of each one.

All of this means it’s still the primary reference for the period nearly sixty years after it was first published; a feat very few other books can claim. It is highly likely no other book will ever combine the relatively introductory nature and comprehensiveness of this one and do it better. This does come at a price—the individual campaigns are covered at something approaching the level of an Osprey Campaign book, and this weighs in at ~1100 pages, with a smaller proportion than normal given over to appendixes, references, bibliography, etc.

There are some limits. As this is the Campaigns of Napoleon, as opposed to ‘the Napoleonic period’, there’s extremely little discussion of the Peninsular War, naval actions, or any campaign not directly involving the star of the show (I would like to see something on the French Revolutionary campaigns in Germany, that Napoleon’s campaigns in Italy were supposed to be a sideshow to). And it’s still 1100+ pages, so not losing focus in this volume is for the best.

And it’s not just the campaigns either. He goes into Napoleon’s background and early training at École Militaire, and spends a nice little bit of time on where his ideas on warfare came and were developed from; that is certainly a nicely informative chapter.

I’ll note the Kindle version has certainly been gone over, and there’s a minimum of errors, though a lot slipped through in the confusion of if a number should be a Roman numeral ‘I’ or an Arabic ‘1’ (there is one rendering of “IIth”), and Blücher gets rendered as “Blöcher” twice. Outside of that, the text is in very good shape.

One of Osprey’s free offers as the pandemic began, this was an unexpected acquisition for me. I’m not up on the US’s Indian Wars at all, other than a few bits of brief outline.

I was certainly aware of the problems with continued British presence in the area after the end of the Revolutionary War, and that there certainly was a lot of conflict between the tide of settlement washing over the Alleghenies and the Indians, that did culminate in a short war but that’s about the limit of it. Certainly, the subtitle of ‘The US Army’s first victory’ seemed… off.

But of course, before the end of the Revolution, the military was the “Continental Army”, and the first major engagements after its disbandment, and slow replacement under the Articles of Confederation, and then the current constitution were defeats. The Legion of the United States is then formed as the start of this particular campaign. Osprey spends some good time on this, as well as a couple pages talking about the general situation in the Northwest Territory, including some estimates of the numbers of people in the region.

This gets complicated with the French Revolution spilling over into North America in person of Edmond-Charles Genêt, who was supposed to be a minister from the new French government, but wanted to be a revolutionary leader, raising armies to invade Spanish territory, and planning to overthrow the American government for one more sympathetic with spreading the Revolution far and wide.

In addition to this, the new American army faced problems from within. Notably, two of Major General Anthony Wayne’s subordinates were working against him; Hamtramck felt unfairly passed over for promotion, leaving his reliability in doubt, and far worse, Wilkinson was being paid by the Spanish Empire to make sure the new army posed no threat to them, wanted Wayne’s job, and had been writing letters and newspaper articles undermining Wayne. So, when a major battle was finally in the offing after two years of campaigning, Maj Gen Wayne had arranged his chain of command so as to largely bypass his two primary subordinates. Not that they had nothing to do; the point was they did have things to do at Fallen Timbers, it just didn’t include command all of their sub-legions.

The bulk of the book of course is about the actual course of events, with a fair emphasis on the logistics challenges Wayne was overcoming to advance deep into Indian territory to force a confrontation. There’s the usual good maps along the way, but since I’m reading this in PDF, and maps are generally rotated 90-degrees, they weren’t as handy for me as I might have liked. There’s also a good number of color photographs of relevant places and museum exhibits. In all, a fairly typical solid Osprey Campaign presentation.

Overall, this period was very unsettled politically for the interior (Wilkinson earlier was involved with an effort to get Kentucky separated from Virginia and the US and allied to/part of Spain… with the practical goal of opening up navigation from there to the Caribbean, since Spain controlled all the downriver parts of the Mississippi), and this shows off part of the process where the region became more firmly tied to the US. However, Wayne’s methodical working through the various obstacles makes this an interesting study for a pure military viewpoint.