The Wandering Army
The Campaigns that Transformed the British Way of War
Huw J. Davies
Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 2022, 384 pages
Book Review published on: April 28, 2023
Service members and military historians both maintain a healthy interest in how, or even if, armies learn from their operational experiences and professional studies. For militaries, the constant quest for applicable “lessons learned” is a noble endeavor to ensure that the rough schooling earned in the blood and sacrifices of war is not lost with the coming of peace. The trick has been to determine which “lessons” were more universal in their application from those that were merely unique to a given conflict. In The Wandering Army: The Campaigns that Transformed the British Way of War, Huw Davies chronicles how the British army benefited from an “accidental military enlightenment” in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought about by their officers’ operational experiences in North and South America, India, and Europe, the officer corps’ willingness to study the flood of domestic and European military writings of the period, and a desire to disseminate the fruits of their studies and the “lessons learned” of their campaigns to the army as a whole. The work is both an examination of the process for spreading professional knowledge throughout the army and a solid history of British campaigning and their “lessons” from the War of Spanish Succession to the Crimean War.
Davies notes that the British army’s evolution and reform during this period was driven largely by a critical mass of thoughtful officers at all levels of the service who sought to keep up with military thought emerging from Europe as well as cataloging their actual wartime experiences to fuse together British theory and practice. By the time of the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, operational experiences in vastly different areas of the globe, against a variety of enemies, gave rise to two major blocks within the army: the German block consisting of officers who had fought against conventional European forces on the continent, and the American block whose experiences were influenced by fighting hybrid enemies during the French and Indian, and American Revolutionary wars. Davies argues that these blocks are not monolithic as officers such as James Wolfe campaigned in both regions, but the experiences of the two groups formed a global knowledge web that encouraged flexibility in the army’s approach to war and experimentation in areas such as the use of light infantry.
Davies’ work is exceptionally well-researched and argued. But he also offers modern U.S. Army professionals some stark warnings. Although the seventy-year enlightenment and reform contributed greatly to Britain’s victory in the Napoleonic Wars, the post war fossilization of military thought led to the painful learning of new, and the relearning of old, “lessons” in Crimea. Although the U.S. Army has put considerable effort into capturing “lessons learned” over the past forty years, Davies’ work should perhaps lead us to ask what exactly have we learned from our experiences in war over those decades and are those “lessons” truly as applicable today as we would like to believe?
Book Review written by:Richard S. Faulkner, PhD, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas