{"id":326,"date":"2009-08-23T16:35:48","date_gmt":"2009-08-23T23:35:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=326"},"modified":"2015-06-05T22:29:24","modified_gmt":"2015-06-06T04:29:24","slug":"the-first-salute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=326","title":{"rendered":"The First Salute"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Barbara W. Tuchman, 1988, Alfred A. Knopf, New York<\/p>\n

The theme of this book was the incident that occurred on St. Eustastia island in 1776 when the Dutch government of island acknowledged a ship flying the flag of the United States.\u00c2\u00a0 The author traces events in Europe that preceded the salute and then takes the reader through to the culmination of the Revolution with the British defeat at Yorktown.<\/p>\n

I learned a great deal from reading this book that I had not known previously, particularly the primary reasons why the\u00c2\u00a0British lost the war.\u00c2\u00a0 I was struck by the parallels between those reasons and the reasons why we Americans lost the Vietnam War.\u00c2\u00a0 The reasons included antipathy to the war at home, over-reliance on superior fire power, not understanding the reasons why the enemy was fighting, adherence to a flawed tactical sea battle plan, and sheer mismanagement.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, I think that a thorough understanding of the prosecution of the American Revolution from the British perspective may have prevented us from committing to the Vietnam War in the way we did.<\/p>\n

The book also gave me a real appreciation of the extent of the French contribution, in money and in military resources, to our victory.\u00c2\u00a0 The author focuses a lot of attention on the war at sea which would not have been possible without the French fleet.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 We were also lucky that Admiral George Rodney of the British Navy was incapacitated at the time of Yorktown.\u00c2\u00a0 He, in fact, destroyed the French fleet when he returned to duty a mere six months after Yorktown.<\/p>\n

After reading An American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House<\/em>, it was refreshing to read a book by a real historian.\u00c2\u00a0 Ms. Tuchman’s book was well researched, provided a great deal of insight regarding the period, and the flow of the book made it easy to follow.\u00c2\u00a0 There were a few places where it bogged down a bit, but the story she tells is compelling.\u00c2\u00a0\"four<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Barbara W. Tuchman, 1988, Alfred A. Knopf, New York The theme of this book was the incident that occurred on St. Eustastia island in 1776 when the Dutch government of island acknowledged a ship flying the flag of the …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14],"tags":[24,20,16],"class_list":["post-326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-four-star","tag-early-american","tag-history","tag-non-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=326"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":562,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions\/562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}