Book Review: Band of Giants

Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America’s IndependenceBy Jack KellyPalgrave Macmillan, 2014 Lamentably few American readers, glancing at the sub-title of Jack Kelly’s crackling good new book Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America’s Independence, will have the correct reaction, which is to ejaculate, “What! Granted, the soldiers who manned the sheets and guns of the French fleet that sent the British navy hull-down for the far horizon at the Battle of the Chesapeake might not have been the finest specimens of manhood, but I assure you, monsieur, their commanding admiral, the Comte de Grasse, would not have employed amateurs.”Of course without the Comte’s dogged sailing prowess – and without the hemisphere-straddling world-power empire he represented – there would have been no “winning” of America’s independence; in 1781 there were still very large, very angry, and very experienced English armies in the field. But Kelly has an entirely different set of amateurs in mind: he’s chosen as the core of his book a small cast of also-ran B-list figures in the formation of the fledgling United States – Founding Second Cousins, if you will, which, granted, doesn’t have quite the same ring as “Band of Giants.”There’s knuckle-dragging Virginia thug Daniel Morgan, and the Quaker Nathanael Greene with his clear tactical mind, and “Mad Anthony” Wayne, and best of all, steadfast Boston bookseller Henry Knox (who was the subject of a very good full-dress biography by Mark Puls in 2008), whose only knowledge of military matters was what he’d hungrily absorbed from Tacitus and the commentaries of Julius Caesar. He impressed George Washington with his strength and tenacity, and as Kelly gamely points out, although the stakes were high, the idea itself wasn’t as unlikely as it might seem to the present age:

This was real. Men’s lives would hang on decisions made by inexperienced officers. Yet it was the age of amateurs. In a time when a retired printer like Benjamin Franklin could make breakthrough discoveries in science, it didn’t seem impossible that soldiers armed with book learning could challenge an empire.

Kelly reminds his readers that in the summer of 1773, Knox had accidentally blown two fingers off his left hand when his fowling piece exploded – “a graphic reminder that a cannon could rupture in the same way, with much more grievous effects.” It was a reminder Knox kept in the front of his attention during his famous overland hauling of the guns of Fort Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights in order to lift the siege of Boston in 1776, and it’s possible that Kelly writes about Knox with such greater sympathetic gusto than he does the rest of his band of giants because he, too, seems to share a depth of insight into the, erm, revolutionary nature of cutting-edge artillery:

Muskets could be lethal at short range, but it was the big guns that held the most unprecedented power. Their possibilities, intricacies, and authority appealed to curious and farsighted men like Knox. Artillery pieces represented humans’ furthest advance in shaping metal on a large scale. They accelerated projectiles to speeds that surpassed the limits of human vision. The gunner was a new breed of warrior, one who has become familiar today. He fought indirectly, servicing a machine that killed and destroyed at a distance.

Knox’s story makes great reading as always, but books like Band of Giants almost inevitably end up broadening their view and becoming default military histories of the great and mighty. Generals Washington, Gage, and Lee and their British counterparts take up as much of Kelley’s story as the smaller-fry do, and indeed, the real amateur soldiers, the ordinary rank-and-file without whom Greene, Morgan, Knox and the rest could have done nothing, seem a far less happy and enterprising lot whenever they make an appearance in the book. “Mad” Anthony Wayne in particular had the “common rabble” that made up his troops. He frequently faced open complaints and once an outright rebellion from the men under his command, and even after he regained control, he found he could only maintain that control by ruthlessly thinning the ranks of his own giants:

Following their January mutiny, [Wayne’s soldiers] remained recalcitrant. They balked at orders to march toward the disease-ridden South. They wanted the pay still owed them. The grumbling, the talk of another mutiny, went too far. One man was heard to say, “God damn the officers, the buggers.” To restore discipline, Wayne found him and five others guilty under the Articles of War. Executioners blew the heads off four of the men with close musket fire. Two were pardoned. A few days later, as the troops began their march, twelve more men refused orders, saying they were not “to be trifled with.” Furious, Wayne instantly had them court-martialed and executed.

Wayne was far from the only American commander who had to resort to this kind of draconian discipline in order to get his sunshine patriots to do what pious history books would later claim they did eagerly. But as a collective portrait of the Revolution’s middle managers, Band of Giants could scarcely be bettered. Just ignore the grim-faced gun-toting Minutemen on the book’s cover; they were no happier being commanded by dilettantes and bookworms than you yourself would be.