European And Native
American Warfare 1675-1615

Book Review

Reviews by "Old Duffer"

Armstrong Starkey for UCL Press

A very interesting summary of its topic this book takes as its basic plot that the Indians were past masters of the "skulking way of war" and that they could only be militarily defeated by the Euros when the latter had learned the same way of war. Since few indeed of the invaders did this one might wonder how the Indians lost. The answer, like for so many warrior races - the Tuareg for example, is that they lacked the numbers to support their losses even when they were victorious. Thinned by disease, without a state apparatus to support a war effort, and having their dependents within range of lumbering European columns all spelled defeat for the Indian. He could achieve temporary success but as soon as the whites thought differently they pressed forward. The shocking lack of good faith from the whites (whose fear of barbaric behaviour caused them to get their retaliation in first) is clear, although one is forced to wonder why the Indians believed them? (The Boers and English treated the Xhosa in a similar fashion).

Starkey is a sharp cookie because he realises that European officers were not quite the fools that American myth requires (but then he does not think the American militias were any better) because they were perfectly well aware of irregular warfare techniques. Officers in the French and Indian War could, for example, have served in the suppression of the Jacobites or seen Imperial Grenzers in operation. Starkey demonstrates that these forms of irregular warfare differed from the Indian way, leaving officers with a choice of learning it, or bulling through with the column and burning the villages. Starkey has a sharp eye for the arguments in this partisan topic. He agrees the Northwest Passage attack on St Francis by Spencer Tracey's Rangers did not cripple the Abenakis, but notes that it was a moral defeat for them, a nicely balanced view.

Having covered the theory Starkey takes four campaigns in detail. First, King Philip's War in New England in Stuart times, then through the various wars to the Treaty of Paris. The War of Indepedence and Pontiac's Revolt takes us through to the final act up to 1815 with Fallen Timbers. The wars finish as they started with the "noble" savage falling for the naughty British tales of support and getting beaten by the US Army. Brains not their strong suit clearly.

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