Victory at Yorktown: The Campaign That Won the American Revolution, by Richard M. Ketchum

1780: General George Washington’s disheartaned Continental Army troops lay idle for want of supplies and money. News arrived that General Cornwallis’s army had destroyed General Gates’s troops in South Carolina. Later that year, Benedict Arnold’s terrible betrayal would further weaken the American cause. But just as rebel hope seemed to fade, Comte de Rochambeau’s powerful French army slipped by the British to land 10,000 trained soldiers at Newport, Rhode Island, on July 11, 1780. Farther south, Nathanael Greene’s hit-and-run guerrilla fighters were beginning to score victories in North Carolina and Virginia, and by the fall of 1781, the 24-year-old Marquis de Lafayette was harassing Cornwallis’s main force near the tobacco port of Yorktown, awaiting the arrival of the Comte de Grasse’s French fleet. The scene was set for Washington’s and Rochambeau’s rapid move south, setting up the daring siege of Yorktown. Drawing on primary research, including diaries and personal letters, an acclaimed historian of the American Revolution offers an account of the strategies and personalities behind the victory that surprised the world. Yorktown was that rarest of military and naval operations in which everything fell into place at exactly the right moment. It was a race against time and distance, by land and sea. After almost seven harrowing years and against all odds, Washington, with French help, defeated the world’s finest army. The war was won.

For a successful combined operation that paid incalculably huge dividends, one need look no farther than Yorktown. This masterful study by Ketchum – all of his other Revolutionary War histories are also highly recommended – has dual appeal: as a patriotic look at how we won our independence, and as a study of combined-ops done right.

ISBN: 0805073965
Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
Pub. Date: September 2004
Publisher: VHPS
Other Formats: Large Print

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