The Revolutionary Transformation of the Art of War; Delivered at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York May 9, 1974
Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1974. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Wraps. Format is approximately 6.5 inches by 9.5 inches. [4], 21, [3] page, plus covers. Some cover wear. Footnotes. Illustrations. This address was part of the American Enterprise Institute's Distinguished Lecture Series on the Bicentennial. This lecture was one in a series sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute in celebration of the Bicentennial of the United States. Forrest Carlisle Pogue Jr. (September 17, 1912 – October 6, 1996) was an official United States Army historian during World War II. He was a proponent of oral history techniques, and collected many oral histories from the war under the direction of chief Army historian S. L. A. Marshall. Forrest Pogue was for many years the Executive Director of the George C. Marshall Foundation as well as Director of the Marshall Library located on the campus of Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. In 1956, Pogue was hired by the George C. Marshall Foundation to write the official biography of George Marshall. From 1963 to 1987, he worked on the four volume biography, and read over 3.5 million pages of research material while completing his work on Marshall. He became director of the Marshall Foundation in 1956, leaving in 1974 to become director of the Eisenhower Institute for Historical Research. Pogue retired in 1984. Pogue was on the Advisory boards for the Office of Naval History, the Naval Historical Office, the United States Army Center of Military History, the Air Force Historical Research Agency, president of the Oral History Association and the American Military Institute and other organizations. As we approach the 200th anniversary of the War for Independence, we shall retell myths, legends, and solemn truths. One of the myths of the Revolution is that Frederick the Great of Prussia described the fighting by Washington’s forces around Trenton and Princeton in the period from December 25, 1776 to January 4, 1777 as the most brilliant campaign in the history of warfare. This appeared only as “it is said” in Bernard Lossing’s 1859 volume on the war. It was disproved in a series of scholarly articles around the turn of the century and supposedly finished off conclusively by Major General Francis V. Greene in 1911. But it still survives. The myth persists because the great European commander of the period should have praised one of the key campaigns of the war. Trenton and Princeton were the signal that the Continental Army had come of age and was in the war to stay. Frederick could not have been expected to applaud a type of fighting so different from the eighteenth-century variety in which he excelled. A monarch who had made war his main pursuit preferred the careful course of eighteenth-century battles to the sudden improvisations being carried out by half-trained civilians under generals not of noble birth. He would have been less pleased had he known that this war began the quarter-century that would transform the type of conflict of which he was the great master and challenge the type of troops and training with which he had won his great reputation. Condition: Good.
Keywords: Military History, Art of War, Standing Armies, Mercenaries, Citizen Soldiers, Marksmanship, Militia, American Revolution, All-Volunteer, Conscription, Military Officers, Military Training, Civilian Authority, Democracy
ISBN: 0844713109
[Book #82116]
Price: $50.00