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By Root 909 0

and the carelessness of the Admiralty’s Commissioners, the ships were in such poor condition that one liner, royally named the Prince William for the King’s son, actually foundered and sank at anchor in the Thames. Its governors were men of limited intelligence, limited experience, no coherent strategy and unlimited assurance of winning. The open question is whether the persistence and will of the enemy in such men as George Washington and the Reverend Daggett of New Haven (whom we shall meet further on) and the geographical logistics of the American continent, where every one of the 50,000 British troops in North America and every bullet and every biscuit of his supply and every letter of instructions to his commanders had to be transmitted over the six-to-eight-week width of the Atlantic Ocean, would not have made the war unwinnable by the British anyway. A larger navy, it is supposed, could have made a major difference by allowing ships of the Channel fleet or the West Indies to be diverted for blockade of France’s Atlantic ports, preventing French maritime intervention in aid of the Colonies, but that could have happened only if the British had thought blockade sufficiently important. They did not, since at no time in the war did they take seriously the possibility of the Americans winning. Blockade of the French ports would have required immobilizing a large number of ships while their bottoms grew foul from marine growth, and would have depended on a concerted decision by the war Cabinet, which could never make up its mind whether concentration of naval forces in one place for blockade was worth weakening the forces available for convoy of trade and for defense of the Caribbean and East Indian colonies and of the home islands.

As in older and later empires, resouces were not equal to the over-extension of the imperial reach. Inadequacy of decision-making was a primary defect. Lord Sandwich begged the King to require that “meetings of the Cabinet” should reduce its decisions to writing, “and when a question is agitated it ought to be decided one way or another, and not be put off as now most frequently happens, without any determination.” Failure to focus available resources on a single objective and give that objective absolute priority was a major failure in strategy. Notwithstanding common opinion, human beings can and sometimes do learn. After Pearl Harbor in 1941, the American decision, previously agreed with Britain, to give priority of defense to Europe and defeat Hitler first was what made his defeat possible.

In 1778, Britain had no one capable of a decisive determination of that kind. Not the King. While George III had no trouble making up his mind, it contained only one idea—to conquer, but not how. Pitt was gone, felled by a stroke in April at the time of the French alliance, and dead a month later. The King’s two chief war ministers, Germain and Sandwich, were emphatic enough, but not usefully, having no clear plan of strategy and sloppy about implementing any plan they conceived. Saratoga, the most stunning British defeat before the end, was the result of simple carelessness to ensure that two armies, Howe’s and Burgoyne’s, which according to the plan of campaign were supposed to meet to form a pincer, were both informed of the design and timing of the movements planned for them. As it turned out, they were not; moreover, the plan approved by Lord Germain was based on the “wildly fallacious premise,” in the opinion of William Willcox, Clinton’s biographer, that Howe’s main field army could operate through Pennsylvania while a substantial part of it was immobilized in New York and that Burgoyne’s could move independently in the North without reference to Howe. Professor Willcox assigns the responsibility of the “worst” British planning of the war to “intellectual shortcomings” of the three architects, Howe, Germain, Burgoyne, and to the “almost complete lack of communication between them.” The basic fault was complacency rather than mental incapacity.

Complacency is an attribute of long-retained power