First Salute [Paperback]

I'd like to say that Barbara Tuchman saved her best for last, and in many respects, she did. However there will be many out there who will not appreciate the slow build-up of The First Salute. Like a sailing schooner waiting for a breeze before finally being able to move, Ms. Tuchman's account of the American Revolution mirrors her main subjects - the French fleet, and that of the Englisman Sir George Brydges Rodney. More than once were they all stuck somewhere in their ships waiting (seemingly forever) for a wind so they could get underway. I felt like this book was waiting to get "under sail" too, mainly at the beginning. But I think you will find that not only is the wait worth it, but once you finish the book, you will realize just how brilliant the author really was in chosing this method to effectively drive home her points by clever use of point of view - Despite what Disney would have us belive, the Americans didn't rally to fighting or winning this war. Congress was as slow, and often made as little sense then as it seems to do from time to time now - Washington was a miracle worker for somehow keeping an army on the field at all. The American Revolution was won by French and Dutch money, and mainly the French military (yes it was fought by many brave Americans too, but there was too much apathy, too much self-interest, and there were too few in number to ever WIN it). Through the story of Rodney, the reader is given a unique perspective from which to witness the incredible mismanagement of the war by the British, insight into those self-destructive practices and entrenched egos that characterized monarchy, and just how close this war was to being lost and how easily it could have turned out differently. Tuchman also does not miss the chance to remind everyone just how far we still have to go to live up to those principles for which the war was supposedly fought - The end of her Epilogue will knock your socks off. All in all, another treasure from Barbara Tuchman.

Some of the greatest works of history are those that ask the simplest questions. In The First Salute Barbara Tuchman asks one of the most obvious of questions: How did England manage to lose the Revolutionary War? To answer the question, Tuchman leads us through a welter of 17th & 18th century European history. By the end of the book we find Britain's loss, paradoxically, both inevitable and avoidable.
The `first salute' was given by the Dutch owned West Indian port of St. Eustatius on November 16, 1776 in response to a salute given by the American brigantine Andrew Doria. It was a momentous moment, the first formal recognition of American as an independent nation.
Our esteem for the brave merchants of Holland is sorely tested by an early digression to explore Holland's confused and confusing diplomatic and political history. In the bibliography Tuchman refers to it as a "Dutch excursion," but "Dutch shanghai" would work just as well. Rather than leave it at "the Dutch had a history of war with Britain" and "their confused form of Republic government didn't help things" Tuchman devotes about forty pages to the Dutch, to their relations with their European neighbors, and to their confounded political system. Decisions like this are death to narrative histories, and Tuchman's wit and skill just barely redeems it.
For instance, that pithy wit takes this swipe at William III, duke of Orange, who "died childless in 1702, in a fall when his horse stumbled over a molehill, an obstacle that seems as if it should have some philosophical significance but, as far as can be seen, does not."
In due course Holland's overt and covert sympathetic attitude to the American rebels leads to a declaration of war by Britain. France, with an acute nose for the smell of blood in the water, throws in with the rebels. To this American reader the greatest surprise The First Salute presented was the value France and England gave to their West Indian possessions. Apparently the sugar trade was more important than the American colonies, and disrupting the enemy's trade seemed to take precedence over the war in North America.
For a good part of the narrative Tuchman follows the career of English Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney. Rodney, who is painted by Tuchman as an energetic, able seaman bordering on genius, was thwarted by many factors - a moribund navy which employed obsolete tactics and suffered "a mental lethargy that underlay the general reluctance to change old habits", a fleet that was stronger on paper than on sea, and a poisoned military environment that led Tuchman to observe "everybody hated somebody in the course of conducting the American war." Tuchman's high regard for Rodney even leads her to speculate that he might have been the decisive factor averting colonial victory had illness not prevented his absence at the endgame.
Tuchman explains French intervention in the war rather prosaically. Rather than suffering a monarchical affinity to liberty, equality, and democracy, France intervened because of a centuries old, deep seated hostility to Britain, to disrupt the sugar trade and, more immediately, to redress losses suffered in the Seven Years' War. The irony of monarchy pitted against monarchy in the cause of democracy isn't lost on Tuchman. You would think regal intuition would have identified the greater enemy, an enemy that would consume it before the century was through.
Save for the unfortunate "Dutch excursion" I enjoyed The First Salute tremendously. As an American it was at first disorienting, and then refreshing, to view the American Revolution from a European perspective.

Tuchman's Guns of August and A Distant Mirror were two definitive works of European history, showing a historian at the full powers of her scholarship and thought. Unfortunately, Ms. Tuchman, in The First Salute, is obviously struggling either with creative exhaustion or simple lack of mastery of her material.

The book is diffuse and a bit chaotic - certainly I understand her premise: in telling the history of the Revolutionary War at sea, and its effect on the world itself, it is certainly necessary to detail preceding events - certainly the war of independence was not an isolated event, but one of a web of changing international conditions. But her scope is so ambitious, and her seeming energy and will to accomplish so weak, that I had the feeling of reading a pile of miscellaneous facts, some of them not particularly well researched, rather than a coherent discussion. Admiral Rodney, despite being sidelined during much of the conflict, is given a outsized portion of this book - we have details of his debts and his preoccupations which tell us why he was not there; relevant to an extent that it illustrates the British mishandling of leadership, but not worth page after page - in a book the scope and size of Distant Mirror, this may have been absorbed; in a book this size this admittedly nicely studied character dominates the book, without dominating the story.

My biggest bone to pick is her, and one that makes me suspect of the worth of many of her conclusions, is her poor knowledge of the 18th century navy - her discussion of conditions is obviously gathered more from hearsay research rather than the index of any historian's effort, checking its accuracy, basically repeating the same myths and half-truths that have been recycled through history books. She views the operation of a man o' war, the existence of which is a central component of this book, from the point of view of 20th century ignorance rather than in the context of 18th century warfare, and draws some startlingly naive conclusions: For instance, she evidently finds all of those ropes and pulleys that sail a warship so confusing that she could never understand them, she thus declares that those aboard would not either - a silly conclusion - every fighting captain, his quarterdeck and able bodied seaman had intimate knowledge of the workings of a sailing ship. One does not carry on worldwide trade not knowing what they are doing. Her discussion of the guns, materiel and fighting conditions is similarly flawed; whereas she understands the suspect "naval intelligence" that led to poorly defended batteries, she falls down, again, when she tries to describe the efficacy of the floating battery, again she cannot seem to keep her 20th century prejudices out of the picture. She similarly has some odd conclusions about shipboard conditions - she didn't do her homework.

This book, I am sorry to say, has all the hallmarks of exhaustion and haste - it is sloppily and hurriedly written and not up to Ms. Tuchman's former excellent standards. Don't let this one put you off reading her other works.