Friendly Fire

Bernard Porter

• Fusiliers: Eight Years with the Redcoats in America by Mark Urban
  Faber, 384 pp, £20.00, September 2007, ISBN 978 0 571 22486 9
• 1812: War with America by Jon Latimer
  Harvard, 637 pp, £22.95, October 2007, ISBN 978 0 674 02584 4

Britain has fought the Americans twice. The first occasion we know about: it was the war that secured the colonists’ independence (1775-83). Mark Urban’s book is about the experiences of one British regiment – the Royal Welch Fusiliers – in that campaign. (Most of them weren’t Welsh, incidentally.) The second war scarcely anyone in Britain has heard of, and even Americans seem to be hazy about it. It ran from 1812 to 1815; the peace that formally settled it was signed on Christmas Eve 1814, but because news took so long to travel not everyone knew this until April the following year. It was during this war that British troops burned down the presidential mansion in Washington – the one thing most Americans are aware of – and it ended with the restoration of the status quo ante, which makes it look pretty pointless. In some American history books it is known as the Second War of Independence, which is nonsense. Britain wasn’t threatening that independence in any serious way: only US trade, temporarily, and insofar as it was seen to be aiding Britain’s major enemy at the time – Napoleon’s France.

If it was a war for anyone’s independence, it was for Canada’s: it started with an American invasion of that country – to ‘liberate’ it, naturally. (‘We will “conquer but to save”.’) So from the point of view of the Canadians, who didn’t want to be saved, it was far from pointless. That’s why Jon Latimer regards it on balance as a British victory. It’s probably also the reason Americans don’t make all that much of it, though some things mattered: the sacking of Washington DC, of course; the occasional instances of heroism (some of them mythical); Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the British at New Orleans, fought after the peace treaty and so definitely pointless; and the fact that it gave rise to what later became the American national anthem (the words, not the tune, which was an old English drinking song). Originally called ‘The Defence of Fort McHenry’ (near Baltimore, 14-15 September 1814), it is now better known as ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’:

Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro’ the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watch’d, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof thro’ the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say, does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Well, yes, it did. But there was never any question about that.

On the British side, neither war was popular. (Urban dedicates his book to ‘those who serve honourably in unpopular wars’ – a clear glance at today.) In the first case this was because so many Britons – even some of the officers who were supposed to be putting them down – sympathised with the rebels. In the second it was because the war was felt to be diverting resources from the much more important struggle Britain saw itself engaged in just then on behalf of the whole world (including the US) against Napoleon’s imperialism. It was a bit as if – though the analogy should not be pressed – the US had decided to take advantage of Britain’s involvement in the war against Hitler to attack Canada. (There was a plan for that, secretly drawn up in the 1930s.) This, together with the occasional American ‘atrocity’, will have accounted for much of the bad feeling on the British side, though the atrocities were often exaggerated, and don’t begin to measure up to many of today’s.

Vol. 30 No. 4 · 21 February 2008 » Bernard Porter » Friendly Fire (print version)
pages 9-10 | 3001 words