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The Battle of Yorktown, 1781: A Reassessment. By John D. Grainger. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2005. ISBN 1-84383-137-6. Maps. Notes. Sources and bibliography. Index. Pp. 203. $90.00.
The Guns of Independence: The Siege of Yorktown, 1781. By Jerome A. Greene. New York: Savas Beatie, 2005. ISBN 1-932714-05-7. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xix, 507. $34.95.
The 225th anniversary of the most successful combined operation in the Age of Fighting Sail has produced two additions to the growing corpus detailing and analyzing the Yorktown campaign. Each of these hooks makes a solid contribution to our understanding of divergent aspects of the Chesapeake encirclement. Neither deals with the major strategic decisions made in London, Paris, and Madrid that influenced this campaign. The French and Spanish desired to keep the faltering American rebellion an active theater so their national objectives in the Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, and West Indies might be achieved. For this aspect of command, we will continue to depend on sueh old standbys as Piers Mackesy's The War for America (1965) and Jonathan Uull's The French Navy and American Independence (1975).
Briton John Grainger's grossly over-priced book concentrates on...