CONGRATULATIONS TO THE HUSKIES AND PAUL CELLA:

Brothers Judd NCAA Pool (ESPN.com Tournament Challenge)

Congratulations, Paul, and thanks to everyone who participated.

The good folks at FSB Associates have supplied us with a very nice prize: Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer. In his NY Times review, Joseph Ellis says of the book:

The centerpiece of Fischer's story is the daring attack across the Delaware by 2,400 soldiers in the Continental Army, who routed the Hessian garrison at Trenton, then fought two additional battles at Trenton and Princeton the following week. Though the sizes of the armies were small compared with the numbers that fought at later battles like Gettysburg or Normandy, Fischer argues convincingly that the actions at Trenton and Princeton were the most consequential in American history, for these stunning victories rescued the American cause from what appeared to be certain defeat and thereby transformed the improbability of American independence into a distinct possibility, eventually an inevitability.

Along the way, Fischer, university professor at Brandeis University, demolishes several myths and misconceptions. Art historians, for example, have argued that Washington could never have been standing up as the Leutze painting claims, since anyone so doing would have tumbled headlong into the ice. But in fact everyone was standing up, because the boats used to transport the troops, horses and artillery were high-walled barges, early versions of the amphibious landing craft employed in World War II. The claim that the Hessian troops were drunk that Christmas night is also wrong. They were exhausted from being on round-the-clock alert for over a week. Finally, several historians, yours truly included, have described Washington's victory at Trenton as a merely symbolic or psychological triumph, akin to the Doolittle raid on Tokyo in 1942. Wrong again. Fischer shows that Trenton altered the strategic chemistry of the war by eroding British troop strength, which was never fully replaced, and winning back the countryside in New Jersey, which was on the verge of capitulating to British control. [...]

Fischer has devised a storytelling technique that combines old and new methods in a winning way. Old-fashioned military history featured the set-piece battle, viewed from headquarters, as a panoramic clash of generic markers on a map, moving bloodlessly across the contour lines like toy soldiers in a game. The more modern military history, pioneered by John Keegan in ''The Face of Battle,'' and before him by Tolstoy in ''War and Peace,'' aims at recovering the fog of war, the chaos and confusion on the ground experienced by ordinary soldiers in battle. Fischer has managed to combine the two approaches, providing an overarching picture of the way armies move, with a genuine sense of what it looks and feels like to face a bayonet charge or to witness the man abreast of you disemboweled by a cannonball.

This is not easy to do. It requires pasting together the grand narrative of generals with hundreds of memoirs by officers and soldiers on both sides of the struggle, operating at different altitudes simultaneously. In Fischer's case, it has also meant walking the battlefields with an odometer, measuring the ice flow on the Delaware River in December, assembling weather records for the Delaware Valley in 1776, calculating accurate casualty rates against the forged figures subsequently provided by both sides. It also means recreating the distinctive character of combat on an 18th-century battlefield, where lethality was less but the face-to-face killing produced greater emotional trauma. In my judgment, Fischer's ability to combine the panoramic with the palpable is unparalleled in giving us a glimpse of what warfare back then was really like.

Enjoy, Paul.

If you haven't yet, be sure to enter your picks for the:

THE BROTHERS JUDD 2004 KERRY RESIGNATION PROGNOSTATHON

and

THE BROTHERS JUDD 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION PROGNOSTATHON

MORE:
-BOOK SITE: Washington's Crossing (Written Voices)
-INTERVIEW: Washington's Crossing of the Delaware: Against the Elements and the Odds, a Revolutionary Turning Point (Weekend Edition, 12/28/03, NPR)

Related NPR Stories

NPR's Present at the Creation: 'George Washington Crossing the Delaware' by Emmanuel Leutze

Vidal's 'Inventing a Nation' Profiles Founding Fathers

NPR's Annual Reading of the Declaration of Independence

Web Resources

•Hessians on 'Liberty: The American Revolution' from PBS

•Washington Crossing Historic Park

•Washington Crossing State Park

•Ten Crucial Days: The Battles of Trenton and Princeton

•Details of Leutze Painting 'Crossing' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 6, 2004 8:41 AM