Epic Retreats: From 1776 to the Evacuation of Saigon

by Stephen Tanner

Book Overview

Napoleon in Russia is the centerpiece of a study of great retreats including Washington from Long Island, Chief Joseph across Idaho, Dunkirk, Stalingrad, Chosin Reservoir and Saigon. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0785814035
• ISBN13: 9780785814030
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Castle Books
• Length: 346 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Great Idea, Good Execution

I love the idea behind this book, examining key massive retreats from George Washington to Napoleon, the Nez Perce Indians, Dunkirk, the Germans in Russia, North Korea, and Vietnam, and I enjoyed the one chapter per retreat format. What I found difficult was the author's stinginess with maps (one map per retreat, no exceptions), and the overly technical and jargoned tone of the prose. I also found his digressions into general politics unnecessary and, for the most part, wrong (do you really believe our fighting in Vietnam led to Gorby's dismantling of the Communist system in Russia?) But overall, I enjoyed the book and found the military history to be very informative, well-researched, and accurate. An entertaining read.

Bravo!

Excellent accounts of all stories told, with great insight into the wars that surrounded these particular retreats. High level strategic background, down to individual accounts of harrowing tales of battle, the stories are quite complete and in many cases enlightening with several myths dispelled. An excellent read. Well done!

Choppers on the Rooftop; Longboats on Long Island Sound

Tanner, a gifted writer of military history, has undertaken a history of the "retreat": that military predicament requiring an army to abandon its plans for conquest and to concentrate solely on staying alive. He presents seven stories, each an epic: Washington in New York, Napoleon in 1812, the Nez Perce, Dunkirk, the Germans in the Russian Caucusus, the U.S. Army in Korea and the Fall of Saigon. His central thesis is that a retreat need not be a disaster: three of these armies (the Continental Army, the British in WW2 and for all practical purposes the US in Korea) managed to regroup and prevail. Because the essays all bear the sure hand of the one author, this broader theme sustains the reader over the many leaps in timeframe and location. Two (very minor) criticisms: first, a lurking Anglophobia rears its head in the 1812 and Korea articles; second, while agreeing that the "counter-culture" had a radical impact on U.S. policy in Vietnam, one factual error arises in Tanner's dicussion of 1969: the Rolling Stones were not singing "Sympathy for the Devil" when the Altamont stabbing occurred, they were playing "Under My Thumb." While the Vietnam essay is very strong, for my money the account of the Red Army's triumph over the Panzer Army in the Caucasus is nothing short of superb.

Armies in Adversity

Carl von Clausewitz wrote in The Principles of War, "only when we cut off the enemy's line of retreat are we assured of great success in victory." Stephen Tanner, a skilled writer of history who knows how to tell a story, examines in Epic Retreats several cases of strategic retreat during the last two hundred years and how they met with success or failure depending upon leadership skills, individual initiative and heroism, and the determination of the combatants to achieve some measure of victory or avoid complete defeat. Tanner's Epic Retreats is highly readable and a fresh approach to military history, shedding light on the dynamics of adversity. The case studies he treats are:The American retreat from New York in 1776, the success of which meant the Revolution could not be easily crushed.Napoleon's retreat from Russia in the winter of 1812 and the destruction of the Grand ArmyThe unsuccessful, heart-breaking attempt by the Nez Perce people to escape to Canada in 1877 to preserve their freedomThe British Army's breathtaking evacuation at Dunkirk in World War II The German army's retreat from Russia in the fall and winter of 1942The American army's fallback in Korea in 1950 after Chinese "volunteers" were launched in massive numbers across the Yalu RiverThe American withdrawal from Vietnam followed by the fall of South VietnamI especially found riveting the tragic account of the Nez Perce and the story of the American army's retreat in Korea, two chapters of history with which I had little knowledge.

solid work

Epic Retreats is a surprising book. I hesitated to purchase it at first since it seemed somewhat anticlimactic to buy a military book about failures, but I'm glad I bought it. Tanner manages to address humiliating losses with an historical perspective that is at once understanding and critical of the hows and whys of what happened to cause the evacuations. What I found especially interesting was the section on the Nez Perce Indians. The first-hand accounts he dug out were particularly noteworthy. The final chapter, which recounts the classic Vietnam withdrawal, is notable for its inclusion of the greater cultural and political picture.I'd recommend this to anyone looking for a different slant on warfare.