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What the British are really not ready for in the American Revolution was the marriage between these hit and run tactics, and a very potent political strategy designed to undermine the will of the British people to continue the battle.ĭocuments like Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" and the Declaration of Independence were aimed not just at winning support in the colonies for the Revolution, they were also very quickly exported to Great Britain, to make the case to the British people as to why they should not be fighting their American brothers. They had experienced fighting the Indians, for example, in North America. Why did it not work for them in the end?īOOT: They were facing a much more sophisticated guerrilla foe than they had been used to facing.
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And that they weren't fools, they tried to be creative, to pick out elite forces, to conduct certain types of raids. INSKEEP: Well, you tell us that the British in the Revolutionary War realized that they had this problem. And not come out until the kind of open gentleman's fight that the British expected, and instead, took a devastating toll on the British regiment. The British got a taste of how the Americans would fight on the very first day of the Revolution, with the shot heard around the world, the Battle of Lexington and Concorde, where the British regulars marched through the Massachusetts countryside.Īnd the Americans did not mass in front of them but instead chose to slither on their bellies - these Yankees scoundrels, as the British called them - and fired from behind trees and stone walls. What were the strategies that the American rebels used when they were rebels?īOOT: Well, it first of all, comes down to not coming out into the open where you could be annihilated by the superior firepower of the enemy. Max Boot sees modern lessons in that story, as told in "Invisible Armies," his new history of guerrilla warfare. But guerrilla tactics played a huge role in securing their independence.
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INSKEEP: Now, the American revolutionaries eventually did form a regular army. And, in fact, many of the strategies which the American rebels used against the British are similar in many ways to the strategies now being used against us around the world. And, of course, in our revolution, we were the insurgents and the British were the role of the counterinsurgency. MAX BOOT: Today, we're used to having Americans soldiers be the forces of the government. The historian Max boot cannot help but notice the irony. The British were the world's policeman - smart and technologically advanced - while the Americans were the insurgents. Barely trained American militiamen shot the elite British force to pieces. In 1775, a Boston silversmith rode to warn Americans colonists that British troops were on the way. That's the start of a poem that tells a story almost every American kid learns in some form. (Reading) Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.