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History Notes Military Logistics, 1550 - 1815 Notes

Military Logistics Notes

Updated Military Logistics Notes

Military Logistics, 1550 - 1815 Notes

Military Logistics, 1550 - 1815

Approximately 77 pages

The essentials of manning, feeding, training, transporting, and keeping an army alive in the field throughout the early modern period. Covering key sources from the time, as well as historical theories and the nuts and bolts of individual campaigns, everything from disease to equipment to food and looting is covered. Includes quotes, illustrations, and chronologies....

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Logistics and experience revision notes

Contents

  • Past questions

  • Quotes

    • Principal sources

    • Secondary sources

    • The Military Revolution

    • The fiscal-military state

    • Disease and food

    • Logistics

  • Chronology

    • Wars

    • Events

  • Principal sources

    • The Charlotte Brown Journal

    • Shipboard Regulations

    • The Durant Journal

    • The Todd Journal

  • Secondary sources

    • A Briefe Discourse of Warre

    • The Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence

    • The Barrington Papers

    • The Seaman’s Narrative

    • Treatise of Military Discipline

    • Reveries, or, Memoirs Concerning the Art of War

    • An Essay on the Art of War

    • The Partisan, or, the Art of Making War in Detachment

    • The Blackader Diary

    • The Encyclopédie

    • Some Few Brief Principles of Tacticks

    • The Law of Nations, or the Principles of the Law of Nature

    • The Coignet Diary

    • Jacques the Fatalist

    • Naval Administration

    • Memoirs for the Instruction of the Dauphin

    • The Saint-Simon Memoirs

    • The Mercer Wilson Journal

    • The Renney Journal

  • Logistics

    • Definition

    • Strategy

    • Movement

    • The caring fiscal-military state

    • Contracting

    • Healthcare

    • Disease

    • Food

    • Desertion

    • The colonial experience

    • Veterans

    • Improvement

    • Revolutionary logistics

    • Revolutionary healthcare

  • Forces

    • The Royal Navy

    • The French Navy

    • The British Army

    • The French Army

  • The Military Revolution

    • Michael Roberts

    • Geoffrey Parker

    • Jeremy Black

    • Colin Jones

    • David Parrott

Quotes

Principal sources

  • Storerooms are to be “cleaned, aired and put into good condition, and made as secure as possible against rats.”

    • Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea, 1745.

  • “Cleanliness being of great consequence to the health of the men,”

    • Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea, 1745.

  • There were “strick’d Orders not to disturb any of the people”.

    • Corporal William Todd, 1758.

  • “We live Exceeding well”.

    • Corporal William Todd, 1758.

  • Every town that did not pay was “totally plunder’d and distroy’d”.

    • Corporal William Todd, 1758.

  • It seemed as if “the whole Kingdom was going to be distroy’d, very shocking to behold”.

    • Corporal William Todd, 1758.

Secondary sources

  • “A good Chiefe; A good Purse; And good Justice”.

    • The three principles of war according to Sir Roger Williams.

  • A “brave Chief will force his Enemies Countreyes to maintaine his action”.

    • Sir Roger Williams

  • “Warres consists altogether in good Chiefs, & experimented Soldiers”

    • Sir Roger Williams.

  • “These Coronells of three dayes, marres all the Armies of the world.”

    • Sir Roger Williams criticises inexperience.

  • Louis of Baden lamented having to act “like a hussar”.

    • Louis of Baden regrets devastating Bavaria in 1704.

  • Neuberg was “of very great consequence to us, since this town will make it easy for us to have all our provisions”.

    • The Duke of Marlborough writes to Sir Sidney Godolphin.

  • “doing our utmost to ruin his country”.

    • The Duke of Marlborough on the Elector of Bavaria.

  • That “it may at last doe ourselves hurt, for want of what we destroye”.

    • The Duke of Marlborough on the devastation of Bavaria.

  • “[T]he poor soldiers shall not want bread”.

    • The Duke of Marlborough.

  • “The army I am joined with has nether canon nor mony, which are two very necessary things for success”.

    • The Duke of Marlborough.

  • One soldier snapped that: “he was the King’s Servant… and that he would go a fishing and sporting wherever he pleas’d”.

    • Complaint from a civilian to Viscount Barrington.

  • “I was much neglected and much injured.”

    • William Spavens on being passed over for promotion.

  • “The remarkable victories which the Romans gained… can be attributed to nothing but the excellent composition of their troops.”

    • Maurice de Saxe.

  • “[I]f they contract any disorders, they are suffered to perish for want of proper assistance”.

    • Maurice de Saxe on the state of the imperial soldiers.

  • “The love of appearance prevails over the regard due to health”.

    • Maurice de Saxe on uniform.

  • “It is therefore no longer surprising, to see so many diseases in an army.”

    • Maurice de Saxe.

  • “According to the fashion of the present times, a man of quality thinks himself very ill used, if the court does not present him with a regiment at the age of eighteen or twenty.”

    • Maurice de Saxe.

  • “Thou art my Physician for soul and body.”

    • Lieutenant-Colonel John Blackader.

  • “Aren’t soldiers supposed to get killed?”

    • The landlady in Jacques the Fatalist, by Denis Diderot.

  • “The smallest army that invades our lands takes more from us in one day” than it would cost to maintain warfare with an enemy state for ten years.

    • Louis XIV.

  • “This proved fatal to many”.

    • Patrick Renney on Lord Hawke’s insistence on James’ Powder.

  • I refuse “this ignorant prescription”.

    • Patrick Renney to Dr Vincent, on being bled with the fever.

  • Dr Vincent “killed more Frenchmen than all the commanders of the navy put together”.

    • Patrick Renney.

The Military Revolution

  • “[I]t is no easy task to provide for the subsistence of vast multitudes in a distant desert”.

    • Charles, Earl Cornwallis, writing the Pitt the Younger in the 1790s.

  • “History knows more armies ruined by want and disorder than by the efforts of their enemies.”

    • Richelieu.

  • ‘Pillage… constituted, along with women and drink, the unofficial wages of war.’

    • Colin Jones.

  • ‘It mattered little whether the indigenous population was friend or foe.’

    • Colin Jones.

  • “A German in the army serves us as three soldiers: he spares France one, he deprives our enemies of one and he serves us as one.”

    • Maurice de Saxe.

  • ‘[M]ilitary expansion [in] the 1620s and 1630s coincided with the apogee of the military enterpriser’.

    • David Parrott

  • ‘The armies expanded… to facilitate the levy of Contributions which, by their very scale, inevitably rendered this method of supporting the forces increasingly unreliable.’

    • David Parrott

The fiscal-military state

  • “The sinews of war are infinite money.”

    • Cicero.

  • ‘The quantity and quality of supply determined how long the navy could stay at sea, how long they could blockade an...

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