F Weigley's From Gentility To Atrocity: The American Way Of War

Coleman 1 Since its publication in 1973, The American Way of War by Russell F. Weigley has been a landmark volume on the United States' strategic methods for wartime success. He names two types of military strategy administered for success in wartime: attrition and annihilation. In From Gentility to Atrocity: The Continental Army's Ways of War, Wayne E. Lee fixates around the strategy of attrition and how Weigley blames the limited resources available to Washington as what dictated American strategic choices. He sees this as an oversimplification and suggests that an increase in the number of variables should be considered. Lee uses those multiple variables to compare the choices made in two campaigns, Philadelphia 1777–78 and Iroquois
According to Weigley, Washington's generalship was shaped by military poverty which was visible in a lack of naval power, the land forces' equipment deficiencies, and a shortage of men and armaments. Weigley also stated that American armies in the Revolutionary War had to utilize a strategy founded upon this weakness. Lee talks about how Washington avoided confrontations with the main British Army whenever he could. The campaign in Philadelphia of 1777-78 focused on three components which mostly affected the level of restraint. First, Washington must keep his army alive by avoiding a crushing defeat. Second, Washington needed to maintain the tenuous support of the American population and preserve revolutionary loyalty. He would not destroy the countryside but would deprive the British of certain key resources. Washington also had to supply his army in a way that would not outrage the people living in the countryside. Third, Washington had to emulate the European style of war in the eighteenth century as there was a need to be seen as cultivated, honorable, and respectable. He notes how Weigley pointed to the limited resources of the Continental Army as an explanation for the calculations of necessity underpinning Washington's strategy of attrition, but the evidence that Lee provides draws an overwhelmingly more convincing argument. The fact that the same nineteen regiments and smaller supporting units fighting under Sullivan's expedition in Iroquois county, having also fought at Philadelphia, prove that attrition was not the only option of strategic warfare. In the Iroquois campaign, Indians were seen as a "special" enemy, not deserving of the usual protections for combatants which led to authorized high levels of personal violence— a strategy of devastation, even atrocity. The level of possible destruction was immediately much higher than it had been in the Philadelphia campaign for two simple