David Smith's useful study of Sir William Howe takes its place alongside such studies as Matthew Spring's With Zeal and with Bayonet Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775–1783 (2008) and Andrew O'Shaughnessy's The Men Who Lost America: British Command during the Revolutionary War (2013) in a growing body of recent literature that is revising our understanding of the British military effort during the American War of Independence. Overturning older stereotypes of an army beset by institutional inflexibility under vainglorious and blundering leadership, recent scholarship has stressed the high degree of tactical and operational competence of field officers and the impressive pace of military innovation achieved in the face of (probably insurmountable) strategic obstacles.

Sir William Howe, who commanded British forces in the rebellious colonies between 1776 and 1777, emerges from Smith's study as a personally courageous soldier but a cautious commander, concerned for the lives of his men and, commendably, unwilling to wage a harsh, punitive war against the king's rebellious subjects. He was also a capable field officer, committed to modern tactics, who, in two years, never lost a major engagement and inflicted a series of punishing defeats on forces under George Washington. His failure to convert those tactical successes into decisive strategic victories by destroying Washington's fleeing armies has been a major point of contention for both his contemporaries and later historians. Smith's discussion of the (putative) lost opportunities at New York and White Plains in 1776 is forensic and goes some way to explaining Howe's battlefield wariness without simply dismissing him as indolent or pusillanimous (the lack of accompanying maps is, however, frustrating for the reader). His decision to storm Fort Washington towards the end of the year indicated his willingness to take bold action when he judged the outcome worth the risk.

Although keen to give Howe credit where deserved, Smith in no way attempts to whitewash his subject. He was a poor communicator and oversensitive too; the breakdown in his personal relationships with Lord George Germaine in London, and his subordinates, Sir Henry Clinton and the Hessian commander Philip von Heister, in North America, seriously hampered his ability to command. Most damning of all was his apparent lack of strategic vision. Smith suspects he did not really understand the potential of the “Hudson strategy,” whereby the rebellious colonies might have been bisected by a drive under Howe northwards from New York, meeting a drive led by Sir John Burgoyne southward from Canada. Instead, in 1777, Howe directed his main effort at capturing Philadelphia. This was achieved, alongside two more clear-cut battlefield victories over Washington at Brandywine and Germantown, but to no greater strategic purpose. Burgoyne, meanwhile, marched to disaster at Saratoga. That defeat was hardly Howe's personal responsibility, and nor had been the embarrassing Hessian defeat at Trenton the preceding December. Yet together they reflected very badly on his command, while his own strategy for winning the war, if indeed he had one, floundered. Frustrated that his demands for reinforcements were not being met and fearing he had lost the confidence of the king, Howe offered his resignation in October 1777 and subsequently returned to Britain to fight a new battle: the defence of his reputation.

Central to Howe's defence was a long, meandering and discursive narrative delivered to the House of Commons in April 1778. In a key archival discovery, Smith has found an earlier, and previously unstudied, draft of this narrative. Through a careful scrutiny of the amendments, edits and redactions made to this first draft, he is able to shed much fresh light on Howe's thinking both about his campaign and about how he intended to answer his critics. Here, then, is a really original contribution to our knowledge, for which Smith should be congratulated.

Paucity of primary material (the bulk of Howe's personal papers have not survived) has hampered historians of this topic. Even here, this slim volume is far from a full biography of Howe, nor even a full study of his campaigns. There are important factors that shaped his command that get little more than a passing mention in this book, for example his lack of cavalry or the logistical restraints imposed by operating at the end of a transatlantic chain of supply. In short, there remains much to be said and it is very much to be hoped that David Smith will return to the subject of Howe's campaigns. With this work, he has established himself as their rightful historian.