The Peninsular War Atlas by Nick Lipscombe

NOTE: There is now a revised edition of this book which can be found here. This review is of the first edition.

I purchased The Peninsular War Atlas mostly because of the positive reviews both on The Miniatures Page message boards and on Amazon.com. I have to agree, the positive reviews are correct. This is a really great book.

The book is very large, with 384 extra wide pages that include 160 maps. It has a hard cover and comes in a nice slip case. It is a really nice looking and high quality book. Here is a picture of the book outside the case.

On top of the production value of the book, the contents are really exceptional. It starts off with a brief Foreword by the current Duke of Wellington, followed by a Preface which contains interesting information about the development of military map making and information about early histories of the Peninsular War. It also lays out the purpose of the tome, which in short is to provide a nearly comprehensive set of maps of the military operations of the Peninsular war, supported by explainatory text. An effort has also been made to portray the entire conflict with coverage of Spanish contributions, which are sometimes neglected by English writers, and English/Portuguese contributions, which are sometimes downplayed in Spanish sources. The book also definitely sticks to battles and things that led up to battles, leaving out anything about the war that is not relevant to the military conflict.

There is an Introduction by Charles J. Esdaile, which is somewhat interesting, but is mostly just concerned with explaining why the Peninsular war is important and interesting, and you probably wouldn't have bought the book if you didn't already think so. It also randomly compares the Peninsular War to World War 1 for some reason. Much more useful are the Chronology of Events in the Peninsular War and the Legend to Maps, which I've pictured below. The Chronology is good as an overview to keep the overall timeline of events in perspective. It also lists all of the huge number of battles and engagements that took place, most of which appear to be covered in some detail in the book.

In the back of the book are a bibliography, a glossary, and several appendices listing out strengths and dispositions of various forces at different times. An example of these pages is shown below.

The rest of the book follows a consistent format: a map on the right side with descriptive text on the left, starting at the very beginning of the conflict and continuing to the very end. The maps cover different scales, from showing the whole peninsula with strategic movements of armies, down to tactical maps showing locations and movements of individual battalions and batteries. There are even some 3D contour maps of some battles. Here are sample pictures of two of the maps at different scales.

The maps are very clear, though the blue color they use for the French and the black for the Spanish are sometimes hard to distinguish at a glance. The accompanying text is very clear and concise, and between the text and the maps it is very easy to understand how the battles unfolded or how the strategic movements were playing out. It is full of great information and is really fascinating for anyone interested in the Peninsular War.

The book is also very useful from a wargaming perspective. If you wish to play one of these particular battles on the tabletop, it is a perfect reference for doing so, and there must be something like a hundred of them to choose from. It's got maps for you to follow and orders of battle for the forces taking part, and even text explaining how the battle played out and what contributed to the outcome. Even if you aren't playing a specific battle, it gives a great impression of the kinds of situations that came up in battle, typical formations and organizations of units that might face each other, and the ways terrain played a part in deployments. It will give you plenty of ideas for battles to fight with all different sizes of forces.

In short, it's a great book that I would highly recommend for anyone interested in the subject or who does any gaming in this period. The retail price is $75, but as usual it can be had for a lot less from amazon.com. If you are even remotely interested, I'd encourage you to check out the page on Amazon, because they have a video that shows more of the book, including the slip case and a lot more pages than I've shown. There are also several customer reviews on there that are very positive. It's definitely worth a look.

There revised edition can be found on Amazon here.

Borodino: The Moscova by F. G. Hourtoulle

BORODINO: THE MOSCOVA: The Battle for the Redoubts is a useful reference for painting figures for Napoleon's 1812 campaign in Russia, but the other information in it is less useful, and it spends very little time describing the battle of Borodino itself. It definitely would not be good as a general introduction to the battle or the uniforms of the participants.

The book includes many uniform plates which cover every division that took part in the Battle of Borodino from both sides. These are excellent and very detailed, though not exhaustive. I can't speak to the accuracy of them, since if I knew everything about the uniforms already I wouldn't need the book, would I? They would definitely be most useful to someone who already knew the basics about the uniforms involved, however. As I mentioned, the book wouldn't be a good introduction to the uniforms, as it doesn't really cover the basics. There are many examples of Russian infantry uniforms from various divisions, but they don't all have captions, and there isn't an explanation of why one might differ from another. Does the uniform differ because he is an NCO? Because he is in a different company or a different regiment? Most of the captions mention the rank of someone, and if they are a grenadier or a drummer or what have you, but without any explanation of how this is reflected in the uniform. So if you already know the basics like that, this is a great reference.

Speaking of which, I have found this website to be an incredible reference for everything about Napoleonic armies. You can easily find the general information about Russian uniforms on that site, and a lot of details as well.

Also included are pictures and explanations about the flags carried by Russian regiments. The number and types of flags carried is explained by the author, and there are pictures of his best guess of the flags carried by each regiment at the battle (as he admits he is not certain about many of them). This also adds to the value of the book as a reference when putting together miniature armies.

The book also contains a huge number of portraits of many of the main players and other high ranking officers. This may or may not be valuable when putting together an army, but it is interesting to put a face to the names. There are also various paintings of the battle reproduced in the book, so it contains plenty of things to look at in terms of reference information and just general inspiration.

The main drawback to the book is the text. As I said, the pictures are great, but the text leaves something to be desired. First of all, the translation from French was just terrible. Some parts are almost unreadable because they are confusing or contradictory, and much of it is just badly worded. But even if the text was well translated, there isn't much of interest in much of it aside from the lists of units.

The description of the Battle of Borodino takes up 15 pages, and is very mechanical. It's mostly just a chronological description of when various formations of men moved and to where, without much real context to it. It's not very evocative, and it doesn't provide much inspiration. The 15 pages does include 6 maps showing the position of forces, many nice paintings, plus a few drawings of how the redoubts were laid out. These are all nice, but four of the 15 pages are just paintings and have no text on them at all, and most of the pages have something besides text, so that probably gives you some idea how basic the description of the battle is.

In addition, the author seems to be very biased in his views and what information he presents. It seems to me like the only purpose of the text is to convince the reader that the French army was hugely outnumbered and at a great disadvantage, yet managed to win a great an unmitigated victory at Borodino, killing 5 times the number of enemy as they lost themselves. Napoleon only waited around in Moscow afterward because he had the decency to give Alexander the chance to capitulate, which of course any upstanding gentleman would have been obliged to do after such a devastating defeat.

At any rate, the bulk of the text of the book is just a listing of the forces involved, which is more useful from a gaming perspective. Here, too, there is a bit of bias as the French forces are described with much more detail, though this may have been due to availability of sources of information. Naturally the author takes every opportunity to conclude that Russian formations included more men than usually attributed, and the French of course had far fewer.

For the Russians, it does break the army down to list each corp, it's divisions, and the regiments in each division. The number of men is only listed at the corp level, which may or may not be enough for gaming purposes. For the French forces the number of men goes down to the divisional level at least, and most of them down to the number of men present in each regiment. On the French side, it also lists what seems like every officer in the entire French army, down to those on each general's staff and leading every division, in excruciating detail. If you've always wanted to know where, when, and how some random aide-de-camp of some random general met his end, or what decorations he received during his military career, now you'll know. Really, I'm not exaggerating. It really does list what must be hundreds of French officers along with about a sentence to summarize their career before and after the battle, and their fate.

If you click the link to the book on Amazon, you can view a sample of the first few pages of the book. This will give you an idea of how the Russian forces are described, (with portraits of many officers in the margins) in addition to a page explaining the Russian flags. Amazon doesn't show a sample page showing the uniform plates int he book, or the level of detail shown for the French forces, but they are quite good. Here are some sample pictures from the book.

In summary, the book is a great reference with plenty of uniform plates, portraits, and organizational details, especially for the French forces, though it does assume some knowledge of the basics of the uniforms. So as a uniform reference, it is quite good, though it doesn't clearly lay out everything you'd ever need to know. If you want an introduction to or narrative description of the Battle of Borodino, or the larger campaign in Russia, you aren't going to get it from the few pages of coverage in this book.

The book can be ordered at a significant discount from Amazon.