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The 5th Battalion of the 60th (Royal American) Regiment was one of the most unusual battalions in the British army of the Napoleonic period. The 60th was itself a rather unusual unit, formed in American before the War of Independence, and which remained part of the British army after American Independence. Even before the formation of the 5th Battalion it was larger than most regular British regiments, with four regular line battalions. When a home was needed for a number of German troops in British service whose original units were no longer viable, the 60th was their logical home. At first the 5th Battalion was armed with the weapons brought to it by its original recruits, by from 1803 it began to receive rifles, making it the first rifle armed battalion in the British army. Most of its men and many of its officers were of foreign origin, with some Americans and many more Germans. The battalion even contained a number of Frenchmen, mainly deserters or POWs who decided to change sides. Finally it rarely served as a unified battalion, but instead individual companies from the battle were attached to different brigades to provide them with a contingent of riflemen.
The original plan was for the new battalion to join the rest of the regiment in the West Indies after being formed on the Isle of Wight, but soon after it was created a rebellion broke out in Ireland, and the new battalion was in the right place to join the British response. After that early burst of combat, it spent more than a decade in the American station, first in the West Indies and later in Nova Scotia. However its main claim to fame came during the Peninsular War. The 5th Battalion was one of the units that sailed to Portugal with Sir Arthur Wellesley in 1808, and it would remain in the Peninsula for the rest of the war, taking part in most of Wellington’s most famous battles and countless other clashes.
This book traces the formation of the unit and its early history, looks at the type of troops who first formed it, the rifles they were equipped with, how they were trained for light infantry work and their time in the Americas, but the bulk of the book covers the regiment’s time in the Peninsula. The nature of the battalion makes it rather hard to provide a detailed account of its role in any particular battle, as the individual companies were spread around the army and thus shared the fate of each part of the army. As a result the battle accounts tend to be more general, although we do get very detailed casualty lists, often tracing the fate of individual soldiers.
Most of the detail on the 5th covers its day-to-day live – recruitment, deserters, illness, the worries of individual officers, with a great deal of detail coming from the battalion’s detailed returns and its paylists, which between them give us a very detailed picture of day-to-day life within the battalion. We get to follow the lives of many of the individual riflemen (if only for short periods), and most of the main officers.
This is a very detailed battalion history that gives us a real feel for what life must have been like for the men who campaigned across Portugal and Spain with Wellington, as well as the uses of the riflemen in the British army of this period.
Chapters
1 – Formation
2 – Barons and Jagers
3 – The Infantry Rifle
4 – Rebellion
5 – The Windward and Leeward Islands
6 – Surinam
7 – Disagreements, Discharges and Drafts
8 – Uniforms and Equipment
9 – Nova Scotia
10 – Prisoners and Preparations
11 – Le Petit Guerre
12 – Rolica and Vimeiro
13 – Desertion and Recruitment
14 – Oporto
15 – Talavera
16 – Bussaco
17 – Fuentes de Onoro
18 – Albuera
19 – Life on Campaign
20 – Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz
21 – Salamanca
22 – Vittoria and the Pyrenees
23 – The Regiment
24 – The Nivelle and the Nive
25 – Orthez and Toulouse
26 – The End
27 – Legacy
Author: Robert Griffith
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 464
Publisher: Helion
Year: 2019