Wellington's Peninsular Victories: Busaco, Salamanca, Vitoria, Nivelle

Author Michael Glover was a British Army veteran of the Second World War who turned to writing military history later in life. "Wellington's Peninsular Victories" is a 1996 reprint of a superb short history first published in 1963. Glover provides a concise yet remarkably insightful narrative of Wellington's campaigns in Portugal, Spain, and France during the period 1809 to 1814, with special emphasis on the key battles of Busaco, Salamanca, Victoria, and the Nivelle. Glover wrote several studies of the British Army in the Peninsular War, and if his work in this book is derivative of older scholars such as Oman and Napier, he has also gone to some effort to find first hand accounts that flesh out the drier details of Wellington's campaign style such as logistics and siegecraft. The key leaders get short biographical vignettes, but Glover finds space in a very tightly written 148 pages of text to work in details about the individual British soldier. The book includes a small selection of maps and photographs. "Wellington's Peninsular Victories" is very highly recommended as a concise but well-written survey of the British Army in the Peninsular War, for the general reader and for the student of Napoleonic warfare.