Richard K. Riehn

Very uneven. The first chapters, in which author Richard Riehn discusses the organization and tactics of Napoleonic era armies, are outstanding. Although I’ve been reading about it for years, I never really understood how the French column attack worked; Riehn explains it with clear text and clear diagrams. But the rest of the book, covering the actual 1812 campaign, is hopeless. The problem is Riehn makes numerous references to geographical situations – for example: “…Dombrowski took the rest of his troops to Sviszlocz on the Beresina. From there, he sent most of his cavalry to Glusk to cover the Minsk-Bobruisk Road and to patrol as far as Mozyr.” But there’s only on map of the overall region, in the front papers, and it’s copied – uncredited – from some near-contemporary source. There’s no mapping of army movements; the reader is expected to know where Sviszlocz and Glusk and Mozyr are. There are two smaller scale maps, one of Borodino and one of the Beresina crossings – but these are just maps of the areas, not of the battles – no plots of troops positions or movements. It’s impossible to follow what’s going on (I could probably dig up my copy of SPI’s 1812 wargame and move the counters around to match Riehn’s text, but why on earth couldn’t he do some more maps? A shame, because the rest of the work is really thorough, with detailed tables of troop strength and organizational breakdowns for the various phases of the campaign. Highly rated for scholarship egregiously bad for lack of maps.… (mehr)