Focusing on the oceanic war rather than on the war in the Great Lakes, this study charts the War of 1812 from the perspectives of the two opposing navies at sea, one the largest navies in the world, the other a small, upstart navy just three decades old. While American naval leadership searched for a means of contesting Britain's naval dominance, the English sought to destroy the U.S. Navy and protect its oceanic highways. Instead of describing battles between opposing warships, Kevin McCranie evaluates entire cruises by American and British men-of-war, noting both successes and failures and how they translated into broader strategies. In the process, his study becomes a history of how the two navies fought the oceanic war, linking high-level governmental decisions about strategy to the operational use of fleets in the Atlantic and Caribbean and from the south Pacific to the Indian Ocean. This comprehensive work offers a balanced appraisal of the sea war, taking into account the strategic considerations of both sides and how the leadership from each side assessed, planned, and implemented operational concepts. It draws on a wealth of British and American archival sources to help the reader understand strategic imperatives and the correlation between these imperatives and why the oceanic war was conducted in the manner it was. All American warships cruises, not just those that resulted in battles, are covered, but the author's action-packed accounts of battles hold special appeal.

This book offers a comparative analysis of British Army Unit War Diaries in the two World Wars, to reveal the role played by previously unnoticed technologies in shaping the archival records of war. Despite thriving scholarship on the history of war, the history of Operational Record Keeping in the British Army remains unexplored. Since World War I, the British Army has maintained daily records of its operations. These records, Unit War Diaries, are the first official draft of events on the battlefield. They are vital for the army’s operational effectiveness and fundamental to the histories of British conflict, yet the material history of their own production and development has been widely ignored. This book is the first to consider Unit War Diaries as mediated, material artefacts with their own history. Through a unique comparative analysis of the Unit War Diaries of the First and Second World Wars, this book uncovers the mediated processes involved in the practice of operational reporting and reveals how hidden technologies and ideologies have shaped the official record of warfare. Tracking the records into The National Archives in Kew, where they are now held, the book interrogates how they are re-presented and re-interpreted through the archive. It investigates how the individuals, institutions and technologies involved in the production and uses of unit diaries from battlefield to archive have influenced how modern war is understood and, more importantly, waged. This book will be of much interest to students of media and communication studies, military history, archive studies and British history.