Donald M. Londahl-Smidt

Considering that the "Men at Arms" series can be Osprey at its most generic (there's a limit to what you can do with 48 pages), I found this particular number to be particularly impressive. One, it really does reflect a deep dive in the relevant archives. Related to this is that the author came up with period illustrations of the uniforms, which give a sense of how the ruling house wanted its troops to look, Three, I think it works very as providing a picture of what battles these troops participated in, and how the force evolved over the course of the war. As an aside, if one is interested in reading a social history of the German contract soldiers in America I can recommend Friederike Baer's "Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War."… (mais)