Some 150,000 Irish-American immigrants served in the Union Army, most of them from Boston, New York and Chicago, and about 40,000 fought in the Confederate Army.
Wellington considered the British cavalry to be technically inferior to the French, although paradoxically he also said that one British squadron would be a match for two of the enemy. His main concern was that although the British cavalry lacked neither courage nor dash, they lacked discipline, in that they invariably failed to rally and re-form once they had charged home. At Waterloo, although the cavalry generally performed superbly well, the endemic faults which Wellington had already identified were repeated more than once, resulting in the decimation of several fine regiments. Bryan Fosten explores the history, organisation and uniforms of Wellington's Heavy Cavalry.
The forces which Wellington led in Portugal and Spain and up into southern France between 1808 and 1814 achieved a record of victory perhaps unmatched in the history of the British Army. Among his infantry the regiments of the Light Division were self-consciously an élite, trained to fight with initiative and independence on the exposed edges of the marching army. This book explains their evolution and tactics, details the campaigns in which they fought and illustrates the uniforms and equipment of the Light Infantry regiments: the 43rd (Monmouthshire), 52nd (Oxfordshire), 51st (2nd Yorkshire), 68th (Durham) and 85th (Bucks Volunteers).