On Reading About The Battle of Bunker Hill

So far I have about four or five small plastic containers that once used to hold chicken stir fry or kiwi fruit, crammed with cards containing notes about the Battle of Bunker Hill and these are mostly though not entirely from secondary sources - e.g. :

Elting's The Battle of Bunker's Hill : very, very good, but too hard on General Gage, who was a bit slack but not that slack - there were factors beyond his control like wind, currents and tide, which frequently stuffed up generals' plans in eighteenth century wars; not hard enough on Admiral Graves, who really was as corrupt and inefficient as the majority of historians paint him  though he did write a wonderful primary source, shorthanded as Graves's Conduct, written to justify his abysmal dereliction of duty while in Boston.)

Thomas J. Fleming's Now we Are Enemies : very well written. Among other things it is especially good on the American artillery and on General William Howe's grand strategy. I found his argument that it was Howe's intention to take Bunker/Breed's Hill swiftly and then move on to take the rebel headquarters and stores at Cambridge, only a couple of miles from the Charlestown Peninsula, quite convincing. As well, it more or less puts paid to the idea that Howe's only strategy was a brutal frontal attack on Breed's Hill. Annoyingly it has no footnotes.

Richard M. Ketchum, Decisive Day. The Battle for Bunker Hill: Also very well written, also without footnotes, and, I think, the last writer to suggest the American rebels used their very inefficient cannon to blast holes in the redoubt walls so they could shoot at the advancing British. Even though it's written after Fleming, who, to my mind, successfully debunks many of the Bunker Hill myths, Ketchum makes no use of him, reiterating all the hoary old stories. (But what else would you expect of an American, (ie Ketchum) who, during the Cold War wrote a book titled What is Communism? I can't bring myself to think of reading it, let alone ordering it via the Net.) His Bunker Hill book needs to be used with considerable care.

So far I've checked through a few general histories for some details, like Ward's The War of the Revolution and MiddleKauff's The Glorious Cause but I've got a few more to go. Then there is the gloriously old History of the Siege of Boston And Of The Battles Of Lexington, Concord And Bunker Hill by Richard Frothingham, published in 1872. He is invaluable for the primary sources in his appendices and footnotes. His telling of the Bunker Hill battle is confused, but really, it doesn't matter; newer secondary sources make the necessary corrections and he just didn't have available to him some of the primary sources we have today.

Some primary sources I've managed to trawl through, like Percy's letters and Drake's edition of British letters from Bunker Hill, Force's American Archives, and a few minor documents I've found on-line. I've ordered Charles Coffin's History of the Bsattle of Breed's Hill By Major Generals Heath, Wilkinson and Dearborn, but its taking Amazon ages to send it to me; and I've been through the relevant parts of Sir Henry Clinton's The American Rebellion. Today I just got in the post Political And Military Episodes In The Latter Half Of The Eighteenth Century Derived From The Life And Correspondence Of John Burgoyne, General, Statesman, Dramatist, (1876). There's quite a few I've yet to get: Heath's Memoirs, the Massachusetts Historical Society's collection of documents on Bunker Hill, (which I trust are more than the few I've downloaded from them on the Net) and various others.

So, you can see, I've been having fun.