UNLIKELY VICTORY: There were at least 13 ways the American colonies could have lost the Revolutionary War, some historians say.
And if we’d fought a losing battle long enough, we might have found ourselves “savagely repressed” by the English army, historian Thomas Fleming contends.
But sheer luck intervened time and again to snatch victory for the beleaguered colonists and defeat what was then probably the world’s most powerful army, Fleming writes in the book What If?, in which historians pose what-might-have-been questions about past wars.