Excerpt from Report of the Commanding General, Department of the East: On the Field Exercises Held in Massachusetts, August 14-21, 1909 In the Act of Congress making appropriation for the Field Exer cises of this fiscal year the condition was imposed that the instruction should be conducted for the benefit of the Coast Artillery Corps. With this end in view a plan was developed, not for making a combined land and naval attack upon the coast line, but rather for assailing these fortifications at their point of greatest weakness, namely, the rear. This could be accomplished only by landing a mobile army the mission of which would be to turn the fortifications from the rear and capture a suitable base for subsequent land operations of a hostile army. The above plan contemplated a war with a European power which, by a sudden attack upon our navy, must be assumed to have gained control of the sea, thereby acquiring the ability to move troop-ships with impunity to selected points of landing on our sea coast line. These conditions naturally led to the following general statement of the situation on which all subsequent operations were founded: On August roth, immediately following an unexpected severance of diplomatic relations, war was declared between a strong Euro pean power (red), and the United States (blue). About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.