By James L. Nelson.  ISBN 978-0-07-162679-8.  Copyright 2010.  Hardcover with 376 pages including 21 black and white maps and illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index.  

In the late summer of 1781, General Washington took the chance that the French armada could hold off the British navy while Washington’s own troops, with French reinforcements, drove Cornwallis’s forces to the Chesapeake.  The Battle of the Capes, the greatest naval engagement of the American Revolution, was the only time the French ever fought the Royal Navy to a draw.  The battle proved catastrophic for the British since Cornwallis had retreated to Yorktown, expecting to be evacuated by a British fleet that never arrived.  In the end he had no choice but to surrender.