To be fair, if you looked at contemporary wars, Americans of that time period has good reason to believe that a decisive battle to end the war was perfectly viable. Austerlitz (1805), the most spectacular and celebrated of Napoleon’s victories, had ended the War of the Third Coalition. Jena-Auerstedt (1806) had devastated the Prussian Army so badly that most of Prussia quickly fell. Waterloo (1815) ended any hope of Napoleon's continued reign. Solferino had decided the outcome of the Austro-Franco War of 1859, and, one year after the American Civil War ended, a single battle at Konnigratz (Sadowa) on July 3rd, 1866, would give Prussia victory in its war with Austria. The difference, of course, between these wars and the American Civil War was that none of these wars were viewed by its combatants as an existential threat.
Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War
- Thread starter Red_Galiray
- Start date
Sure they have two allies but without Paris the French logistical network is basically gone. Paris was the hub of the French railways and just about all of them used it as their base and ran their main lines through it. If Paris falls France looses something like 70% of it's rail capability at the time. Even with the British and Russian's that's essentially a death knell.
I mean, those are more counterexamples than anything else. Austerlitz and Jena-Auerstedt might have ended the sub-conflicts that they were part of, but the wider Napoleonic Wars raged on regardless until Napoleon himself was cast down. And while Waterloo did end the Napoleonic Wars decisively, it also came at the very end of a broader conflict lasting over twenty years that had slowly worn down France's strength and ability to resist, and in particular after the campaigns of 1812-1814 that had destroyed Napoleon's army and deprived France of the resources needed to carry on a long fight.
If anything, they prove that even incredibly lopsided battlefield victories will not result in the ultimate end of the conflict; instead, the enemy has to be ground down, and only when he's at the end of his rope does a "decisive" victory actually decide the conflict for good. If Waterloo had been fought and won in 1805 instead of 1815 it would merely have been an equivalent to Gettysburg or Antietam; important, but not the end of the war because at that point Napoleon could have retreated, reformed his armies, and tried again. It only achieved the status it did because the losing side had largely lost the ability to fight and losing the battle left them entirely without resources.
Also even if Napoleon had won at Waterloo the 7th coalition still would've fought on. The Russian army which hadn't been involved in the fighting would've been bearing down on him.
I tthink there are other threads to discuss this. In the end, most AH-discussions comes down to "if Lee/the Kaiser/Wehrmacht win this battle" vs. "lots of industrial statistik".
Cryostorm
Monthly Donor
Funny thing is that Rome shrugged off Cannae and won for the same reasons the Russians did and the Union is, they had and have the manpower and material advantage to replace their losses and increase the number on the field where Carthage, Germany, and the Confederacy do not.
You know that's actually funny now that I think about it. Because for all that Lee and others went about trying to find his "Cannae" and to a lesser extent "Silva Litana"* they all seem to forget that Rome didn't surrender after it. Hell not only did they not surrender but they fought for 14 damn years until Hannibal was finally defeated at Zama. People forget that while military disasters can rouse those who want peace they else tend to radicalize those who wish to continue the war just as much if not more.
*Funny enough this battle, unlike Cannae, actually convinced the Romans to stop fighting the Gauls till Hannibal was dealt with.
Imperial Japan made the same mistake. Methinks that even if they had, for example, won at Midway, the US would have simply adopted a Japan-first approach to the war and left Europe on the backburner. Allied forces may meet on the Weser instead of the Elbe, and Bavaria might be part of East Germany, but defeat for the Axis would be assured no matter what.
Speaking of Japan, weapons that were used in the civil war were later sold to partisans in the Boshin War. Will this different outcome make thing any different?
Cryostorm
Monthly Donor
It is pretty much known that a loss at Midway while a setback would not have really even changed the progress of the Pacific theater. The US was just making that many ships, that even a few Midway losses would have only delayed the inevitable.
Cannae had a fairly strong grip on western minds even before Clausewitz - not that I have come across any evidence that Lee read Clauseewitz, or at least not in any depth. But it's not clear to me that Lee was (OTL) ever especially focused on it as a model tactically. In OTL he did attempt dual flanking attacks on three obvious occasions - Glendale, Second Manassas, and Wilderness - but at Glendale and Wilderness they seem to have been spur of the moment, opportunistic decisions, and not one of them offered a Cannae-like opportunity for the destruction of the entire opposing army. (I think E. Porter Alexander was probably right that Glendale was the closest he ever got to pulling it off, and even so it would only have encompassed the destruction of 4 of McClellan's 9 divisions.) Usually Lee was outnumbered enough that just a single flank attack was all he could hope to manage, and likewise while he faced his share of slow and sickly Union commanders, none of 'em were as obtusely cooperative as Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro. At Gettysburg Lee tried a different tactical strategy on each day of the battle, and those strategies were influenced a lot more by Napoleon than they were Hannibal - sometimes for good (Day 1), and sometimes for ill (Day 3).
In our moment of Lee Revisionism I think we still have to give him his due, as a general. Whatever his faults he wasn't a moron; his correspondence makes clear that he understood at the time how badly the war-making power of the North was stacked against the CSA. His thinking in the Gettysburg Campaign wasn't to crush the North outright - that was far beyond his capabilities - but rather that any reasonably decisive victory on northern soil might create enough peace sentiment to force Lincoln into talks. An Austerlitz would be nice, but even a Wagram might suffice. In any event, Lee could at least plausibly tell himself that he knew the northern mindset than Hannibal knew that of Rome. I think he underestimated that willpower, or at least Lincoln's; but I don't think he would have been wrong to think that the North could not bear the kind of bloodletting Rome suffered in 218-216 BC.
I would also recommend reading Gary Gallagher's The Confederate War. Gallagher makes a good case that Lee was fighting the kind of war the Southern public demanded, that moreover Lee's string of big splashy (but bloody) victories in 1862-63 were critical in sustaining Confederate morale for as long as it lasted in the face of what were frankly longshot odds and horrific losses - and that, more to the point, Lee was aware of, and acting partly in response, to this dynamic.
Jon Parshall is in the right of it in saying that Midway did not decide the war, but that it did change the course of the war. In the crude sense, Japan lost the war the moment the first bomb fell on Battleship Row.
A big loss at Midway would likely have made some butterflies in Allied grand strategy in 1942, but not enough to alter the outcome. I have long been tempted by the thought that a loss at Midway not only would not lengthen the Pacific War, but might even shorten it. Because you'd be butterflying away the Solomons Campaign, and it could be that the smashing up of the IJN that took place in the Solomons over 10-12 months would just happen more suddenly in the Central Pacific once Nimitz started his drive.
Parshall's classic essay over at CombinedFleet is essential reading here: http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm
This is all quite true, of course; but it has to be said that it was Bonaparte's insistence on ever widening his circle of domination that helped diminish the fruits of these big victories. Austerlitz perhaps *could* have been the basis for a durable (French dominated) peace, had Napoleon been willing to avoid provoking Prussia and made the kind of concessions to Russia that built a perception of Napoleon as someone they could do business with, that was not bent on total hegemony. (Granted, this requires Napoleon to stop being Napoleon.)
Whereas once you get to Leipzig and Waterloo, that opportunity is long gone for anyone not named Klemens von Metternich (and there are times when I'm not even sure about him): no one was really willing to trust him, not after the past decade of his behavior as France's overlord.
That said, while the Napoleonic Wars were an inspiration and model for American Civil War commanders, it seems apparent that the strategic model that Southerners really had in mind - and not just for propaganda and political legitimacy purposes - was the American Revolution. Problem was, Northern votaries were more deeply invested in political union than British elites had been in 1775-83.
I reed the book years ago, but saw the movie just recently again. I think its actually the point of the story, that Scarlett is a horrible and selfish person and that that is the reason, she will never find true happiness.
I have read Lee’s letters and he was contacted by Europeans at various times. He was better aquatinted with the French and British military thinkers. Though he knew some of the German ones. I don’t recall Clausewitz’s name coming up.
He was rooting for the French in the Franco-Prussian war though it isn’t much of a surprise as Virginia and France were close enough that it was a huge deal for Virginians when Lafayette came to Monticello in 1824 when Lee was a teen.
In terms of his post war interviews he said that public opinion/anger made negotiation for less then maximalist terms for the first two years of the war impossible. That 1863 was the year he felt the South was ready for a return to the Union on ‘honorable terms’, but the North wasn’t willing to talk.
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My sense is that this was true of most American officers, north and south. Then you had Phil Sheridan over riding around with Wilhelm and Bismarck, lambasting French ineptitude in every letter home, exhorting 'em to shoot franc-tireurs on sight and burn the towns to the ground. But then, I guess he wouldn't be Phil Sheridan if he wasn't urging that.
Or at least Lincoln and Davis weren't willing to talk on those terms. Other folks might have been, but they weren't the ones making that decision.
God, as if Sheridan couldn't get more based, now this comes to my knowledge.
That is probably true.
The only southern officer I can recall that supported the Prussian side was Moses Ezekiel the first Jewish VMI cadet that fought at New Market and in the trenches around Richmond.
After the war he didn’t know what to do with his life and Lee urged him to pursue and excel at his passion which was sculpting. He was living in Berlin when the Franco Prussian war broke out and became tight with Wilhelm and his court due to his art and as a storyteller about the US Civil War.
I suspect you are correct.
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The way that I've explained it to people is that the Nazis could, especially if the Soviets fell, reach a point where they would have been very difficult to dislodge no matter the economic advantages that the allies had over them. The Japanese, OTOH, could never really reach that point. Even if Australia and India fall (either of which are much less likely than the USSR falling to the Nazis), the Japanese while they would have had more oil would have had *extreme* difficulty turning those conquests into additional ship and air capability. And without that, the US *can* sail to the Japanese coast and wreck the country. And while I have no idea what a significant stranged IJA in Mainland Asia would do, it wouldn't survive long.
I think that's just part of fabricating the Lost Cause myth - lies made up to make it seem as if the South was in the right and the North forced the war on them and was unwilling to make peace on "honourable" terms.