1798

samcster94

Banned
How realistically could the French have helped turn the tide in favor of the Irish 1798 figures?? I am no expert, but I do know the French had plans to help them.
 
How realistically could the French have helped turn the tide in favor of the Irish 1798 figures?? I am no expert, but I do know the French had plans to help them.

Not much unless they do a lot better at sea than OTL.

Otherwise, while they might land an army in Ireland, it would be stranded there much like Bonaparte's in Egypt, and doomed to ultimate defeat.
 
I’ve looked into the PoD and it doesn’t really seem likely for them to definitively achieve their goals. If the weather had been different, Lazare Hoche and Wolfetone could have landed in Southern Ireland successfully with French troops. I think you could also get a repeat of the Castlebar Races where you rout any British forces in the area. However, after that it will be difficult to capture the island.

The British will quickly bring their fleet together and blockade French forces, so supplies and reinforcements couldn’t get through. The French could probably gather a pretty large amount of volunteers to fight, but they’d need time to train and drill or they’d be fairly ineffective (and they were mostly armed with pikes and farm tools, so they’d need muskets) The Franco-Irish forces I think could probably capture Cork in quick succession and set up base there and attempt to arm their volunteers.

The British could not really afford to allow the French to consolidate in Ireland because that would expose the home island to the threat of invasion, I can’t really see them giving up on Ireland. They’d ship lots of troops over and destroy Hoche’s army. Hoche was a good commander by all accounts and I’ve seen him equated to Napoleon in efficacy on the battlefield, but even if he defeats one army I think he’d eventually be forced to pull an Egypt and sneak out of the country and leave his men to their fate.

The campaign was ultimately not very well thought out and you would need at least local French naval superiority for this to have a chance of success. Even if it fails though, I think that a successful landing PoD would have an interesting effect on Irish Nationalism, and perhaps the French would be more interested if Robert Emmet approaches them in 1803 for his rebellion.
 
The Spanish didn't seem to have any great difficulty in supplying their forces in Ireland in the 1590s

Obviously the British fleet in the 1790s is larger, but it's still going to have to sit off ports that the French and Irish take over.

IIRC in Biscay, they took Ushant as a base to keep up a close blockade from. Whether there are islands off Ireland that would serve the same purpose, or a constant relay would be taken up from Cornwall and Devon, I don't know

How much a French army could live off the land, especially raiding Loyalist/Unionist (etc) settlements I don't know

But once a sizeable army has landed, the war is usually either won or lost on the land.
 

althisfan

Banned
The Spanish didn't seem to have any great difficulty in supplying their forces in Ireland in the 1590s
They didn't? Oh, I think they did. I believe you're talking about the Nine Year's War (a subset of the Anglo-Spanish War, which was 1585-1604); and you're talking about the same time period when the Spanish Armada is destroyed in 1588. The Spanish had a hard time getting supplies to Ireland, England is beginning its time of dominance of the seas.
 
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