DBAHC: Save British military reputation

As a Briton, sometimes I get sick of the way everyone always slams the British armed forces. You know, all the usual jokes: "What would happen if the British Army landed in Europe? They'd be arrested." "How do you get the British to win a battle? They lose, then someone else shows up and wins so that they can claim to have won." "How does British English define an army? A navy which doesn't have any ships." "What's the British Army flag? The White Ensign."

However, I don't think this reputation is based on fact. Britain may have lost the American Revolutionary War, but it did win the Seven Years' War and actually defeated France and took lots of France's colonies; and for all that everyone laughs at Waterloo, it really wasn't just Blücher who defeated Napoleon, Wellington had a part in it too. Even as late as the Crimean War, with the charge of the Light Brigade the British were regarded as crazy beserkers and, at the very least, warriors, not incompetent nitwits who either quickly lose or do nothing in every war they fight. Honestly I think that reputation completely disregards pre-20th-century history and is solely due to the poor British military record in the 20th century, losing to the French, the Irish, the Indians et cetera.

So here's the challenge: How is it that you can make the British armed forces widely respected in its popular image, or at least regarded neutrally? I'm not asking for a French-esque reputation—that wouldn't be possible; the British haven't spent most of the last few centuries single-handedly fighting much of the rest of Europe at the same time and often winning; I'm trying to maintain some plausibility here—but at least a reputation as something other than complete pushovers.

I think a good start would be to get rid of the Moroccan War. I know it's counter-intuitive, as that's one of the few wars where Britain was on the winning side, but I think it did real lasting damage to Britain's reputation. For all that some people on this board advance the really interesting argument that Germany might have won if not for the British blockade taking away their nitrates, the popular image of the war is the French and Russians storming into Germany while the British dawdled on their ships, doing nothing, and then were taken unpleasantly by surprise by the decisiveness of their allies' land victory. I think that really added to the general impresssion of incompetence that the British gave out. Also, significant changes in the Moroccan War would change the 20th century enough to butterfly later conflicts; the Moroccan War laid down the foundations of the Rhineland War and we all know what happened then. I know, I know, it was inevitable that there would be some sort of colonial conflict as the great powers divided Africa and Germany arrived late to the imperialist table and wanted more than it could get; you don't have to repeat that to me, I understand, I do remember the last thread. But maybe Britain and Germany, alone, could fight a later conflict, without France. Then the British might have a better later reputation. The difficult part is getting Britain and Germany, without France, to fight a war; if it did happen the British would obviously win, since they'd have to do astonishingly badly to manage to lose a war to the Germans of all people.

So, then, what do people think?
 
The Asian Wars. That was the foundation for a lot of this stuff - undeserved, most of it, but still.

After the Rhineland War, we had the situation in India reach boiling point. Which led to the Imperial Boot getting put in. But once the British forces in India started floundering, every independence-minded group in Asia decided that that was their chance. Which in turn led to the Empire of Japan running guns to every rebel group going, and after British forces in Asia were spread thin across Malaya, Borneo, Burma and India...well, then, the Anglo-Japanese War of 1950-1952, overextended British forces being wiped out by Japanese and Thai units, the RN task force despatched to the region being sunk at the Battle of the Gulf of Thailand. And, ultimately, the formation of the East Asia Co-Prosperity Alliance.

The problem was, the speed with which the Japanese and their Thai allies overran the region. It made the British look incompetent, even though they were overstretched to hell and back and couldn't have been realistically expected to win. And another big part was that they'd been the only colonial power who could have kept the Japanese at bay from European colonies in Asia. Once Britain went down, then France and the Netherlands hadn't much of a hope of keeping theirs. So they blamed it all on British incompetence.

But yeah, avoid the Asian Wars somehow - or, failing that, have Britain win, or have Japan's Pan-Asian idea fail miserably, rather than lasting until today (which it has, even if Japan's just an equal partner rather than the leader now) - and we've met your aim.
 
The British Army has nothing to be ashamed of, and anyone who thinks so is just wrong. There are solid political and cultural reasons why the British only have large armies when there was no other choice (and his name is Cromwell).

Although Cromwell and the New Model Army was probably one of the best in Europe in that era, with only the Swedes probably being better. But there is that whole dictatorship thing as a counterbalance
 
It's the inescapable end for a failing Empire. They grew too big and collapsed. Big deal.
At least the Americans gave a good fight against the Japanese in the Philippines and saw to a peace treaty when it became obvious they'd fail.
In a way, the rise of Japan would've been fated - being surrounded by much weaker countries and oppressed peoples ruled by governments across the world, the answer was all too obvious: total liberation of the Asian peoples.
No wonder they won the war so quickly.
 
In a way, the rise of Japan would've been fated - being surrounded by much weaker countries and oppressed peoples ruled by governments across the world, the answer was all too obvious: total liberation of the Asian peoples.

Yeah, so they could oppress them and steal their resources themselves.:rolleyes:
 
It's the inescapable end for a failing Empire. They grew too big and collapsed. Big deal.
Besides the British were smart. They put colonials (Canadians, Australians and especially Indians) in the field and got them to to the fighting and dying. Previously they had used other colonials (Scots and Irish) as well as the dregs from the rookeries (eg Sharpe).

High quality colonials make first rate troops because they are good at the job and ultimately expendible. Whilst it is good for a ruler's image to be seen as a warrior (and here I mean anyone in the ruling class) one must avoid the dying bit because that defeats the objective of the exercise.
 
Yeah, so they could oppress them and steal their resources themselves.:rolleyes:

And in the end everything worked out. They conscripted and trained almost a hundred divisions from Southeast Asia to fight in India, which turned out to be a great idea. And by the end of Afghanistan the Japanese granted all states autonomy except Korea, which was kept as a "dominion" until 1980. And now look where we are. Japan's happy, and the rest of Asia's happy. Couldnt've asked for better, particularly with the Brits or the French.
 
I get that the Asian Wars did the bulk of the work in establishing Britain's current reputation (and yes, I agree it's undeserved and nothing to be ashamed of, but that's not how most people see it). However, by that time I think it was rather too late. With the losses in the Rhineland War, the huge economic cost of that war and, afterwards, the political and economic instability of the late 1930s and the 1940s, it's hard to see how the British could have kept control over an empire on the other side of the world. Sure, everyone points out that the United Kingdom (let alone the whole British Empire) still outmatched Japan in economic size and in industry, but projecting power to the other side of the world is difficult, especially when there's a huge domestic element that is vehemently opposed to fighting any war at all, and obviously important Indian leaders like Bose would always have sided with Tokyo rather than London.

I think the loss of the British Empire, probably in a manner just as one-sided and humiliating as in OTL, was pretty much impossible to avoid after the Rhineland War. How were the British to economically recover while the USA had gone protectionist and they were locked out of their natural trading partners by the League of Western European Nations? Everyone says that the British could have won if they'd explored carrier aviation as the Japanese did rather than remaining tied to battleships and that they could have won if they'd kept going and exploited their ability to outbuild the Japanese in the long run, rather than surrendering in 1952; but both those flaws in Britain's military performance came directly from the Rhineland War, the former due to the RN Admiralty trying to refight the last war with the great battleship clashes with the French, and the latter due to the rise of the Socialist Party: also a direct result of the instability caused by losing the Rhineland War.

So I think that to avoid the British being seen as pushovers they need to avoid losing the Rhineland War. Pretty much everyone except the really hard-line revisionists agrees that France—by weight of population, fairly monoethnic demographics (making for an easy transition from feudalism to nation-state like Russia, rather than falling apart like the Habsburg or Ottoman empires) and resources—was destined for OTL-esque Western European hegemony since the weakening of central authority in the Holy Roman Empire and that it was just a matter of time until this was achieved. Indeed I don't dispute that the British were destined to lose the Rhineland War in Europe from the moment it began; I understand why Baldwin felt that France needed to be stopped, but fighting a land war against France without any allies except weak and artificial states like Belgium and Germany was a really stupid move, since Germany (basically an accident of history due to the Prussian victory in 1870-71), having lost most of its pre-Moroccan War industrial heartland to France, never stood a fraction of a chance at defeating the best army in Europe, and indeed was on the defensive for the entire war. As soon as they entered the war, the British made inevitable the annexation of Belgium, the partition of Germany and the final consolidation of French authority in Western Europe. Unless the British put a lot more money into their army (which would have meant less for the RN or the RAF, so they would have done worse in some other aspect of the war, which is what everyone always ignores when they say "But what if Country X put more money into Thing Y?"), even a significantly larger and better-equipped British expeditionary force couldn't have been created and deployed in time to prevent the Fall of Germany. The OTL disastrous failure of the Schleswig Evacuation and capture of four-hundred-thousand British PoWs could probably have been averted if only that idiot Percival hadn't been involved, which would have made Britain look less incompetent in that particular war; but ultimately I think that wouldn't change the outcome much, though we won't know how much horse-trading was necessary to get France's British PoWs back until the files are declassified in 2034, and it's the broad thrust of the war's outcome, not the specifics, which led to such weak British performance in the Asian Wars.

However, I think the colonial theatre was less one-sided and more likely to have gone the other way. Could the British have won naval superiority in the Mediterranean? I doubt anything could have been retained in West Africa—far too many French troops, surrounding a variety of small British colonies—but if the war had gone differently in the Mediterranean the British could perhaps have kept Iraq, Syria, Palestine and, most importantly, Sudan and Egypt; and if so, they and the Belgians could have defended the Congo, and the Portuguese wouldn't have joined the war to reopen the old wounds from the Ultimatum and retake Rhodesia. Perhaps this is a bit of a stretch, but I genuinely do think that French Africa's border could have been kept to the west of Italian Libya and Sudan and to the north of the Belgian (probably to turn British after the annexation) Congo.

Though—at risk of going off-topic—to suggest that "Asia is happy" or that Imperial Japan is just an equal in the Co-Prosperity Alliance is to view things through rose-tinted glasses. The Army and Navy may be less powerful than they used to be, now that they've achieved the empire they wanted to and don't have much of a job except glaring at the Russians, but Japan's "Asian allies" are still basically owned by Japanese zaibatsu. Don't people remember what happened to President Ishak of Indonesia when the People's Party tried to raise trade tariffs with Japan in order to build up some of their own industry rather than being swamped by Japanese manufactured goods and serving as a source of raw materials for Japanese industry? Sure, it was in the name of "maintaining free trade and prosperity in East Asia", but everyone knows what that translates to. Japanese imperialism is no different in fundamental nature from European imperialism; it's just that the Japanese are closer and thus find it easier to hold on, and they call their puppet states "allies" instead of "protectorates". And the Japanese loss of Korea was no more willing or peaceful than the British loss of Ireland; the supply of Russian weapons had quite a lot to do with that, just like with the French. Korea may have pivoted away from the Tsar and become friendlier with the Co-Prosperity Alliance since then, but the Empire of Japan would never, ever have let Korea get independence—only Japanese 'dominionship', which was nothing like, say, Canada in the British Empire, just another word for direct imperial rule—if not for the Russians making it too expensive for the Japanese to hold on.

I understand that the political right in much of Europe and the USA can get rather unpleasantly Yellow Peril-ish in their condemnations of the Japanese empire, but that's no reason to go too far in the opposite direction.
 
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The Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force have always commanded great respect. The image of the British Army has waxed and waned over the years. It probably hit a high point at the time of Waterloo, and a low point at the loss of Singapore in 1942. On balance, though, I think their reputation is a good one, all things considered.
 
Though—at risk of going off-topic—to suggest that "Asia is happy" or that Imperial Japan is just an equal in the Co-Prosperity Alliance is to view things through rose-tinted glasses. The Army and Navy may be less powerful than they used to be, now that they've basically won and achieved the empire they wanted to, but Japan's "Asian allies" are still basically owned by Japanese zaibatsu. Don't people remember what happened to President Ishak of Indonesia when the People's Party tried to raise trade tariffs with Japan in order to build up some of their own industry rather than being swamped by Japanese manufactured goods and serving as a source of raw materials for Japanese industry? Sure, it was in the name of "maintaining free trade and prosperity in East Asia", but everyone knows what that translates to. Japanese imperialism is no different in fundamental nature from European imperialism; it's just that the Japanese are closer and thus find it easier to hold on, and they call their puppet states "allies" instead of "protectorates". And the Japanese loss of Korea was no more willing or peaceful than the British loss of Ireland; the supply of Russian weapons had quite a lot to do with that, just like with the French. Korea may have pivoted away from the Tsar and become friendlier with the Co-Prosperity Alliance since then, but the Empire of Japan would never, ever have let Korea get independence—only Japanese 'dominionship', which was nothing like, say, Canada in the British Empire, just another word for direct imperial rule—if not for the Russians making it too expensive for the Japanese to hold on.

I understand that the political right in much of Europe and the USA can get rather unpleasantly Yellow Peril-ish in their condemnations of the Japanese empire, but that's no reason to go too far in the opposite direction.

All Southeast Asian colonies under European rule barely saw any economic growth, most were under 3%. Under Japanese "dominionship" they never saw growth go down below 5% for the next three decades. During that time there was rise of income, increased labour union memberships, growth of a middle class, and a restoration in faith that Asians can make themselves greater. The Japanese, as was promised, saw to a massive recall of all troops after the liberation of India was over, and only token forces were kept in strategic positions along the Indian-Persian, Sino-Soviet, and Indonesian-Australian borders. All were granted parliaments and constitutions within the decade and many voluntarily voted within the first years to organise a political, military and economic union along the lines of the old "Co-Prosperity Sphere".

On the Zaibatsu, its rise was inevitable and was not only accepted but also welcomed with open arms. They were willing to cooperate with the governments and made sure the countries saw economic development with large-scale infrastructural development. They keep white-collar and blue-collar Asians across the continent employed, and have been for the last five decades. They are the reason why Asians boast a strong industry and military, contrary to the constantly fluctuating European and American economies.

On Korea, you seem to be talking about the Korean Red Army - a thirty-man fringe group who supports the Christian extremists in Central America and had launched terrorist attacks across Japan and Korea. Not only do they fail to represent the strong majority of opinions in Korea, they also hamper the growth and maturation of politics, whose party politics is only comparable to Mysore. As if a cycle, every time a conservative politician seems to flounder, a terrorist attack occurs and the president suddenly becomes a "strong leader".

Damn your Eurocentric views. What a tragedy it is that you can't accept the fact that Asians are very, very content with themselves.
 
On the Zaibatsu, its rise was inevitable and was not only accepted but also welcomed with open arms. They were willing to cooperate with the governments and made sure the countries saw economic development with large-scale infrastructural development. They keep white-collar and blue-collar Asians across the continent employed, and have been for the last five decades. They are the reason why Asians boast a strong industry and military, contrary to the constantly fluctuating European and American economies.

True. And let's be honest here: the Zaibatsu look after their employees far better than American or European ones do. Company housing, company vacations, company schooling for kids...even company funerals. And generous pensions.

OOC: Zeppelinair RP'ing as a pro Co-Prosperity poster? What have I done? :eek:
 
OOC: Zeppelinair RP'ing as a pro Co-Prosperity poster? What have I done? :eek:

OOC: kek. Count Valerian would be happy. :D

I thought the POD was early enough(late 1800s, wasn't it?) that Japan would be very much changed. Although, I must say, the POD was very ambiguous and I just wanted to see a good Japanwank for once. Very un-zeppelinair of me, I agree. ;)
 
OOC: kek. Count Valerian would be happy. :D

I thought the POD was early enough(late 1800s, wasn't it?) that Japan would be very much changed. Although, I must say, the POD was very ambiguous and I just wanted to see a good Japanwank for once. Very un-zeppelinair of me, I agree. ;)

OOC: I get you. A large part of the reason I've written Japanese-centric stuff on this site (so far, one day I'll confuse everyone by writing a TL about the Principality of Antioch :D ) is less because I like Japan, more because I like Asia in general, and given Japan's status as the leading nation in terms of modernisation, they had great potential to help change Asia for the better. So my thinking goes, if you take Japan before a certain date (or ISOT modern Japan), then you could have things work out better for Asia. Comparatively speaking - Japan would still have issues...
 
OOC: I get you. A large part of the reason I've written Japanese-centric stuff on this site (so far, one day I'll confuse everyone by writing a TL about the Principality of Antioch :D ) is less because I like Japan, more because I like Asia in general, and given Japan's status as the leading nation in terms of modernisation, they had great potential to help change Asia for the better. So my thinking goes, if you take Japan before a certain date (or ISOT modern Japan), then you could have things work out better for Asia. Comparatively speaking - Japan would still have issues...

OOC: Of course. And China's just too much of a cliche(in both TTL and OTL) for being the obvious candidate of a leading power of Asia..
 
OOC: Of course. And China's just too much of a cliche(in both TTL and OTL) for being the obvious candidate of a leading power of Asia..

True. Large countries that could accommodate the geographical area of most other nations in their immediate region tend to be rather predictable as world powers :D
 
OOC: The PoD, as was intended to be (but evidently wasn't) clear in the OP, was that OTL's World War I was pre-empted by an earlier conflict breaking out from the Moroccan crisis, the aforementioned Moroccan War. (It had to be a PoD after 1900 to be in this forum!) Crucially, this is before the Haber process is available on an industrial scale—which means that the Central Powers, under blockade, are completely and utterly screwed. Hence this war really is over by Christmas (perhaps literally, perhaps not, but either way a short victorious war). The French and Russians storm into Germany, France's border moves to the Rhine, the Austro-Hungarian empire is torn apart, the Russians make out like bandits in Eastern Europe… and the British, who did not want anywhere near such a decisive outcome, are left impotent in a Franco-Russian-dominated Europe. Then recall that the Franco-Russian Alliance, when first signed, was targeted as much against the British as against the Germans; and both France and Russia have plenty of imperial issues to settle with the British now that the threat of Germany has been decisively defeated, but very few issues with each other. Hence the Britscrew, Francewank, Russiawank history of TTL. I… did not consider it especially likely that this would lead to a benevolent Imperial Japan. The PoD is after the annexation of Korea and does not prevent Japan from regarding France and the United Kingdom as the logical next opponents, and it does not prevent the British from being more friendly with the Americans than with the Japanese. Nothing prevents Japan from being a major industrial, would-be imperial power lacking captive markets and lacking natural resources as the established imperial powers had. It even gets rid of the Russian Civil War and removes a major impetus for the (temporary) Japanese democratisation of OTL. Hence why I did what I did in regard to the rose-tinted view of Imperial Japan that was being constructed.
 
OOC: eh whatevs, it was fun writing the posts. :D

OOC: True

IC: Whatever our opinions on the subject, though, we can agree that the Asian Wars and the defeat by Japan represented a major blow to Britain's military reputation. And the rapid economic growth in the region afterwards added insult to injury.

I think, though, another major cause was the lack of attention given to modernisation after the Morocco War. The shortness of the war and Britain remaining aloof meant that the Brits didn't out much research into emergent technology (Tins*, military aviation - as you pointed out with their ignoring carrier air - stuff like that).

*OOC - Tins=TTL's name for tanks.
 
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