as to Conroy, yes indeed he has his problems ... on the other hand you have to admit he sells a lot more books than we do, unless we have a writer (1) on this thread who routinely sells lots of mass market paperbacks and not a few hardbacks. BTW, there is a book with a scenario where the British intervene and the North loses... it is called "Dixie Victorious" edited by Tsouras. (2)
1) John (
Birmo) Birmingham (The Axis of Time trilogy, the two book After America series). He hasn't posted in years, probably worried about charges of plagiarism.
2) Even when Tsouras wrote a Union Victorious novel (Gettysburg), in which the North wins the war at Gettysburg, he can't resist spending the whole nine chapters of the book describing Johnny Reb kicking Billy Yank ass. The Union doesn't pull off its victory until the last couple of sentences in the final chapter, leaving an epilogue depicting (with little explanation of what happened) Longstreet surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia. IOW, more fap material for the Neo-Confederates, save for a last moment of coitus interruptus.
I think this is probably the best bet. Maybe have war take longer to start so the side that has this advantage has time to train properly.
The English Civil War took some time to really get rolling. In the American Civil War, everybody (except Winfield Scott and William Tecumseh Sherman) thought it would be over in six weeks. So why bother preparing when the other side was only going to run away from our tremendous numbers/fighting spirit?
I think another big problem here is lack of trained officers and staff in both armies. US has to be much more militarized and have a lot more officers available at the start of the war to be able to achieve control needed for complex maneuver. Not sure how this can be brought about
The Antebellum South was an armed camp by 1860, between the building pressures of an institution of slavery (reinforced by the Fugitive Slave Law and the Dred Scott Decision) and the sense of separation already building between the two very different societies, North & South. Laws openly embraced allowing regular censorship of all mails (to combat the Underground Railroad), constant patrolling against runaways day and night, laws mandating that all White men away from their homes always be armed...Yeah.
I have never been surprised by all the many tactical victories the South enjoyed. Particularly early in the war. The vast majority of officers in the US Army were Southerners, and many more people in the South (per capita) chose to join the army/militia. Add on the advantage of the interior lines...which is why they never got the Arizona Territory, Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, or Maryland. There, they didn't have interior lines. And in the cases of Arizona and West Virginia, their LOCs were horrible.
Since someone has already brought up Tsouras, his
Disaster at D-Day is not too bad.
http://www.amazon.com/Disaster-D-Day-Germans-Defeat-Allies/dp/1848327234
In places it is just about plausible, and he manages to keep the Brit-Bashing under control (Unlike his later work).
Although there are actual factual mistakes, he certainly does a better job than
some writers.
As a matter of fact, not speaking to his work on D-Day, but from another. I had a guy who for years regaled me with his insistence that the Allies deliberately held off landing in France until the Soviets and Germans had bashed each other enough to "control them postwar".

He then did a massive study on his own and realized (as he said to me) "My God, if there had been seven straight days of bad weather starting on the day after the Allies landed, they would have been in the sea!"
The whole thing with the distrust of standing armies.Because of military rule,the English/British were heavily suspicious of standing armies.This sentimentality was transferred to the US via English settlers and was reinforced when Britain billeted troops in the 13 colonies following the 7 Years War and tried to reinforce their rule their with standing soldiers.
Yeah, and British military pay back then was astonishingly low. They had to work in the civilian workplace to supplement their income, competing with locals for a drastically depressed economy, exacerbated by British demands for additional tax revenue. So the potential (and eventual causing) of great friction was there. (1) The Americans were well aware that thanks to newly rigidly enforced anti-smuggling laws by the British, a massive trade imbalance between the Colonies and Britain was in place.
Unfortunately, all that revenue was flooding into the coffers of private British commercial interests, so as far as Whitehall was concerned they had yet to see a brass farthing. The more they screamed for taxes, the madder the colonists got. And with the mercantile system in place, and those same British men of capital getting ever richer, they didn't want anything changed.
1) The colonists weren't fooled by any nonsense that the troops were there to protect them. The Natives were long gone from the coastal areas, the French Navy was prostrate and in no position to threaten the American coastline, and privately the decision-makers in London itself admitted that having troops there would be advantageous for the purpose of quelling any chances of rebellion. Which tells me they were already preparing for the results of their brand new "get tough" post Seven Years War colonial policy.
Wait - didn't the puritan colonists support the roundheads in the English Civil War? Taking into account that Cromwell was a republican, one could suspect that the Americans held him in grateful memory.
Actually, American's opinions on Cromwell varied greatly depending on where you were in the Colonies. Generally, the further south you went, particularly in Catholic areas, the more notorious his name became. Cromwell caused a flood of refugees into the Southern and Central colonies, but it was the Restoration that forced many puritans to flee to New England.
Actually, it's not very hard to get at least the snipy-shooty thing inculcated in. It takes a few weeks to train a teacher, and then that teacher can handle their own entire battalion.
You could quite easily - if there was the driver for it - train a few hundred teachers, twenty at a time, and then those teachers in turn spread skilled shooting through the army.
As a matter of fact, that's exactly how Major General von Steuben did it with the rebel army in the American Revolutionary War. His genius was in determining that psychologically Americans were different from their European counterparts, and his breakthrough discovery that allowed him to succeed where so many other Europeans sent to train and lead American troops had failed.
His discovery? To get Americans to obey orders as quickly as Europeans, just make sure that they know the "why" of their orders. That is, "why" the need for close order drill, marching in step, complex small unit formation march orders, firing in volleys as opposed to as fast as you could shoot, and so on. The rest of their training could then follow.
Steuben took a very small company of sergeants, trained them as you described, and then they followed suit with their own companies. His "little blue booklet" of rules and regulations for army training became the standard until 1818, and AIUI the US Army's manual of regulations is today still called "the Blue Book".
Steuben's tale is why it is the winter spent at Valley Forge that is so often remembered, despite that other places for Washington's army to winter over in the war were worse. At Valley Forge the American Continental Army became the United States Army.
