Napoleonic invasion of Britain

Guys

As well as the problems of defeating the RN at least for a short period there is the small factor of getting an army across the channel and then supplying it.

The barges Napoleon was planning to use in 1805 were very fragile. There is a notorious incident earlier in the year when a demonstration was ordered. As a small swell was running the naval officer in charge tried to persuade Napoleon to cancel it, only to get sacked. His subordinate carried on with the landing and most of the unit involved were killed.

Even if Napoleon gets a period of control of the channel he's likely to lose a hell of a lot of the invasion force simply by sinking. If even a relatively small storm comes up things will be very bad. Get a few 32 gun frigates into the force and it would be a slaughter.

This could actually be the best way of bringing a quick and fairly bloodless end to the Napoleonic wars. If for some reason he thinks he has the RN out of the way and orders the invasion then a lot are going to be lost at sea. A force may reach Britain but if the navy is able to intervene at all it will be a small and highly disordered remnant landing where they can. With the core of his veterans dead and the rest isolated in Kent and also probably Napoleon sharing their fate the wheels could come off the empire very quickly.

That would set a hell of a lot of butterflies free of course. :D

Steve
 
The Channel is notoriously stormy, but successful crossings have been made.

Though if the barges are that flimsy, add another entry to the Reasons This Can't Be Done list.

It should at least take a proper storm to sink one, not a small swell.
 
Prefrence, certainly nothing wrong with that.:)

One reason the British position at sea became so secure was because the French reached a point of not trying to seriously reverse their decline in position.





Faeelin! No! Not Tremaire!:eek:
 
The Channel is notoriously stormy, but successful crossings have been made.

Though if the barges are that flimsy, add another entry to the Reasons This Can't Be Done list.

It should at least take a proper storm to sink one, not a small swell.

Elfwine

Dug out a reference book, David Chandlers 'The Campaigns of Napoleon', p323. Slightly different from what I remembered. It was 20th July 1804 and he had the Boulogne flotillas pass in review of him in spite of a gale. Admiral Bruix dismissed and exiled to Holland for remonstrating and a cowered vice admiral Magon obeyed orders. More than 20 gun sloops filled with soldiers and sailors were flung ashore and more than 2000 men drowned.

I could have sworn that I had read, possibly somewhere else or my memory playing up:eek:, that there had been an attempt to demonstrate a landing rather than them simply reviewing near the shore. As such the weather was probably worse than I thought but making a landing would still have been awkward. While this operation involved sloops a lot of the crossing was meant to be in barges and rafts towed by such ships!:eek:

Steve
 
Elfwine

Dug out a reference book, David Chandlers 'The Campaigns of Napoleon', p323. Slightly different from what I remembered. It was 20th July 1804 and he had the Boulogne flotillas pass in review of him in spite of a gale. Admiral Bruix dismissed and exiled to Holland for remonstrating and a cowered vice admiral Magon obeyed orders. More than 20 gun sloops filled with soldiers and sailors were flung ashore and more than 2000 men drowned.

Ouch. Good for Bruix (even if it cost him his career), though. Napoleon needed more men with the balls to say "Your glorious imperial majesty, you might possibly want to consider whether or not this is a good idea."

I could have sworn that I had read, possibly somewhere else or my memory playing up:eek:, that there had been an attempt to demonstrate a landing rather than them simply reviewing near the shore. As such the weather was probably worse than I thought but making a landing would still have been awkward. While this operation involved sloops a lot of the crossing was meant to be in barges and rafts towed by such ships!:eek:

Steve

That's pretty alarming. If the sloops are vulnerable to weather Napoleon would be willing to launch this in, the barges are doomed.
 
Fantasies of Brests

Wel the title should ghet you reading.

I am doing this without notes because there is an inordinate amount of nonsense being spewed upon the main so there may be things slightly wrong but the main sense is not.

Go see N A M Roger’s books plus bibliography.

French Ships superior – NO.
French hulls were hydrodynamically superior. However speed and manoeuvrability in a sailing ship are a function partly of hull form but mainly rigging and sail handling. British rigging was far and away superior. The actual speed order is French Hull Brit rig - Brit hull Brit rig - French hull French rig, all of these with British crews.

A British crewed anything is normally superior to a French (or Spanish crewed) anything in this period for the simple reason that they are better practiced. Privateers will be different but they are a whole different and minor beast.

Speed is tactically irrelevant. Fleet actions were fought under just enough sail to give steerage – walking pace basically. Burning canvas and black powder to not mix and the captain has to minimise the crew needed to sail in order to fight the ship.

French guns superior – NO.
British guns were markedly superior – mainly because they were flintlocks. That gives a marked advantage on reload time which combined with better training gives a massive fire superiority to the RN.

Blockade

Is phenomenally important. A fleet at anchor deteriorates faster than one at sea. Physically the ships become less seaworthy more prone to damage underway with crews unable to practice essential skills. For example you can’t manoeuvre individually or as a squadron. It’s hard, possibly impossible to fire the batteries and therefore you have an essentially untrained crew at the start of a voyage vs an expert crew in a faster ship.
Just for fun in the several hours between sighting the enemy and engaging the French will be able to see their inferiority to the RN as the fleets manoeuvre.

British Gunnery
The combination of better equipment and much better training means RN gunnery will be better than its opponents. For those interested Lanchester’s maths show that a marginal superiority in firepower is decisive. 10% superiority = a one sided massacre as first one then another of the enemy is taken out of action. The British gunnery superiority from 1798 seems closer to 50% on reload times alone.
Just to give an idea – HMS Java (38x18pdr main battery) only lost to USS Constitution (55x 32 &24pdr main battery) after a 3 hour fight which left the Constitution in need of major dockyard repair. Java was not remarkable ship and it still punches way above her weight against a very good American. Shannon (a very good ship) took Chesapeake in 13 minutes.

French (and Spanish) Losses pre Napoleon.
The French lost 7 of the line (of 21) (to 2 RN) at Quiberon and 5 (of 12) at Lagos bay. They also lost India, Canada, Manila, Havana and a few other places only accessible by sea.
The losses at Quiberon in terms of influence on the war amounted to the entire French fleet.

Suffren

Probably the best French admiral of the age. And good by any standard. His captains however were borderline incompetent/treasonous and his opponent not exactly the leading admiral in the RN. Who fought him to a standstill. The whole issue of this period (and I mean the early mid 1780’s) is the inability of ships in line of battle to achieve a decisive result so Suffren’s tactical success are on a level with the British tactical success at Chesapeake. Actually a strategic defeat. The only one that might have been different was Cuddalore but the ‘victory’ would have been raising a siege.

And it’s a secondary theatre. The main theatre resulted in the Saintes with 4 French of the line captured and one destroyed of 33 engaged. And look at the casualties.


Naval Yards
The numbers of lost actually underestimate things. A full blown naval dockyard is a rare thing in this age. There are maybe 8 in the world (Portsmouth, Chatham, Toulon, Brest, Ferrol, Cadiz, Venice, and Copenhagen.) that can fully service a fleet. The Dutch yards could but the shoals tended to limit the size that could sail to around 50 guns. There are secondary yards that do limited things but if a ship has taken major damage it needs to get back to one of the big yards or have stores and skilled manpower transported (which means by sea normally). Because they are the only places you have the industry to build or stores to replace and the skilled labour in sufficient numbers to undertake major works. The French survivors after Quiberon for example were mission killed for the duration of the war, capable of sailing but incapable of fighting until they had got to a main dockyard.

Nelsons Fleet
Nelsons fleet is not the RN. Apart from his force there are 28 of the line in the channel fleet. And a total of 96 in commission most in European waters. Defeat of Nelson = a fight with the much larger channel fleet with the semi wrecks the combined fleet would have consisted of.


Fantasies of Brest
Brest is a damn useless place for a major fleet base in the age of sail. Great anchorage but with virtually no river communications with the rest of France and in order to exit the Rade there are 3 or 4, 90 degree turns to make over a distance of around 10 – 20 miles. That matters when it’s the wind pushing you. And about 4 hours each tide when a ship of the line can do it. And you go out pointing the wrong way probably with a bitch of a wind driving you east or south (i.e. not where you want to go)
Basically this means that it’s hard to get more than a dozen ships out on any one tide. Which makes it suicidal to try if there is a larger RN force able to engage you before the next tide. Just about the only way you can get out is in the gap between the RN taking refuge in Torbay in a big storm and regaining station. Maybe a day and half if you are lucky and the RN will be sitting at the mouth of the channel if that’s where you want to go. Of course there will be picket ships there before then.
What every French admiral knew was that to join the Brest squadron with anyone else (the Med Fleet basically) meant that fleet fighting an action with the RN channel fleet and most probably the RN Med fleet Before being able to join. Even with equal capability that’s suicide given the RN margin of superiority probably since the 1680’s its insane to even think about it.
 
Guys

To add a few, fairly random, points to Gaunt's excellent post.

a) In earlier times blockade was limited because Britain didn't have the same organisation and experience for maintaining fleets. Economic in terms of being able to pay the bills, organisational in being able to supply the ships with food, equipments etc, knowledge in terms of diet to avoid scurvy and copper plating to minimise effects of shipworm and plant growth on the hull. As such there was the potential for very expensive and largely ineffective blockades with substantial losses to illness and crippling damage to ships.

By the mid 18thC Britain had largely solved those problems so, aside from the problems at the start of each war due to navies being run down in peacetime, Britain was generally able to fairly quickly establish reliable blockades of major enemy bases, trapping the bulk of their fleets and hence preventing invasions and exposing their colonies and merchant fleets to the royal navy.

b) The blockade also exposed another big weakness in the location of Brest. Being on the end of a peninsula its fairly isolated from the rest of France. A fleet and the supporting infrastructure needs a lot of food and equipment. [I have read that one reason the combined fleet in 1805 had to leave Cadiz was that the hinterland simply couldn't maintain that number of men and ships!]. In Brest's case also by the 18thC much of the suitable wood in the region had been cut down, so it had to be imported from hundreds of miles away. In peace time no great problem as they can be moved by sea. Once a blockades in place oops! Everything has to come via expensive and slow wagons.

c) Britain was also making huge technological leaps during this period, partly prompted by the demands of the military market. For instance the largest single building in Europe was one for the manufacture of the huge amounts of hemp cables needed for rigging. Similarly with pully blocks - from the Wiki entry for Lord St Vincent "By 1808 forty-five machines were turning out 130,000 pulley blocks per year. The innovation meant that only ten to thirty unskilled men were able to equal the output of 100 skilled blockmakers and the capital cost of the project was recovered in three years". Also iron production exploded with advance in designing cannons and hence it was easier to produce the large numbers of cannon needed.

By 1800 [often before] Britain had establish a huge advantage over just about any potential enemy in terms of the naval power and it was going to take huge changes to alter this. This was reinforced by the political situation with the strong and long recognition of the importance of the navy to Britain. Hence it both got a lot more investment than its rivals and had far more influence and social importance. In contrast France had a military dictator who was only minimally interested in and understanding of the problems and needs of the navy and by character and circumstances had to concentrate his main effort onto the army.

Steve
 
Elfwine

Dug out a reference book, David Chandlers 'The Campaigns of Napoleon', p323. Slightly different from what I remembered. It was 20th July 1804 and he had the Boulogne flotillas pass in review of him in spite of a gale. Admiral Bruix dismissed and exiled to Holland for remonstrating and a cowered vice admiral Magon obeyed orders. More than 20 gun sloops filled with soldiers and sailors were flung ashore and more than 2000 men drowned.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has that incident in Chapter Ten of his novel Uncle Bernac: A Memory of the Empire:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10581
 
As far as I can see this is near impossible. As mentioned by others the supremacy of the RN by this timeframe was absolute.

Yes the French could continue /start a large naval buildup, but all you are going to end up with is a large number of ships, where do the crews come from and where (due to the blockade) do they get the training and experience to sucsesfully fight? Then there is the issue of morale, as is mentioned in N.A.M Rodgers book the french were often beaten before a fight began as they did not belive they could win where as the opposite was true of the RN. To use a qoute from much later (1941) "it takes three years to build a ship 300 years to build a tradtion".

Also the British are going to take countermeasures, they are not just going to sit back and watch all these preparations take place. If the descion is taken in 1812 to invade Britain its going to be 1813/1814 before the operation takes place (to build all the ships, landing craft assemble supplies make plans etc) and the Brits are going to take countermeasures.

If somehow by a miracle (which is what it would take IMO) a largley intact army lands on british soil within a few weeks its supplies are going to be cut and at this stage the British army is a much better fighting force than earlier in the wars, indeed the peninsular army with its battle hardened and veteran soldiers could well have been recalled to Britain, so any land campaign would not be the walkover some people think it would be.

Thats my tuppence worth anyway.
 
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