Realistic CSA victory timeline

Lloyd, the problem is the British don't have to defeat the Union on land to win. By preventing the US from being able to blockade the CSA (Because one thing Britain won't do is blockade the CSA, even if they don't actually ally with them.) the CSA can hold on a lot longer than IOTL, perhaps long enough for the US to give up.

Although there were procedures to make nitrates, IIRC the US obtained most of their supply from foreign sources, sources that shall be cut off.

I don't see the UK occupying major areas of the US (Other than as conditions of a peace treaty), the US won't "win" the war.

I preface all this with the knowledge that I'm mostly working off what I've read in past discussions about the Trent Affair.
 

amphibulous

Banned
As much as I want to go "America F-yeah!", I must ask, what exactly are your sources?

For a start, the ones I linked - e.g. Lt Colonel Freemantle's book. If I failed to provide a source for eg the size of the British expeditionary force to the Crimea, google should take care of that for you.

And this isn't a "America F-yeah" thing - it's a NOT BEING INSANE THING. Really: British troops were superb at the trooper level, but not one is good enough to outfight odds of literally 100 to 1! Even the Spartans, Roman Legions, Mongol Cavalry and the Royal Navy of Nelson's period weren't that good.

And that's even if they have good generals - the British generals of the time were often outstandingly bad. The Army was also shown by the Crimea to be incompetent at logistics.

Most of all, apply simple common sense. Do you really believe that US troops - who had fought and been lead so superbly in the Mexican War - were enormously worse than the Russian troops that the British Army had such problems overcoming in the Crimea? If so, what was this profound US incompetence composed of? They had better trained officers than the British with about as much relevant combat experience, so the lack must be in the troops - are they the world's most appalling shots? Casualty records wouldn't indicate it. Cowards? Seems a strange thing to believe of the men who fought in the Wilderness.
 
:rolleyes: I'll try one last time to get past that Titanic sized blind spot you have... But you do realize the concept of defense and offence, right? If the British are INVADING, they are on the OFFENSE... right? They have to cross rugged terrain with little infrastructure to reach anything of value in the Union. Now the Union, in this instance are the ones being invaded so they are on the DEFENSE... they have to stop the Brits from capturing their cities and destroying industry and what not, since the Union is already there in those cities they can prepare defenses, right? Now, if the Brits are invading they need enough men to gain control of places even over the defenses... They need enough supplies to make it down to their target, overcome the defenders and hold that position long enough to either damage or destroy its value or force the Union to fight on their terms, right?

Now, you keep going on and on about the Union's manpower problems... the Union has a population of 22 million... In the OTL ACW the Union mobilized 2 million men over 4 years, and aside from CSA 2 offensives that didn't do much disruption, remained unmolested and on the offense throughout the war. They had war exhaustion because they were on the offense the whole time. Now they are on the defense. The British invasion is threatening their homes and cities... a much better motivation to get up and fight for the Union than esoteric national concepts and later slavery. The CSA mobilized a much larger percentage of its fighting population than the Union (15% vs 9% or thereabouts) Every 1% greater mobilization the Union is able to rally is 220,000 more men... and I seriously doubt the Union is so lacking in motivation that they couldn't raise their mobilization levels to face the Brits.

Now we have the British side of the invasion equation. If the Union is able to raise 200k men who are willing to defend then the Brits have a problem. Their hard core of trained men is 25k and those are far flung all over the Empire, the rest will be on the same level as the Union troops in training. Even by your best metrics the Union now has a 10:1 advantage, better than your 6:1 magic ratio which you seem to think is what one 'Spartan II' Brit is worth vs one Union soldier (I don't accept that at all but lets give you all benefit of the doubt here for the sake of argument). So now the Brits have to raise an army above what they got. They have to ship that army over the Atlantic, they have to base that army deep in Canada, they have to march that army over the Adirondacks to hit anything of value, and if they lose or are forced to implement a siege they have to stay at the end of a very long supply line while the Union is working off its internal rail and road networks...

Now, if we robotomized everyone, took out politics and simplified logistics and boiled it down to a game of Civilization the Brits could, theoretically, muster more men than the Union, they could put a million man army in Canada, march it down to NYC and take it after sustaining Nappy'esque casualties while building another million man army to replace the losses... but this isn't a game of Civ... and the Brits don't have the nofog cheat on to see exactly what they are going up against, all the while the Union has the home field advantage.

My statement is none of this. My statement is that the USA must invade, conquer and occupy the Confederacy, which is the size of Western Europe. As OTL showed it took a massive amount of manpower to do this. At this point the USA must also wage a land war against the British Empire when that Empire has torpedoed its blockade of the CSA and imposed one against the USA. The USA is in the position of the Russian Empire in WWI, its huge armies will be increasingly intimidating only on paper and killed by economic strangulation.
 
How about this:

The UK helps to stop the blockade on the CSA but does not join the war.

The CSA makes use of its railroad systems more effectively, maybe putting them under Government control as the US did? And uses the Telegraph as well more efficiently.

Some losses later cause Lincoln to lose re-election to a more "end the war" candidate who agrees to peace?
 
So Cardigan? Lucan?

Have you even heard of the Crimean War and the Charge Of The Light Brigade???

Lee quite possibly is over-rated. But that doesn't make him worse than Lucan or Cardigan!

I think that he arguably *is* worse than they are. For one thing he was smart enough to know in the case of Petersburg that he'd lost the war before the siege there started it, and he prolonged it for no reason other than his many, many personal quirks and problems. He thus ensured thousands of men died to assuage his own issues. That far outpaces incompetent use of light cavalry, and this is without raising the craptastic performance at Gettysburg and Malvern Hill, or the idiot damn fool headlong attack on the second day of the Battle of the Wilderness, or particularly Grant moving 100,000 men right out from under his nose for six whole days before Lee finally had that dawn on him.
 
For a start, the ones I linked - e.g. Lt Colonel Freemantle's book. If I failed to provide a source for eg the size of the British expeditionary force to the Crimea, google should take care of that for you.

And this isn't a "America F-yeah" thing - it's a NOT BEING INSANE THING. Really: British troops were superb at the trooper level, but not one is good enough to outfight odds of literally 100 to 1! Even the Spartans, Roman Legions, Mongol Cavalry and the Royal Navy of Nelson's period weren't that good.

And that's even if they have good generals - the British generals of the time were often outstandingly bad. The Army was also shown by the Crimea to be incompetent at logistics.

Most of all, apply simple common sense. Do you really believe that US troops - who had fought and been lead so superbly in the Mexican War - were enormously worse than the Russian troops that the British Army had such problems overcoming in the Crimea? If so, what was this profound US incompetence composed of? They had better trained officers than the British with about as much relevant combat experience, so the lack must be in the troops - are they the world's most appalling shots? Casualty records wouldn't indicate it. Cowards? Seems a strange thing to believe of the men who fought in the Wilderness.

The incompetence comes of the neglect of such things as reconnaissance (which neither side in the war really bothered with and which done by any general might have altered profoundly a number of problems in and during the war), the inability of generals on either side to master certain basic tactical rules (such as, for instance, avoiding frontal assaults when they were clearly bad ideas), the problems of controlling subordinates (see: Army of the Ohio, Army of Tennessee), the staggeringly high casualties from neglect of such simple things as basic sanitation.....and these are factors that apply to *both* sides in the war. If we go with just the flaws of the Union Army alone, one of the first and most fundamental elementary failures at a clearly military level was the corrupt process of replacing units that led to vastly understrength veteran forces for no reasons other than backscratching, the astonishing infighting of people like Halleck and Buell, McClernand and everybody, McClellan and Halleck against people they disliked.....as well as a tendency by too many Union generals to find excuses to do everything in the world but fight battles.
 

amphibulous

Banned
Lloyd, the problem is the British don't have to defeat the Union on land to win. By preventing the US from being able to blockade the CSA (Because one thing Britain won't do is blockade the CSA, even if they don't actually ally with them.) the CSA can hold on a lot longer than IOTL, perhaps long enough for the US to give up.

..I preface all this with the knowledge that I'm mostly working off what I've read in past discussions about the Trent Affair.

The UK could have broken the blockade on the CSA. But this was never likely, and anyone who suggests that the Trent could have caused such an act is being silly. Because

1. The UK needed US grain - BADLY

2. Slavery was completely unacceptable to the British public. For analogy, try to imagine what slight from Churchill could have made the US ally with Hitler if the Holocaust had been public knowledge. The idea is just insane.

3. The UK was making a fortune from selling arms to the North

4. The UK would have lost Canada

And the UK had so many other ways of bending the US to its will - it really held all the diplomatic cards.

I preface all this with the knowledge that I'm mostly working off what I've read in past discussions about the Trent Affair.

Given the lack of historical knowledge shown here, that's probably the worst possible source. It's notable that no one has discussed the only proposal for a US-UK conflict that was actually made by a cabinet member on either side... (Hint, it happened in a city that isn't called London.)
 

amphibulous

Banned
The incompetence comes of the neglect of such things as reconnaissance (which neither side in the war really bothered with and which done by any general might have altered profoundly a number of problems in and during the war)

Both sides made extensive but imperfect use of recon; this was cavalry's main use in the ACW. That you think otherwise is your failing. E.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalry_in_the_American_Civil_War
At the time of the Civil War, the cavalry had five major missions, in rough priority:

  1. Reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance screening
  2. Defensive, delaying actions
  3. Pursuit and harassment of defeated enemy forces
  4. Offensive actions
  5. Long-distance raiding against enemy lines of communications, supply depots, railroads, etc.
This represented a change from previous eras, in which offensive action was the primary mission. In the Napoleonic Wars, for instance, there were instances of massive cavalry charges used for tactical envelopments of infantry formations. The technology of the rifled musket, which emerged in the 1850s, put an effective end to this practice. While swiftly moving cavalry could overwhelm infantry whose weapons fired accurately only 100 yards, the infantryman with a rifled musket (accurate to 300 yards or more) could fire multiple rounds in the time it took the cavalry to reach his position. And a horse and rider were easy targets.

And again, Freemantle was a cavalry officer. He was with Lee for months. If Lee's use of cavalry was poor, then why did Freemantle, the elite British cavalry officer from the supposed British super-army, proclaim Lee a genius and the inevitable victor of the war??? (Freemantle's book is online, btw.)

I'd suggest that the most reasonable explanation here is that Lee's use of cavalry was thoroughly professional and you're simply wrong.


, the inability of generals on either side to master certain basic tactical rules (such as, for instance, avoiding frontal assaults when they were clearly bad ideas),
CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE!!!

the problems of controlling subordinates (see: Army of the Ohio, Army of Tennessee),
The British Army in the Crimea had Raglan, who wouldn't issue orders, and Lucan and Cardigan, who wouldn't obey them.

the staggeringly high casualties from neglect of such simple things as basic sanitation
Which was actually excellent compared to the British Army in the Crimean War. E.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale#Crimean_War

Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports began to filter back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On 21 October 1854, she and a staff of 38 women volunteer nurses, trained by Nightingale and including her aunt Mai Smith,[5] were sent (under the authorisation of Sidney Herbert) to the Ottoman Empire, about 295 nautical miles (546 km; 339 mi) across the Black Sea from Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based.

Nightingale arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari (modern-day Üsküdar in Istanbul). She and her nurses found wounded soldiers being badly cared for by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of them fatal. There was no equipment to process food for the patients.

..Ten times more soldiers died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. Conditions at the temporary barracks hospital were so fatal to the patients because of overcrowding and the hospital's defective sewers and lack of ventilation. A Sanitary Commission had to be sent out by the British government to Scutari in March 1855, almost six months after Florence Nightingale had arrived, and effected flushing out the sewers and improvements to ventilation.[6] Death rates were sharply reduced.


During the war she did not recognise hygiene as the predominant cause of death, and she never claimed credit for helping to reduce the death rate.[7]
Nightingale continued believing the death rates were due to poor nutrition and supplies and overworking of the soldiers. It was not until after she returned to Britain and began collecting evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army that she came to believe that most of the soldiers at the hospital were killed by poor living conditions.



You're comparing the faults of something you know something (but probably very little about) with the virtues that you imagined were possessed by another entity about which you are in a state of perfect ignorance. (Ok: other than the fact that you the British Army wasn't fighting Napoleon in the 1850s...)
 
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Given the lack of historical knowledge shown here, that's probably the worst possible source. It's notable that no one has discussed the only proposal for a US-UK conflict that was actually made by a cabinet member on either side... (Hint, it happened in a city that isn't called London.)

Yeah, playing around with Google would probably help, I just seem to quickly forget exactly what I was researching anyways:D
 
1) Yes, we can see the excellent use of it in occasions like JEB Stuart's useless rides around the Army of the Potomac and in Sheridan's useless two weeks riding around Lee's army, as well as in the perpetual failures of cavalry to do anything of the sort west of the Appalachians.

2) So? The British don't have to be the best army ever to be better than US Civil War armies. I repeat that the CS Army was terrible and Grant and Thomas will be competent generals by the standards of enemies of even quality. For every instance of the Light Brigade there's something like the Battle of Harper's Ferry for the USA or the Battle of Five Forks for the CSA. The British and French both made errors in the Crimean War, yes. But these errors reflected as much the traditional Russian skill in artillery used to good effect as their own mistakes. The outcome of the war also reflects that the Russian army in that war in practice was better than it was made out to be subsequently, as some of those battles ended as they did because the Russians weren't drooling idiots backstabbing each other and incapable of more than frontal assaults, dependent on personalities to the point that an individual's death wrecked an army, but were instead another professional army well-trained and well-disciplined.

3) There's a difference between this and the outright malevolence of Bishop Polk or the kind of shenanigans the AoTP regularly got up to.

4) The British had learned lessons about sanitation. The USA had a future general-in-chief observing these issues and what did McClellan learn about sanitation? Nothing. What did any of the other generals learn about these well-reported issues? Nothing. What did the CS generals learn about them? Nothing.
 
4. In terms of battlefield casualties Russia gave as good as she got and gave up after losing their 'key point' and gateway to their soft underbelly, which was easily accessed through the Black Sea. The Union has an underbelly, but reaching it and exploiting it requires marching hundreds of miles through poor infrastructure and mountains, trying to hit easily defendable centers of industry that are flung far and wide. And they have to do it basically alone because, as you point out, the CSA was completely incompetent and dysfunctional in that theater and only lasted as long as it did because of the sheer distances involved. Any British land force is going to have to contend with those same distances just to get to their starting points and actually hit Union soil if coming from the CSA, or contending with a whole lot of nothing before hitting anything major or vital if coming from Canada.

This of course misses a very obvious difference between the Tsarist army and that of the Union Army: the Tsarist army was a conscript army of professionals, one of the longest-serving and most cohesive in Europe. When people were recruited into that army they were recruited for 20+ years, and this was an army that made superb use of artillery. By comparison the Union army was formed by amateurs leading amateurs and continued to show some blinkered issues very late into the war, while the CS Army was much worse than the Union army was.
 

amphibulous

Banned
Lloyd, the problem is the British don't have to defeat the Union on land to win. By preventing the US from being able to blockade the CSA (Because one thing Britain won't do is blockade the CSA, even if they don't actually ally with them.) the CSA can hold on a lot longer than IOTL, perhaps long enough for the US to give up.

Although there were procedures to make nitrates, IIRC the US obtained most of their supply from foreign sources, sources that shall be cut off.

If foreign nitrates were essential, then the CSA would have collapsed in a few months. Importing them was the cheapest and easiest option, but even the CSA managed to make her own - and the North was vastly more productive and industrially capable.

In case you're ever-blockaded by the Royal Navy and need to keep your black powder army going, here is what to do:

http://www.armchairgeneral.com/confederate-boys-and-peter-monkeys.htm

First, the dirt was placed in large bins shaped like the letter “V”. At the bottom of the bin was a slit, and beneath this slit was a trough that led to a larger trough or bucket. The bin would be filled with cave dirt, and then water would be poured slowly over the dirt. As the water percolated though the soil, calcium carbonate and nitrate would come with it. The water would then drip through the slit at the bottom of the bin, and be captured in the troughs or buckets arranged to collect the muddy water. In chemical terms, the cave soil plus water resulted in ions in solution “[calcium nitrate + calcium carbonate] + water à calcium, nitrate, and carbonate ions in solution.”

To get potassium ions in solution, the Confederate manufacturers added wood ashes to the leached solution from the cave dirt. Potassium is present in all trees, but is more prevalent in hard woods. Traditionally, willow has been preferred, but almost any wood will do. By adding water to the wood ashes, potassium hydroxide would dissolve into potassium and hydroxide ions in solution.

Mixing the water from the cave dirt and the water from the wood ashes, resulted in calcium, nitrate, carbonate, potassium, and hydroxide. From this mixture, a precipitate would form, which was called “curds” by the miners. The curds were calcium hydroxide and calcium carbonate. What was left in solution were the ions of nitrate and potassium. The evaporation of the solution resulted in the precipitation of the nitrate and potassium ion as K2NO3 (saltpeter).
So, what does all of this mean? The process is pretty easy, and requires only a few crude instruments and procedures. The soil and water need to be close together. The wooden bins are easy to make. Large iron kettles used to evaporate the water were fairly common and easy to obtain. The only thing that was in short supply was the manpower to mine the dirt.


This mining was fairly easy to do, as it was “in-your-face” mining, in that the dirt was dug out at face level, and it was easier than hard rock mining. Cave dirt mining does not require a great deal of experience, as there is little blasting, drilling, or other specialized mine engineering needed. One simply gets to the dirt and starts digging.
 

amphibulous

Banned
This of course misses a very obvious difference between the Tsarist army and that of the Union Army: the Tsarist army was a conscript army of professionals, one of the longest-serving and most cohesive in Europe.

They were notoriously poorly trained and motivated: read a book.
 
The CSA did that, however, over a process that took a full year and importing and capturing weapons left by the US army from its defeats on the battlefield. And this factor unfortunately has tended to be neglected by most historians as it was the rare area where the CS government *did* work and work well.
 
Lloyd, the problem is the British don't have to defeat the Union on land to win. By preventing the US from being able to blockade the CSA (Because one thing Britain won't do is blockade the CSA, even if they don't actually ally with them.) the CSA can hold on a lot longer than IOTL, perhaps long enough for the US to give up.

Although there were procedures to make nitrates, IIRC the US obtained most of their supply from foreign sources, sources that shall be cut off.

I don't see the UK occupying major areas of the US (Other than as conditions of a peace treaty), the US won't "win" the war.

I preface all this with the knowledge that I'm mostly working off what I've read in past discussions about the Trent Affair.


Breaking a blockade is one thing, invading is another. One can easily be done the other is a bloodbath that costs far more than the Brits would be willing to pay.
 
Breaking a blockade is one thing, invading is another. One can easily be done the other is a bloodbath that costs far more than the Brits would be willing to pay.

And when the CSA starts gaining through imports what the USA was closing off from it, like food and the like (as without the blockade there'll be more ships to ship things other than high-priced luxury goods)?
 
My statement is none of this. My statement is that the USA must invade, conquer and occupy the Confederacy, which is the size of Western Europe. As OTL showed it took a massive amount of manpower to do this. At this point the USA must also wage a land war against the British Empire when that Empire has torpedoed its blockade of the CSA and imposed one against the USA. The USA is in the position of the Russian Empire in WWI, its huge armies will be increasingly intimidating only on paper and killed by economic strangulation.

Blockade yes, invade no. Why invade? Why would the British knowingly walk into a bloodbath? Would you? In real life the Brits didn't bounce bullets off their chests and American riflemen could often hit what they were aiming at. When the body bags come back by the tens of thousands the Brits will give up.
 
How about this:

The UK helps to stop the blockade on the CSA but does not join the war.

The CSA makes use of its railroad systems more effectively, maybe putting them under Government control as the US did? And uses the Telegraph as well more efficiently.

Some losses later cause Lincoln to lose re-election to a more "end the war" candidate who agrees to peace?


That could well work and it would be SANE unlike trying to conquer the US with 50,000 troops.
 
How about this:

The UK helps to stop the blockade on the CSA but does not join the war.

The CSA makes use of its railroad systems more effectively, maybe putting them under Government control as the US did? And uses the Telegraph as well more efficiently.

Some losses later cause Lincoln to lose re-election to a more "end the war" candidate who agrees to peace?
I am a little tired of the TL that invovle peace due to Lincoln losing the election. Are there any ways for the CSA to force a peace and have Lincoln win a 2nd term?
 
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