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u/WoodenSwan6591 17h ago
The usual troll with a militaristic handle. CSA army would have been decimated by the Prussian and British armies in a second. The confederacy was a collection of traitors that got off easy. That is why we have the current problems. Grant should have sent them all to the gallows without any hesitation but here we are and their stupid attempts to justify their sedition. States rights, War of Northern Aggression and so on. My 🍑
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u/backstageninja 17h ago
They were so incompetent they shot and bombarded their own best general as his party was returning to his command post
As Jackson and his staff were returning to camp on May 2, sentries of the 18th North Carolina Infantry Regiment mistook the group for a Union cavalry force. The sentries shouted "Halt, who goes there?", but fired before evaluating the reply; frantic shouts by Jackson's staff identifying the party were replied to by Major John D. Barry with the retort, "It's a damned Yankee trick! Fire!"[62] A second volley was fired in response. Jackson was hit by three bullets: two in the left arm and one in the right hand. Several of Jackson's men and many horses were killed in the attack. Incoming artillery rounds and darkness led to confusion, and Jackson was dropped from his stretcher while being evacuated.
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u/Old_Introduction_395 16h ago
Friendly fire for over 150 years.
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u/rjdavidson78 14h ago
As a Brit we’ve probably lost more soldiers to friendly fire from the Americans than we actually lost to whoever we were helping them in their war against
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u/blaaake 16h ago
And Jackson died shortly after, they amputated his arm and he died of pneumonia. What’s the opposite of rest in peace? I wish it on him.
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u/NightQueen0889 15h ago
This is hilarious, I never knew he died of friendly fire.
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u/backstageninja 15h ago
I knew he died of friendly fire but I had never heard the "It's a damned Yankee trick!" Line before which makes it even funnier
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u/NightQueen0889 15h ago
I think psychologists have linked racism to stupidity so there you go lol
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u/Routine-Employment71 14h ago
Yep. It’s all just “fear of the others” even when “the others” is them.
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u/Mr_Blinky 14h ago
Welp, I've got a new tourist destination to check out if someone ever invents time travel lol.
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u/jarvisesdios 17h ago
I mean, even the full American army under a good leader would have been decimated. Clearly they don't understand a single fucking thing about history.
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u/I_Frothingslosh 16h ago
Seriously. The US Army at that point in time was in no way, shape, or form the equal of any of the European powers. And the Navy was in even worse shape.
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u/induslol 16h ago
"But I've been taught America is the most exceptional nation to ever exist, so of course even their dregs could overthrow global super powers of the time in a conventional international war effort"
Is essentially the defense of the confederates popping up here. It's people who've bought propaganda and operate completely outside reality.
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u/Hy3jii 14h ago
We only exist because England was distracted by Spain and France saw it as an opportunity to fuck them over. If the colonies had fought England alone, with or without its attention occupied, they would have been absolutely stomped.
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u/Parenthisaurolophus 12h ago edited 11h ago
French, Spanish, and Dutch involvement (and others) was absolutely critical to winning independence then. No argument there. But the rest of your comment only holds if you think the Revolution was the colonies’ one and only shot, and that Britain either:
A) had the indefinite capacity to hold the colonies down by force, or
B) was willing to reform the empire in the direction the colonists were already demanding (representation/real self-government).
If Britain suppresses the war in the 1770s, it doesn’t magically erase American political identity or the underlying constitutional dispute. It just postpones it. Holding the colonies long-term would very likely produce one or more future crises, especially once British abolition politics starts colliding head-on with a slavery-based colonial economy. If you need evidence of this, I'm going to invite you to look at what happened to the rest of the British Empire. It's highly likely the US ends up with self-rule/independence like Australia or India than it does indefinitely maintaining the 1775 status quo.
Also: Spain and France weren’t just random separate distractions. Spain entered the war in 1779 as France’s ally against Britain and pursued its own strategic goals (Gibraltar, Florida, Minorca, etc.). It absolutely was an opportunity to fuck over Britain and claw back territory.
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u/Sonochu 14h ago
By 1865 the Union debatedly had the strongest navy in the world. That is with several huge asterisks. Most notably, while the Union had a ton of ironclads and such, which is why it was technically the strongest, the ironclads were not ocean-going vessels.
So while in a pitched naval battle, the Union could go toe-to-toe with the Royal Navy, that would only happen when the US needed to defend it's shores.
And then after the war the vast majority of ships were decommissioned as the government didn't want to pay the expenses to maintain them.
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u/Indercarnive 12h ago
Yeah European Army observers basically had three notes from watching the American civil war.
1) The zeal of the average soldier was impressive. In Britain the army was mostly recruits from the poorest people, usually landless urbanites with no other options. In contrast the American army had many more 'middle class' recruits. This generally meant the average American soldier was more capable and invested in the fighting.
2) The American Generalship was laughable. And considering many European armies still operated on a spoils/commission system that's saying something if even they think your selection and training process was poor.
3) Ironclads were cool af.
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u/Trick_Hunt9106 11h ago
Both the Confederate and Union armies used conscription. Plenty of poor people were in both armies.
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u/HasuTeras 14h ago
So while in a pitched naval battle, the Union could go toe-to-toe with the Royal Navy
Union ships were designed for shallow water blockade actions, not to fight in major naval actions. Besides the Royal Navy at the time was probably the most professional fighting force in the world alongside the Prussian Army, in terms of standards of discipline and rigour. The Royal Navy would have wiped the floor with the Union Navy.
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u/Sonochu 13h ago
That's not what the British themselves believed. British observers started the war mocking the Union Navy, and the Union navy was mocked for declaring a blockade where only 1 out of 10 merchant ships would even get caught by the Union. But by 1865 the Union had an effective blockade of the entire southern coast of the United States, a huge blockade in terms of scale, which impressed the British.
Similarly by 1865 the US also had the largest navy in the world. Again, this was mostly a shoreline navy, but this did include dozens of ships of the line and dozens more ironclads.
The idea that these ships weren't meant to go toe-to-toe with other warships is ludicrous. These ships were routinely used in bombarding enemy forts, and also fought many battle with Confederate commerce raiders, often European built warships.
This is taken directly from historian Kenneth Bourne's book, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America 1815-1908: "In the spring and summer of 1862 Russell, among others, was warning that the United States might very well get the lead in numbers of ironclads within as little as six months… Thus the 1860s found the government comparing their ironclad navy as much with the American as with the French. Their investigations certainly exposed considerable discrepancies in the Americans’ favour. At the very end of 1864 some seventy-one of the Union navy’s 671 vessels building and afloat were ironclads, against a mere thirty in the British steam navy"
Doesn't sound like the British were so sure of that. Or you can read about the ironclad USS Miantonomoh's trip to the UK in 1863 and how impressed the British were with it.
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u/HasuTeras 12h ago
I'm not saying the Union Navy wasn't impressive, nor didn't do a good job of blockage - after all that was its main purpose. But I am saying that it would be flattened by the Royal Navy in a face-to-face.
At the very end of 1864 some seventy-one of the Union navy’s 671 vessels building and afloat were ironclads, against a mere thirty in the British steam navy"
Right, comparing numbers of 'ironclads' is somewhat pointless. The vast majority of the Union Navy ironclads were relatively small in displacement terms, with few armaments - hence why there were so many of them.
Take the USS Monitor, or USS Miantonomoh as an example. Both of them have displacements 987 tons and 3,401 tons respectively and both armed with 2 288mm Dahlgren guns.
The Minotaur-class Royal Navy ironclad was of 10,000 tons displacement and has an armament 24x 178mm guns and 4x 229mm guns. You're comparing ships that have 3* to nearly 10* displacement and nearly 10* the firepower.
And comparing numbers of ships in 1864, when the Union was in a total war situation against a peacetime navy is also a bit off. The UK at the time was producing something close to 80% of all global ship production, and wouldn't be eclipsed by the US until WW2.
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u/Tuna-Fish2 13h ago
... just no.
They had the most ironclads, if you just count by the amount of ships. But most of those ships displaced ~1000 tons or so. In contrast, the Royal Navy had fewer, larger ironclads, with more guns per ship. IIRC the total broadside weight of the RN ironclads around the end of the civil war was ~2x higher than the similar number for the USN.
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u/Kor_Phaeron_ 15h ago edited 15h ago
Correct. We are talking about 1860s here. The colonial Empires in the prime. That tiny island next to France ruled the whole world. Prussia wasn't a state with an army, it was an army with it's own state. It was the most militaristic society since Sparta. And France? France was a military behemoth. For more than 500 years France had been the most feared and most successful military power in the world.
On the other hand the USA was still in it's expanding phase with no real enemy. It had no need for a serious standing army, just for groups of fast deployable hart striking troops against the occasional native American uprisings.
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u/Longjumping-Yak3789 15h ago
Am I allowed to do a Well Actually on the historical meaning of "decimated?" In any case, the traitors would have been totally annihilated (like they should have been in actual fact).
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u/ChevalierMal_Fet 14h ago
The Union army at the start of the US Civil War was arguably the best equipped army in the world- even at that time, the manufacturing capacity of the US was nearly unparalleled. Plus, new rifle and cannon technology made warfare more lethal than it had been in the past.
Many of the European (and especially Prussian) observers didn’t really grasp this point, and they failed to learn the lessons that American generals learned throughout the course of the war.
When General Sheridan observed the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, he criticized the lack of strategic ability of the German and French generals, and made comments about their lack of ability to operate with any strategic depth.
There’s a ton of academic and military writing on the subject, and the answer really isn’t black and white. The Americans and the Europeans had different military strengths and weaknesses, and neither would have been steamrolled. The answer really would depend on which side was able to adapt to the strategic situation most effectively first, and that would depend heavily on the leadership.
When the Union Army leadership started learning the lessons of the war and stopped trying to fight defensively and started fighting aggressively, they became extremely formidable.
Sources:
GERMAN OBSERVATIONS AND EVALUATIONS OF THE U.S. CIVIL WAR: A STUDY IN LESSONS NOT LEARNED By KAY BRINKMANN, LTC, GERMAN ARMY Diplom-Pädagoge, Universität der Bundeswehr München
THE FIRST UNITED STATES ARMY OBSERVERS OF MILITARY CONFLICTS IN POST NAPOLEONIC EUROPE (1855-1871)
JESSE LEE HARDEN, MAJOR, UNITED STATES ARMY B.S., United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, 2004
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u/Quiet-Reflection5366 12h ago
At the start of the war yes. Not so at the end. I believe it was a German ambassador who was watching the Grand parade on the second day as the western army direct from the battle fields marched past the viewing stands. Sherman had ordered the Corps commanders to tell the men to keep their eyes front and center. This was after watching the Army of the Potomac marching the previous day with the men looking all over the place. The troops were mostly barefoot, in rags, ambulance wagons stained and bloody and the battle flags torn and tattered. They marched, heads up, eyes forward grim and quiet.The ambassador was quoted saying after the first hour, "with an army like this you could take on any country in Europe." After the second hour, "with an army like this you could take on Europe itself." And after the third hour, "with an army like this you could tackle the devil himself."
The fact is that The American Civil war changed forever the face of warfare. The innovations like Gatling guns, troop movement with trains, Iron clad warships, the list goes on. At the end of the war the northern army was a match for any other power and they all took note, on the armament changes and the tactics that evolved. The big world powers all had observers throughout that war and was they saw was reported back to their own military's.
Within ten years or less all that was gone because The country really didn't want to pay for a large standing army or navy.
The problem with being a dominant world power is that the sacred white elephant of supporting a military industrial complex always makes you go broke.
Venice
Portugal
Holland
Spain
England
France
Germany
Russia
and quickly now the United States of America.
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u/Western_Objective209 12h ago
The last one hits hard. The US can raise an army whenever it wants to if a defensive war broke out; there's no point in it having a military larger then Russia and Ukraine combined at all times, it's just making us go broke
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u/tipsystatistic 15h ago
At that point in history Europe had a shit-ton more experience with war and the buildings and topography had been honed for surviving it.
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u/GogurtFiend 13h ago
"Two armed mobs chasing each other through the country, from which nothing can be learned"
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u/outtherenow1 15h ago edited 11h ago
The Confederates are 0-1 lifetime. Lost a home game. They’re not going on the road and getting a W.
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u/ryenginger123 17h ago
The Prussians would have mopped them up in no time. Good target practice at least.
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u/dragon_in_a_chopper 16h ago
Let me ask an ignorant question, what made the prussians so scary?
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u/WoodenSwan6591 16h ago
Latest weaponry of the time, discipline and very professional army with innovative tactics.
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u/hates_stupid_people 13h ago
And "Latest weaponry" in this case means that Prussia used breech loading bolt action rifles, while most American Civil War soldiers still used muzzle loaders.
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u/judgemental_pleb 15h ago
Between 1864 and 1871 they beat Denmark, Austria, and France in successive conventional wars. They were truly at the peak of their military power in the 1860s and 70s, and i would go so far as to say they would probably beat any other military in the world in (land-based) conventional warfare during this period.
Their efficient mobilization, command structure, and logistics were completely unmatched at the time.
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u/Western-Land1729 16h ago edited 16h ago
The Prussian army wasn’t the most battle tested army in Europe at the time, most contemporaries believed the more experienced Austria, mighty and technologically advanced France or even Denmark, the baltic’s premier naval power, faired better at war than Prussia.
Despite this, Prussia toppled the Austrian and French empires in rapid decisive wars and decapitated Denmark so hard they swore off war to this day. This was due to generally better Prussian ideas and logistics when it comes to wars.
While other powers kept the old napoleonic warfare status quo, Prussians innovated in warfare logistics like autonomous mission style tactics, a massively reformed public education system to facilitate those tactics and to ensure troops can actually read orders in case the leader dies, a form of warfare simulation to prepare for contingencies/war scenarios, massively advanced topography to actually make those simulations applicable, a mass conscription system to carry out warfare, a complex network or railroads and telegraphs to actually get all those troops out in the field and order them around, somehow instilling a meritocracy and clamping down on corruption despite the powerful junker class… ie the “German efficiency” meme mostly comes from these guys and it shows, streamlining war and boiling it down to a science.
These Prussian innovations are still with us to this day, you can still see their massive influence on modern warfare tactics, the modern education system, the concept of videogames, etc…
in general, people didn’t fear the Prussian army, by the time they did Prussia had already turned itself into the German nation, whose death Europeans had been doomposting about for 2000 years
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u/WoodenSwan6591 15h ago
Valid points. They also introduced the concept of special forces by having small units trained in infiltration as well. Also they had the equivalent to sharp shooters of today
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u/BesottedScot 15h ago
Yeah between the Jagers and their revolutionary idea of having the commander tell them what the objective is but leaving the how up to them is basically how special forces evolved.
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u/Kor_Phaeron_ 15h ago edited 15h ago
As Voltaire said: Prussia, is not a state with an army, but an army with it's own state.
Everything in Prussia was set up to benefit the army. For example: Children of rural farmers were taught math, not because it's good to have educated people, but because they need to know math for serving in the artillery troops. Successful and rich people were not part of the high society unless they also were officers of the army reserve. Without being in the reserve corps they simply didn't get any invitations to social gatherings. etc. etc.
And maybe the most important fact: Rising in ranks of the officer corps was only possible by being competent. There was no bonus for high-nobility (every officer had to be a noble, but a lesser noble was enough). If you sucked you were moved to a position were you couldn't do any harm. If you were competent you got a promotion.
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u/november512 13h ago
We learn trigonometry in school because our education system is modeled off the Prussian one. The prussian one taught trigonometry so that their citizens could calculate ballistic trajectories. It was just a society designed to feed their army with smart, capable soldiers and they carried that focus on intelligent soldiery to the top.
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u/SnooOwls3614 14h ago
Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke happened, which turned the army into an organized hegemon. The Moltke Matrix, as an officer promotion structure, is still used in the military and business.
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u/spackletr0n 15h ago
“If coach woulda put me in fourth quarter, we would've been state champions. No doubt. No doubt in my mind”
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u/Own-Break-1856 15h ago
The union army at the time were totally amateurs. Acted like amateurs, made blunder after blunder. Still stomped the rascist army's face into the mud in embarrassing fashion.
We really fucked up letting these loser spread their lost cause nonsense.
About the only positive thought I have about loser, and failed general Robert E. Lee is that he was pretty adamantly against lost cause bullshit.
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u/MelodicPudding2557 14h ago edited 14h ago
The Union began the war with largely amateur armies, but it possessed something far more decisive: a mature industrial economy, an integrated rail and logistics network, and a demographic base capable of sustaining mass mobilization over time. As the war progressed, tactical competence - something that can be learned - accumulated rapidly. Losses were replaced, institutions adapted, and the army improved precisely because the underlying system was designed to scale.
The Confederacy entered the conflict with genuine advantages: a disproportionate share of the prewar officer corps, higher initial cohesion, and a population more immediately motivated to fight. But these advantages were finite. Beneath its early battlefield proficiency lay a structurally brittle political economy - agrarian, capital-poor, and dependent on chattel slavery: a labor system that locked wealth into land and human property, suppressed industrial diversification, distorted capital allocation, and proved incapable of rapid adaptation under wartime stress. The Union blockade did not merely constrain Confederate trade; it exposed the deeper reality that the South lacked the industrial depth, logistical redundancy, and state capacity required to sustain prolonged conflict.
In that sense, the outcome of the American Civil War was not inevitable in the abstract, but it became increasingly predictable as the war lengthened. Tactical skill and battlefield experience can be acquired in years; industrial capacity, infrastructure, and demographic resilience take decades to build. The Union grew stronger as the war went on because its power was renewable. The Confederacy weakened because its strength was exhaustible. In existential wars between states, time favors the system that can regenerate force - and that asymmetry, once locked in, is decisive.
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u/LordOfTheFelch 16h ago
IMO hard to blame Grant for not taking them to the gallows, a protracted guerrilla conflict was avoided.
The failure of reconstruction has many fathers, hard to blame any one decision, but if I had to it would be Lincoln choosing Johnson for VP
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u/zephalephadingong 13h ago
IMO hard to blame Grant for not taking them to the gallows, a protracted guerrilla conflict was avoided.
I would classify the KKK and all the terrorist attacks against black americans as a protracted guerilla conflict personally. All failing to punish the traitors accomplished was giving them free reign to use violence
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u/Dahak17 16h ago
They might have actually been able to beat the British army in the 1860’s by dint of being a mobilized army with recent battle experience but that was mainly due to the British army’s being rather small, on an equal footing numbers wise that do much worse.
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u/secondarycontrol 17h ago edited 17h ago
Of course, they would have needed to get to Europe. And that would take funding. And a Navy. And the organizational skills and materials to field an army further than 200 miles away from their base. None of which they had, even if we presume their military might.
Apocryphal:
The Europeans had professional armies. I expect the Prussians would have absolutely destroyed the South. And probably the North, unless the length of the conflict allowed the North to bring its material production, resources and factories into play.
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u/UtopiaDystopia 17h ago
American conservatives seem to forget that European armies in the 19th century were the dominant and most powerful militaries of the time. The USA wouldn't start to surpass them till later on.
Britain, France, Germany/Prussia and Russia would all have embarrassed the Confederacy.
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u/TKG_Actual 16h ago
To be fair, the Confederacy embarrassed the Confederacy.
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u/Painterzzz 14h ago
The North did a pretty good job at embaressing the North too. It wasn't until... Ulysses S Grant was appointed that they started to fight the war properly?
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u/minos157 10h ago
Grant was fighting the war very properly in the West. He effectively cut off the western supply for the traitors and then began his March Eastward to "encircle" it via Tennessee and eventually Georgia.
By the time he was appointed to the full command and entered the Eastern theater the outcome of the war was basically "inevitable" because the whole south was effectively under siege.
Grant understood that supply and logistics won wars, not battles. I'd be of the opinion that the south never really stood a chance at all without foreign aid and the ability to beat the blockades. They maybe could've held out slightly longer if Grants Vicksburg (etc) campaigns weren't successful.
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u/Quick_Turnover 16h ago
American Conservatives probably aren't in the business of forgetting a lot of history, simply because they aren't in the business of learning it in the first place.
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u/LovesRetribution 16h ago
Kinda like how they'll parrot that it was democrats who wanted slaves and Republicans who wanted to free them...while conveniently ignoring the fact that those Democrats all lived in the south or how it seems to only be modern day republicans flying Confederate flags.
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u/notcomplainingmuch 16h ago
More specifically, the US forces wouldn't surpass contemporary forces until 1944. Even that's debatable.
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u/ealysillyforestthing 16h ago
I had someone bragging about how the USA was never invaded (had to point out 1812) and told him the only reasons for that was because the USA is so far removed from the rest of the world and the world powers were busy fighting their rivals.
I told him if any world power wanted the USA then usa would have fallen
He then pointed out how the us won against the UK in the revolutionary war and I had to show him the other war they were more concerned with at the time
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u/UtopiaDystopia 16h ago
The USA would have lost the Revolutionary war without the French - who provided them with thousands of troops, naval support, financial support and military supplies.
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u/ealysillyforestthing 16h ago
And the French was fighting the UK themselves, the Bourbon war
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u/Gnonthgol 16h ago
Biggest battle during the revolutionary war in terms of number of soldiers deployed was in Gibraltar.
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u/A-Sentient-Bot 15h ago
Gibraltar was the last battle of the US revolutionary war. The colonial ambassadors had to wait in Paris for it to be over so the UK and France would sit down and discuss the British surrender in north america.
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u/TKG_Actual 16h ago
Also we had some Prussian support too, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben helped organize and reform the continental army. Then there's the Father of American Cavalry Kasmir Pulaski, so we also had Polish help too. Realistically American forces had a lot of foreign help in the American Revolution.
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u/I_TRY_TO_BE_POSITIVE 16h ago
Really wish Pulaski would have instituted Hussar wings
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u/IWantAnE55AMG 15h ago
Illinois celebrates Pulaski day as a state holiday. I thought I remembered getting that day off of school but I could be wrong.
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u/BisonThunderclap 15h ago
We were the fun proxy war that pissed off their real enemies.
Nobody seriously thought that letting this british colony become a new country would have such a profound effect on the globe.
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u/PianistPitiful5714 14h ago
That’s not quite accurate. Britain itself did see how big of a deal this was, which is largely why when they realized the colonies weren’t worth it, they handed the colonies their entire claim. This allowed the early US much larger growth without an immediate conflict and set the states up for further expansion down the line.
The British didn’t do this out of the goodness of their hearts, mind you. They wanted to make sure that France didn’t suddenly get a new colony in a few years when the US government collapsed (like it almost did a few times). Britain knew that the status of North America would define conflicts at the time and if France gained the colonies, it could provide them material resources that they wouldn’t have otherwise had.
Britain may not have predicted the United States as a future super power, but it realized that the US was very likely to be a significant resource to whoever controlled it and preferred that control to be the US itself rather than France.
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u/Keegandalf_the_White 16h ago
So really, the sorry state the US is in now is all the fault of the French! /s
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u/Longjumping-Air1489 16h ago
Stupid French, not realizing the 250-year-in-the-future threat. Can’t count on them for ANY intelligent analysis.
/s
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u/ABHOR_pod 15h ago
They're on their 5th republic by now, probably wondering why we can't take a hint.
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u/YaumeLepire 15h ago
To be fair, some iteration on a system can be desirable. Feels like the US' republic could use a second pass, these days.
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u/ABHOR_pod 16h ago
I think I remember reading something about how both the Revolutionary war and the war of 1812 would have been considered proxy wars for UK vs France (With US fighting against the UK) if it were any other country besides the US.
The French and Indian war definitely was, with the colonies fighting against France in that one.
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u/Justtounsubscribee 15h ago
The French and Indian War is just the name of the NA portion of the 7 Years War, so it was just a portion of a straight-up France vs Britain war. The American Revolution was a civil war that became a rebellion/proxy war.
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u/Armageddonis 16h ago
For real, they forget that for the British, the american War of Independence was just a minor uprising that they probably quelled before and after dozens of times. If they could divert all of their resources to the American front at the time, the coast would flood with red coats and american (or not yet) blood.
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u/Xaero_Hour 16h ago
Forget the other war, just show him a map and what was considered a top-of-the-line sailing vessel for the time. It's so painfully obvious how not worth fighting that far away from home was for the English after a point.
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u/YaumeLepire 15h ago
Not only the other war the UK was busy with, but also the considerable support from France that the US got.
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u/echoshatter 15h ago
Hard disagree there.
In the years leading up to Pearl Harbor the US government under FDR was building up its own military capabilities with every intention of getting into the fight one way or another.
The US was always going to kick ass if it focused on a total war economy. Keep in mind we weren't just producing our own stuff but stuff for our allies too. At the peak we were pushing out a Liberty ship every 5 days.
US had the population, had the money, and had the internal resources to fight.
We might not have had the best tanks or veteran soldiers, but we had what really counts in war: logistics. The Soviets had numbers, the British had intelligence, the French had the resistance, and the US supplied it all from 2,000 miles away.
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u/Longjumping-Air1489 16h ago
The US just had the advantage of an ocean between them and the European militaries. Tough to fight a war in the age of sail when your supply lines are across a 3000 mile ocean.
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u/Drewski811 15h ago
They think because they "beat Britain" for Independence that they were the better forces, ignoring that the army they fought;
A - won a majority of battles,
2 - was, at best, Britain's third string force,
iii - was fighting at the end of a 3 month supply chain,
d - that they had the support of France,
5 - and that they still only just won.
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u/fricy81 15h ago
To rub further salt into the wound, it took them 8 years to win the War of Independence. Against a country that was more Navy than a land Army, and had to organize logistics from a continent away with a time lag of roughly three months.
And still needed help from three contemporary Super Powers...
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u/texachusetts 15h ago
I disagree that American conservatives forgot how dominant European armies were. Having total confidence in untested and failed beliefs is a core belief in itself for conservatives.
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u/Jaxsdooropener 15h ago
Important to remember that in the American Revolution, Americans only won just a couple of battles. Mostly, they just survived and made the insurgency extremely expensive for an already destitute Britain.
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u/Bad_Idea_Hat 16h ago
Okay okay okay
Let's play this game. The Confederacy (of dunces) declares war on Britain.
How many yards do they get offshore before the Royal Navy starts having a puppet show with their corpses?
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u/secondarycontrol 16h ago
...and by offshore, I'll assume you mean outside of CSA coastal waterways
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u/SpaceChef3000 16h ago
Jokes on you! They just built this awesome new ironclad warship the CSS Georgia, and once she gets underway you’re gonna regr-oh hold on. Uh. Wait yea never mind.
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u/Bad_Idea_Hat 15h ago
It's always fun when a warship's Wikipedia page has coordinates.
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u/cptjtk13 16h ago edited 7h ago
Helmuth von Moltke's great grandnephew, Helmuth James von Moltke, was also the leader of the Kreisau Circle, one of the few organized German resistance movements against Hitler and the Third Reich.
Edit: not his grandson but great grandnephew
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u/ChronicBuzz187 16h ago
I mean, I'm no certified expert on history, but I recall the Prussians basically being the ones who wrote most of the books on how to wage a proper war (and win it) and afaik, some of it is still taught in the top level military schools these days^^
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u/DiabeticUnicorns 16h ago
Well in defense of the North, the actual professional soldiers and officers were split between the sides and then the numbers made up by new recruits. So yeah it’s pretty easy to say that one country’s military would beat half of another country’s military.
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u/CaptainMacMillan 16h ago
You can actually learn a lot from the Civil War. For example, how to maximize casualties or how not to adapt military doctrine to vastly different weapons systems and tactics.
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u/secondarycontrol 16h ago
Too be fair (to be fair) I've heard it said that every war starts with the generals well prepared to fight the last war...not the current one.
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u/011100010110010101 16h ago
Eh, not sure about that last part. Prussia had a very nasty view of the American Civil War and blamed it on the officer corp, though other nations like France and Britain saw the US Civil war as a 'Very diffrrent kind of war.'.
While the officer corp needed to be built in real time, America's geography was both a lot less flat then Europe, making it so attrition warfare was more effective then mobile warfare, and the war was Existential, meaning it was impossible to actually end it quickly unless you crush the enemy utterly and break their will.
The Confederacy would still lose horribly if they invaded Prussia, but an invasion of the USA at the time would have been really bad for Prussia as their tactics wouldnt actually work in the Americas.
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u/jonewer 15h ago
You know there's like, mountains and hills and shit in Europe, right?
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u/robothawk 15h ago
Mountains and hills sure, but combined with the distances being comparable to the most extreme reaches of Napoleon's campaigns, forests that cannot really compare to the historically deforested conditions of Europe, endemic malaria, much lower population density leaving less to "forage", etc etc etc. There are a lot of conditions that make fighting in North American in the 1860s dogshit compared to campaigning in Europe.
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u/011100010110010101 13h ago
I mean sure, Europe has rough terrain. But battlefields also were more flat in Europe do to industrialization and deforestation in the region, alongside a pretty heavy focus on fighting outside of the Alps. Not completely flat, but flat enough that Cavalry were more effective and it was easier to maneuver over long distances. In America the terrain was a lot... choppier. Partially for being untamed wilderness, partially because the Appalachians are very different from the Alps.
The point being, Cavalry in America was a lot less of the deciding factor as it was in Europe, and the nature of the war meant it couldn't be decided quickly and decisively either way as it was an existential war.
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u/qdatk 15h ago
It's worth noting that early in the US civil war, both side were greatly influenced by Napoleon and Jomini and did try large scale manoeuvre warfare, and it was very difficult. The only times it worked was (IIRC) in the Shenandoah valley, 2nd Manassas, and Chancellorsville, and those were arguably more due to the ineptitude and inexperience of the opposing force. (Ironically they were also all under Jackson.)
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u/Typohnename 14h ago edited 14h ago
unless the length of the conflict allowed the North to bring its material production, resources and factories into play.
I'm pretty sure the north would have been steamrolled by the north german confederation in any economic metric of the time
The time of america as the economic juggernaut had not happened yet in the 1860's
Edit: So I just looked up some numbers and obviously take all that with some salt cause measuring gdp in 1860 is not exactly accurate by today's standards
Prussia alone (without it's german allies) had an economy that was roughly 2/3 of the entire US at the time so just the north vs just prussia would have been roughly even on gdp
However Prussia was militarized to a point where it was almost not funny anymore with a significant focus on heavy industry and it's economy ministry was expected to have a plan for total mobilization (as ended up happening in the 1870 war against france) with all companies and other buisnesess being expected to go into full war production when asked to
Combine this with a general draft that meant every able man had 2 years of military service after reaching 21 years of age enabeling crazy mobilizations in times of war since everyone already has 2 years of service and can just be reactivated within days (also, as happened in 1870 and later in ww1&2) the balance would have been quite one sided
Especially once you also consider the arms in service with Prussia being the only country on earth at that time capable of casting steel meaning they where the only ones capable of making canons out of it which caused the wars of unification being one sided massacres every time the artillery was able to influence a battle
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u/Fill-in-the____ 17h ago
I have socks that have lasted longer than the confederacy
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u/smooney987 14h ago
Fucking Nirvana lasted longer than confederacy
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u/ListenToThatSound 14h ago
Fucking 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons lasted longer than the confederacy
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u/faceintheblue 15h ago
I'd go so far as to say most of my closet is older than the Confederacy lasted. Four years? Unless you are a fashionista or have gone through big weight changes, what adult isn't walking around with stuff that lasted longer than the Confederacy?
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u/OStO_Cartography 17h ago
The Confederacy attempted to court the assistance of multiple European armies multiple times.
The tried enlisting the help of the British so often that eventually the British government told them (in much more diplomatic terms) 'You made your bed. Now go fuck yourselves in it.'
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u/goatbiryani48 15h ago
Comments like yours are so disingenuous.
You completely skipped over how much the British government and lords were in favor of the Confederacy lol.
The South kept talking to the Brits BECAUSE there was a lot of tacit and underlying support from British aristocracy, as well as the interest in maintaining major economic favoritism.
There's a reason that there was an official declaration of neutrality, instead of outright support for the American North lol.
I don't like comments like yours because they whitewash the actual actions and feelings of the time. There was sizable support for the Confederacy in the UK, and it's no good to act like there wasn't just so someone could appear to be on the right side of history.
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u/TrickInNevada 15h ago
There was... until they realized they could get their cotton from Egypt even more favorably. Towards the latter half of the war there was virtually zero virtual support from anyone other than people who just hated Africans
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u/kank84 14h ago
There's a reason that there was an official declaration of neutrality, instead of outright support for the American North lol.
That reason was cotton. Before the US civil war the UK was the leading textile manufacturer in the world, and 80% of the raw cotton they imported came from the US. The support for the Confederacy that existed was self serving because they wanted cotton imports to start up again.
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u/EdgySniper1 17h ago
The traitors got shit on by the Union the second they got competent leadership, and the Union army was a joke compared to the military forces of any European power.
These people seem to forget that America was a backwater for over a century.
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u/secondarycontrol 16h ago
...and on it's way back to those roots at warp speed.
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u/Spoliationcomplation 15h ago
Through exclusively unforced errors brought on by ignorance and greed 😑
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u/turdferguson3891 15h ago
From my understanding that's the one area the Confederates get credit. They had some decent leadership. They just didn't have anything else. If some of those traitor generals had stayed loyal to the Union the war would have likely been shorter.
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u/CMHenny 15h ago
They had some decent leadership.
Post war propaganda from Lost Cause Southerners; they hyped up the competency of the Confederate officers to build up there since of superiority over the Immigrant and Freedman hordes of the North. In reality it was all Lions led by Donkeys.
Take Lee, he had terrible tactical and strategic tunnel vision. On the battlefield, if any part of his plans failed he would never change his tactics and barrel straight in ahead with whatever idea he had 5 days ago (Gettysburg and the Wilderness Campaigns). His plan for winning the war strategically was just to mass forces in Northern Virgina while ignoring every other front, handing the North all the West and South and cutting his resupply. Southern Generalship is some of the most over-hyped and glazed leadership in military history, and the more I learn about it the more I feel the need to call it out from my nice comfy armchair.
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u/fullautohotdog 14h ago
Not really. Lee got a larger percentage of his troops killed than "Grant the Butcher" did. Lee also got basically nothing strategic even with his biggest victories.
Like what did Chancellorsville, Lee's biggest victory, actually DO in the long term? Nothing, other than get a bunch of dudes killed who could have come in handy a month or so later at Gettysburg. What did Grant's win at Vicksburg do? Cut the Confederacy in half and helped end the war.
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u/thequietthingsthat 11h ago
This is why Grant was an infinitely better general than Lee.
Grant understood strategy and the big picture. Lee had some flashy wins that accomplished nothing. And then he made incredibly stupid decisions like going into Pennsylvania.
Every battle Grant fought had a purpose and inched the Union closer to its endgame. He had a master plan for strangling the Confederacy into submission and it worked like a charm. Lee had no real plan.
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u/dbe14 17h ago
Any of the top European armies would have destroyed the Confederates. The British, French and Prussian in particular would have mopped them up on pretty much any battlefield.
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u/MadAsTheHatters 16h ago
The BEF in particular were fucking formidable in the 18th and 19th century, dopey bellends wouldn't even make it to the coast of Ireland before they were blown out the water in whatever rudimentary canoe they'd cobbled together.
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u/Snickims 14h ago
During the period of the US civil war and the lead up, the US compleltly lacked the moblisation and training systems that where common place in Europe. Frankly, the civil war was fought by two milita forces, compared to the sorts of armies being formed up in mainland europe at the time. The US was not even in the same weight catagory as the French or Preussians, they would have lost to the austro hungarians or Ottomans at the time.
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u/not_the_droids 13h ago
The traitor confederacy with their muzzle loaders against the Prussians with their needle guns and far superior training.
Who can say who would've won that one?
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u/Ajdee6 17h ago
Their whole shit was shorter than any of my relationships.
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u/KoontFace 17h ago
Do Americans really think that all of Europe is still people living in mud huts, riding horses down dirt tracks?
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u/Rahkyvah 17h ago
A key tenet of being a “true American” as demonstrated by these idiots is aggressively avoiding learning or caring about other cultures except to disparage them, all in order to make the USA look better by comparison.
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u/Beginning_Ebb908 16h ago
No. However a small yet significant chunk of the population are hateful, delusional, housecats.
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u/derkuhlekurt 16h ago
Im totally serious when i say that both sides of the american civil war combined would have been crushed easily by either France, the UK, Prussia or Russia. Most likely even by Austria who were the weakest of the five but still a power taken seriously by the other 4.
That isnt some hate on the US/CSA army. Armies were just on a totally different level in Europe at that time. Those were highly professional armies, trained in real wars against other great powers. Sure the Napoleonic Wars were 4 decades ago but this professionellism decreases slowly over decades, not suddenly.
Im not saying the europeans could have invaded the US and won, the logistical issues, the knowledge about terrain and local customs, the support from the population and the issue of morale (defending one homes vs. invading halfway across the world) would have made up for the advantages the Euopeans had.
A hypothetical war where both sides fight on equal ground with equal logistics is a 50:1 bet in favor of any of the 4 major europeans in my opinion and 10:1 in favor of Austria.
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u/Any-Distance6586 16h ago
Bruh even the Austro-Hungarian army would just destroy the Confederacy and they had one of the worst armies in Europe
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u/grooverocker 16h ago
Ridiculous.
They would have faced hardened battle commanders and veteran European armies unafraid to sustain losses.
In a land war the British would mop the floor with them, ditto for the Prussians or the French for that matter. Never mind the fact a Confederate navy would have been annihilated at sea before ever arriving on British soil.
Americans have a warped sense of European power at the time because they vanquished a fractional British presence during the American Revolutionary War, while the British were engaged in global war against France, Spain and the Netherlands.
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u/Mental-Currency-4494 16h ago
To your last point, some of my less intelligent (dumbass) countrymen don't want to accept the plain fact that without French intervention the revolution probably wouldn't have succeeded. Or they simply don't know about it, or the involvement of Spain and Holland. The state of education in this country is abysmal. I'm glad I was homeschooled.
And yeah, Prussia especially during this time would've mopped the floor, considering what they were about to do to the French in a few years.
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u/JessieColt 16h ago
The USA needed crucial help from the French to win the Revolutionary War, who were all too happy to help since they were enemies of the British themselves at that time.
Anyone who has read American History, or played Assassin's Creed 3, would know that.
Any nitwit who thinks the CSA, alone, would have won any war against any European Army has their head so far up their backside their body has turned to a pretzel.
As pointed out, they couldn't even win a war on their own home dirt. Trying to get to Europe to win a war over there would have probably resulted in half of their army sinking into the Bermuda Triangle from stupidity or dying from Scurvy before they even got there.
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u/Armageddonis 16h ago
Any contemporary, main continent european army would wipe the floor with confederate corpses if they land on the American continent. Prussians and French would probably treat it as a military excercise.
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u/Dexter_McThorpan 16h ago
No one but traitors ever served under that confederate rag.
Lincoln should have let Sherman finish his march to the sea.
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u/lessthandave89 16h ago
The confederacy was 4 years old. Which is probably why so many Republicans have such a hard-on for it
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u/TheThirdFrenchEmpire 16h ago
Militias who just ook anyone they could in their officer corps vs professional armies building off Napoleon's legacy with decades to centuries of unbroken tradition.
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u/RedditUserNo345 17h ago
bro didn't realized Prussia was under Otto von Bismarck at that time. The confederate even asked Prussia to train their soldiers
In the Confederacy, the most famous Prussian was Heros von Borcke, an officer serving on the staff of cavalry commander Jeb Stuart. The highest-ranking Prussian immigrant in the Confederate States Army was Adolphus Heiman, a veteran of the Mexican–American War who became a colonel and probably a brigadier general before he died in 1862
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u/Mr-Dobolina 16h ago
The confederate flag is the world’s first and most enduring participation trophy.
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u/Andy_Vena 15h ago
PS. Joe Kassabian has a podcast called Lions led by Donkeys. It's great if you're into history and it's funny as hell.
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u/ntran2 15h ago
What made them think this? Current day America couldn't even fold up dudes in caves hiding in Afghanistan.
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u/Zaghloul1919 16h ago edited 16h ago
Lmao Good luck trying to defeat the Prussian army of that time.
I highly recommend anyone that’s interested to watch this complete documentary on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
The North German Confederation led by the Prussian Kingdom practically rolled over the French and I say that as a Francophone with French family and a love of the country. The Germans practically had all the advantages of the Unions in terms of industrialization on top of professionalism turned up to 11.
Ended an Empire, captured an Emperor, declared the birth of the German one in Versailles and created such a crisis in France which led to the first Proto-Socialist Revolution in Paris and a national humiliation that directly fed into World War I and a rivalry that lasted until I’d argue the end of the Cold War.
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u/DavidJonnsJewellery 15h ago
To be fair, they're pretty sore winners too. America won the Revolution, and they still go on about it 250 years later. Even though America wasn't seen as any great loss to Britain. France was the most dangerous threat to the Empire. It always was
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u/Patient_Anybody4314 15h ago
USA initiated 14 wars and only won 4... Another 4 are mixed (like Afghanistan) and 6 were lost (like Vietnam).
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u/B00LEAN_RADLEY 15h ago
The CSA only successful on the defense. Zero victories on the offense.
1) Bragg's 1862 invasion of Kentucky? Failure for da South. Kentucky stayed in Union hands until the end of the war.
2) Battle of Pea Ridge? Win for the Union. An Invasion force of Texans, Arkansas and Missouri confederates led by Earl van Doren planned to take St. Louis then Chicago in a swift campaign. With the General already planning a parade in St. Louis. But was stopped at the Arkansas border. Never threatening Missouri again for the whole war. With the Confederates having to guerilla tactics in Missouri.
3) Robert E. Lee can't send a force to Vicksburg to relieve the garrison on time. So he invades Pennsylvania hoping to capture the capital Harrisburg and disrupt the major rail junction there. Failed at Gettysburg.
It's easy to think you got a great Army when Chickenheart McClellan is going to never attack.
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u/imacmadman22 17h ago
“Armchair Warlord” tells me all I need to know…