Re: Regarding the American Revolution, the Articles

["Alan Bradley" <abradley1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Mark Lause
> Actually, in terms of numbers, maybe some other country (perhaps the
> Chinese?) had larger numbers of soldiers than both the French and the
> British.

Definitely the Chinese, and some others as well.  I would guess that the
Chinese armies would have had the most troops of anyone.

> What matters is that British control of the seas made its military might
> the most effectively "strongest" overseas.

Overseas presumably not including continental Europe.

Yeah, I could buy this.  The British army could well have been the
"strongest" outside Europe.  Of course, this strength often depended on
local allies (see India, for example), but these could usually be provided
by virtue of the deep pockets of British capital.  Of course, they weren't
strong enough to defeat the American revolution, but that's not really the
point.

> On the eve of the American Revolution (and a causative factor in its
> making), the British defeated the French in the Seven Years' War (known
> over here as "the French and Indian War").

From: "Johannes Schneider"
> But they primarily financed their Prussian allies to fight on the
> continent.

This is correct.

Incidentally, I took the Seven Years' War into account when I suggested that
the French were candidates for "the world's strongest army".  Prussia, of
course, fought most of the rest of Europe to a standstill during that war.
The cost of that was military exhaustion.  By the time of Frederick II ("the
Great")'s last war, the War of the Bavarian Succession, the Prussian army
was clearly a spent force, and on its way towards the humiliations that
faced it at the hands of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies.

As for the French:  the Revolutionary armies were built upon the foundation
of the Royalist army of the 1780s.  This was a significantly modernised
force compared to what it had been a couple of decades before.  The
techniques used by the revolutionaries, and above all by Napoleon, were
already more or less in place.

The Revolutionary armies took these state of the art techniques, and added
mass conscription.  At first the nucleus of their armies were the veterans
of the royalist army, but as the conscripts started to learn enough to
actually become assets rather than liabilities the sheer mass of them
started delivering victories against smaller enemy armies.  Eventually,
really military skill developed, with Bonaparte as the pin-up boy.  But of
course he had been trained in a pre-revolutionary military academy...

Against this, the British could offer subsidies to various continental
powers, a naval blockade, and a couple of rather ineffectual early
expeditionary forces.  They only became involved in land on a large scale
from 1807 onwards, with the outbreak of the Spanish resistance to Joseph
Bonaparte.  Then they were mainly involved in a defensive campaign based in
Portugal, while Spanish guerrillas did most of the killing of French
soldiers.  Their eventual move onto the offensive was to a large degree
enabled by the French march on Moscow, and the events that followed...

Waterloo was fought by a coalition force, in which the Prussians were
probably the largest single component.  Ignoring them, the force under
Wellington's control was a mixture of troops from Britain, the Netherlands
and Belgium (the two states were united at this point), and German states
(Brunswick, Nassau, and maybe some others).  The "British" troops, of
course, included units like the "King's German Legion", who were (I think)
more or less the remnants of the Hanoverian army.

For a proper measure of British military might, the Crimean War is
instructive.

Alan Bradley
abradley1@xxxxxxxxxxx



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