Post by © Flipper Mike ®³On this date in 1776 we kicked all of your limey ancestors asses! LOL
FM...
Happy 4th to Ian & Eva!
actually you need to check your patriotiism with a little accurate history,
you need to look at the story from the british, french and spanish
perspectives as well, and even more importantly what was being said by
interested onlookers in non-participant nations to get that full story.
The main reason you guys won being that the british people had little
interest in the war, indeed the oppositionists in the parliament at that
time were openly sympathetic to the rebels cause and frequently managed to
stagnate debates on support for the campaign, or even sabotage the bills
completely, they were helped by this by the fact that many government
members of parliament also sympathised, though in their case and for obvious
reasons much more secretly. (you see memories of their own civil war, fought
over pretty much identical issues to your war of independance, were still
very strong, and it was pretty diificult for them to dismiss principles that
members of their own families had died fighting to establish in relatively
recent historical times)
Even those few among the british elites who were in favour of the war effort
(and admittedly these included all of the most important parliamentarians
bar only two) were far more concerned about the prospect this gave the
french and spanish to reclaim their north american and carribean holdings
the british had recently secured , the elite units were thus sent to the
sugar islands (it was sugar in its raw syrup form that the term 'liquid
gold' was originally coined to describe) in the carribean, the coaling
stations in the atlantic, and fatefully several units were sent to India to
secure the cotton supply from there. In an indirect way the independance of
3 million americans led to the removal of even their nominal independance
for close on 50 million Indians.
The forces sent to north america were, far from the war hardened veterans
portrayed in many movies on the subject, mostly raw recruits, completely
green, and under generals who were even prior to the war regarded as little
more than competent officers, had no clear delineation of responsibilities,
and the two most important came from established aristocratic families that
had been mutually hostile to one another since the time of henry the 3rd.
So the british lost the war of independance for exactly the same reasons you
guys were beaten in vietnam, Fickle political support, complete lack of
support from the general populace, including large sections of the elite
classes, barely competent military leadership at the highest levels of the
campaign, and the use of raw recruits and conscripts to prosecute a war that
even professional soldiers would have found gruelling, even the attitude of
the great power involved was similar, both dismissed clear tactical and
strategic planning errors as unimportant, after all they were only fighting
a bunch of farming hicks and peasents , they couldnt even conceive of
losing, an attitude which is substantially the reason the other guy won.
Underestimating ones enemy is usually the last mistake a general will ever
make, he will subsequently never hold enough initiative in the campaign to
be in a position to make another.
Cheers
Fozzi