"invasion 1805? a lost chance?" Topic

Hi,
There,
I Always wonder why not briton never ever invaded france after the destroying the French fleet?in 1805 and
Napoleon turning his back to the invasion of briton in 1805 so for britania a lost chance napoleon on the way to Vienna? best to you al serge joe

Just a lost chance to get rid of napoleon once and for ever greetings serge joe

Since Britain wasn't preparing for an invasion of France before the Battle of Trafalgar, it didn't have the troops and equipment in place to launce a crossing. Not to mention that after Trafalgar the weather would be too shirty for the crossing. There's a reason why early summer was picked for D-Day.

So man power but could have taken the shortest way by boulongne?
But after 105 stil some chance in 1806 napoleon wasstil far away from france

no plane what so ever?
greetings serge joe

Despite having his Navy battered Napoleon still had more troops than Britain, and in fairness the average quality of the French troops was probably better in 1805.
GBs regular army was tiny. Easily the smallest of the major powers. GB could have quite easily landed troops in France. With out local support though or a large European ally like Spain/Prussia/Austria/Russia there were limits to what she could do.
Britains muscle lay in its money and navy. It's army was good but far too small and thinly spread. In 1805 it was probably still a little behind the French in terms of quality aswell.

O K winter 1805 is not that good idea yeah did not think about that! best all the same to you al serge joe

Considering after Austerlitz – fought a long way to the East – Britain had no allies left to fight alongside. Remember how close Waterloo was … then think of no Hanoverians, no Dutch, no Belgians and no Prussians. Britains army was tiny and organisationally second rate in 1805. In short, not remotely possible – hence the Iberian strategy.

@Serge,

Britain did actually send a (small) army to mainland Europe in 1805 and took back Hanover whilst the French Army was concentrating on the main campaign in Southern Germany and Austria: link

It pretty much demonstrates the limits of what Britain could achieve in 1805. Maintaining a British Army in the face of a concentrated large Imperial French Army was never an option during this entire period – logistically, even if for no other reason.

Because Sharpe was busy. And in 1805 Britain only had 50 guys in their army.

This is a pretty good question.

Trafalgar permanently crippled the Spanish navy but the French soon re-bounded & had a fleet in being that, theoretically, could endanger Britain.

From Chandler: "Although Napoleon 'lost' the war at sea effectively from 1805, his naval strategy against Great Britain remained surprisingly effective. … By keeping his surviving squadrons ready for sea (or capable of being rapidly made so) at Brest, Rochfort, or Toulon, he kept the Royal Navy at full stretch on blockade duties, and the task of hunting down a small French break-out force was incommensurately expensive in terms of vessels and effort."

Thus a large percentage of available funds & manpower was still tied up in naval power, leaving little scope for military adventures for some time.

From a bit later but was it not Bismark who said if Britain invaded germany he should have the constables round them up? Probably where more gendarmes in france that soldiers in the British army in 1805.

Thought he said something to the effect that the Royal Navy sails on the sea not on the land in reference to fears of GB intervention in German Unification. If I remember my Alevels right.

The British had little success on land during the period with the exception of Wellington's army in the Peninsula. And Wellington's army was small and the Portuguese had to augment it or it very well could have shared the fate of Moore's army in Portugal and Spain-getting run out of the country.

The British failed in Holland in 1809 and 1814; against Suchet in eastern Spain, and failed in the United States and Canada in 1814 against the Americans, being fought to a standstill on the Niagara, and incurring defeats at Plattsburg, Baltimore, and New Orleans. They also failed twice against Buenos Aires.

The British had little success on land during the period with the exception of Wellington's army in the Peninsula.

Perhaps because they didn't actually do much fighting anywhere else except for the 100 days?

I suggest anyone who thinks Trafalgar settled any long-term issue read the excellent "Britain at Bay" by Richard Glover, which includes quotes from senior politicians and RN officers to the effect that had the war gone on beyond 1815, France would have eventually out-built the UK to such an extent that invasion would have been unstoppable. The various alliances the French forged with other European nations – regardless of how long each lasted – meant that France had a minimum of a 3:2 advantage over the Royal Navy in all types of ships for the decade after Trafalgar.

This Wikipedia article covers the subject of what Britain did to protect itself against invasion (it also suggests there was a brief window of opportunity in 1803 that was more viable). Note that The Treaty of Tilsit gave Napoleon (briefly) the use of the Russian fleet, at a time when he was still allied with Spain and looking to seize the Danish and Portuguese fleets as well.

link

The British had little success on land during the period with the exception of Wellington's army in the Peninsula.

Well, yes, as always Brechtel, you're absolutely right.

Except of course, as always, for the bits you carefully left out:-

- the initial campaigns in Flanders (1793-95 – Lincelles)
- the French invasions (albeit tiny) of Wales and Ireland
- Egypt 1801
- the campaign in Hanover in 1805
- Maida, and the control of Sicily and the Greek islands
- the landings supporting the attack on Copenhagen
- the capture of Alexandria in 1807
- the Walcheren campaing (a medical defeat, rather than a military one – viz. the capture of Flushing)
- the gradual reduction of French assets in the Caribbean
- the capture of all Dutch possessions in South Africa (twice, in fact, pre- & post-Amiens), Sri Lanka (twice – ditto) and the Far East
- Cornwallis and Wellington in India (defeat of the Mysorean (twice) and Maratha empires)
- repulse of successive US invasions of Canada
- the burning of Washington
- "O" Battery at Leipzeig

What defeats there were tended to be small-scale and largely inconsequential from a military perspective.

link

"RN officers to the effect that had the war gone on beyond 1815, France would have eventually out-built the UK to such an extent that invasion would have been unstoppable."

Was N in an economical position to do this ???

Whether or not France was outbuilding "Perfidious Albion" I don't know, however France's supply of experienced seamen was dwindling as they were, more often than not, cooped up in their home ports, not to mention being conscripted into the French army. What was the French navy doing during the 100 days campaign?

It's interesting to observe that Britian has in fact never been capable militarily of anything like a full scale invasion of France since the Hundred Years War when France had not yet evolved into the France of later times. Britain is a relatively small country compared to 'modern' France but punched way, way above its weight thanks to agricultural and geographic advantages enabling social and political stability. With secure borders and the seas to buffer against any major threats, the ruling elites sank a lot of private and public money into building and maintaining a massive maritime capability both commercial and military. Navies were and still are incredibly expensive. The ordnance on a first rate ship of the line just about equals an entire army's artillery park. Even in the 20th century their land force are self styled as 'Expeditionary' in nature. It's a numbers game.

Was N in an economical position to do this ???

Evidently.

You'll find some interesting statistics here:
link

Britain, like a lot of other countries, has a number of foreign policy objectives and approaches that have remained largely and surprisingly intact for several hundreds of years despite changes in government.

One such objective is that the Channel / North Sea coast not be allowed to fall under the control of a single power. This has happened exactly twice since about 1300, and in each case, 1800ish to 1814 and 1940-1944, it represented an existential threat.

The threat was acute because Britain relied upon the navy to defend the shore line. If someone controlled all that coast, such that the invasion threat might originate from the Spanish border round to Denmark and all points in between, then no navy that Britain could possibly have built could have repulsed attack from every possible direction. So you made sure that never happened, and you also controlled choke points like Malta and Gibraltar that would have enabled similar attack (eg against any sortie north from the Med in support of some northern ally's sortie west from the Baltic).

With the majority of the effort being made at sea, this left you little manpower or money for a large army. The navy had probably 200,000 men of military age in its ranks in this period. These are just the men embarked aboard ships. Chuck in the merchant marine and the onshore infrastructure and you've probably got half a million men involved in the sea.

This is a helluva deduction from the pool potentially available to fight on land.

Consequently one of the means Britain has always relied on to pursue this national strategic goal has been to enlist foreigners both into the army directly and more generally into alliances, so that foreign proxy armies can do the land fighting that Britain's small population and naval commitments made impossible.

This has persisted into the present day, with the use of American proxies to recover the North Sea coast in 1944-5, for example.

It also demonstrates pretty conclusively that Britain was no military threat to France because she could never have landed an army of invasion, but the reverse was not true because the French could have got lucky and brought off an invasion.

London was only 5 days' march from the Channel coast so some sort of battle in Kent seems likely. Lenham offers an interesting defensive position and was where a group of us hypothesised and gamed a battle some years ago. I still have some notes about it from the campaign notes I wrote up.

Napoleon's troops broke camp at 6am on the 9th and marched north-east along the Ashford-London road. Cavalry patrols were searching all around the line of the army's march and by 8am chasseurs à cheval had encountered militia pickets in Little Lenham, a hamlet of three or four buildings half a mile south of Lenham itself. As they had done at Tenterden, the militiamen allowed the French cavalry into their midst before opening fire from behind walls and hedges. The chasseurs escaped this ambush by riding forwards through the hamlet, splitting in two and then evading by wheeling back through the open country to either side of the main road. They then reported this melee back to the Emperor, whose questioning of the messenger elicited the fact that the resistance appeared to consist of irregulars once more. By mid-morning the main French body had covered the eight miles from Ashford to Little Lenham. Watched by the Emperor, a battalion of the 13th Légère moved forward and took possession of Little Lenham, which proved empty of enemy troops, militia or otherwise.

Pressing further on up the main road, the light troops were fired on by artillery deployed along the top of the ridge north-east of Lenham. Informed of this evidence that regular enemy forces were in the neighbourhood, Napoleon rode forward to see the enemy for himself.

The Lenham position was remarkably reminiscent of another famous battlefield of the era. The British army was deployed along a long ridge that extended south-west to north-east, from just south of Sandway in the west as far as Lenham Green in the east. The Faversham road ran through Sandway, which lay behind the western end of the ridge, then climbed to the crest and ran along it through Leaden Cross Green and Lenham, the latter in the centre of Moore's position. This transverse road was flanked by high hedgerows for most of its length. Between Sandway and Leaden Cross Green, the ridge road passed through a wood which extended onto part of both the front and reverse slopes of the ridge.

Lenham itself was a town of about 1,500 inhabitants in 1805. Its main feature was a market square, flanked by Queen Anne houses and inns to the north, east and west. To the south, Lenham church was on the eastern side of the main road, and featured a distinctive square tower nearest the road. Lenham was described in 1798 as

"rather a dull and unfrequented place, and of but little traffic"

and its environs

"a poor unfertile country, the fields of which are in general large, having but few trees round them, and those of a stunted unthriving aspect" (The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent: Volume 5, Edward Hasted, 1798).

The ridge road then continued north-east, skirting around Lenham Woods and passing through Lenham Green.
Directly south of Lenham, the slopes the French would have to ascend to attack Moore's line were broken up with agricultural enclosures and stands of trees. East of Lenham, on the Faversham side of the position, the ascent to the crest was largely clearer and consisted in July 1805 mainly of fields of green wheat. Lenham Wood formed the eastern boundary of the battlefield, with the village of Lenham Green beyond.

Two roads approached this position. The old Ashford road split into two some miles south of Lenham, with the southernmost fork leading to the villages of Sandway and Biggins Heath. Both of these settlements were behind the ridge, at the extreme right of Moore's position. Beyond this flank was hedged countryside, poorly served with roads and not well suited to flanking manoeuvres. The other branching of the road continued northwest through the centre of Moore's position straight into Lenham and out the other side. Just in the rear of the crest, this road again split into two, with the main route continuing to the north-west and the smaller road leading off to the north-east, parallel to the ridge road to Faversham but well in the lee of the ridge. North of Lenham the country was open, largely unhedged, and well suited to cavalry action.

It's interesting to observe that Britian has in fact never been capable militarily of anything like a full scale invasion of France since the Hundred Years War when France had not yet evolved into the France of later times.

Not helped by the fact that since the end of the Restoration of the Monarch there was a distrust of large standing army. The brief English Republic was, in effect, a military government. The who process of purchased commissions aimed at ensuring only the ruling class were officers and worked against of another military coupe.