[Last Dakotan]

Thanks for the posting.

I never understood why the British simply re-cycled the same tactics that had failed for them 30-40 years previously in the American Revolutionary War.

[Free Vulcan]

Their arrogance didn’t help, but I think they hadn’t done much beyond the European battlefield by this point in terms of fighting away from home. I would guess they simply had no more living knowledge of fighting by other methods because this was after they’d gotten the Scots and Irish under relative control. They just couldn’t adapt back to the simpler, cruder techniques of warfare in the bush. That seems to be the achilles heel of major powers.

[70th Division]

They were liberals of course. Trying the same tactic over and over and hoping for a different outcome. Long rifles ruled the day and the war.

[Free Vulcan]

Well on second thought the British had fought the French-Indian war successfully about 40 years earlier. I’m not sure of the the tactics, but you’d think there’d be plenty left alive to know how to fight that way. It might have been politics or it might have been that those who were there didn’t stay in the military. Hard to say.

[sinsofsolarempirefan]

The British won most of the Battles of the Revolutionary War, but they lost the crucial ones. The musket was actually, the most important weapon of the war and was used by both sides. The trouble with the rifles of the day was that they were expensive, relatively fragile and slow to reload, riflemen made excellent skirmishers, but they could not hold their own against the massed volley of a line of regular troops, trained to fire three shots a minute. In any case, the British did have riflemen (google Major Ferguson) as well as American colonial troops on the British side armed with rifles. What did for the British was not the rifle, but the intervention of the French, Spanish and Dutch, as well as opposition at home by whigs such as former Prime Minister William Pitt, and Charles Fox (who wore blue in Parliament to signify his sympathy for the rebels).

As for the war of 1812, anyone who has watched Sharpe will know that the riflemen were an important component of the British Army by this time, with many light companies being equipped with the Baker Rifles as well as the 5th battalion the 60th Regiment, which fought in the Americas during the War of 1812, as well as an entire regiment, the 95th Rifles....