OldAFSarge is (like me) fighting blogger burnout. He's been posting for 16 years which is quite an accomplishment. Unlike me, he's put his hand (quite successfully) at military history fiction which takes a whole lot more effort than the Dad Jokes and stuff I put up here. Besides, OldAFSarge's co-blogger Tuna sends me half of the Dad Jokes anyway.
So I understand what he's going through.
But one thing he posted recently was a straight (non-fiction) account of the run up to the Battle of Waterloo, to set the scene for his fiction. This tickled my memory:
But every time [the French] ended the war, the British would dig deep and come up with more money to finance yet another coalition to fight Napoléon. They had the advantage of their island and the most powerful navy on the planet between them and the French.
As much as Napoléon wanted to be done with those pesky islanders, he couldn't get to them. The Royal Navy had smashed the combined French and Spanish fleets (huh, the Spanish, I thought the French were their enemies) at Trafalgar. Napoléon was a master of land combat, never did understand the sea. A big advantage the British had was that their navy was constantly at sea, blockading the French and cutting off their trade from the rest of the world. The French mostly sat in port, plotting to drive the Brits off but never getting quite there. Though, for the most part, French ships were better, it ain't the ship, it's the crew. And the Royal Navy had some excellent sailors.
People don't realize just how much better the Royal Navy was than anyone back in the day. And yes, it wasn't the ship, it was the crew and especially the leadership. Nelson's captains were justly famous for their independence and their aggression.
Heck, half a century earlier Admiral Byng had been shot, not for losing a battle, but rather for not winning it. Voltaire immortalized this miscarriage of justice in Candide, famously writing "in this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others." Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres. The Royal Navy flag officers learned from that.
Nigel Calder wrote about just how amazing the Royal Navy's performance was in his fantastic book The English Channel. I cannot recommend this book more highly, and it's the book that I have re-read more than any other. In it, Calder (who was quite an accomplished yachtsman) sailed his ketch all the way up the English channel on the French side, crossed over the Dover Straight, and then sailed it back down the English side. Along the way he wrote about the geology, seascape, history, and current events (from 1986) all along the way. The book is a complete delight.
He starts off in Brittany at the far Atlantic end of the French coast. The great French port of Brest was there, but Calder points out that in the age of sail the port was a trap for the French fleet because the prevailing wind was from the west. Because of the difficulty of a sailing ship sailing against the wind, the Royal Navy was able to blockade the French for years. Calder describes just how amazing a feat of seamanship this was:
The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars spanned eighteen years, with only two short breaks. During most of that time there were British warships off Brest. To begin with they were only frigates, but later the British fleet remained at sea off Ushant winter and summer, in a patient demonstration of seamanship. When the wind blew hard from the west, the British ships beat their way out into the Atlantic, or even ran for shelter in Tor Bay on the English coast, confident that the French could not leave harbour against the wind. But whenever the weather was suitable for a breakout, the blockading fleet closed to within sight of the French shore.
...
In 1805 the conquest of England was Napoleon's first priority. The main responsibility lay with the fleet at Brest, and its commander Honoré-Joseph-Antonin Ganteaume. The duty of preventing the adventure belonged to William Cornwallis, who was in charge of the Channel Fleet blockading Brest. Cornwallis was known as Blue Billy because of his determination to remain at sea. If a gale forced his ships to run for shelter and replenishment in Tor Bay, the fleet was no sooner anchored than the flagship Hibernia would run up the blue signal flag denoting an imminent departure.
The preparations for the invasion were grandiose. Shipyards from The Netherlands to western France built nearly 2000 barges to carry 100,000 troops, complete with their guns and horses. The naval plan required all the fleets, from Brest, Rochefort in Biscay, Ferrol in Spain, and Toulon in the Mediterranean, to break out and rendezvous in the West Indies. The idea was to draw the British fleets to the wrong side of the Atlantic and to mass the French and Spanish ships for a dash back to the undefended English Channel.
...
On July 22 an inconclusive battle took place in fog off northern Spain, between a British force under Robert Calder [no relation to the author Calder - Borepatch] and Villeneuve's stronger fleet. Calder was court-martialed for capturing only two ships. Villeneuve received exhortations from Napoléon to free the fleet from Brest and sweep all before him.If you give us control for three days, nay, even for twenty four hours, your task will be done: all is ready, Europe awaits breathless on this great event.Villeneuve chose instead to retreat to southern Spain, and the Brest fleet stayed put. During these alarms, the British blockading force was reduced to fifteen ships of the line as compared with twenty five in Brest. Ganteaume thought he could shoot his way out but he was forbidden to sail because a major naval battle was not what Napoleon had in mind. While the British sacked Calder for failing to wipe out a superior force, the French would not let Ganteaume take his chance with a weaker one. Different attitudes to sea power, evolved in hundreds of years of warfare in the English Channel, decided the outcome.
...
A week later the truth dawned on Napoleon that Villeneuve was timid and Ganteaume was never going to get out. The Emperor ordered the Grand Army to march from the English Channel to the Danube where British diplomats had stirred up trouble for him. The small craft of the invasion fleet were docked and the crews disbanded. The attack on England had been called off. The blockading fleet's task lacked the drama of a major sea battle like Camperdown where the British had crushed the Dutch eight years earlier, but it decided the final contest at sea between the British and the French. The American naval historian Alfred Mahan [yes, that Alfred Mahan of "fleet in being" fame - Borepatch] wrote:Never in the history of blockades has there been excelled, if even equaled, the close locking of Brest by Admiral Cornwallis, both winter and summer, between the outbreak of war and the battle of Trafalgar. It excited not only the admiration but the wonder of contemporaries.
If you like OldAFSarge's military history fiction, you will like Calder's book. It's part tourist guide, part history, part sailing log. Like I said, I've re-read this book more than any other I own. Highly, highly recommended.
