re: Was the Union Army/Navy strong enough to challenge England at end of Civil war?

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Battle tested nothing. The Union through troops in waves at the Confederates to win by sheer force, no matter how many Union troops it took. Doubt that strategy would work against a European army.

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True. Battle tested means shite against superior training, strategy and tactics.

The Prussians, and later the Germans, were decades ahead of everyone in the world militarily. They had a system in place where a standing army was backed up by a huge reserve, and both received intensive training unlike anywhere else. It wasn't uncommon for a million men to practice together on maneuvers.

But what really separated the Prussian/German army from everyone else was their system of planning battles. They had a dedicated War College before anyone else. Their battles were planned by officers rigorously trained to account for even the smallest detail, and their scouting was unmatched at the time. They made telescopes and binoculars better than anyone else, and their observers were trained how to use them.

Robert Conroy wrote a novel called 1901, in which an Imperial German Army invades Long Island to force the US to give up the territories won in the Spanish-American War.

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The year is 1901. Germany’s navy is the second largest in the world; their army, the most powerful. But with the exception of a small piece of Africa and a few minor islands in the Pacific, Germany is without an empire. Kaiser Wilhelm II demands that the United States surrender its newly acquired territories: Guam, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. President McKinley indignantly refuses, so with the honor and economic future of the Reich at stake, the Kaiser launches an invasion of the United States, striking first on Long Island.

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1901

In that novel, the Germans savaged us until we learned to adapt, and received much-needed assistance from the British.

Back to the OP: The Union Army would have beaten the British Army, but that was no great feat. The Union Navy wouldn't have stood a chance.

That was then, this is now.

I just ordered the book from Amazon looks like Robert has a sequel for it also.

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This wasn't seen in Europe until the Prussian Army did this to beat France in 1870

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Actually you are thinking of their war with Austria-Hungary. The railroads and the needle guns.

Well, because Bismark took on one country or empire at a time.

Kaiser and Hitler tried to take on the whole damn world each time.

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The Union through troops in waves at the Confederates to win by sheer force, no matter how many Union troops it took. Doubt that strategy would work against a European army.

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Union troops, as well as Confederate troops were using Napoleonic tactics during the Civil War - the same tactics that were in use by the Europeans until 1914.

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but that still doesn't change the fact that the Germans lost both World War I and World War II.

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And as I said, nearly won both, despite overwhelming odds.

And according to Niall Ferguson, noted British Historian, the world would have been better off if the Germans had won WWI.

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In 1998, Ferguson published the critically acclaimed The Pity of War: Explaining World War One, which with the help of research assistants he was able to write in just five months. This is an analytic account of what Ferguson considered to be the ten great myths of the Great War. The book generated much controversy, particularly Ferguson's suggestion that it might have proved more beneficial for Europe if Britain had stayed out of the First World War in 1914, thereby allowing Germany to win.

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Wiki

I read a little of the wiki on Niall and he seems to be a little thrown off.


To say that the Germans just wanted their day in the sun describing WW1 is kind of fricked up.

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Union troops, as well as Confederate troops were using Napoleonic tactics during the Civil War - the same tactics that were in use by the Europeans until 1914.

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Yes but the Union could absorb significant losses, the CSA could not.