History questions not worth their own thread III

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Because I hate myself.
 
Well, we knew that. After all, you are Catholic. :p
 
Ow. Below the belt, much? :cringe:
 
There are times when dictionaries talk crap just like any other book.
 
Was there any real, concrete reason for the British to be worried about Denmark leading to the Battle of Copenhagen? Was the Danish fleet going to be used for nefarious purposes against Britain?
 
Okay, I don't know a single thing about the history of night attacks. Were they generally successful? Were night watches an uncommon thing back in ye olden days, or were they common sense since Biblical times?

Unrelated: was there any instance in history where a country in the middle of a war would have one of its forts near-completely abandoned in celebration of any kind?
 
Okay, I don't know a single thing about the history of night attacks. Were they generally successful? Were night watches an uncommon thing back in ye olden days, or were they common sense since Biblical times?
They've been stock in trade for awhile. You can find them all over during the Peloponnesian War. The Athenian general Demosthenes was a particularly good night-fighter, and successfully conducted such attacks on the Spartan-allied Ambrakiotes in his famous Aitolian Campaign in 426 BC. During the siege of Syrakousai in 413 BC, Demosthenes led an army of Athenian reinforcements to try to restore the situation from Nikias' bungling, and settled on a night attack on the Syrakousan fortifications on the Epipolai. The Epipolai attack demonstrated how night attacks could go horribly wrong despite everything; the Athenians enjoyed great success at the beginning, but became disorganized and lost coordination; some Syrakousans were able to rally and counterattack, while some of the Athenian units lost their way and were chased over cliffs to their deaths. So you have the dilemma of a night attack: if it works, you can achieve a great deal of surprise over your opponents, potentially a decisive advantage; but keeping your army together and on track is heavily reliant on luck, and the slightest misstep can spell doom for the attacking force.

You probably know about the Roman practice of castramentation, the daily construction of a fortified camp at the end of the march in order to take even the advantage of surprise away from a night attacker.
flyingchicken said:
Unrelated: was there any instance in history where a country in the middle of a war would have one of its forts near-completely abandoned in celebration of any kind?
This kinda doesn't apply, but classical armies fighting the Jews enjoyed great success by attacking on the Sabbath, when Jewish soldiers were not under arms. More than one siege of Jerusalem was resolved this way (once by the Seleukids, and once by Pompey).
 
Was there any real, concrete reason for the British to be worried about Denmark leading to the Battle of Copenhagen? Was the Danish fleet going to be used for nefarious purposes against Britain?

Well the Danish fleet was quite impressive if I remember correctly and could have aided Napoleon quite a bit in harrassing the british traderoutes I suppose. But i guess it might as well come down to us been pro-napoleon and destroying our navy means we wont be participating in any active ways in the war.
 
The Danish fleet was part and parcel of Tsar Pavel's hilariously wacky machinations following Suvorov's withdrawal from the Italian peninsula. Denmark-Norway had joined Russia's League of Armed Neutrality, which was basically an anti-British initiative. At the same time, Pavel launched a Cossack expedition to attack British India (this was before Central Asia was under Russian control, while Afghanistan and the Punjab were both quite independent polities with little interest in serving as the locus for an Anglo-Russian war but whatever).

But outside of Denmark's accession to the League, there wasn't any concrete evidence that a Danish naval war against Britain was imminent, from what I remember. I think the Danish partially joined up with the tsar as a negotiating ploy to force the British to back down on some of the more extreme blockade policies while retaining as much freedom of action as they could, but if that was their goal, it obviously backfired horribly.
 
Had King Sebastian of Portugal not died at Alcácer-Quibir, would Portugal still have retained it's trade monopoly with the Indies?
 
In the short run, yes; in the long run, no.
 
I'm going to repeat my last question in case it got lost. Does anyone know how relevant the Papal-Norman alliance was by 1155
 
I'm going to repeat my last question in case it got lost. Does anyone know how relevant the Papal-Norman alliance was by 1155
Nonexistent. In that year, Manouel I invaded Norman Apulia and captured Ancona, backed up by an alliance with the pope and with Friedrich I. It took Gugghiermu I until the next year to patch up his relationship with the papacy and to win a signal victory over the Byzantines at Brindisi.
 
Nonexistent. In that year, Manouel I invaded Norman Apulia and captured Ancona, backed up by an alliance with the pope and with Friedrich I. It took Gugghiermu I until the next year to patch up his relationship with the papacy and to win a signal victory over the Byzantines at Brindisi.
Thanks a ton. Saved me a bunch of research to find out a vague notion turned out to be wrong.
 
I would like to know if the following information is true, as the show which claimed it to be was more docutainment than scientific:
When Wilhelm II hoped that the Nazis would put him back to power he wrote a letter to Hitler claiming "gas might be a solution of the jewish problem" (...Gas könnte möglicherweise eine Lösung des Judenproblems sein...)
It is known to me that Wilhelm was quite against german facism as soon as he realized they wouldn't re-enthrone him so he was either very oportunistic or the information is most probably false.
 
You might as well ask how important was Churchill, Roosevelt, or Hitler in the war effort.

If memory serves, Stalin made some disasterous mistakes early in the war when he insisted on having military command. Later, as the war went on, he shifted that responsibility to actualy military generals.
So to answer your question: Stalin was very important in the Soviet war effort.
 
If memory serves, Stalin made some disasterous mistakes early in the war when he insisted on having military command. Later, as the war went on, he shifted that responsibility to actualy military generals.

Stalin probably realized that he could take play them against each other and then purge them after the war ended.
 
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