Crackpot Schemes or Good Ideas (Non-Churchill) – The Comment Questions...

A Vicksburg comment shows how canals and minor waterways could look crackpot before gunboats and transports found a workable route past the batteries.

The 1944-45 Channel operations were still developing techniques later treated as standard, so mistakes and enemy luck have to be part of the judgment.

A comment thread compares older negotiated settlements with the harder war aims of the American Civil War, First World War, and Franco-Prussian War.

A comparison with recently suppressed European uprisings explains why Union leaders could mistake secession for a manageable regional revolt.

A walk over Culp's Hill shows why map-based arguments for Ewell's attack miss hidden obstacles, fading light, and Union cover.

A comment contrasts the Union's experienced NCOs and quartermasters with the expense and spectacle of Zouave uniforms.

The Alpine movement was a well-executed idea, but the invasion itself rested on a serious misreading of Rome.

A comparison with First Bull Run becomes a sharp criticism of McClellan's piecemeal deployment despite superior numbers and Lee's lost order.

A brief comparison links Confederate and Japanese hopes for a quick political settlement to failures of reciprocal historical understanding.

A Maginot Line comparison becomes a concise explanation of how a carrier group can make a large maritime area dangerous to cross.

The France 1940 discussion shows how a successful fixed barrier could be undermined by alliance changes, delayed deployment, and weak coverage elsewhere.

Britain and France could make a morally justified guarantee, but geography left them without a practical way to deliver decisive aid to Poland.

Yes, but a credible defense needed stronger coverage to the Meuse, overlapping sectors, and at least two lines where only lighter fortifications were feasible.

The fall of France is tied to dispersed aircraft, weak communications, poor coordination, and the gap between possessing doctrine and implementing it.

His answer is to be cautious about direct analogies: modern systems matter, but their usefulness depends on targeting, computing power, maturity, and the actual problem being solved.

The later Maginot debate distinguishes static garrison manpower from a usable mobile reserve and asks whether French industry could really trade fortifications for armour.

A technical exchange explains how sparse roads, widening work, breakdown bypasses, and small defensive stands shaped the German advance through the Ardennes.

A comment points beyond 1940 to fortifications in Vichy Madagascar and the later reuse of Maginot works during Operation Nordwind.

A revisionism comment raises French violence and racial policy in Haiti, while the answer distinguishes omission by scope from moral approval.

The comment thread separates failed French Revolutionary landings in Wales and Ireland from the Norse-descended Norman conquest of 1066.

No. The system was constantly broken, including by smuggling into France, while Britain still traded beyond the continent.

The answer treats the P.94 as a plausible missed opportunity: a turretless, better-armed Defiant might have been useful in 1941 even if the original turret-fighter concept was weak.

A counterfactual comparison asks whether a navalized P.94 could have offered the Fleet Air Arm a smaller, faster alternative to the Fulmar.

Role and context matter, but turret fighters only made sense where the aircraft could approach without fighter-style maneuvering and where armament, speed, and timing matched the threat.

Battlecruisers were a logical continuation of armored cruisers rather than a crackpot scheme, although their name shaped later perceptions.

Not quite: the cruiser-submarine idea depended on exceptional endurance and reload capacity, while its large hull and added roles imposed serious diving and payload tradeoffs.

Radar helps, but a low antenna, limited horizon, emissions, sea motion, and the escort's own radar prevent it from creating a safe long-range gun duel.

The exchange explains why deck guns became weapons for isolated merchant targets rather than the principal armament of wartime submarines.

Unlikely: a destroyer's much higher volume of fire, maneuver, sensors, supporting ships, and the submarine's damage sensitivity overwhelm the caliber advantage.

The discussion widens from one escort to the destroyers, cruisers, and occasional capital ships that could protect a convoy.

Yes. Italian boats used adapters for 450-millimeter torpedoes in larger tubes, both to address shortages and to carry more suitable shots for smaller targets.

The cruiser-submarine argument ends by showing how aircraft, escort groups, and carrier construction made surface raiding steadily less viable.

A brief follow-up identifies nuclear guided-missile submarines as the closest modern analogue to the interwar cruiser-submarine idea.

No. It might protect the gun crew, but the pressure hull and the rest of the surfaced submarine would remain vulnerable to three- or four-inch fire.

Only under unusually permissive conditions, and even then it would be inefficient; spotting, sea motion, exposure, and hull vulnerability make a surface ship the better gun platform.

Hampton Roads, Mobile Bay, Savannah, and the Mississippi show why ramming successes did not displace big guns and balanced ship design.

Because this was an ordered fleet maneuver shaped by obedience to Vice-Admiral Tryon, not a free combatant evading an enemy's deliberate ram.

Ramming could be a backup tactic in narrow circumstances, but ships designed to make it their principal weapon were betting against improving gunnery and normal maneuvering realities.