Rotten Weather Saves the Day!

There is a Nor’easter screaming up the coast right outside my house, which naturally brings to mind the times that rotten weather saved people, armies and even a couple of entire nations.  So shake out your umbrella, wring-out your socks, grab a cozy seat by the fire and some mini-marshmallows for your coco because shit’s about to get real.  Remember the time when

1. The Israelites Crossed the Red Sea

You know that 4” fish you caught and how it morphed into an 18” monster with each retelling?  Yeah, that kind of stuff happens all the time with history and historical accounts.  There is always a fact or two at the bottom of these inflated stories, but people’s imaginations can take those facts and stretch them to ridiculous lengths.  Fact: the Israelites lived in Egypt, but wanted to leave.  Fact: the Pharaoh at the time didn’t want to lose such a useful, industrious people, so he told them no.  Here’s where things get a little fuzzy.  The Bible’s account says the Israelites followed Moses to the banks of the Red Sea and then crossed over dry ground after Jehovah parted the waters for them. And the army that Pharaoh sent after them?  They drowned after Jehovah closed the sea again.  A little incredible, especially given the fact that nobody slipped on stranded fish or sea weed. What really might have happened isn’t quite as cool as a divinely created sidewalk through the sea, but is pretty cool too.

 

Let's go, everybody!  You too, Mr. & Mrs. Glickstein.

The northern arm of the Red Sea is bordered by salt marshes with really tall reeds growing in them.  That part of North Africa is also home to these sick rogue winds.  Similar to Southern California’s Santa Ana Winds, these tempests start as superheated air boiling off the Nubian and Libyan Deserts and then barrel towards the cooler seacoast with the force of a freight train. When they hit the salt marshes, all those thick reeds are flattened, making the otherwise impassable marsh doable for people on foot, leading a few domestic animals and one wiggy prophet of God.  An army following later would become hopelessly mired, forcing it to give up the chase or drown in a sea of mud.

So did a freak wind storm get the Israelites out of captivity and on the road to the Promised Land?  Maybe.  But there is no question at all that

2. The Kamikaze Wind Saved Japan from the Mongols

A modern military historian once likened the Mongol armies to American mechanized armor battalions without the tanks.  A lot of the time, locals took one look at the Mongols and gave up.  The few that decided to fight were ground up and shat out the other end.  Ever heard of the Islamic Khwarazmian Empire?  Yeah, they fought and lost. China resisted too, but even its Great Wall was no match for Genghis Khan and his hairy horde.  From Krakow to Korea, the yak-tail standard of the Mongols waved supreme.  All that was left to complete their 16-0 season was to take care of a couple of islands near Korea the locals called Nippon, the Land of the Rising Sun.

 

Mongols on the way.  We so fucked.

As great as the Mongols were on land, they weren’t too good on the water –not too many lakes and oceans in the Gobi Desert –so they strong-armed the Koreans into building them a respectable invasion fleet in order to deliver their can of whuppass to Japan.  The Daimyo and Samurai grimly sharpened their swords and donned their armor, fearing the worst.  The Shinto priests, however, sent up an urgent call to the kami, or spirits of nature, for a little help.  What they got was the Kamikaze, or divine wind –a typhoon, really  --which sent the Korean-built Mongol invasion fleet to Davy Jones’ locker.  Any Mongols that made it ashore were promptly dispatched like maki on a sushi bar, and Japan would remain unconquered until 1945, when a different sort of kamikaze couldn’t stop the USA from nuking two cities and firmly cementing baseball as Japan’s most fan-crazy sport.

Another badass ocean storm hit off Ireland in the 1500’s, when

3. The “Protestant Wind” Smashed the Spanish Armada

After the Protestant Reformation in Europe, a person’s religion wasn’t so much an individual choice as it was a political statement: Catholics were for the Pope and Spain, and Protestants were for England, the Netherlands, Northern Germany and Scotland.  It was just a matter of time before Philip II of Spain made a move against England and her heretic queen, Elizabeth, in part to return good Englishmen and women to the bosom of Mother Church, but really to stop England’s “Sea Dogs” from raiding Spain’s treasure fleets from Mexico and Peru.  His Most Catholic Majesty cut down an entire forest in order to build enough giant ships to link up with the Duke of Parma, who had just finished pounding the Netherlands, and land a huge army in England, just so that England didn’t miss out on the fun of the Spanish Inquisition.

 

Francisco, I told you to pee BEFORE we left Cadiz.  !@#*

Before things started, Sir Francis Drake came ashore in Lisbon and burned tons of barrel staves.  Big deal, right?  Yes it was, because all ships’ provisions were stored in barrels, which had to be constructed of properly seasoned staves.  This resulted in 1. a shortage of barrels, and 2. barrels made of greenwood staves, which rotted the food and skunked the water that was stored in them.  The Armada’s commander, the Duke of Medina y Sidonia, was a great general but a rotten sailor who spent the entire time seasick, leaving some critical decisions to his subordinates.  Things got worse once the Armada sailed into the English Channel, where it was subjected to the indignities of English long-range naval guns and burning fire-ships.  Still and all, things weren’t a complete bust.  The Duke decided they’d just sail around Scotland and Ireland, and whack the heretic English in Wales or the southwest coast.

How you like me now, puto?

But this was the North Sea those Spanish galleons were sailing in, and when the Armada pulled up on the west coast of Ireland, they were hit with a howling storm spun right off the North Pole which drove the leaking, crippled ships onto the Irish beaches, where any surviving sailors were rounded up and either executed or ransomed if they were nobles of means.  What remained of the once mighty Armada was left to limp and bail its way home to Spain.  Back in London, Queen Elizabeth celebrated by drinking sangria and eating paella –wait, no, she took everybody out to the pub for darts, bitters, snooker, bangers ‘n mash, and bubble ‘n squeak.

Sometimes just ordinary crummy weather can change history, like the time

4. New England’s Snowy Winter Helped Kick the British Out of Boston

After the battles of Lexington and Concord, part-time druggist and army deserter Benedict Arnold had a brilliant idea: flounce up to Fort Ticonderoga, overpower the garrison and steal all the nice cannons, mortars, powder and shot.  He asked the Massachusetts Committee of Public Safety for permission to do just that and they agreed, because after all, what's safer than letting some sketchy guy from Connecticut have a whole fort full of artillery (!)  Along the way, Arnold ran into Ethan Allen who said HE was on the way to Ticonderoga to do the same thing, so piss off.  But piss off he did not do.  Arnold and Allen took the fort with no problems at all, and Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys went back to doing what they did best --drink, swear, screw farmer's daughters and generally cause a riot wherever.  Arnold left a few Massachusetts militiamen in charge at the fort and then beat it back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to report on his success and become instantly famous.

The new general in charge at Cambridge, some Virginian named Washington, was trying to do two things and coming up short on both.  Firstly, he had to get the militia surrounding Boston to stop drinking, cursing, bathing nude in the Charles River, and to start showing up regularly to the war.  Secondly, he had to remove the British from Boston.  Bunker Hill gave the Brits a bloody nose, but was still technically a loss for the Americans  What to do?

Asa Wooding's sled ran over my foot again!

Fortunately, also at Cambridge was a portly ex-book seller, self-taught artillery genius called Henry Knox who knew just what to do with the cannon Arnold and Allen had captured.  He set off through central Massachusetts and eastern New York until he arrived at Fort Ticonderoga, whereupon he put his plan into action.  He loaded all the cannon onto barges so that he could get them across a river, then muscled them onto sledges and waited for it to snow.  And boy, did it ever snow!  With all the rutted, rock-strewn roads covered by a slick coating of white, Knox bought or stole every team of oxen he could find and began gliding the whole hot mess back to Cambridge.  Along the way, recruits from towns he passed swelled the ranks and goodwives filled the soldiers with hot food until the whole operation started to look like a sleighing party.

The guns were mounted on Dorchester Heights, whereupon the British occupying Boston all took a collective dump in their britches and then sailed away to Halifax, never to return. 

Weather was to come to America's rescue again in Long Island, when

5. Washington's Entire Army Vanished in a Nor'easter

After getting his ass handed to him at the Battle of Long Island by British generals Howe, Clinton, Cornwallis and Percy, George Washington retreated to the western end of the island with about 9,000 troops and the East River at his back.  His plan was to, I don't know, coax a UFO to land and fly his army out of there?  What happened was almost as improbable.  With a superior force in his face and without control over the waterways, Washington managed to ferry out his entire army across a stretch of water notorious for its tides and sandbars and somehow kept the American Revolution in business.

The day before the Miracle on the East River, the greater New York area was battered by a Nor'easter, keeping Admiral "Black Dick" (hee-hee!) Howe and his fleet busy trying to keep their ships afloat.  The night of the evacuation was dead calm, giving some help to General John Glover's sailors from Marblehead, Massachusetts (a quaint drinking town with a fishing problem), as they ferried men, horses and cannons over to Manhattan.  At one point during the night, the commander of the troops who were supposed to keep the campfires burning so that the British sentries would believe the Americans were still there, received orders to pack up and go way before the evacuation boats were ready for them.  He and his troops ran back, stoked the fires, and kept the deception going.

As morning dawned, all of Washington's troops including Washington himself were not yet across the river.  As if in answer to his prayers, a thick fog rolled in, totally blinding the British to what ol' George was up to.  Once the fog lifted, General Howe and company were astonished to find the entire American army vanished, leaving behind only burned-out campfires and disabled cannon.  In the words of General Sir Hugh Percy, "E's buggered-off!"

You've lost the entire American army?  Did you look behind the sofa?

Some places have really nasty weather all the time, like the country of

6. Russia, Whose Weather Defeated Both Napoleon and Hitler

I'm not sure even Russians like living in Russia.  When it isn't raining and all muddy, it's hot and humid and full of flies.  And when it isn't that, it's colder than a nun's nasty.  It is so cold in parts of Russia that most people plan to stay indoors from November to April.  When the Mongols conquered Russia, they put the local princes in charge of collecting tribute and moved to the sunny markets of Tashkent and Samarkand.  When the Tatars conquered Russia, they did the same, substituting the Crimea for Samarkand.  The Swedes, no strangers to cold weather, tried to invade Russia and just lost interest.  So why the hell did Napoleon Bonaparte invade Russia?  Not enough tundra in France?

It seems that Napoleon was angry at Russia for violating something called the Continental System, a fancy name for their boycott against England.  And that was something that Napoleon would just not tolerate.  He gathered an invasion force of about 400,000 and marched into Russia on a bright summer's day, bearing his message of a personal "Mange merde" to Czar Alexander, whom he hoped to find defending Moscow.  Once there after a few cursory battles, Napoleon found Moscow surprisingly empty --there was, in fact, nobody who offered to surrender the city to him, although he was in possession of it.  As the weeks, then months dragged on and without any response to his angry letters to Czar Alexander, Napoleon decided to quit the city altogether, mostly because Moscow was burning around his ears.  Through a combination of carelessness, neglect and outright arson, the spiritual capital of Russia was fast turning into the world's biggest ashtray.

The French troops were weighed down with tons of plunder as they made their way west over roads choked with mud and rivers swollen with autumn rains.  Then it turned cold.  Then it turned bitterly cold.  Then it got so cold that even Russians said, "Shit, it's cold!"  Then the Cossacks attacked.  Then it got even colder.  Then the French started to burn their officers for warmth at night.  Then it got reeeeaaaallllyyy cold.

Was eet zees colde when we made l'invasion?

Napoleon, being the stand-up guy that he was, left his army to get back home as best as it could, while he waited in the Castle Fontainebleau for his one-way ticket to Elba to arrive. 

You'd think that 120 years later, Hitler would have remembered Napoleon's little misadventure and stayed away from Russia, but he too invaded.  In Hitler's great plan for Aryan world-domination, the Germans would kill and enslave the Slavic peoples of Europe and take their land because the Master Race needed plenty of real estate.  This is why Hitler violated the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact by invading Russia in June of 1942.

At first, things went swell.  Stalin was caught flat-footed and the three German armies plunged deep into Russia and the Ukraine.  Kiev fell, Leningrad was encircled, and old age pensioners began to dig tank traps outside of Moscow, when winter arrived.  Both sides slowed down, stabilizing the front and giving the Soviets time to dismantle entire factories, ship them to the Urals by rail, and reassemble them.  The following spring and summer, the armies fought and maneuvered to no clear advantage when against his generals' advice, Hitler staked it all on taking the city of Stalingrad on the Volga River.

Under aircraft and artillery bombardment, the city turned into a giant heap of rubble, which gave its defenders excellent places to hide and snipe at the Germans.  Then it got cold.  Sound familiar?  It was so cold that surgeons performed battlefield surgery without clamps or cauterization, because blood vessels froze in place.  Soon it is the Germans who were on the defensive in Stalingrad as an encircling Soviet army draws its noose tighter around the blasted city.  What happened next was almost unthinkable: the surrender of a German Field Marshall and his entire command, one-third of all the armies on the Eastern Front.  Months later, with Soviet Marshall Zhukov's troops in the Berlin suburbs, Hitler took his own life in a bunker under the Reich Chancery building.

So the next time you get crummy weather, don't forget that your rotten day might be somebody else's saving grace.  Because when the Mother of All Battles begins, you don't want to also be fighting that bad ol' mutha, Mother Nature!

5 Ways We Could Have (and probably should have!) lost the Revolutionary War

John Adams once wrote that there were three camps of American opinions about what he called "independency:" one-third who wanted to remain part of the British Empire, one-third who didn't, and one-third who were either too slave, female, illiterate, Indian, insane, or too far away from the colonial centers of population to give a shit about it one way or another.  Of course, John Adams had the luxury of writing this before the war for independence had gotten started, and his polling methods may not have been statistically sound, but he did not write this from prison at the close of an unsuccessful revolution awaiting the hangman, so he and his co-conspirators must have done something right.  Or did they?  What if American independence wasn't won by the Founding Fathers, but lost by an inept British king and his mad-cap, bumbling, 3-stooges-like ministers.  Here are, in no particular order of importance, 5 times we could have lost our revolution.  And the first is:

1. Lexington and Concord- On one very early April morning in 1775, His Majesty's troops stationed in that loutish city of Boston were on a super-secret mission: about 700 redcoats under Lt. Col. Francis Smith were to row across the Charles River, march to Concord (about 25 miles away), destroy arms and ammunition that radical colonial Whig politicians were storing there, and bring back two disreputable characters, John Adams and John Hancock, for questioning.

This wasn't a very tough assignment.  And this army had done the same type of thing before.  When they marched north to Salem, Massachusetts (yes, that Salem!), the town militias  along their way turned out and escorted the British Regulars down the road.  Once they arrived in Salem, they were greeted by Salem selectmen and were told that the army wasn't allowed into town until Salem's militia that did not contain any witches had finished hiding their secret stash of arms and ammunition, even though the British army was very keen on confiscating it all.  So there things stood, quite literally: the Salem militia, town fathers, other town militia units, umm, milling around, and the King's Own Regiment of Foot or some other bunch looking very silly because they weren't allowed to kill anybody.

Oh, please? Can't we kill just one person? Somebody you don't like?

To stop that sort of embarrassing thing from happening this time, strict secrecy was to be observed.  It was so secret that Paul Revere and all his friends and drinking buddies at the Green Dragon, a couple of prostitutes that specialized in British officers, one washerwoman, five apprentices and a guy named Phil were the only ones on the Colonial side to know.

To make a long story short and way more interesting, Revere, William Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott woke up the captain of the Lexington Militia. as well as everybody else along their route.  The militia did the sensible thing: voted to go home.  Then a bunch of them went to Buckman's Tavern for some 'flip, the colonial equivalent of the mudslide.  Then they got a bit bottle-brave and lined-up on Lexington Green.

And nobody would have sculpted me!

And here is where we could have lost the war before it even started.  The Lexington Minutemen stood their ground in a very manly fashion, while a British officer screamed at them to lay down their arms and disperse.  Nobody moved.  Farmer, husband, teenager, battle-scarred veteran of the French and Indian Wars, all stood facing a detachment of the army that won the 7-Years War, and nobody blinked. Then some idiot's pistol went off and the British column threw a fiery sheet of lead musket balls into the Minutemen, dropping a lot of them in the process.

But what if nobody shot anybody?  The troops would have gone to Concord, the same stand-off would have happened as at Salem, cooler political heads would have prevailed, America would have stayed in the British Empire, and we all would be like Canada today, except maybe not quite as polite.

You see, it was the out-of-control soldiers who fired against their orders that touched-off the swarming militia response that battered the retreating British column until it was rescued by Brig. Gen. Hugh Percy.  Without the battles, the Second Continental Congress would have adjourned after sending a severe message to Parliament to leave our taxpayers the fuck alone, commercial trade with America and India would have paid off Britain's war debt, and British North America would have run from the North Pole down to the Bahamas, but only as far west as the Mississippi because Napoleon probably wouldn't have sold Louisiana to the British in order to raise money to attack them.  Sure, imperial foreign policy might have had us invade Mexico and add all that Southwestern territory, and we might have bought the Louisiana Purchase from France a little later on, or maybe not. However, there would have been no Civil War in 1865, because slavery would have been ended in 1833 when it was ended in the British Empire.  So, tell me again why we fought this stupid war in the first place?  Oh yeah, Taxation without Lap Dancing is Tyranny.  Or Give me Rogain, or give me one of those cool powdered wigs.  Or some shit like that.

And George Washington?  Gentleman planter of Virginia's Tidewater, never to grace the one dollar bill, or quarter, or ever to have a new car sale dedicated to his birthday.

2. Bunker Hill- Just about everybody I talk to except historians, who are really hard to wake-up at faculty mixers, think that we won Bunker Hill.  We did not.  The town of Charlestown had the shit burned out of it by flaming cannon balls fired from British warships, and the earthenware redoubt constructed on Breed's Hill, not Bunker Hill, fell after four determined British charges.  But it WAS a Pyrrhic victory, because we wasted so many British regulars that day, with an especially high proportion of officers killed.  This is the reason that General Gage was so cautious about breaking out of the ring of colonial militia that kept him a prisoner in Boston.  But what if things had gone slightly awry at Bunker Hill?

Tell me again why we're attacking this stupid fort?

The two big heroes on the American side at Bunker Hill were William Prescott and John Stark.  Prescott lead the bunch who fortified the hill in the first place, and Stark played pivotal roles both during the battle and during the retreat.  If Prescott had built the fort on Bunker Hill like he was supposed to, the British in Boston couldn't have shelled it from their warships.  They might not have even attacked it, because it was too far away from Boston to do the colonists any good offensively either.  So no battle.  No battle, no casualties.  No casualties, no cautious British commander, who probably would have blasted out of Boston some other way.

I am John Stark and you must believe me
when I say, "Winter is Coming."

John Stark is the other variable.  His 1st and 3rd New Hampshire Volunteers were among the last to arrive on the scene, having to bully their way through a bunch of guys who had deserted before the fight actually started! so he was able to immediately see that the fort could be easily flanked on either side.  It looked like the British were going to try the side where a rail fence was first, so Stark sent his troops over there to shore up the fence as well as they could with straw and big rocks.  Sure enough, the British came his way first.  Stark had his guys hold their fire until the British had already passed them, making for an even more unpleasant surprise.  After getting sliced to ribbons by the future Granite Staters, the Brits came back and charged again.  Even though they were ready for Stark's men, they still got their asses handed to them and kicked down the hill.

By now, British command took the wise step of going full-frontal on the fort (slaughter continues), so they figured, why not do it again?  As luck would have it, the Americans were out of powder, shot, and witty "yo-Mama" insults to hurl down the hill, so on the fourth charge, everybody broke and ran for it.  John Stark to the rescue!  He held the only piece of land that connected Charlestown Peninsula to the rest of the dry land, and he calmed down the fleeing idiots that came running down the hill, making the American retreat off Breed's Hill much more orderly and profitable for the nascent American Army, for he who turns and runs away, lives to fight another day.

Hanging.  Because the British
don't do pinatas

So, what if Stark hadn't shown up?  What if he never got through that bunch of deserters, or had deserted along with them?  What if he had instead marched his volunteers to the coast to protect Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from an attack from the sea?  New Hampshire had to temporarily relocate its capital during the war for that very reason.  What if Stark had been killed during his service in Rogers' Rangers during the French and Indian War?  The other New Hampshire military light, General Cilley (pronounced "silly."  I swear I am SO not making this shit up!) was more of a politician than a soldier.  It's fairly certain that if he was in command of the 1st and 3rd New Hampshire, they may not have even sought out the most vulnerable point on the battlefield to defend, and in the unlikely event they did, they might not have withstood the first British assault.  And the retreat would have been a mess, so tons more Americans would have died than British.

So instead of no battle, we're faced with a big loss for America, fewer British casualties, an emboldened British commanding general, and one revolution crushed when Gage breaks out of Boston and begins stringing-up rebel officers at Town Neck in Roxbury.

3. New York City- The British had three, count 'em, three chances to obliterate the American Army and end the revolution --four if you count the diplomatic mission the Howe Brothers were charged with, so let's start with that.  The British landings at Staten Island was the largest amphibious landing ever seen until that time, only to be eclipsed by the Crimea, Gallipoli and Normandy D-Day in the future.  New Yorkers who saw this display of imperial might quite wisely ran-up the Union Jack and tried to get their daughters married to a handsome British or German soldier.  Congress and Washington, perversely, prepared for a fight.

Whole books are devoted to Washington's mistakes during the defense of New York.  Suffice it to say that he divided his outnumbered force in the face of overwhelming numerical superiority (a big no-no), and stuck his soldiers into trench works and breastworks of questionable design.  But before all the shooting, the Brothers Howe were entertaining certain gentlemen Congressmen on board Sir Richard Howe's flagship.  The topic of conversation was pardons.  The Howes were authorized to give anybody a royal pardon and once the army outside that was making all the tactical and engineering mistakes had disbanded and people started singing "God Save the King" again instead of "Yankee Doodle."  They would then take all their scary soldiers and go home.  --but leave behind a few JUST IN CASE Indians attacked.  Or the French.  Or Dutch.  Or Chinese.

Nice boat.  But beg your pardon, no pardons needed here, thank you.  Oh yes, I will have another crumpet!

If the Crown was really serious about ending things without bloodshed, they would have sent a few cabinet ministers as well who would have worked out a way to redress American complaints and keep her in the British Empire, not just a pair of military brothers armed with blank pardons.  To get a pardon, you have to admit you've done something wrong, and the Congressional delegation told the Howes that America had done nothing wrong, so no pardons needed, so fuck off and take your hired Kraut mercenaries with you.  Was this a real peace offering, or just a stalling tactic for both sides so they could get ready for the slaughter to come?  There are few hints in the extant letters, but the Congressmen were impressed by the cordiality and sincerity of the Howes, so at least they believed it, but everybody knows how easy soldiers are to fool into doing stuff, so who really knows.  The fact remains that the British had an opportunity to stop the war after only a few battles, make nice with the Americans, and they blew it.  Onto the shootin' war!

The British kicked-ass in Brooklyn, Long Island, Haarlem Heights, White Plains and some death trap named Fort Washington, and were about to finish annihilating the American Army when it got all cold and rainy, so General William Howe called off the attack so that he could take what he believed would be the American surrender in the morning, after everybody had had a good night's sleep.  Dumb move.  Washington's whole entire army slipped out of town like a sleazy salesman slipping out of a motel without paying.  The whole hot mess ended up in New Jersey, where they would go on to cause havoc at Trenton and Princeton, but most importantly, they were all alive and very much in the game.

Yeah, you bitches need me.

Had William Howe pressed his attack that night, the Americans had a huge army in their face and a river at their backs.  They would have all been shot down or surrendered.  The fight for American independence would have either died that night, or would have morphed into a hit-and-run guerrilla war that would have torn the country, its people and the imperial occupiers apart.  America could have become like Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Finally, during one particularly badly fought battle around the Big Apple, the redcoats sounded the fox-hunting call as they chased fleeing Americans through some tall swamp grass.  This pissed-off Washington to no end.  He wheeled his horse around and then rallied anybody around him (about 16 guys who were looking for the ferry to Hoboken) and charged the offending British.  For his trouble, most of the guys died and Washington himself was hit multiple times in the coat, the hat, his saddle and his horse.  BUT  NOT  HIM!  Washington may have had some kind of Matrix-Ninja-ass stuff going for him, because this wasn't the only time he got shot but not anywhere in his body.  Since Generals Stirling and Sullivan were captured during the New York defense, that would leave Congress with Nathaniel Green, "The Fighting Quaker," Horatio "Granny" Gates, and Benedict "You guys wanna trade, 'cause I'm a great traitor" Arnold as possible replacements.  Not quite the Big GW.

4. West Point- Today, it's the home of the U.S. Military Academy, but back in the day, it was the most strategic spot on the whole Hudson River, which is strategic in itself because it is navigable all the way to Albany, deep in the interior of New York.  To get there, you have to sail past West Point, the part of the river that sailing ships of the day had to make a series of tacks, only if the wind is cooperating, which makes them vulnerable from getting blown out of the water by cannons from the West Point fort.  Benedict Arnold was given command of this fort, after he had married the most beautiful Loyalist girl of Philadelphia society, Peggy Shippen.  And after he was pissed-off at the way other generals and Congress treated him, passing him up for promotion again and again, and not giving him the credit he thought was due to him. 

It's not polite to Point.

Strangely enough, Arnold decided to sell the plans of the fort and the fort itself to the British, after doing everything he could do to weaken the fort's defenses.  All was set for him to defect.  Once in British hands, they had a chance to control the Hudson, despite Burgoyne's failed invasion from Canada.  Then two things happened: a robbery and a surprise visit.  The robbery was committed on the person of British Maj. John Andre, spy extraordinaire, and former boyfriend of Peggy Arnold.  The highwaymen who robbed him found West Point plans stuffed in his boots, and turned him over to a local militia unit.  The surprise visit was George Washington and company, come to see the Arnolds socially, and to inspect the fort, militarily.

Needless to say, it all fell through.  Andre was hanged, the Arnolds were shown the door (Peggy was.  Benedict had already defected).  But what if the "keys to the continent" wound up in British hands?  The force from New York City could have secured British access all the way to Albany.  The British then, having enjoyed naval superiority throughout the war, could have stockpiled provisions in Albany, concentrated troops there, and linked up with the garrison in Canada.  This would cut New England off from the rest of America and allow the British to blockade it and then destroy it.  Under this scenario, America would have probably become a place like Ireland or Scotland, occupied and beaten, but still in the British Empire.

5. The French Stay Home- Pretty much every historian says that it was French involvement that tipped the balance scale in favor of the Americans.  Not that there was any real love between the French and the American colonists.  The French were regarded as half-Indian frontier rats who fought dirty and were <gasp!> Catholics.  This was a clear case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  It was the French fleet that chased the British away from the Chesapeake; it was French engineers and artillerymen who designed the siege at Yorktown.  Finally, it was the French who the British tried to surrender to --Rochambeau refused, indicated Washington, who refused, indicated General Lincoln who had just been chased out of Charleston, South Carolina, who finally accepted it.

But what if there were no French?  They were almost broke at the time; the American Revolution put them firmly in the red, causing a fiscal crisis that started their own revolution.  What if Louis XVI's ministers convinced him that America was a lost cause?  After all, the only Frenchman Washington liked was the Marquis de Lafayette, the rest of the French volunteers being stuck on KP or latrine duty.  Let's say that Franklin, Adams and Jay completely botch their diplomatic mission.  Who was left?  Who could replace French power and might?

Now zis is what a real army looks like.  Go and fetch my poodle.

The Dutch sent some money and allowed St. Eustatius in the Caribbean to be used as a smuggling port.  Spain sent food and cloth through their possessions in Florida.  Russia was sympathetic, but it was doubtful the Czar would send any troops.  Prussia was too expensive to hire as mercenaries, as were the other German principalities.  Poland sent a couple of generals, one of whom created the U.S. Cavalry even!  Unfortunately, all this well meaning help would still not have been enough to replace the French if they didn't show.  So merci beaucoup Frenchies!  Without you. we'd be just like Canada, but not the hip, cool, chic French part.

Our revolution was by no means a sure thing,  In fact, it should have failed.  What is surprising is that it did succeed.  And a good thing, too!  Where would this world be without World Wars I and II?  There is no way in hell Germany, a new nation in 1874, would have started anything untoward, certainly not against a humongous British Empire that included all of America.  World War I might have just been the 3rd Balkan War, with minor participation by Russia and Austria, with a peace treaty mediated by France or even Romania.  And without World War I, no World War II.  Hitler would have lived and died in obscurity.

No Civil War, maybe no Vietnam either, but there's a downside too.  We would have been involved in every British colonial fight in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.  And who knows: we, not India, might be the brightest jewel in the crown, and therefore the last one to go, if at all.  I'm sure that Britain would have had the sense to get rid of the endemic corruption American Patriots complained of.  I am also sure that the democratic movements of the 19th and 20th centuries would have been well received in Britain and her North American possessions, and also that Constitutional Law and English Common Law would take deep root in American soil.  And it wouldn't be too bad to be like Canada --hey, they seem to like being in the British Empire, unlike those Israeli kooks who hated the British because they wanted their own little synagogue-sized country, but hey every family has some nuts.