Quote:
Originally Posted by Farragut33
"The Americans didn't win their independence, the British gave up." Agree or disagree
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Both.
A lot of people have this false notion that wars tend to end with one military completely and totally dominating and then destroying the other. In reality, nations engage in armed conflict until such time as one or the other decides that the cost and benefits of continuing the war exceed accepting what terms the other side is willing to offer.
To examine the military capacity of a power vis-a-vis another power in a vacuum that ignores the rest of the world as well as domestic politics and realities is meaningless.
In the case of the British and the American War of Independence, after Yorktown they simply decided that they had better things to do with their finite military resources. Of course, this would come as no surprise to the Continentals, who were not trying to defeat the British Army and the Royal Navy but simply to be a sufficient pain in the ass that the Brits would throw up their hands, pack their bags, and go home. And this is precisely what happened. If this offends the pride of some of my fellow Americans because they don't feel such a victory is
glorious enough, that's their problem.
As an aside, this reality of warfare is what so often leads to one or another variation on the 'stab in the back!' revisionism. This took root in Germany after World War I, asserting that the war was all but won but those meddling politicians betrayed the German people and armed forces by surrendering. And I think we've all heard it articulated many times regarding the Vietnam War, how victory was so easily obtainable but for the politicians refusing to allow the military to win. At best this is a simplistic and naive notion that profoundly misunderstands conflict and its inevitable interconnection with international and domestic politics. At worst, it is an intentional obfuscating of the historical reality.