Were the Biritsh Rifle regiments OP like in Sharpe?

Were the Biritsh Rifle regiments OP like in Sharpe?

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>like in Sharpe
Sharpe the novels were already straddling the pale on suspension of disbelief, the tv series was a fucking joke.
That said, the 95th Rifles was indeed an elite regiment, with innovative equipment and tactics and extensive training. It was manned by veteran soldiers and officers who already distinguished themselves in standard light companies, and the results were in line with expectations. The green jackets regularly whipped the voltigeurs and all others enemy light infantry when matched in equal numbers.

Sharpe is the Call of Duty of the Napoleonic Wars

British soldiers were terrible in general, but even for countries that had good soldiers (France, Prussia and Austria), three dudes wouldn't take down an entire cavalry unit by themselves like it happen in every Sharpe movie

>terrible in general
Explain the entire Peninsular war then. I'm okay with saying that it was a tertiary theater, and that the number of French troops in theater was more to do with the level of partisan activity than the Allied field armies, but British troops on almost every occasion matched their French counterparts in maneuver, morale and fire rate - though starkly inferior in artillery quality.

>Explain the entire Peninsular war then.

It's their terribleness that explains why they got stalled for 6 fucking years on the short road from Northern Portugal to the Pyrenees despite fighting a second-rate French army not even lead by Napoleon

Meanwhile in just two years, the Russians fought off the main French army lead by Napoleon from Mocow to Paris

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>stalled for six years
There are myriad reasons, not least the lack of support from the home country, the general incompetency of the Spanish, and the fact that 200,000 French troops were in their way. The geography is also far harder than the flatlands of central Europe. I'd like to see you give a clear example where the inferiority of British troops was the direct reason for the lack of advance. The British also reached a fair bit father into France than you point out - they besieged Toulouse.
>second rate
They were professional soldiers, identical to that of the troops you'd see in Napoleon's army. They were also led by, in succession after being defeated by Wellington, hand-picked Marshal after hand-picked Marshal.
>from Moscow to Paris
Napoleon's Grand Armee was defeated by the winter, never in a decisive battle until Leipzig. The Russian troop quality has nothing to do with it, frankly.

Finally, if the British troops were so awful, why were they not swept away by Napoleon in the first moments of Waterloo? It was not the Prussians that forced the retreat of the Old Guard, nor was it the Prussians who broke the back of the French cavalry afterall.

>if the British troops were so awful, why were they not swept away by Napoleon in the first moments of Waterloo?

The main difference between the Peninsular War and Waterloo is that at Waterloo, Wellington was given quality German and Dutch troops (with Brits being a minority in his army) while in the Peninsular War he had to deal with British soldiers, "the scum of the earth"

I'm not shitting on Wellington
He was a good general, it's just that for most of the war he had been cursed with British soldiers

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>the scum of the earth
That was a compliment, actually.
>minority
A plurality, actually - for the majority of Waterloo, chances are that the soldier the Frenchman finds in front of him wears a redcoat.

"... the English army was absurdly under-rated in foreign countries
and absolutely despised in its own ...the ill-success of the expeditions
in 1794 and 1799 appeared to justify the general prejudice. "
England, both at home and abroad, was in 1808
scorned as a military power ..."
Napier - “History of the
War in Peninsula 1807-1814” p 21

>for the majority of Waterloo, chances are that the soldier the Frenchman finds in front of him wears a redcoat.

But low chances that this redcoat would be British as only 25,000 men out of Wellington's 68,000 strong army were British
Most of his troops were Germans and Dutch that had been issued British gears and put under Wellington's command