Masters of the Battlefield

by Davis, Paul K.

  Quick campaigns of misdirection kept Tilly off balance while Gustavus captured Frankfurt an der Oder, which gave him a strong strategic position as well as a riverine line of supply. In early May 1630 he finally convinced the elector of Brandenburg to ally with him, but had to reconvince the wavering elector in June by marching on Berlin and threatening it. Gustavus still met reluctance from John George. Meanwhile, Tilly’s forces expanded a blockade of the city of Magdeburg into a full-scale siege. Gustavus had sent one of his generals, Dietrich von Falkenberg, to organize the city’s defense, but the inhabitants were more worried about their own safety than the overall progress of a war that had dragged on for fourteen years. Hearing of the Brandenburg alliance and fearing a quick Swedish march to relieve the city, Tilly’s forces on 20 May stormed the city and took it. The result was 25,000 of the 30,000 citizens killed in the siege, the pillaging, or the fire that burned most of the city to the ground. Tilly’s army had been starving and looted the city, but the fire destroyed what long-term succor it might have provided. Still hungry, Tilly had no choice but to march on to unplundered Saxony if his men were to be reprovisioned. Russell Weigley comments, “Tilly was an experienced veteran soldier and a generally sound commander, [but] he had mismanaged the logistics of his 1631 counteroffensive. Mismanagement of logistics was not difficult, of course, after much of Germany had been the scene of marching and countermarching for many years and had repeatedly been picked bare of sustenance.”35

  Tilly sent word to John George to join him or be invaded. That threat, coupled with the outrage over the destruction of Magdeburg, finally convinced the Saxon elector on 11 September to join forces with Gustavus. It was not a ringing endorsement of the king of Sweden or the Protestant cause, and Gustavus would always have doubts about John George’s dependability. After all, it was only Tilly’s capture of John George’s capital of Leipzig that pushed him to an alliance. They joined forces on the 15th, and two days later the armies were in battle.

  Breitenfeld

  BOTH ARMIES WERE SHORT OF SUPPLIES, but Tilly was expecting reinforcements from the south. A conflict in Italy had just been brought to a close, and imperial forces were on their way to aid him. All he had to do was sit tight in Leipzig once he captured it, fatten up his men, and choose his own time for battle when the relief army arrived. Further, he believed that his veterans could easily handle the Swedes, even though they had made little progress against them in the past several months. In a council of war on the 15th, Pappenheim claimed the neither the Saxons nor the Swedes were anything to worry about.36 Tilly’s army numbered 21,400 infantry and 9,900 cavalry, with 26 artillery pieces.

  Gustavus arrived in Düben, twenty miles north of Leipzig, to join with John George on the 15th, just as Leipzig was falling. He commanded 14,742 infantry and 8,064 cavalry plus 54 artillery pieces. John George brought 12,100 infantry, 5,225 cavalry, and 12 guns.37 The primary difference between the two armies was not numbers but experience, since the Saxons were for the most part recently called up militia and had few veterans. The one bright spot in the Saxon army was Lieutenant General George von Arnim, formerly second in command to Wallenstein and a veteran of the imperial campaign against the Swedes in Poland. Unfortunately, he had just assumed the position of army commander the previous June, so he had too little time to whip the troops into shape. From Düben, the combined force marched south to engage the imperialists. Between the two armies ran a small river, the Loder. Although Pappenheim’s cavalry did engage in some minor harassment, Tilly did not attack during the river crossing. Had he placed his troops there and awaited an attack, the outcome could have been radically different. According to Liddell Hart, “The formality of the time is well shown by the failure to fall on Gustavus during this crossing.”38 Hans Delbruck’s explanation is more practical: “[Tilly] did not do so, probably in order to allow his artillery first to fire on the enemy while he was involved in his deployment.”39

  During Tilly’s council of war on the 15th, he proposed staying inside Leipzig and forcing Gustavus to waste men assaulting it or waste time besieging it; after all, reinforcements were just a few days away and could put the Swedes between two fires. The older officers agreed, but the younger officers rallied around Pappenheim, whose nature despised anything but the offensive. Reluctantly, Tilly agreed to fight in the open, perhaps because of taunts that he was too old or afraid to meet Gustavus in battle.40 It is possible that Tilly overruled the more numerous younger officers but gave Pappenheim permission to take 2,000 horsemen in order to reconnoiter the enemy approach.41 This was not a wise move. Tilly had exercised wisdom in deciding to remain behind Leipzig’s walls, but unfortunately for him, giving Pappenheim an inch was the same as giving him a mile. The young cavalry commander would launch a reconnaissance in force that would oblige Tilly to march to the rescue.42 Loosing Pappenheim and expecting him to follow orders to merely scout the enemy was too much to ask. Who knows—Pappenheim may actually have thought he could defeat the Saxons and Swedes by himself.43

  Pappenheim’s sally was on the 16th, and Tilly soon began marching his men out of Leipzig. Tilly spent the balance of that day deploying his troops initially in a defensive position, a stance he had rarely taken.44 Accounts vary, but Gustavus seems to have encamped north of the stream on the night of the 16th. He deployed in line of battle while still on the other side of the river, and his men slept in position. As mentioned, Gustavus’s army crossed the Lober against minimal cavalry resistance, then marched forward to face the enemy. Gustavus commanded the center of the army, with Marshal Count Gustav Horn on the left and much of the cavalry on the right under Marshal George Baner. The Saxons under John George and Arnim were deployed on the left flank. The Saxons used the tercio formation but little is known of their exact deployment; possibly it was in a pyramid of units with the point toward the enemy and cavalry on the flanks. With both Saxons and Swedes posting cavalry on their wings, the center of the line thus became predominantly cavalry, but for the mixing of musketeer units as Gustavus had designed.

  Tilly was atop a very low ridge and deployed his army with the infantry in the center and cavalry on the wings, the traditional format. Sources disagree on whether his infantry was deployed in twelve or seventeen tercios, but they were divided into imperial troops next to Catholic League troops, who had fought with Tilly the longest. He deployed them line-abreast rather than in the normal checkerboard fashion, probably in order to match the width of the Swedish line. Cavalry was assigned fairly equally to both flanks, Pappenheim commanding on the left and Furstenburg on the right.

  The field is open and slightly rolling, so neither side really had a height advantage. Oddly, half the sources describe a mist on the morning of the 17th while the others describe it as dusty and windy. The Swedish army had received their exhortation from their king; the senior officers had been given a less stirring, more pragmatic talk on the need for discipline and flexibility. They decamped about 9:00 and reached the battlefield near noon. They faced imperial cannon fire as they deployed, but soon Torstensson’s artillery was arranged along the front, and the Swedish forces’ superior number of guns, as well as their ability to load and fire three times faster than the imperial gunners, gave them the advantage as the duel went on for more than two hours. Further, the tercios received terrible damage. The imperial formations were too big to miss, and the effect was disastrous. The forward ranks took the brunt of it, but any ball passing through a man in front still had 10 or 12 more behind him to hit, and for every pikeman who went down there fell an iron-tipped pike to trip fellow soldiers.45

  Sometime between 2:00 p.m. and 2:30 the armies began to move. The cavalry charged first, although it is disputed if Pappenheim made the first move (a safe assumption) or Furstenburg. Furstenburg’s assault on the Saxons bore fruit quickly. For mostly untrained militia, the two-hour cannonade had been frightening enough (with some 1,000 Saxons killed). Now they could see the enemy begin to move toward them and hear their battle cry “Jesu-Mar
ia!” Croatian cavalry led the charge, red cloaks streaming and sabers flashing, screaming unintelligibly as they moved forward.46 For the supposedly unwieldy tercios, Tilly had them moving in an oblique, a form of advance to be perfected a hundred years later by Frederick the Great. They initially marched not straight ahead but half right, then pivoted half left toward a Swedish flank opening ever wider as the Saxons began to run. It was vintage Tilly and worked as it often had in the past—at least against the Saxons.47 The Saxon gunners in front broke first, and soon it was learned that John George was galloping away at top speed. The entire Saxon army fell apart and ran, some stopping only to loot the Swedish baggage. The Swedish left was completely broken, and Tilly sent his infantry to take advantage.

  On the western side of the field, Pappenheim’s cavalry rode up to the mixed cavalry-musketeer units. They fired their first volley from the caracole, whereupon the Swedes responded with massed musket fire and a cavalry sally. Pappenheim quickly withdrew and moved further to his left in an attempt to turn the flank. Gustavus sent in reserves as Baner pulled back to present a refused flank. Pappenheim’s second caracole fared no better than did his first. Neither did the third, fourth, or even seventh attack. By 4 p.m. his men had taken a beating from the constantly reinforced Swedish line and massed muskets. Pappenheim withdrew from the field as Tilly was leading his infantry against the collapsed Swedish left flank.

  Tilly and Furstenburg were as shocked as Pappenheim had been when they found, instead of an exposed army, another refused flank, this one deployed by Horn. The slow-moving tercios were being easily outmaneuvered by the smaller Swedish units. Horn, however, did not stand and fight, but attacked the imperial forces as they were trying to recover from their charge against the Saxons and change face to meet the new threat. Soon, the imperial ranks were nothing but confusion; and then it got worse. With Pappenheim on the run, Baner’s wing advanced and swung east to occupy the ground where Tilly’s army had stood before their charge. That imperial charge had left all their artillery behind, and the Swedes quickly seized the guns and aimed them at the rear of the imperial army. Musket fire and attacks from the Swedish lines coupled with cannonballs tearing through their forces from behind: it was more than the imperialists could possibly stand. They too began to waver and run, and the Swedes were quick with the pursuit.

  It was an overwhelming victory. Tilly, wounded in the battle, fled the field leaving behind 7,600 dead, 6,000 made prisoner on the field, and another 3,000 taken captive the following day in Leipzig, where a tercio and some stragglers had fled. Thousands more were cut down in the pursuit, died of their wounds, were murdered by the Saxon peasantry, or simply deserted. The imperial forces lost all 26 guns and 120 regimental flags. Pappenheim was also among the wounded.48 Swedish losses were 2,100; the Saxons lost 3,000 on the field and while being pursued.

  Gustavus led his men to Breitenfeld on an approach march leading to a meeting engagement. After more than two hours of an exchange of opening fire, he received the imperial attack. On defense his right flank disrupted Pappenheim’s attack with much greater firepower than the attacking cavalry could deliver. This led to a separation of enemy forces when Pappenheim withdrew and Tilly attacked the Saxons. For the first time in centuries a force was made up of units able to quickly move about the battlefield, and the Swedish reserves were committed in sufficient numbers to both strengthen the refused flank and to extend it so it could not be ridden around, as Pappenheim had intended. When Baner’s men went over to the offensive, Gustavus could reconstitute his reserve and back up Horn’s refused flank. Once on the offensive, his men exploited the situation by capturing the enemy guns and turning them on the enemy rear. With the imperial force caught in midmove out of its north-eastward attack against the Saxons trying to face about toward the new flank, Horn’s attack was perfectly timed and executed. His men maintained sufficient offensive pressure to back the crumbling tercios against some neighboring woods, but spent so much time attacking their front that several thousand escaped. Pappenheim’s reorganized cavalry arrived on the field to stop close pursuit of the imperial retreat to the west.

  The victory was one of the maneuverability of the Swedish units versus the size and weight of the tercio. Conversely, it was a victory of the weight of Swedish firepower over the limits of that produced by the tercio. Gustavus won because his forces could deliver much more firepower than the enemy. The infantry in their extended formations used their superior muskets, and the superior Swedish light artillery moved forward with the infantry, delivering canister fire within yards of the enemy.49 The day of the caracole was dead, that of the tercio was on its deathbed. The battle proved to be a dramatic endorsement of Gustavus’s linear system and cavalry. The Swedish deployment in two lines to make a reserve enabled Gustavus to protect his flanks and differed in no serious respect from the use made of their second lines by Scipio and Caesar. Few military men in Europe missed the lesson to be learned here, as Gustavus himself was to see the following year when he faced Wallenstein at Lützen. The success of the Swedish army and tactics in the war may be gauged by the efforts of Sweden’s opponents to copy them.50

  Breitenfeld was also a victory for Gustavus’s methods of training as well as his organization. The mutual trust gained between officers and men as well as king and men gave them the confidence to persevere when almost half the army broke and ran. When all is said and done, the elite military spirit of the Swedes won Breitenfeld. The Saxons buckled under the pressure, but not the Swedes.51

  In the days following the battle Gustavus failed to maintain pressure on the defeated Tilly. Instead, he turned his attention more toward Bohemia, where he dispatched John George’s army. This failure to crush his opponent robbed him of the decisive victory Breitenfeld could have been, although it was a major morale boost for Protestants throughout Germany, and therefore brought Gustavus allies, reinforcements, supplies, and money. Some argue that Gustavus should have made immediately for Vienna. Tilly’s broken force was the only one available to stop him, and seizure of the city could have forced Emperor Ferdinand to the peace table.52 Liddell Hart, however, agrees with Gustavus’s plan to maintain secure bases and gather allies: “The scheme was wise and far-sighted, took into calculation all the political and military elements of the situation, and was based on broad, sound judgment. For seventeen hundred years, no one had looked at war with so large an intelligence. … What he has taught us is method, not temerity.”53 Had Vienna been a national or even an imperial capital, its capture may have been decisive, but it was merely Emperor Ferdinand’s home rather than a true seat of government. J. F. C. Fuller’s analysis covers most of the strategic bases that may have led Gustavus to decide against going directly to Vienna. First, the roads were bad, winter was coming on, and Gustavus possessed no detailed maps. Additionally, without the Catholic army destroyed, a move to the south would expose his supply lines. Instead, by moving westward through Catholic territories to the Protestant Palatinate, he would tap into new sources of supply while denying them to the imperialists. And finally, occupation of the Palatinate would bar Spanish Hapsburg access from Italy to the Protestant United Provinces, against whom Spain had been warring for decades.54

  With John George leading his army and a band of Bohemian exiles toward Prague, therefore, Gustavus pointed his army southwestward. Although Tilly did quickly recover from his wounds and gather together another army of 25,000 men, there were no major battles. At Wurzburg Tilly faced a badly outnumbered Swedish army but followed orders from his boss, Maximilian of Bavaria, to bring his troops back for home defense. Thus, Gustavus continued—slightly more cautiously—to move to Frank-furt-am-Main (captured 27 November) and thence to Mainz (taken on 22 December). Finally he settled into winter quarters, master of a wide swath of German territory running from the French frontier to the Baltic.