Masters of the Battlefield

by Davis, Paul K.

  To cover Massena’s withdrawal, Napoleon ordered his reserve Guard cavalry to stop the oncoming Austrians. They failed, but bought enough time for the Guard artillery to bring up 60 guns (soon reinforced to more than 100) and place the Austrian advance under fire. That slowed the Austrian troops down sufficiently to shift MacDonald’s corps even farther around to the west from Aderklaa and create a strong flank position with 30,000 men. MacDonald wheeled left and met the Austrian advance at Sussenbrunn; some of Eugene’s men and the Guard came to assist. It was just enough to counter a tiring Austrian advance, which ground to a halt. By late morning the Austrians had failed in their plan, and Napoleon was ready to take charge.80

  The time had come to shift from defense back to offense. On the far French right, Davout, who had spent the morning waiting for ammunition resupply after the Austrian dawn assault, finally managed to capture Markgrafneusiedl and force Rosenberg back onto the plateau. Rosenberg had called on Hohenzollern for reinforcements, but pressure from Oudinot and Eugene had frozen him in position. The Austrians were fully committed, but no longer advancing. Massena had retaken Aspern and Essling, so the southern flank was secure. Napoleon ordered MacDonald to push 8,000 men at the Austrians around Süssenbrunn with Gerasdorf as his target; Oudinot and Eugene were to push west and northwest to force back Hohenzollern and Bellegarde, while Davout was ordered to implement his original orders and sweep around the Austrian left onto the plateau.

  MacDonald’s attack was designed to both break the Austrian line, if possible, and keep Charles from shifting any men to aid Rosenberg. Macdonald led l’ordre mixte with eight battalions in line and nine battalions in column on either flank. The attack succeeded at first but took a heavy beating from Austrian artillery, which inflicted some 5,000 casualties; the Austrians then rallied and counterattacked.81 As MacDonald’s battle was being fought, Oudinot’s force aided Davout driving onto the plateau. Eugene’s force moved obliquely on Deutsch Wagram and captured it, turning to the left to aid MacDonald. At this point, Charles saw that the day was lost and ordered his men to withdraw, which they did in remarkable order. By evening they had consolidated themselves and remained a cohesive force, obliged to leave the field but not really beaten.

  The opening of the battle saw Napoleon surprise the Austrians with the location of the river crossing, but not with the timing of it. Since Charles did not choose to deploy in a forward defense, the French were allowed to concentrate on the north bank of the Danube with virtually no serious resistance. There was no real tempo to control, as the bulk of the day was spent in deployment rather than fighting. The hasty evening attack across the Russbach was a surprise but lacked sufficient preparation; the entire operation was almost a reconnaissance in force to determine the location and strength of the Austrian army.

  The second day found Napoleon beaten to the punch, with the Austrians gaining the initial surprise on Davout’s corps and then following it with another on the French left flank. Charles, unfortunately, had too great a battlefield and too-distant generals to dictate the necessary tempo, which Napoleon regained about noon. He then rearranged his forces to meet the Austrian assault and launched the counterattacks necessary to win the day. The orderly Austrian withdrawal coupled with the exhaustion of the French army resulted in no exploitation or pursuit for a few days.

  Charles is to be congratulated for his ambitious offensive in the wake of his weeks of inactivity. His army acquitted themselves well, and he was in the thick of the fighting and slightly wounded during the day. Charles was wise to disengage while his army was still intact. The withdrawal from the field was done in an orderly fashion, a difficult move at the best of times.82 The Austrians had stood toe-to-toe with the French and given as good as they got. Had the subordinates been more aggressive or Archduke John arrived prior to late afternoon, the battle could easily have been an Austrian victory. Losses were horrendous on both sides: more than 6,800 French killed, almost 27,000 wounded, and another 7,000 taken prisoner; 40 generals were among the casualties. The Austrians lost some 6,500 killed, plus more than 18,000 wounded and almost as many missing or captured.

  For Napoleon, it was the apex of a successful career from which ensued his long descent toward Waterloo. He showed at the start of the campaign that the French corps d’armee system was as good as ever as he constantly outmaneuvered the Austrians all the way to Vienna. Aspern-Essling, however showed that he was either far too confident of his soldiers’ abilities or he was too vain of his own abilities to care about his men. His traditional preparation was not there, and his army paid the price. As Chandler comments, “There is scant defense for his hasty and ill-considered decision to make an unprepared crossing of the Danube in mid-May.”83 Once he reverted to his old ways, the July crossing of the Danube and the deployment to the Marchfeld was error free. What followed, however, was no Austerlitz, and Charles, whatever his faults, was no Czar Alexander. Still, Napoleon showed that he could master even potential ruin. “Many commentators place Wagram among his greatest battles in terms of tactical skill,” Chandler notes, “and there is no doubt that the way in which he retrieved one critical situation after another, refusing to show perturbation at even the most perilous moments, show Napoleon, the soldier, at his best.”84

  After Wagram, however, victories were fewer and much further between. This is due to both the declining numbers of veterans as the battles became more costly and the increasing quality of the opponents as they adapted to Napoleon’s style of warfare. Although the French army that fought at Wagram and later did not have the quality of the one that fought the Austrians in 1805, it still could not be taken for granted. In his work on the Napoleonic wars, Rothenberg comments that “the fighting qualities of his troops were high, if only because less experienced troops often fought more aggressively than veterans who had acquired survival skills. The combat performance of Davout’s and Massena’s corps was equal to anything in the past, indeed all corps fought well. Italians and Bavarians matched French performance at Wagram, and the Saxons did very well on the first day and [were] routed on the second because of Bernadotte’s poor leadership.”85

  Napoleon’s Generalship

  MOST NAPOLEONIC COMMENTATORS argue that the French emperor was no developer of tactics or systems like Frederick; rather, he became a master of the system he inherited from French military theorists immediately before the Revolution. Rothenberg asserts that he “was not a great innovator but imposed his genius and personal leadership on the huge, largely conscript armies he inherited from the Revolution. He perfected their offensive, mobile and ruthless way of war.”86 Chandler also comments on Napoleon’s interweaving of strategy and grand tactics, saying, “Napoleon fused marching, fighting and pursuit into a single remorseless process, affording his enemy no time to draw breath.”87

  It was that march-into-battle concept that Napoleon developed, perfecting what is today called the operational level of warfare. His tactical skill is not to be ignored, however. While he did not lead from the front, he was meticulous in setting his units on the battlefield in order to best coordinate the three arms.88 It is the grand tactical area of warfare, of course, with which this work concerns itself. Napoleon was exceeded only by Chinggis Khan and Subedei in his mastery of the principles of war; Napoleon’s thoughts on warfare, however, are much more readily available than those of the Mongol leaders. At the same time, Napoleon himself scorned “rules of warfare.” He had the necessary coup d’oeil to deploy his men correctly, hold back a reserve, let the enemy attack, and then exploit mistakes.89 None of his battles were identical, and his use of the various principles of war was fluid and ever changing. He particularly shined in the areas of objective, offensive, mass, economy of force, unity of command, surprise, and morale.

  In 1797, Napoleon said, “I see only one thing, namely the enemy’s main body. I try to crush it, confident that secondary matters will then settle themselves.”90 In almost all warfare up to the late eighteenth century, the object of warfare, o
r center of gravity, was a location: usually the enemy capital city, which the enemy would do anything to defend. In contrast, Napoleon ignored cities as goals, but used them to manipulate his enemy’s movements. By threatening a capital, like Vienna in 1805 or Berlin in 1806, he knew he could draw the enemy army to its defense. In his article “How Good Was Napoleon?” Jonathan Riley says, “For Napoleon, the centre of gravity at the operational level was almost invariably the enemy’s army, and the decisive act in achieving his strategic objectives was its destruction in battle by the fastest means available. By this means he would break the enemy’s will to resist so that all else—the conquest of territory in particular—would follow.”91 As the enemy army was his objective, it would present itself somewhere between where he crossed the frontier and the target location. There, on the path to the city, he would find and attempt to destroy it. A collection of buildings cannot defend a country, Napoleon asserted; only an army can. Destroy the army, and the country has no choice but to surrender.

  On the battlefield, the objective was connected to that same concept. Threaten the line of communications back to the capital, or wherever the primary source of supply lay, and the enemy would move the bulk of its force to protect that line. By doing so, the enemy forces would weaken themselves somewhere else on the field, providing Napoleon with the perfect point at which to strike. This concept was illustrated in his first major battle at Toulon, where his strategy was to threaten the navy, the royalist source of supply. With that threat accomplished, the battle was over. At Wagram, the source of supply was not the point to threaten, since Vienna was already occupied; instead, Napoleon chose to cut the possible line of assistance to the east from where Archduke John was advancing. Like Alexander, he always looked to create a weakness in the enemy line and pounce when it was exposed.

  Napoleon was also master of the offensive. As he wrote, “Making war offensively; it is the sole means to become a great captain and to fathom the secrets of the art.”92 Riley argues that Napoleon “rarely fought a defensive battle, even when he was strategically and operationally on the defensive. There are arguably only three occasions when he did so: Leipzig in 1813, and La Rothière and Arcis in 1814. Even then, he only did so as a last resort.”93 Offensive action operated on both the strategic and tactical levels. As mentioned above, Napoleon usually let his enemy attack first, which means a tactical defensive stance, a position he put himself in at Rivoli and Austerlitz. However, any such defensive situation was intended to be temporary, held only until the enemy weak point appeared. To look at Napoleon’s campaigns from Italy forward, only in the wake of the capture of Moscow in 1812 was he forced on to the defensive. Multiple coalitions were formed and declared war on France, but only at the end of his career was any fighting done on French soil; he always took his army against the enemy in their own countries.

  Napoleon went to great lengths to make sure he went into battle with numerical superiority, but the most important aspect of his battles was, as his primary contemporary analyst Henri Jomini explains, to find the enemy’s decisive point and strike it with as much force as possible. “When you have resolved to fight a battle, collect your whole force. Dispense with nothing. A single battalion sometimes decides the day.”94 At Rivoli Napoleon was outnumbered in total, but never at any particular point. This was his true battlefield genius: to move his units in the midst of battle to the location where he would have the localized advantage. He did the same thing strategically, always trying to get his army between two opposing forces in the “central position.” This way he could divide his army, using a small holding force against one opponent while massing the rest of his troops against the other. At Ulm his overall numerical superiority allowed him to surrounded Mack’s Austrian army, while at Austerlitz the bulk of his army struck the weakened Austro-Russian center. His shifting of units on the second day at Wagram saved his army by enabling it to never be outnumbered at any point. Napoleon reflected on the principle of mass in his writings: “The art of war consists, with an inferior army, of always having more forces than your enemy at the point where you attack, or at the point which is attacked; but this art cannot be learned either from books or from practice. It is a feeling of command which properly constitutes the genius for war.”95

  This principle, however, was one of the factors in his ultimate undoing. The great losses of men at Eylau, Aspern-Essling, and Wagram were indicators that Napoleon was becoming less subtle in his battles. Instead of always creating an opportunity by obliging the enemy to weaken some part of his own line via maneuver, he began to rely increasingly on firepower followed by manpower; this was especially true after Wagram, when he increased the guns committed to the Guard and reintroduced the concept of distributing guns among the infantry. In his work How Great Generals Win, Bevin Alexander writes, “As Emperor Napoleon, however, he possessed such enormous armies and so much confidence in his military ability that he no longer depended upon speed and surprise but relied upon sheer mass or offensive power to win his victories. … Napoleon purchased victories at the cost of great losses of manpower—on both sides. With virtually a blank check on the resources of his empire, Napoleon lost his resolve to win by guile and deception.”96 As we will see in the next chapter, his inability to even find the enemy army’s decisive point at Waterloo, coupled with his inability to force the British army to weaken itself anywhere along its line, proved more than Napoleon could overcome.

  Intent as he was on superior numbers, Napoleon never wasted manpower. His grasp of economy of force is best illustrated by the fact that he always maintained a sizable reserve, which indeed became a larger and larger percentage of his force as time went by and he grew his Old, Middle, and Young Guards. He benefited from having marshals who knew his views and could, in most cases, hold positions against superior enemy forces while the mass (usually including the reserve) was committed to the decisive point. At Rivoli he thinned his front lines facing the bulk of the Austrian assault in order to join with his reserve and beat back Quasdanovitch’s attack on the French right flank, and then sent those forces back to the center to launch the winning counterattack. Massena’s corps was stretched to the limit at Rivoli and again at Wagram, but he always did what Napoleon needed in order to stabilize the situation and bring about victory. Davout’s corps arrived in the nick of time to hold the French right flank, then beat back Rosenberg’s surprise attack and still turned the tide of battle with the flank maneuver that had been his original mission.

  When Napoleon implemented the corps d’armee system, the concept was that if an individual corps stumbled into an enemy force, it could launch a spoiling attack or stand its ground, as necessary, until reinforcements could arrive. Napoleon always depended on minimal forces to exert maximum effect while the main force and reserve finished the battle. Rarely did those corps commanders disappoint him.

  Napoleon’s maxim 64 asserts: “Nothing is so important in war as an undivided command: for this reason, when war is carried on against a single power, there should be only one army, acting upon one base, and conducted by one chief.”97 In volume 31 of his correspondence, entitled Notes on the Art of War, he muses explicitly on the principle of unity of command: “Unity of command is of the first necessity in war. You must keep the army united, concentrate as many of your troops as possible on the battlefield, and take advantage of every opportunity, for fortune is a woman: if you miss her today, do not expect to find her tomorrow.”98 In some ways this is a reflection of Napoleon’s personality, for it is virtually impossible to imagine him sharing anything. Perhaps the trial of being forced to serve under a succession of incompetents at Toulon reinforced his high opinion of himself, but once he secured his first independent command in Italy, he was the sole determinant of what the army would do.

  Napoleon benefited from the fact that unity of command was a principle not often followed by his opponents, perhaps best indicated at Austerlitz where two emperors commanded the Austro-Russian coalition. This made for a mu
ddled chain of command as well as the problems of communicating orders in two languages. Likewise, arguments between commanders, primarily Mack and Archduke Charles, weakened the Austrian effort in 1805, resulting in the disaster at Ulm. In contrast, Napoleon, as commander in chief and head of government, had only himself at the head of the chain of command.99 The implementation of the corps d’armee system would seem on the surface to fly in the face of the concept of unity of command, as virtually self-contained small armies operated outside of Napoleon’s direct command. In reality, although he gathered about him subordinates he could trust to fight independently for a short time, he only allowed them to do so until he could arrive with the rest of the army and take over. In this system, however, we also see some of the problems that led to eventual decline. Napoleon needed good corps commanders to act semi-independently and follow orders, but they could not be so talented as to challenge his reputation. Thus, he kept some men who were brave and loyal, like Marshals Murat and Michel Ney, though he himself admitted they could not be trusted alone or with large commands.