A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

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  No. 41 BATTLE OF SOLFERINO–SAN MARTINO

  24 June 1859

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  For the battle that took place around the northern Italian towns of Solferino and San Martino in June 1859 between the armies of the Austrian Empire and those of France and Sardinia-Piedmont, explanations often centre on innovations – such as the use of railways to bring in reserves, or the development by the French of the rifled artillery gun, which increased range and accuracy remarkably. But the real innovation that arose from this battle was supplied by Henri Dunant, a young Swiss businessman, who arrived in the aftermath of the battle and was shocked by the plight of the thousands of wounded soldiers lying untended on the field. Four years later, Dunant hosted the founding meeting of what became the Red Cross organization, committed to helping the sick and wounded on both sides. This commitment was enshrined in the first Geneva Convention, which was signed by the majority of the states of Europe on 22 August 1864.

  The battle that Dunant witnessed was the final confrontation in a war that began on 29 April 1859 when Austrian forces crossed the border between Austrian Italy (the provinces of Lombardy and Venetia) and the independent Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont. The conflict was really over the creation of an Italian nation, an aspiration that had been crushed by the Austrians during the revolutions of 1848–49. A decade of military reforms made the army of Vittorio Emmanuele II of Piedmont a more modern and effective force, but it was still not strong enough to confront the vast Austrian army. The Piedmontese prime minister, Count Camillo di Cavour, persuaded the new French emperor, Napoleon III, nephew of the great Napoleon, to give military support to the effort to expel the Austrians. Some of the senior commanders in the French army had fought with Napoleon III’s uncle and saw the conflict with Austria as unfinished business. Napoleon agreed with them. The Piedmontese strengthened the frontier with Lombardy, and when they refused an Austrian demand to disarm, war was declared.

  The balance strongly favoured the Austrian 2nd Army, commanded by Field Marshal Ferenc Gyulai, which outnumbered the Piedmontese by two to one. But confusion over what strategy to adopt gave the French time to mobilize and to arrive in strength, thanks to the railway, by mid-May. The Austrians were defeated at Montebello, Palestro and a major battle at Magenta, and Gyulai was forced to pull back from the Lombard capital at Milan and concentrate Austrian forces on the ‘Quadrilateral’ of major fortresses at Peschiera, Verona, Legnago and Mantua. He resigned after his failure to halt the French advance and was replaced by Field Marshal Count Schlick, a veteran of the wars against the first Napoleon. The Austrian emperor, Franz-Joseph, now insisted on assuming overall command himself. The Austrian 1st Army, under Field Marshal Franz von Wimpffen, joined the 2nd, and 119,000 infantry, 9,500 cavalry and 429 guns moved onto a wide plain stretching from Lake Garda to Mantua. The forces were centred on the town of Solferino, protected by its high walls and the ridges and hills of the surrounding area.

  The French Foreign Legion, dressed in their distinctive zouave uniform of baggy red trousers, charge towards the Austrian troops during the Battle of Solferino–San Martino. Losses were very high on both sides – 17,000 French and Italian, and 22,000 Austrian.

  After inflicting so many defeats, the French and Piedmontese had been uncertain about Austrian intentions. On 23 June, they could see Austrian activity in front of them as they crossed the River Chiese south of Brescia, and Napoleon III, like Franz-Joseph the overall commander-in-chief, ordered an advance during the night to avoid the scorching sun of the day. On the north wing, 38,600 Piedmontese, including Giuseppe Garibaldi’s irregulars, advanced towards the village of San Martino; in the centre and south, 83,000 French infantry and 9,000 French cavalry, supported by 240 of the new rifled cannon, moved towards Solferino and, further south, towards Guidizzolo and the Plain of Medole. At 5 a.m., while many Austrian troops were still breakfasting, the two armies clashed. The battle divided into three. The Piedmontese tried all day to dislodge General Ludwig von Benedek’s VIII Corps, who were ensconced on a hill around the village of San Martino. French armies in the centre, led by General Patrice MacMahon and Marshal Baraguay d’Hilliers, pushed into Solferino and its surroundings, while French armies in the south, heavily outnumbered, tried to force the Plain of Medole.

  The Swiss businessmen and philanthropist Henri Dunant (1828–1910) was so shocked by his visit to the battlefield at Solferino in June 1859 that he set about establishing an international organization to help wounded men. The result was the founding of the International Red Cross, in 1864.

  The battle was won in the centre, where determined French attacks, aided by more effective artillery and cavalry (though won in the end at the point of the bayonet), pushed the Austrians out of Solferino by the early afternoon. The Austrian commander ordered a retreat and by 3.30 p.m. the French had occupied the town of Cavriana, which shortly before had been Franz-Joseph’s headquarters. Once the breakthrough was achieved in the centre, the position of Austrian forces on both wings deteriorated. Despite their fierce defence of San Martino, Benedek was forced to withdraw by the early evening to avoid complete encirclement. In the south, the battle was sharper and the Austrian 1st Army fought desperately to hold onto a line across the Plain of Medole. French artillery fire and cavalry drove the Austrians slowly back, and the loss of Solferino released more support for the southern wing. By 4 p.m., the French were threatening Guidizzolo on the far side of the plain. Suddenly the fierce sunshine that had tortured the men of both sides with unendurable thirst gave way to a spectacular storm of rain, hail and thunder. Under the darkening skies, the Austrian 1st and 2nd Armies withdrew across the River Mincio, abandoning permanently, as it turned out, the whole of Lombardy.

  The battle was fought at close quarters with bayonets as deadly as any more modern handheld weapon. Losses were high, 17,000 for the French and Piedmontese, 22,000 for the Austrians. It was the wounded from the battle that Dunant saw that evening. He had come to petition Napoleon III personally for help in a business venture in Algeria, but found himself an onlooker to the fighting. He was sickened by the stench of battle and the cries of the wounded, more than a third of whom required amputations. There were few medical facilities and the Austrians had withdrawn many miles away. Dunant immediately began to organize local villagers to supply water and clean linen for the wounded of both sides. On 27 June, he ordered from Brescia, the nearest large city, lemons, camomile, sugar, shirts and tobacco. Men from both sides were helped – ‘all brothers’, Dunant told his suppliers. The neglect of the wounded and the prisoners affected him so much that he gave up his business (Napoleon had refused to help him anyway) and devoted himself to recruiting Europe-wide support for the idea of formal medical assistance on the field of battle for sick and wounded soldiers. Of all the innovations associated with Solferino, this was the most important and most enduring.

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  No. 42 BATTLE OF KÖNIGGRÄTZ (SADOWA)

  3 July 1866

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  Few major battles have been affected so decisively by a single new weapon as the confrontation that took place near the small town of Königgrätz in Austrian Bohemia in early July 1866, at the climax of the contest for supremacy in Germany. The weapon in question was the Prussian needle-gun, a breech-loading rifle capable of delivering ten to twelve shots a minute, much faster than the muzzle-loaded guns still used by most of Europe. Its effect was devastating against the standard Austrian tactic of the storm attack. Within minutes, whole battalions were reduced to a fraction of their strength, the ground littered with corpses in gruesome heaps so dense that at the end of the battle Prussian horsemen had to dismount to cross the battlefield.

  The needle-gun was the invention of the Prussian gunsmith Johann von Dreyse. Developed from 1836, it was finally adopted by the Prussian Army in 1848 and was standard issue by the 1860s. The paper cartridge was inserted by bolt action, and its paper construction meant that the cartridge case did not have to be unloaded
before reloading, increasing the speed of fire. The failure of the Austrian Army to adopt the needle-gun was not based simply on a lack of imagination. It was a far from perfect weapon. Its 600-metre (2,000-feet) range was shorter than conventional muzzle-loaded rifles, and after a few shots the escaping gas from the explosion of the cartridge caused burns, forcing troops to fire the gun from the hip. The needle that pierced the paper cartridge when the trigger was pulled was also prone to break or wear out. The one advantage of the new weapon lay in the rate of fire, which exceeded that of anything else until the first machine guns. But even this advantage might not have been fully exploited had the Austrian army not chosen the massed frontal assault as its principal battlefield tactic.

  The long struggle to determine the future of the German area, dominated for centuries by Austria, and organized since 1815 as a loose German Confederation, was always going to be a contest between northern Protestant Prussia and the multi-national, mainly Catholic, Habsburg Empire, with Austria at its heart. German patriots wanted a single German nation, but the Habsburgs were solidly opposed to it because their multi-national dynastic empire would collapse if nationalism succeeded. The Prussian monarchy was not particularly enthusiastic about a German nation either, but it became clear that promoting a unitary state separate from Austria would only be to Prussia’s benefit as the most powerful kingdom in Germany. A clash was not inevitable, though likely. In 1866, the Austrian government decided to test the question of who dominated Germany. A Prussian–Italian treaty signed in April, designed to support Italian efforts to remove Austria from its remaining Italian territories, proved enough. The Austrian emperor, Franz-Joseph, ordered mobilization first in Italy and then, in late April, of the Austrian Northern Army under commanding general Ludwig von Benedek. The Austrians prepared to concentrate their forces in the Bohemian plain where they could use their storm tactics effectively.

  At the Battle of Königgrätz (Sadowa) on 3 July 1866, the major difference between the Prussian forces, pictured here, and their Austrian opponents was the effective firepower of the new Prussian needle-gun, capable of firing ten to twelve rounds a minute.

  The Prussian chief-of-staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, divided his army corps into three distinct forces, all of which converged on the Bohemian plain: the 2nd Army was based in Silesia, the 1st Army in Prussian Saxony, and the Army of the Elbe, which included forces from Prussia’s German allies, based in Saxony once it was occupied. By the third week of June, the Prussians had invaded Saxony and deployed the last of their armies in a wide 400-kilometre (250-mile) arc around Bohemia. This was a risk, since the larger Austrian forces could defeat the Prussian enemy one army at a time if they moved quickly and boldly. However, when Moltke ordered the invasion on 22 June, a pessimistic Benedek dithered over his strategic options until he finally decided to move initially against the Prussian 1st and Elbe armies and, having defeated them, to turn east again to defeat the 2nd Army marching from Silesia. The first major engagements at Podol and Stralitz were a disaster, the needle-gun mowing down advancing Austrian infantry. Benedek changed his mind and decided to retreat in order to deal with the Silesian threat first. His armies converged on the banks of the River Elbe, in front of the town of Königgrätz, where he hoped they could rest and nurse their early wounds. The long marches in difficult weather with poor logistical support undermined the Austrian forces and Benedek recommended suing for peace. Franz-Joseph would not hear of it, and on 3 July the Austrians faced the prospect at last of a major battle against the encircling Prussians.

  The Prussian forces had their own difficulties. Although the battle is often remembered as one decided by the more efficient Prussian railways, the two sides arrived at the same time in June, while the Prussians suffered from problems of supply once the troops had been transported. The 124,000 of the 1st and Elbe armies were outnumbered by the 265,000 Austrian soldiers and 650 cannon, and needed the 100,000-man Silesian Army to march to their help as quickly as they could. On 3 July, Moltke ordered the Prussian 1st Army to attack Benedek’s larger force, but the troops were tired and hungry and the early engagements found the Prussian front held down by heavy and accurate Austrian artillery fire. The new Krupp 2.7- and 1.8-kilogram (6- and 4-pound) guns had shorter range and were poorly concentrated; artillery innovation was not, as is sometimes suggested, a key to Prussian victory. The answer was the needle-gun. On the left of the Prussian 1st Army, the commander of the 7th Division occupied the Swiepwald, a small area of forest. The Austrian right decided to clear the forest in order to attack the Prussian flank, but after four hours of attacks by much larger Austrian forces, twenty-eight out of forty-three Austrian battalions had been decimated by needle-gun fire. The forest was in Austrian hands but no flank attack was possible. Instead, Benedek found that a large hole had developed in his front at a critical moment.

  The Prussian 2nd Army, commanded by Crown Prince Friedrich-Wilhelm, had made its way slowly over muddy roads and awkward terrain. It debouched onto the battlefield by mid-day with the whole Austrian flank exposed before it. Helped by the geography of small ridges and tall crops, the Prussians filtered forward under heavy artillery fire. The needle-gun was a lethal advantage and soon the Prussians overwhelmed the defences around the town of Chlum, threatening the whole Austrian army with encirclement and annihilation. A fierce Austrian counter-attack to retake Chlum was stopped in its tracks by volleys of fire. The roadway to the small town was quickly nicknamed ‘Dead Man’s Way’. When the Prussian 1st Corps arrived, the Austrian assault died out. Benedek ordered his one remaining reserve corps to attack the oncoming Prussians, but within half an hour 10,000 of them were dead or wounded by needle-gun fire, half the strength of the corps. Before the Prussians could snap the jaws of their trap shut, Benedek ordered a general retreat across the still-intact Elbe bridges. Not a single infantry unit was any longer combat effective. The Austrians left 22,000 dead or wounded and 9,200 prisoners, against Prussian losses of 9,172, including 1,935 dead. Three weeks later the Austrians sued for an armistice. The future of a German nation was now to be determined by Prussia.

  The outcome of the battle was not inevitable, since Prussian strategy had been at risk if any one element of its elongated line had been defeated quickly by the greater Austrian numbers. For most of the day, Moltke was uncertain about whether his side was winning, and there were moments when Prussian commanders thought retreat might be necessary. Prussian artillery performed poorly compared with Austrian. The needle-gun gave the outnumbered Prussian Army the edge it needed. Austrian forces took terrible casualties as they were propelled forward against the Prussian firing lines. The fact that they continued to attack even when experiencing such losses compounded the problem. An older form of battlefield practice, based on élan and aggression, was giving way to a battlefield dominated by fire.

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  No. 43 BATTLE OF SHANGANI

  25 October – 1 November 1893

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  In 1884, Hiram Stevens Maxim, an American inventor who made his home in London, developed the first recoil-operated machine gun. Unlike existing machine-guns, which had to be cranked by hand, the water-cooled Maxim gun used the energy from the recoil to eject a bullet and insert the next. This prevented overheating of the barrel and allowed rates of fire of up to 600 rounds per minute. Orders were placed by the British army in 1888, and a prototype was ready a year later. The first true test of the new gun came in the First Matabele War in present-day Zimbabwe, when a British expeditionary force was sent to impose conditions on the powerful king of the Matabele (Ndebele), Lobengula Khumalo. The five Maxim guns carried by the British column were all that was necessary to destroy a Matabele army more than ten times larger.

  There is still much argument about who started the First Matabele War. British settlers and traders had been moving inexorably out from their base in the South African Cape colony in pursuit of farmland, minerals and gold. By the early 1890s, they had established an unstable frontier with the
Matabele kingdom, but the urge to exploit its economic potential made further encroachment hard to resist. The pioneer colonists Cecil Rhodes and Dr Leander Starr Jameson brokered an agreement with the Matabele king to allow some mineral exploration in his lands, but Lobengula rightly concluded that the long-term intention was to colonize his kingdom. Rhodes’s British South Africa Company occupied Mashonaland to the south of the Matabele, enforcing control with a company police force and paid paramilitary troops. The Mashona were traditionally a source of women and cattle for Matabele raiding parties and it was an argument over just such a raid in July 1893 that finally provoked conflict. A Matabele impi (a Zulu term for an armed body of men), intending to punish a Mashona chief, entered the colonists’ base at Fort Victoria, killed Mashona servants and ransacked a number of European houses. British insistence that Lobengula suspend raiding into the Company’s area of Mashonaland was more than the king’s honour would permit. More impis were raised and deployed on the roads leading from the king’s capital at Bulawayo.

  This photograph of an early model of the Maxim Automatic Machine Gun was published in 1900. With its water-cooling system, the gun could fire up to 600 rounds a minute, transforming the nature of modern battle.