A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

  Each time the French forces stormed a redoubt or an earthwork, a second line of Russian soldiers stood in front of them a few hundred metres further back, making a second charge necessary. The struggle for the Raevsky redoubt came late in the afternoon and it soon turned into a swarm of soldiers from both sides fighting hand-to-hand to the death. But when the French stormed it, there was a second line of Russian infantry forming a new wall 800 metres (2,500 feet) away. Napoleon could find no way through and failed to outflank his enemy. His 25,000-strong Imperial Guard was held back throughout the battle when it might have won it in the last hours. At around 6 p.m., the battle petered out and the Russians withdrew a few kilometres to the east. Their withdrawal allowed Napoleon to claim Borodino as a victory, but it was a hollow success. He inspected the battlefield with its piles of corpses and wounded. In the Raevsky redoubt, they lay bleeding or senseless six to eight deep. The French forces lost forty-nine generals killed or wounded; the Russians lost twenty-nine, including Prince Bagration. French losses were estimated at 28,000, but thousands more died of wounds that could not be treated for lack of medical supplies and doctors. Russian casualties were put at 45,000.

  The Russian army reformed to the south but abandoned Moscow, which Napoleon entered on 15 September. Borodino made no difference in the end to either side. Alexander still refused to make peace. Short of food and water, harassed constantly by angry peasants and booty-seeking Cossacks, uncertain as to the future, the French armies became quickly demoralized. Napoleon was forced to retreat, and the long road back from Moscow left him in the end with only 20,000 tattered, emaciated and frozen troops when the army arrived outside Vilna. Napoleon hastened back to Paris, leaving perhaps 400,000 dead littering the wide Russian steppe. ‘Fortune,’ Napoleon is supposed to have said on the eve of Borodino, ‘is a fickle courtesan.’ For all the courage of his army, fortune abandoned him as it abandoned them.

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  No. 76 BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

  16–19 October 1813

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  The Battle of Leipzig was almost certainly the largest land battle fought in Europe before the First World War. It has been called the ‘Battle of the Nations’, but it was in truth a battle of monarchies – the Sixth Coalition of Austria, Prussia, Russia and Great Britain against the upstart emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte. Smaller monarchies joined in or changed sides, but the deciding struggle was between the big players, and the stakes were very great. This time the old monarchies of Europe wanted to be rid of Napoleon for good, even though they could not agree among themselves under what terms the defeated emperor would be tolerated once he was contained in France. The final showdown around the Saxon city of Leipzig in eastern Germany turned into a fierce face-to-face battle as the troops from both sides took and inflicted high casualties. The raking fire was nothing new to a Napoleonic battlefield, but this time all the armies involved understood that it had to be endured for what was evidently a climactic confrontation.

  The army of 177,000 men that Napoleon mustered for the final battle was not the army of his earlier campaigns. After the disastrous adventure in Russia in 1812, Napoleon was forced to scrape the bottom of the recruitment barrel. Young, raw recruits, older men, disabled veterans, 20,000 naval marines and gunners and units of the National Guard militia were drawn together, seasoned with the few remaining veterans and professionals. There was a severe shortage of cavalry horses, and the new horsemen recruited compounded the problem by not understanding how to care properly for their mounts, which died in thousands on the campaign. There was also a shortage of heavy horses to pull the guns and not enough time to train new animals to cope with the stresses of the work. The whole campaign in 1813 was dogged by a shortage of trained cavalrymen and difficulties in keeping open long lines of communication into central Europe.

  A German postcard of 1913 commemorates the centenary of the Battle of Leipzig in which the Prussian general Gebhard von Blücher, pictured here, was one of the Coalition commanders against the armies of Napoleon.

  The campaign in 1813 was complicated for both sides because fighting was taking place in three separate theatres: in Italy, in the Low Countries and northern Germany, and across the central German area of Saxony. Two major battles were fought at Lützen on 2 May and at Bautzen on 21 May; in each case Napoleon, whose army was divided, was able to bring up strong reinforcements in time to compel the Russians and Prussians to withdraw, though not to defeat them. Both sides took heavy casualties, and for a number of months a ceasefire existed. In the interval, Napoleon tried to win over the Austrians, but he could not agree to their demands and the Austrian chancellor, Prince Metternich, brought Austria into the Coalition camp in August. Napoleon now had almost the whole of Europe ranged against him. The Coalition comprised an Army of the North numbering 120,000 under Napoleon’s former marshal, Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, who was now king of Sweden and had taken the name Carl Johan; the Army of Silesia under the Prussian general Blücher, with 95,000 men; and the Army of Bohemia with 240,000 men. The overall commander was the Austrian field marshal, Prince Karl zu Schwarzenberg. Napoleon had armies stretched out across Europe, a total of 473,000 men. For the next two months they fought indecisive engagements against part of the enemy force as the two sides manoeuvred for advantage, but in the process Napoleon lost tens of thousands of his carefully garnered troops.

  A nineteenth-century engraving by the French artist François-Louis Couché (1782–1849) shows the retreat of Napoleon Bonaparte (on a white horse) from the Battle of Leipzig on 19 October 1813. The only bridge over the River Elster in Leipzig was detonated prematurely by a French sergeant while French troops were still crossing it, leaving 30,000 on the wrong side.

  The climax finally came in October. Leaving a force of 45,000 at Dresden under Marshal Joachim Murat, Napoleon took 150,000 men to try to pin the Prussians down to a decisive battle. Blücher avoided combat, but suddenly Napoleon had news that the Austrians and Russians, under Schwarzenberg, had returned from their sojourn in Bohemia and were pushing Murat back towards the city of Leipzig. What followed was a three-day battle on a truly awe-inspiring scale as half a million men were pitted against each other for the future of Europe. Napoleon had left 177,000 men, though few cavalry, to confront his approaching enemies. He attacked the Army of Bohemia, expecting to have support from other French armies further north. But they now faced stiff combat from the Prussians moving rapidly south. Napoleon’s offensive came to a halt, and on 17 October both sides regrouped for a final showdown. Though 14,000 more men reached Napoleon, the pause gave time for the Army of the North and additional Russian units to arrive at Leipzig, bringing the Coalition total to 256,000 infantry, 60,000 cavalry and 1,382 guns. The two gigantic armies then crashed together again on 18 October, but this time Napoleon was surrounded by a great semi-circular arc of enemy troops, who attacked in six columns, pushing the French back towards Leipzig.

  The fighting was fierce and confused for much of the day, but the direction was clear. When the traditional three cannon shots signalled the end of the day’s fighting, Napoleon had no alternative but to order a general retreat, and at 2 a.m. on 19 October, his armies began to withdraw westwards as best they could. The rearguard held the enemy at bay but was finally swamped by sheer numbers in fierce hand-to-hand fighting. Throughout, both sides had fought in the face of withering fire and heavy cannonades, with battlefield casualty rates among the worst of the war. For the French there was still one more tragedy. The single bridge over the River Elster at Leipzig had been mined for detonation by French engineers. A French sergeant blew up the bridge prematurely while it was still crowded with French troops, leaving 30,000 men to be captured or killed on the wrong side of the river. The 38,000 French dead and wounded from the three-day battle, added to the loss of the rearguard, took the heart out of what was left of the Grande Armée. The ferocity of the final days of fighting could be judged by the 54,000 casualties on the Coalition side. When the British ambassador to Vie
nna, Sir George Jackson, crossed the battlefield two days later he was shocked by the scene. He later wrote that ‘a more revolting and sickening spectacle I never beheld.’ He witnessed bloated horses, headless corpses, heads without bodies and thousands of ‘upturned faces of the dead, agony on some, a placid smile on others.’

  The ‘Battle of the Nations’ satisfied dynastic ambition at last and demonstrated that the armies of Prussia, Russia and Austria had learned something from the long campaigns against an ailing military genius. Napoleon turned back again to France, where he faced months of fruitless argument over seeking peace and a bitter and hopeless defence against a vast invading army. On 2 April, the French Senate deposed him as Coalition forces finally entered Paris. On 28 April, he was exiled to the island of Elba, off the Italian coast. Most of the battles in the revolutionary and Napoleonic era were not decisive in any meaningful sense, but Leipzig was.

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  No. 77 BATTLE OF NAVARINO BAY

  20 October 1827

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  The modern states of Greece and Egypt both owe their path to independence to a battle fought at an inlet in the western Peloponnese between a small squadron of British, French and Russian ships and the fleet of the Ottoman sultan. The battle had not been planned by either side, nor was it clearly directed at the independence or otherwise of either of its eventual beneficiaries, but it helped to end centuries of Turkish domination in the Balkans and did so in the most dangerous of circumstances. The battle in Navarino Bay was fought at close quarters after a mixed squadron, commanded by Vice Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, had sailed into the midst of the enemy fleet to frighten the Ottoman leaders into abandoning a savage campaign against the local Greek population. Crews on both sides bravely kept their place when they suddenly found themselves subjected to point-blank fire. Although at an immediate tactical disadvantage, the European ships stuck to their task with a grim and courageous determination and won an unexpected conflict.

  The Greek struggle against Ottoman rule had begun in 1821. By 1827, a ferocious campaign of repression waged by the Turks and their Egyptian vassals had left only a few areas of Greece in nationalist hands. Despite public sympathy in Christian Europe for the Greek cause, concern that the balance of power would be upset by an Ottoman defeat prevented any formal commitment to the Greeks. The atrocities in Greece nevertheless called for a response and in July 1827, Britain, France and Russia signed the Treaty of London, in which they agreed to pressure both sides in the war to accept mediation and end the violence. A small fleet set off from Russia commanded by Admiral Count Lodewijk van Heiden, while the British and French Mediterranean squadrons were instructed to engage in a ‘friendly demonstration of force’ to make sure an armistice was observed. Codrington found the expression puzzling, since force could seldom be friendly, while the Sultan in Constantinople and the Egyptian commander in Greece, the shrewd and ruthless Ibrahim Pasha, rejected out of hand any idea that the European powers had the right to intervene in their efforts to crush Greek insurrection. Instead, they assembled a large fleet in Alexandria and sent it to the Peloponnese to help finish the task of suppression. The fleet entered the small bay at Navarino on the western coast of Greece.

  The orders sent to the three European naval squadrons were never very precise and Codrington arrived off the coast at Navarino uncertain how to proceed. He was joined by the French ships under command of Admiral Henri de Rigny, while Heiden’s force was still on its way through the Mediterranean. The British and French commanders met Ibrahim Pasha on 25 September in an attempt to persuade him to accept the armistice, which the Greek nationalists had already done. Ibrahim refused, and a few days later he slipped out of Navarino Bay with part of his fleet to sail for Patras and drive out the nationalist garrison there. Codrington, though outnumbered, forced him to return. Ibrahim defiantly set off by land and began a campaign of renewed savagery against the local Greek population. This proved too much for Codrington and his allies, who were all pro-Greek, and on 18 October they decided to sail into the bay at Navarino, under the shadow of Turkish guns, to intimidate the Ottoman forces into abandoning the repression and dispersing their hostile fleet. Codrington later insisted that this move was not meant as a precursor to battle, but it is difficult not to see the entry of the European ships as a direct and humiliating challenge to which the Turkish–Egyptian fleet was honour-bound to respond.

  An illustration by William Overend (1851–98) for Cassell’s Illustrated History of England, published in 1874, shows the British ship Asia engaging two Turkish ships during the Battle of Navarino Bay on 20 October 1827. The vessels were only a few metres apart during the bombardment.

  On paper, the balance of forces favoured the Turkish–Egyptian fleet commanded by Tahir Pasha and the Egyptian admiral, Moharrem Bey. Their combined fleet had 65 ships with 2,000 guns, with a small number of fire ships. The European fleet comprised 12 British, 8 Russian and 7 French ships, mounting between them 1,298 guns. The Turkish vessels were drawn up in a horseshoe formation around the bay as if already expecting battle, with the major fighting ships at the front, and the fire ships and smaller sloops behind. At 1.30 p.m. on 20 October, Codrington led his Royal Navy squadron into the bay, followed at a distance by the French under de Rigny, and finally by the Russians. Arguments have raged ever since about who started the fight, but Codrington had been keen to avoid it if possible. Both sides had itchy trigger-fingers; the guns were primed and the fire ships ready to go. When a red flag was raised as an apparent signal to the Turkish vessels, activity could be seen on the first of the fire ships. A small British boat was sent to order the crew of the fire ship to cease their preparations, but the sailors were fired on and the officer killed. A few minutes later a Turkish ship fired on de Rigny’s flagship Sirène and a general battle started almost at once, with the ships from both sides firing from only a few metres’ distance apart – point-blank cannonades backed by rifle fire from the marines.

  What followed was an extraordinary mêlée as the ships, mostly at anchor, tried to shift away from the worst of the broadsides while inflicting as much damage as possible on the enemy. European guns and gunnery were generally superior, but the Turkish sailors stuck to their task with exceptional bravery, as British accounts later confirmed, even while their ships caught fire, or, in some cases, exploded with a deafening roar. Codrington’s flagship Asia destroyed the Turkish flagship of Tahir Pasha before turning to wreck the Warrior, flagship of the Egyptian commander, who had been reluctant to enter the fray at all. The water was soon filled with wreckage, struggling sailors and mutilated corpses; many Turkish sailors were chained to their posts and unable to escape into the sea. The only tactic, one British sailor later wrote, was ‘burn, sink and destroy’. When Heiden’s squadron finally sailed into position, firing with great effect, the battle had already been decided. Heiden’s flagship Azov sank three frigates, one corvette and a sixty-gun ship of the line, which blew up after half an hour of bombardment.

  After more than three hours of fighting, the Turkish fleet abandoned the contest with most of its ships destroyed or incapable. Not a single European ship was lost, while only 174 Europeans were killed; the Turkish fleet lost 60 ships and an estimated 6,000 dead. A number of the ships still afloat were deliberately blown up by the defeated Turks during the night. The battle made extraordinary demands on the crews, who found themselves in a situation from which they could not escape and which exposed them to direct and crippling fire. When Codrington visited the dying commander of Genoa, Captain Walter Bathurst, he told him, with some justice, ‘you die gloriously’. Yet little of this sacrifice was appreciated once it had been made. Codrington was summoned back to England and made to explain to a hostile parliament why he had allowed the battle to happen at all, while Ibrahim Pasha continued his depredations until compelled, under the terms of the Treaty of Adrianople two years later, to withdraw. The battle was, nevertheless, a turning point. Egypt finally rejected Turkish rule; Ottoman Turkey began
its long decline as the ‘sick man of Europe’, and Greece recovered its independence after centuries of servitude.

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  No. 78 FIRST BATTLE OF MANASSAS (BULL RUN)

  18–21 July 1861

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  The first major land engagement of the four-year American Civil War was fought around a small rail junction at Manassas, Virginia, close enough to the Union capital at Washington to make this a battle that Union generals wanted to win. Instead it was a major victory for the Confederacy, the group of breakaway states that hoped to retain slavery and defy the northern and western states of the Union. The forces were evenly matched in the numbers that actually fought, but neither side had anything like a disciplined body of men used to fighting on a battlefield. Both armies nevertheless displayed a robust courage under unfamiliar fire, though it was the Confederate units who stood firmest when the test came for their exhausted, thirsty and fearful men. Confederate stamina was exemplified by the famous stand of Brigadier General Thomas Jonathan Jackson, whose nickname ‘Stonewall’ was earned at Manassas as his unit stood firm against the tide of Union attacks and suffered more casualties that day than any other.

  The military leaders of both armies had been reluctant to fight this battle so soon, but the pressure from popular and political opinion on both sides to get to grips with the enemy as quickly as possible proved irresistible. The Union commander, General Irvin McDowell, had gathered around 35,000 troops in the Washington area, most of them green and untrained, many of them the newly recruited ‘ninety-day men’, who had been conscripted to serve for just ninety days before returning home. President Abraham Lincoln favoured action and ordered McDowell to attack the Confederate forces gathering around Manassas Junction in the hope that a major victory would open the way to the occupation of Richmond, the new capital of the Confederacy in Virginia, which was within easy reach from Washington. On the other side, the preferred strategy was to hold a line defending Virginia from Union encroachment, but public outcry demanded action against an enemy rated poorly compared with southern soldiers. The local commander at Manassas, General Pierre Beauregard, and the commander of the Army of the Shenandoah, General Joseph Johnston (who, under the nose of Union forces, slipped out of the valley with 11,000 men to join forces with Beauregard), could between them call on around 30,000 men for the battle, a little less than Union strength. Artillery was more even: fifty-five Confederate guns against fifty-seven of the Union.