A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

  Japanese politics in the late sixteenth century was dominated by the Toyotomi clan and its leader, Hideyoshi, who by the 1590s had imposed a fragile political unity on the whole of Japan. Failure in war in Korea weakened the Toyotomi hold over the rival daimyo. That hold was further weakened when Hideyoshi died in 1599, leaving a five-year-old son, Toyotomi Hideyori, as his successor. Before his death, Hideyoshi established a board of five regents (tairo) to rule on his son’s behalf and five administrators (bugyo) to oversee the running of the state. Within two years the two groups split into rival factions. While Hideyori and his mother sheltered in the powerful castle at Osaka, Tokugawa Ieyasu, the most senior military commander and a powerful landowner, built an alliance to support his efforts to supplant the Toyotomi. The daimyo still loyal to the Toyotomi succession, their land based chiefly in the west of the Japanese islands, gathered around the figure of Ishida Mitsunari, one of the leading bugyo. They also made their base at Osaka Castle, where the infant Hideyori was protected by the daimyo Mori Hidemoto, one of those who was to play a double game at Sekigahara.

  The clash between the two sides gathered pace in the summer and autumn of 1600 as each side sought to win over the allegiance of daimyo who hesitated to commit themselves. The Western Army captured the Tokugawa fortress of Fushimi while Tokugawa Ieyasu gathered a force of 30,000 of his own followers and 40,000 from his allies and marched towards Osaka. Ishida’s army numbered an estimated 80,000, but the reliability of many of his allies, already secretly in contact with Ieyasu, was doubtful. After a difficult march through heavy rain, the Western Army arrived at Sekigahara, where Ishida deployed his troops on hilly ground, protected on either flank by a stream, to await the oncoming Eastern Army. On 20 October 1600 (the Japanese fourteenth day of the ninth month), Ieyasu learned that the enemy was waiting for him at Sekigahara and the following morning, in heavy fog, the two armies stumbled into each other. As the fog lifted, the two armies stood face-to-face, an array of heavily armoured samurai armed with their traditional swords and bows, some on horseback. They were backed by a militia of light infantry carrying the traditional spear (naginata). Both sides had cannon, though Ishida’s artillery was hamstrung by the rain, which had soaked the gunpowder. Ieyasu had brought a supply of arquebuses to add to the traditional weaponry of the Japanese soldiers. He placed his allies in the front line, his own retainers in the reserve. At mid-morning, his ally Fukushima Masanori began the battle by launching his advance guard along the River Fuji against the right wing of the Western Army.

  A Japanese print of the Tokugawa clan leader, Ieyasu, whose victory over rival clans at the Battle of Sekigahara in October 1600 ended Japan’s civil wars and initiated the 250-year period of the Tokugawa shogunate. During the battle the 16,000 men of Kobayakawa Hideaki changed sides to support Ieyasu, sealing his victory.

  The details of the battle are sparse. Ieyasu followed Fukushima’s assault across the rain-soaked ground against the Western left. The samurai, like European knights, were the fighting elite, trained from a young age for mortal combat. ‘The way of the samurai,’ wrote one sixteenth-century soldier, ‘is desperateness. Ten men or more cannot kill such a man.’ As both assaults pushed forward, Fukushima’s flank lay open to attack. Otani Yoshitsugu, a former ‘chief-of-staff’ of the Toyotomi army in Korea, crossed Mount Fuji to attack Fukushima’s forces, who were already engaged in a fierce contest. At this point, Otani should have been supported by the 16,000 men of Kobayakawa Hideaki, stationed behind him on Mount Matsuo. Ieyasu ordered the arquebuses to open fire on the hill and as he did so, the young Hideaki, smarting from Ishida’s accusation of incompetence and encouraged to defect by a Christian daimyo, Dom Daimia Kuroda, decided that his allegiance to the Western Army was no longer useful. He charged into the fray against Otani and turned the tide of the battle. Seeing Hideaki’s disloyalty, and fearing its consequences, four other commanders switched sides. Behind the Western Army stood the reserve of Mori Hidemoto, with 15,000 soldiers. He, too, doomed Ishida by remaining largely inactive. The political calculations on the battlefield made the difference between defeat and victory, for the Western Army was not only larger, but had more battle experience from the war in Korea. This army now disintegrated and fled. Ishida and two of his leading commanders, Konishi Yukinaga and Ankokuji Ekei, were captured and later publicly executed. The casualties suffered by both sides in a long and bitter battle are unknown.

  The victory at Sekigahara confirmed Tokugawa Ieyasu as the military hegemon in Japan, though the defeated Western clans acknowledged his claim with reluctance. In 1603, the emperor Go-Yozei installed Ieyasu as sei-i tai-shogun, chief of the Japanese warrior estate and in effect the dominant political authority in Japan. Ieyasu took land away from the defeated daimyo of the Western Army and re-distributed it to his allies and those who had switched sides so auspiciously during the battle. The Christian daimyo, Kuroda, who played a key role in persuading Hideaki to change sides, was presented with a large fiefdom. In 1605, Ieyasu made his son Hidetada shogun in his place, initiating what was to be a 250-year dynasty of the Tokugawa.

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  No. 91 BATTLE OF MARENGO

  14 June 1800

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  One of the most famous portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte has him mounted on a rearing white horse crossing high in the Alps on his way to a stunning victory over the Austrians at the north Italian town of Marengo in the Po Valley. In reality, he made the journey partly on foot, partly on a more reliable mule, and the triumph at Marengo was so close to turning into a battlefield disaster that the later legend which surrounded it required judicious amendment of many of the facts. The real hero that humid day in Italy was Lieutenant General Louis Desaix, who managed to get his tired men to march back 15 kilometres (10 miles) from where Napoleon had sent them, and to lead them into battle at the last moment against an Austrian enemy so confident that victory had been won that their guard was down. As he charged, Desaix was accidentally shot in the back and killed, leaving the legend of Marengo to the fortunate Napoleon.

  The battle brought to an end the war of the Second Coalition, an alliance of Austria, Russia and Britain formed to overturn the conquests of revolutionary France in Italy, Germany and Switzerland. The war hinged on the ability of the Austrian army, commanded by General Michael von Melas and his chief-of-staff, General Anton von Zach, to drive the French out of northern Italy. Melas took 85,000 men on the campaign with the object of besieging the French garrison at Genoa and driving the army of Italy, commanded by General Louis Suchet, back over the frontier into France, to be followed by an Austrian invasion. The plan worked well enough at first. Suchet was pushed into Provence by mid-May while the 5,900 troops in Genoa finally surrendered on 1 June. The problem for Melas was the new French First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been appointed in a coup in November 1799 in Paris. His responsibility was to overcome the crisis faced by the military effort to export the revolution to Europe. Napoleon understood how serious the Austrian threat was. The only way to get quickly to northern Italy with the new army he had raised, the so-called Reserve Army, was to cross over the Alps behind the Austrians, cut off their supply route, and leave them trapped between two French forces, one in their rear, one in Genoa.

  Crossing the Alps was a severe challenge. It had to be done over the St Bernard pass, bringing 60,000 men, supplies and heavy guns along the snowy mountain tracks. Napoleon insisted on the risk, since success would place him right behind the Austrian army. Mules struggled along the treacherous paths laden with stores, while 100 soldiers pulled each cannon up the slopes. Yet the whole crossing, which had cost Hannibal heavy losses many centuries before, was undertaken in just three days. Most of the men and equipment made it safely across, and Napoleon moved towards Milan, which a smaller Austrian force then abandoned. Further south, he cut the main road used to move Austrian supplies along the Po Valley. What he did not know was that Genoa had already surrendered and Suchet’s army driven back towards France.
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  A portrait by the French painter Jean Antoine Gros (1771-1835) shows a mounted Napoleon Bonaparte with his troops after the Battle of Marengo on 14 June 1800. Although defeat loomed, French reinforcements arrived just as Napoleon was losing hope.

  Alerted to his enemy’s movements, Melas turned to face Napoleon, concentrating most of his army of around 30,000 men at Alessandria. His chief-of-staff suggested a ruse to get Napoleon to disperse his forces, allowing the main Austrian army to batter its way along the main supply road and reach safety further east. A spy was sent by the Austrians to inform Napoleon that Melas was hoping to escape northwards towards Milan, in the hope that the French would then move north as well, exposing their flank to an attack from the main Austrian force. Napoleon was unsure how to treat the deception, though the spy reported to Melas and Zach that the ruse had worked. In the end, Napoleon did not move north, but he sent one division northeast to cut off any Austrian attempt at a breakout, and a division commanded by Desaix southwest, towards the Austrian forces that Napoleon assumed were still at Genoa. Napoleon set up camp, uncertain of his options.

  On the evening of 13 June, the central French line clashed with a force of Austrians in and around the village of Marengo, close to the main bridge over the River Bormida and a few miles from the Austrian camp. Thanks to the spy, both sides misinterpreted the clash. Napoleon assumed this was Melas’s rearguard, left in place as the Austrians tried to withdraw, while Melas and Zach assumed that it was a small French blocking force, sent to disguise the move of the French army further north. The following morning Melas sent the bulk of his army across the plain from Alessandria, over the Bormida Bridge, and on to Marengo. The rest were sent northeast with Field Marshal Karl Ott von Bártokéz to block what was expected to be the real advance guard of Napoleon’s army. Both sides soon discovered their mistake. A crushing assault on the French line, now weakened by the dispersion of divisions north and south and the reserve held further back by Napoleon, was repulsed with difficulty. Twice more the Austrian force charged forward, both sides taking heavy casualties in bitter fighting. Napoleon at first believed the assault was a mere feint to mask the Austrian retreat and refused his front-line commanders’ request for aid. He finally realized his mistake by mid-morning and sent a despairing note to Desaix, 15 kilometres (10 miles) down the road in Genoa: ‘For God’s sake, come up if you still can.’

  Slowly the French army, outgunned by the larger Austrian force, was pushed back from Marengo. At places there were only ten paces between the lines as men fired at point-blank range. Melas ordered a flanking attack on the French left, while Ott’s force, finding that the French army was not advancing from the north, turned back to threaten the French right flank. By 2.30 p.m., after hours of stubborn, blood-soaked fighting, the French abandoned Marengo for a line of vineyards further back; the right wing faced collapse and at 3 p.m. Napoleon ordered the elite Consular Guard to attack Ott and hold back the threat of encirclement. The Guard found themselves isolated and were annihilated, and by late afternoon Napoleon faced a catastrophic defeat. Melas thought he had won and ordered a pause while the army organized for a pursuit. Bruised by two falls earlier in the day, he returned to the Austrian camp, confident of victory.

  A short while elapsed while the French waited for the final humiliation when suddenly Desaix arrived to greet Napoleon. Among the many versions of what passed between the two men was one that suited the later Bonaparte legend. ‘I think this is a battle lost,’ Desaix is supposed to have said, to which Napoleon retorted, ‘I think it is a battle won.’ The 6,000 new troops were sent against the tired Austrian line after a brief and unexpected bombardment. Desaix was killed in the first attacks, but the momentum continued. When an Austrian rally threatened, General François Kellermann attacked with 400 cavalry and scattered the threat. Two more hours of bloody combat followed as the disheartened Austrians were pushed back through Marengo and the narrow river crossing. Here hundreds were crushed at the water’s edge or drowned in the river. Unexpectedly, the Austrians now stared defeat in the face. When dusk came, they fell back in a battered line to the Austrian camp. Around 6,500 casualties were suffered by both sides; the French lost 5,000 as prisoners, the Austrians almost 3,000. An armistice was signed and Melas was allowed to retreat eastwards with his surviving army intact. On 2 July, Napoleon returned in triumph to Paris, where his reports on Marengo had already turned a battle he had almost lost into an undeserved monument to his masterful leadership and shrewd battlefield skills..

  This panorama of the Battle of Marengo, fought in northern Italy near the River Bormida, was painted by the French soldier-artist Louis-François, Baron de Lejeune (1775-1848), who was present at the battle as an officer of engineers. It shows the arrival of French reinforcements led by Lieutenant General Louis Desaix, who died as he charged the Austrian lines.

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  No. 92 BATTLE OF WATERLOO

  18 June 1815

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  The great Allied victory near the Belgian village of Waterloo against the final offensive of Napoleon Bonaparte has at its core the legend of the arrival of the Prussian army in the nick of time to save the day for the beleaguered forces under General Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. The claim has always encouraged arguments about the decisive moment in the battle. It is not untrue that the Prussians arrived as the struggle was near its end, and thus ensured a comprehensive rout and pursuit of the French army, but it is not necessarily the case that Wellington needed Prussian help. His management of a classic defensive strategy on ground of his choosing sealed the outcome of a battle that Napoleon had been overconfident of winning.

  Waterloo was neither the longest nor the largest battle of the Napoleonic Wars, but it was decisive in ending the spectacular career of the Corsican-born emperor who had taken France and then Europe by storm. After defeat and exile to the island of Elba in 1814, Napoleon harboured ambitions for a return to glory. Escaping from his unwary British guardians, he returned to France in March 1815, overthrew the recently installed king, Louis XVIII, raised an army of veterans and admirers and prepared to fight Europe for his right to rule. Meeting at Vienna to argue out the terms of a peace settlement, the other Great Powers responded to the arrival of a fresh Napoleonic threat by immediately forming a Seventh Coalition. This included Great Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia, which each pledged 150,000 troops to finish off Napoleon once and for all.

  By early summer Napoleon had organized an army loyal to him, led by marshals and generals who had served him through conquests and defeats. His strategy in the past had relied on dividing his enemies and defeating them piecemeal. The armies of the Coalition were gathered slowly together, but the British army in Belgium under Wellington, with a mixed force of 90,000 soldiers from Britain, the Low Countries, Brunswick and Hanover, was the nearest and the most vulnerable. The Prussians, under Field Marshal Gebhard von Blücher and Lieutenant General August von Gneisenau, were forming an army of 130,000, but the two coalition forces were still stationed some distance apart – Wellington around Brussels, the Prussians further east around Namur. Napoleon chose to attack them separately before they had consolidated their forces. The Battle of Waterloo was in truth a battle of three days of position and manoeuvre as Napoleon sought to eliminate two of his powerful opponents. On 15 June, he launched his field army of around 100,000 men across the Belgian border. Part of it was to attack and drive back the Prussians, and part was to march on Wellington before he was ready and drive the British into the sea.

  On 16 June, the French army attacked the Prussians at Ligny and Wellington’s army at the village of Quatre Bras. The larger Prussian force resisted stoutly but took heavy casualties to prolonged French assault; they eventually fell back in good order having suffered 19,000 losses to 13,900 French. Marshal Michel Ney commanded the force against the British and initially he had 28,000 men to Wellington’s 8,000. But more of the Coalition force arrived and they soon numbered around 30,000, allowing early French
gains to be retaken. Wellington then disengaged with great discipline, moving his forces back to a position he had already reconnoitred on the road to Brussels, along a ridge at Mont-Saint-Jean near the village of Waterloo. In torrential rain the two sides moved into position to continue the contest. Napoleon was confident that the Prussians were fleeing eastward and sent Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy to pursue them, but on 17 June Blücher informed Wellington that he was actually moving north in order to join him at some point on the following day, the very outcome that Napoleon had wanted to avoid. The bulk of the French army, around 72,000 men, moved up the Brussels road towards Wellington. On the morning of 18 June, through paths and fields turned to churning mud by heavy rains, Napoleon drew up his army for what he hoped would be a textbook victory against a British opponent he had consistently underrated.

  Wellington had chosen his ground well. On either flank he was protected by a hilltop farm, Hougoumont on the right, La Haie Sainte on the left, both of which were heavily garrisoned. He placed his artillery along the forward slope to slow up the French advance, and held the bulk of his infantry and a reserve of cavalry on the rear slope, concealed from view and sheltered from the worst of the French artillery barrage. The foot soldiers were in ranks four-deep on the centre and right, though weaker on the left in expectation that the Prussians would soon arrive from that direction. Napoleon had once claimed that war was waged only with ‘vigour, decision and unbroken will’ but at Mont-Saint-Jean he was a tired commander, made sluggish by painful haemorrhoids and cystitis and a greater remoteness from the battlefield, whose management he left to Ney. Rather than try a battle of manoeuvre, he believed his force strong enough to sweep Wellington’s army away with a firm frontal assault. The two redoubts at Hougoumont and La Haie Sainte were invested first; Hougouomont was never captured, La Haie Sainte only at 6.15 p.m., both attempts absorbing large numbers of French troops. At 1.30 p.m. the first wave of French infantry – four divisions under Count Jean Baptiste d’Erlon – attacked Wellington’s centre. As they crossed in columns over the ridge, they confronted a line of defence that they could not break. The cavalry under Lord Uxbridge then charged, driving the French infantry back. The attempt by the French to dislodge the enemy on foot had failed.