The Tyrolean insurrection did not come as a total surprise to Napoleon or the Bavarian authorities. But having taken the correct decision to concentrate on destroying the main Austrian army under Charles, they took a calculated risk. With the main body of the Bavarian army under Lefebvre fighting in the north, the total Bavarian force in the Tyrol amounted to fewer than 4,200 men, whose principal mission was to protect communications along the main road connecting the Army of Italy and the Army of Germany. This weak force, commanded by the incompetent General August Kinkel, was divided into penny packets around Innsbruck and Brixen, both towns divided by the Brenner Pass, with small detachments north along the Inn to Altbayern and south to the Kingdom of Italy. Only the fortress of Kufstein near Salzburg, lightly held by some depot companies but mounting sixty guns, provided a strong position.13
When on 9 April the promised Austrian troop aid, Chasteler’s augmented division, had crossed the frontier at Lienz, the Tyrolean sharpshooter Schützen militia, alerted by church bells and signal fires on the mountains, assembled at once. On 10 April they drove out the small Bavarian garrison at Sterzing, two under-strength light-infantry battalions, which retreated south across the Brenner Pass. Three days later, now 15,000 combatants strong, commanded by Major Martin Teimer, a retired officer, and inspired by popular leaders like Hofer and the fanatic Capuchin monk Josef Speckbacher, they defeated a 4,000-strong Bavarian–French force in the first battle of Mount Isel, 2 miles south of the capital Innsbruck. Continuing on to Innsbruck, on 16 April after a short siege the garrison, 3,860 Bavarians and 2,050 French, capitulated, providing the insurgents with a valuable booty of five cannons, two mortars, thousands of muskets and considerable stores. The same day Chasteler’s leading brigade entered Innsbruck while a 2,000-strong French column marching on the main road from Italy to the Danube was attacked by the insurgents and forced to capitulate. Success spread the revolt west to adjoining Vorarlberg, ceded to Württemberg at Pressburg, where insurgents under Anton Schneider, a lawyer, drove the small garrison out of the country and occupied Bregenz. Encouraged, Tyrolean war parties even raided into south Bavaria, creating bitter hostility by their looting, brutality and occasional atrocities that would carry over into the guerrilla war in the home country. With almost no regular troops available, the Munich government was compelled to create ad hoc forces by the first week of May, notably a special 7,500-strong Mountain Sharpshooter (Gebirgschützen) Corps under Count Max von Arco.
After Ratisbon, Lefebvre was detached to deal with the insurrection. In the end, his intervention with Deroy’s and Wrede’s divisions from 7 Corps, assisted by small contingents of Confederation of the Rhine troops, decided the issue. On 12 May Deroy relieved Kufstein and the next day Wrede defeated Chasteler’s main body at Wörgl, a village 10 miles south-east of Kufstein, driving the Austrians and Tyroleans back into Carinthia. The Austrians lost 200 dead and wounded, 2,000 prisoners of war, nine cannon and three flags. The victory, however, was marred by a level of atrocities that caused Lefebvre, a hard man, to issue an order-of-the-day stating that he was deeply offended by the conduct of the troops. ‘Who’, he demanded, has permitted ‘the many cruelties, murders, looting?’ He continued ‘that soldiers had no right to killed unarmed civilians, plunder houses and huts, and torch villages. I ask you soldiers, where were your feelings of humanity?’14
On 19 May the Bavarians reoccupied Innsbruck and, convinced that he had broken the revolt, on 22 May Lefebvre took the bulk of his forces back to Salzburg, leaving behind only Deroy’s division, little above 5,000 combatants, in the capital. But only three days later the Tyroleans, this time led by Hofer and Haspinger, rose again. The second battle of Mount Isel on 25 May remained undecided, but four days later the third battle of Mount Isel was a victory of 1,400 Austrian regulars and some 13,600 Tyrolean levies over the Bavarians under Deroy and enabled the Tyroleans to occupy Innsbruck again. For once optimistic following the success at Aspern–Essling, the Emperor Francis now gave his solemn assurance that Austria would retain the Tyrol in any peace treaty, an undertaking he would break after he was defeated.
The Battle of Wagram and the Armistice of Znaim released additional French and German troops, Rouyer’s division, Bavarians and Saxons among them, which, conducting a concentric offensive, reoccupied Innsbruck by 30 July. Even so, by the next day, 1 August, the rebellion flared up again. Once more, the insurgents, now fighting without the support of regular Austrian troops and with the Austrian civilian administrator withdrawn from Innsbruck, were initially and surprisingly victorious. On 4 and 5 August the Tyroleans led by Speckbacher managed to ambush Saxon and Bavarian troops in a narrow valley, named the Sachsenklemme (Saxon clamp) ever since. Blocking the defile at its narrowest point with well-placed rocks and tree trunks, they inflicted about 500 casualties and forced the remaining 700 to surrender. On 13 August Lefebvre with 10,000 men was defeated in the fourth battle of Mount Isel, a success that enabled Hofer to enter Innsbruck again. Here he proclaimed a provisional government in the name of the Emperor Francis I, assuming the title of military governor (Landeskommandant). When the rebels also gained victories in the west and south of the country, a deeply despondent Lefebvre evacuated the Tyrol. But this was the last notable success of the insurgents. The defeat of Austria allowed Napoleon to employ overwhelming resources to crush the revolt. Mustering 50,000 Bavarian, Württemberg, Saxon and Italian troops, he ordered a methodical offensive. On 28 October a Bavarian detachment once again occupied the capital. Hofer had managed to mobilize some 8,000 men south of Innsbruck, but these were the ‘last levy’, old men and boys, and their activities lacked cohesion and enterprise. When attacked by Wrede in the fifth battle of Mount Isel on 1 November, the Tyroleans broke and fled. Ultimately this engagement decided the fate of the country.
Though Hofer fought on, he rapidly lost support. Food was short, many were disillusioned and it became increasingly difficult to keep men fighting. Moreover, in the new offensive, a deliberate effort was made to curb troop brutalities and to gain the hearts and minds of the population. The Bavarians in particular had learned a good deal about pacification and mountain fighting. Now more disciplined, the French and allied troops committed fewer atrocities while, by occupying the valleys, they forced the Tyrolean insurgents to take refuge in the inhospitable mountains. With supplies short, resistance flagged and then ceased in the north of the country; within a month the south-west of the country was similarly pacified. Hofer himself took shelter in a mountain hut, but his hideout was betrayed and he was captured on 27 January 1810. Despite pleas for mercy from Prince Eugène and others, a French court-martial tried him as a rebel and he was executed by firing squad in the dry ditch of Fortress Mantua on 20 February. As Carl von Clausewitz, the great interpreter of war, pointed out, national insurrections ‘thrive in mountains, but always need support from small regular units’.15 In the campaign of 1809 these conditions prevailed initially in the Tyrol, but after the withdrawal of Chasteler’s division, the Tyroleans stubbornly fought on, greatly aided by the terrain which provided them with tactical advantages. But they had to come down from their mountains for food and this proved their tactical Achilles heel. Strategically, once Napoleon was established near Vienna and given Charles’s reluctance to cross the broad river to attack him, any temporary interruption of communications between Germany and Italy had little effect.
SPRING INSURRECTIONS IN NORTH GERMANY
Austrian hopes for a national uprising in north Germany were also to be disappointed. Neither the three insurrections in Westphalia nor the Duke of Brunswick’s operations in central Germany inspired a national revolt. They were embarrassments only, easily dealt with by reserve and allied forces, including Dutch and Danish units.16 They opened with insurrections in the Kingdom of Westphalia, a member of the Confederation of the Rhine since 1807, created by combining Hanover with the duchies of Brunswick and Hesse-Cassel and ruled by King Jerome, Napoleon’s brother, from the capital, Kassel. Like all other members of
the Rheinbund, Westphalia was to provide an army for field service. This was originally set at 25,000, but wanting a well-founded force Napoleon then decreed it should consist of only 12,500 men. But overly ambitious, Jerome raised a larger army with a disproportionately large Royal Guard and with his line regiments – four infantry regiments, one light battalion, two cavalry regiments and two foot artillery batteries – manned with volunteers and conscripts. In addition, various units of National Guard were formed. Officers were found from various sources, with at least 50 per cent of them Hessians, some 25 per cent Prussian, Brunswick and Hanoverian and the remainder French. Holding mainly senior and staff positions, the French officers, largely cronies of King Jerome, aroused a fair amount of dislike and compromised the emergence of a national Westphalian force. While conditions of service were enlightened, the army had not yet been fully formed or coalesced and in the spring of 1809 Westphalia was beset by three small uprisings, two led by former Prussian officers, one by an active-duty Prussian officer.
In late 1808 and early 1809 one regiment of chevaulegers and one infantry division had been ordered to Spain, leaving King Jerome with only his Royal Guard, one under-strength cuirassier regiment, one formed and three as yet still assembling infantry regiments, all widely dispersed, at his disposal. The first uprising came between 2 and 4 April, that is even before Austria opened hostilities.
Friedrich Karl von Katte, a pensioned former Prussian lieutenant, had been approached by German conspirators directed from Vienna and had agreed to raise a force to take Magdeburg fortress. Though he spent several months trying to recruit followers, he had only about 300 men when he attempted to march on Magdeburg. After crossing the Elbe from Prussia into Westphalia, he encountered a mounted patrol of Westphalian National Guards and fled back across the river. His force disbanded and Katte escaped into Bohemia to join the Duke of Brunswick’s enterprise.
The collapse of Katte’s enterprise should have been a warning. The next attempt at a revolt also only lasted three days, 22–24 April, and was led by a former Prussian officer, Wilhelm Freiherr von Dörnberg, who had been taken into the Royal Guard where he attempted to gain support for another revolt. Dörnberg was an experienced officer, though lacking judgment, but his associates, recruited in the various former states that been combined to form Westphalia, were self-important and confused enthusiasts. Acting on the news of the initially successful Austrian invasion of Bavaria and anticipating support from a Prussian military revolt, Dörnberg’s scheme was apparently to seize Jerome and his French generals and capture the capital. Beyond this the plotters had no concrete plans.
On 22 April, while Napoleon was beating the Austrians at Eckmühl, Dörnberg raised the standard of revolt, assembling about 4,000 men. He had already given up his attempt to capture Jerome, but on the 23rd was marching at the head of his small column towards Kassel. While surprised by developments, Jerome did not panic. He was able to muster some loyal troops who managed to halt and then to disperse the disorderly rebels of the main body, while other insurgent groups met a similar fate. By the evening of the 23rd the insurrection had collapsed, its leader fleeing in disguise to Bohemia. Jerome, despite advice to the contrary, had remained in the capital and by reminding his officers to remember their oath, had kept waverers in line to lead their troops against the rebels.
Finally, there was the attempt by a Prussian major, Ferdinand von Schill, a cavalry officer who had gained a reputation leading raids against the French rear in 1807 and who hoped that his vision would inflame a national revolt in north Germany and lead Prussia to re-open the war against France. On 28 April he led his 2nd Brandenburg Hussars out of Berlin and, after informing them of his intent to invade Westphalia, rode on towards Magdeburg. But when he learned that this strong fortress was prepared for defence, he turned south towards Saxony to appear before Wittenberg. Though he asserted that he was but the vanguard of the Prussian Army, two energetic Saxon captains refused either to capitulate or to comply with his demand for a very substantial amount of money.
Frustrated, Schill turned north into Westphalia. After scoring some minor successes he found that the population, fearing that the enterprise was likely to degenerate into brigandage, was not about to rise against the French. By 4 May he received intelligence that Dörnberg had failed and that a French–Westphalian force from Magdeburg was marching to intercept his small force – which he had renamed the Freikorps Schill in order not to compromise Prussia – to block his onward march. On 5 May a small force consisting of two companies of the French 22nd Line, four Westphalian companies and two guns confronted Schill at Dodendorf south of Magdeburg. The ensuing encounter was a minor tactical victory for Schill but a costly one, with Schill increasingly disappointed that the Westphalians had not gone over to him and that his losses – twelve officers, seventy men and numerous horses – could not be replaced. Discouraged, he crossed into the duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and then began his march north along the Elbe and east towards Stralsund in Swedish Pomerania, where he hoped to find support from the Royal Navy and from the Swedish troops. Schill reached Stralsund on 24 May and seized the dilapidated fortress, encountering negligible resistance. Here some Swedish soldiers and militia infantry from Rügen Island joined his force, bringing it up to 1,400 men with fifteen pieces of artillery.
In Kassel, meanwhile, Jerome’s government, believing that Schill was but the vanguard of a Prussian invasion, had panicked and on 4 May had called on the minister of war in Paris and on Kellermann for support. Napoleon refused and told Jerome that his 10 Corps was more than adequate to defend the kingdom. Even so, Kellermann dispatched a Berg regiment to Kassel where it arrived at the end of June. While the regiment saw no action, its presence allowed Jerome to employ his Royal Guard for operations. At that point the bulk of 10 Corps was distributed with the Royal Guard, a combined battalion of French depot troops and the Berg infantry regiment at Kassel, the line units and the companies of the French 22nd Line in Magdeburg, and a Dutch division under GD Pierre Guillaume Gratien between Hamburg and Bremen. Although command and control of 10 Corps was totally ineffective, the situation not improved by rivalry between the various commanders, by 20 May it had become clear that Schill had but a tiny force and now Gratien set off in pursuit. After some delay Gratien, reinforced by some 2,100 Danish troops to around 6,000 men, stormed the fortress on 31 May. Schill was killed during the fighting. His remaining officers and men surrendered. Randomly selected, fourteen troopers were shot between 18 and 22 July; the remainder were sent to the galleys at Cherbourg and Brest. The eleven officers captured faced court-martial at Wesel and were shot on 16 September. Only a handful of Schill’s men escaped into Prussia, where the officers were cashiered and the men imprisoned.
THE BLACK BAND AND AUSTRIAN INCURSIONS INTO SAXONY
Among the various revolts raised in Germany in 1809, the efforts of the Black Brunswickers, a force raised and commanded by the 38-year-old deposed Duke of Brunswick-Oels, Friedrich Wilhelm, were perhaps the most effective and certainly the luckiest. His duchy had been absorbed into Westphalia and he had retired to Baden. When it became clear that Austria was intent on war with France, he hurried to Vienna to sign a convention that he would raise a small corps, about 2,000 strong, and join the war against France as an independent ally not as part of the Austrian Army. Obsessed by thoughts of revenge against Napoleon and France, he clothed his men in totally black uniforms, hence their name, the ‘Black Band’. On 21 May he issued a proclamation calling on all Germans to revolt and began to engage a small war against French communications, depots and such like in Saxony from where most line troops had departed as the 9 Corps under Bernadotte. But the duke’s forces displayed an unfortunate proclivity to loot and plunder and became little more than brigands. Meanwhile, his appeals for volunteers fell on deaf ears: fewer than 200 men were enlisted. Even the support of an Austrian division under FML Carl am Ende, arriving from Bohemia in late May, did not improve the Brunswickers’ effectiveness or thei
r recruitment effort and neither did other Austrian detachments sent from Bohemia on raids into Saxony.
They were none the less an embarrassment to the French and their German allies when they occupied Dresden on 16 July, this despite improving Saxon attempts to raise or organize new troops even to the extent of recalling units from Poland. This annoyed Napoleon. The region’s defence was the responsibility of Jerome’s 10 Corps, but the prince had done very little. Now stung into action by several harsh reprimands from the emperor, he finally sent Westphalian and Dutch units to drive the Black Band out of Saxony. Main elements of 10 Corps arrived in the combat area on 1 July, but on 13 July the Znaim armistice ended the fighting between France and Austria, and on orders from Archduke Charles, the Austrian contingents, ultimately commanded by FML Kienmayer, were withdrawn on 21 July. As an independent ally of Austria, the Duke of Brunswick refused to acknowledge the armistice between the Napoleonic and Habsburg empires and with a small mixed force, some 2,200 men, set out towards north Germany passing through Brunswick. He had expected popular support in his ancestral lands, but little emerged and though he managed to defeat a scandalously poorly led Westphalian column, mainly the 5th Line, on 1 August at Halberstadt, he had no option but to continue to the North Sea. Evading an extremely badly handled Westphalian and Saxon pursuit, the duke and his remaining 1,600 men – three light battalions, one sharpshooter company, a hussar regiment, a lancer squadron and a horse artillery battery – managed to embark on Royal Navy ships near Bremen on 3 and 4 August. Thus they escaped the fate of Schill’s men and, reorganized on the Isle of Wight and designated as the Brunswick-Oels Jäger, in October 1810 they were sent to join Wellington’s army in Spain.
The Emperor's Last Victory Page 9