Let's give credit where it's due. Wellington -- with the belated assistance of the Prussians -- defeated Napoleon, once and for all. Whether through his own brilliant leadership or his opponent's poor is largely a matter of opinion.
ahhhh....not so.
It was Blucher who won the battle of Waterloo in 2 ways:
1) His army when it withdrew from the defeat of Ligny drew off one Corp of Napoleon’s army, which was not present at Waterloo.
2) His very fast movement of the Prussian army allowed his army to be present at Waterloo, again while one of Napoleons corps was off chasing him in the wrong direction.
3) His fierce attack on the right flank of Napoleons army in the afternoon kept Napoleon from concentration on the British forces. Napoleon had to split his forces in the midst of two forces and was unable to mass the concentration he needed to defeat the British in detail. Had Blucher not been coming in on the right flank, that would not have been the case.
Wellington certainly held off Napoleon in the “same old way” but without Blucher the best he would have achieved was a draw, instead of the decisive defeat achieved by the allied armies.
So the combination of moving his army faster than the French thought possible and making a very effective flanking attack with forces coming off of a movement was what one the battle and made it famous.
Histories written since 1915 seem to have left most of this out, focusing instead on the valiant British stand at waterloo. I wonder why.......
Waiting for Napoleon to get his ass handed to him was a legit strategem. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was just a boneheaded maneuver. Wellington’s snarky critiques of Napoleon are related to the fact that Wellington only is known in relationship to Napoleon. Obviously Napoleon was the greater general, and not by a little bit — he just wasn’t always right.
Casualties (both sides) at Borodino were 70,000; Napoleon lost 350,000 troops in the Russian campaign, mostly not due to battle, but rather to winter weather (there have been many attempts to revision that out of history, but it’s just a fact).
The Battle of Nations didn’t involve British troops, apart from some serving with the Swedes, yet involved about half as many troops as would later fight the huge Battle of the Somme in WWI (the difference being, the Somme lasted four months). That final campaign consisted of a series of battles, including some French victories, but after his defeat at Leipzig, Napoleon went into his first exile.
Waterloo was a fart in a hurricane by comparison with the Battle of Nations; French casualties at the earlier battle were roughly the entire combined casualty figures for Waterloo. After Leipzig, the piles of dead were everywhere.
Nappy had fewer troops by far, and there was still no recovery from the losses of veterans and command during the Russian campaign. He still maneuvered to beat Blucher; his idea appears to have been to keep the Prussians on the run and away from the battlefield, but ultimately that failed. He was forced to fight his adversaries simultaneously. Despite those disadvantages, he nearly pulled it off.
It’s mysterious to me that, given his interest in antiquity, Napoleon paid no attention to Herodotus’ account of the Persian army’s adventure chasing the Scythians around what is now the western Ukraine. They never were able to engage them, the Scythians would wait until they were in sight, then pack up everything, bug out, and ride off, putting multiple days’ march on the Persians’ to-do list. When winter started to come in, the Persians made their best time, marching as quick as could be to their bridge over the Danube, then to the Bosphorus bridge, and back to their empire.
The Germans in WWI might have learned something from that, and from Napoleon’s dabacle.
And Hitler, one would think, might have learned something from all three of those. Nothin’.