"I said dry, with an olive you peasant!"
Posted on 04/24/2008 10:43:29 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
I fear that the French are wasting their time. The problem is that every time they look at Waterloo they say that Napoleon won on points.
Napoleon’s army was the best he had commanded since he advanced into Russia – an army of veterans, 200,000 strong. Wellington referred to his force as “an infamous army”.
My predecessor, David Chandler, who wrote the definitive account of Napoleon’s campaigns, said that the Emperor’s idea had been to get between the Prussians and the British. “I will defeat the British and the Prussians, then the Austrians, then the Russians, and Europe will be mine,” Napoleon said.
He hits the British at Quatre Bras, who go reeling north back towards Brussels, and he hits the Prussians at Lingy. They retreat east, thinking that their commander, Blücher, is dead. He is found under a dead horse and revived with gin, rides after his soldiers and turns them around.
Napoleon doesn’t know anything about this: on the morning of June 18, 1815, he is terribly complacent.
Wellington decides to fight a defensive war of attrition. Through drunkenness, stupidity or fear of their officers, the British line holds. The French have been aware for some time of soldiers advancing on their right flank. Napoleon knows that these are the Prussians, but he sends his aides out through the ranks to say they are French soldiers. He has calculated that the British will fall first and he will have time to redeploy. It is a massive miscalculation.
When the Prussians come into musket range they open fire. The cry goes up among the French: “Treason!” They think these are French soldiers that have changed sides. It is then that the French army collapses.
That is Dr Chandler’s reconstruction and it is the most telling I have ever heard. Napoleon was responsible for his own defeat: he was complacent. Wellington was anxious and left nothing to chance. And if you are going into battle it is far better to be in a state of deep anxiety, as the events of the past four years prove.
— Duncan Anderson is Head of War Studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst
"I said dry, with an olive you peasant!"
BS! Napoleon was anything but complacent. He was just outgeneraled by Wellington during the battle. Plus, he was very ill at the time with either colitis or hemorrhoids, and could not effect his presence at key points in the battle, as he had done in victories past, since he could not ride his horse.
... where his complacency after Borodin and the sack of Moscow undid him.
Two serious mistakes were Ney's cavalry charge against the British squares, and Grouchy wandering around instead of hitting Wellington's flank or at least pushing Blucher out of the fight completely.
As to the British Army, it was loaded with hardened veterans of many campaigns and they were some tough hombres.
Wellington was smart to get the high ground, put many of his troops behind the slopeof the hill and fight a defensive battle.
Its threads like this that confirm to me the quality of contributors to FR. I’m sure if this thread was started over at DU or DailyKOS or Huffington, the typical response would be who’s Wellington?
I have read a number of accounts of Napeoleon and I agree with you. He was an extraordinary man who could simultaneously run military campaigns and a country. His powers of mental focus were unheard of then or since. He could dictate orders that were simple, clear, and precise. And he was able to operate this way days on end without sleep. His combination of intelligence, personality, and constitution made him a giant that took of of Europe to bring down. Next to him, Hitler was a midget.
1) The French army of 1814-1815 was not nearly the same terrifying military that crushed the coalitions in 1804-1805. Most military historians, including David Chandler, admit that the French army had significantly deteriorated by 1807, which is before Portugal, Spain, and of course, Russia. Conscription by 1810 had been greatly expanded, and by 1814 included 16 and 60-year-olds.
2) Napoleon's officer corps was shattered. His finest commander, including Murat (his finest cavalry commander), were already gone, many killed in Spain and Russia. At Borodino alone, Napoleon lost 13 generals killed!!! His chief of staff, Berthier, known for writing the most precise of orders, died falling off a house the year before Waterloo, and Napoleon's own pitifully worded instructions to Marshal Grouchy, to "stay at Blucher's back" sealed his doom by depriving Napoleon of 33,000 men in the heat of battle. Berthier never would have allowed such sloppy orders to go out.
3) The aura of the French military had been destroyed in Spain and Portugal. The confidence that they could beat Wellington alone, let alone in concert with other great powers, was not there. After Russia, it was totally shaken. The only ones not afraid were those too young to have experienced battle.
4) Absolutely Napoleon was to blame for "delaying" the attack at Waterloo until the afternoon---but that was precisely because the rain had soaked the ground turning it to mud. Duout warned Napoleon that he would not be able to move the artillery as fast as normal, depriving Napoleon of his typical ability to focus fire on specific parts of the British line.
5) Wellington, though having fewer dependable troops, nevertheless conserved his manpower by hiding them behind the ridges. This had the effect of not only preserving them from artillery fire, but in stunning and shocking both Ney's cavalry (which charged over the ridges into squares) and the subsequent "Old Guard" infantry advance, which again was staggered by the previously undetected reserves.
The fact is, even without Blucher arriving on the flank, Wellington had beaten Napoleon by the end of the day. The Old Guard was crushed, much of the French army was running, and Grouchy, with the only "fresh" reserves, was neither fresh---having marched for two days---nor able to link up with Napoleon because he was separated by Blucher's army.
Finally, Napoleon himself was assisted from the field right at the crucial moment due to his stomach cancer. There was nothing he, nor any other Frenchman, could have done to win that battle after Ney's cavalry charge.
See my analysis, above.
On that note, don’t miss #28. I’ve read Chandler, and the West Point text on the Napoleonic Wars (great for all the maps), and it’s spot on.
Seems to me that Napoleoen, like Hitler afterwards, was finally undone by a gambling problem.
But the Russians executed a scorched earth program on their own territory not their opponent's.
Don’t forget that the British pioneered the tactic of scorched earth on your ALLIES territory even earlier in Portugal during the Peninsular war
Thanks guys.. I should of known better.
The British troops at Waterloo were of lesser quality than Wellington had led in Spain, some of them raw recruits.
Wellington did have some experienced troops in his army, but many of them, like the Dutch-Belgians, had been in Napoleon's army as recently as 1 1/2 years before. Would kind of make you nervous.
But the “sepoy general”, as Napoleon liked to deride him, held it together and sent Napoleon on his path to the South Atlantic paradise of St. Helena.
Actually Berthier died just a few days before Waterloo, watching allied troops from a window in his home in Germany.
Fell? Pushed? Jumped? No one knows. But he didn’t join Napoleon for the Hundred Days, so apparently he had seen enough of war.
Neigh!!!!
One of the results of which was Clauswitz.
It is also instructive to the complacency that we see on our side as the “democrats” appear to self destruct. We will learn what some have always known about the left, they will lick their wounds and unite before November no matter who is at their head. They believe in winning, they believe in Lennin’s dictum “two steps forward, one step back”. Better to have 10% of something, than 100% of nothing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.