Battle of Jena: Napoleon’s Double Knock-out Punch

Military History  | 2 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

On the night of November 5, 1805, two men and a woman secretly entered the crypt of the Church of the Garrison at Potsdam near Berlin. At exactly midnight, the three joined hands over the coffin of Friedrich II, king of Prussia — Frederick the Great — and swore to overthrow ‘The Monster,’ as they and many other Europeans called Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of the French. Making the oath were Friedrich Wilhelm III, king of Prussia; his wife, Queen Louise von Mecklenburg-Strelitz, so beautiful that a contemporary described her as ‘an apparition from a fairy tale’; and Tsar Alexander I of Russia.

Within a month of their solemn agreement, however, that oath was in jeopardy. On December 2, 1805, Napoleon crushed a combined Austro-Russian army at Austerlitz, a victory that left him in control of most of Western Europe. The Austrians were forced to sign the humiliating peace treaty of Pressburg, and Alexander’s Russian army had to retreat homeward, technically still at war with France, but defeated and exhausted.

But where were the Prussians? Despite Friedrich Wilhelm’s assurance of support, the pace of events had moved too fast. By the time that the king’s foreign minister, Christian Graf von Haugwitz, managed to meet with Napoleon, the French emperor had already destroyed the Austro-Russian armies. Instead of delivering an ultimatum, Haugwitz abruptly reversed his stance, offered his warmest congratulations and agreed to a treaty with France. Under its terms Prussia ceded the principalities of Ansbach, Cleve, Neufchatel and Wesel to France. In return Prussia received the right to occupy the kingdom of Hanover, then the property of George III, king of Great Britain. When word of Friedrich Wilhelm’s duplicity became public, Britain promptly declared war on Prussia.

For Prussia, worse was to follow. On July 17, 1806, Napoleon concluded the Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine. Fifteen German rulers, sniffing the prevailing wind, agreed to secede from the Holy Roman Empire and the protection of defeated Emperor Francis II of Austria and become members of a Confederation of the Rhine under Napoleon’s protection. The 15 pledged to shelter French troops and to raise contingents of soldiers to aid them in any war they might fight.

Friedrich Wilhelm now feared war with France and tried to forestall pressure from the growing war party in his government, one of whose leaders was Queen Louise. When Napoleon offered to return Hanover to George III in exchange for peace with Britain, however, the Prussian king was furious. He wrote to Tsar Alexander on August 9, ‘If Napoleon is treating with London about Hanover, he will destroy me.’ The Prussians secretly started preparing for war with France. Friedrich Wilhelm began to seek allies. A flurry of new treaties with Russia, still eager to overthrow Napoleon, and an agreement with England led to the formation of a new coalition — the fourth — against France.

Supremely confident of victory, the Prussians bragged that clubs would be all they needed to thrash Napoleon’s French ‘cobblers.’ Berliners cheered wildly when Queen Louise, wearing a crimson and blue colonel’s uniform, paraded before the regiment of dragoons that bore her name. French Lieutenant Jean Baptiste Antoine Marcellin de Marbot, then in Berlin as an envoy to the Prussian government, recalled, ‘The officers whom I knew ventured no longer to speak to me or salute me; many Frenchmen were insulted by the populace; the men-at-arms of the Noble Guard pushed their swagger to the point of whetting their sword-blades on the stone steps of the French ambassador’s house.’ On October 7, 1806, Friedrich Wilhelm sent an insulting ultimatum to Napoleon, giving the emperor just two weeks to remove all French soldiers east of the Rhine and demanding that France give up all territory acquired since 1794.

To knowledgeable observers, Prussian confidence was out of place. As early as 1789, a French politician noted, ‘The Prussian monarchy is so constituted that it could not cope with calamity.’ The much-vaunted Prussian army of Frederick the Great had rested on its laurels and lacked recent experience in combat. In peacetime there was scant provision for large units to exercise together. In time of war brigades and divisions were organized ad hoc, leaving commanders little time to train or get to know their units. There were no army reserves of artillery or cavalry, or more important, any staff organization worthy of the name.

Most of those problems stemmed from the fact that the officer corps was old and hidebound. Many of Prussia’s highest-ranking officers had been junior officers during the Seven Years’ War; by 1806, of 142 generals, four were over 80 years of age, 13 were over 79, and 62 over 60, while 25 percent of the regimental and battalion commanders were over 60.

The Prussian mobilization was disorderly and incomplete. Young Captain Carl Maria von Clausewitz wrote that the Prussian army had 210,000 men, but such large detachments were held back in Poland and Silesia that the actual number of men available to face Napoleon was not more than 110,000.

To compound the army’s problems, the king divided his army into three commands. The first, 60,000 men, was commanded by 71-year-old Duke Carl of Brunswick, nephew and pupil of Frederick the Great. The second, 22,000 men, was under 60-year-old Friedrich Ludwig, Prince of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen. The third, 28,000 men, was commanded by General Ernst Philipp von Rüchel. Brunswick nominally commanded the entire force, but the other commanders felt free to propose their own plans and did so. To allay friction among the commanders, the king decided to accompany the Duke of Brunswick’s headquarters, taking with him his own military advisers, the Ober Kriegs Kollegium, or Army Council. Even Queen Louise and her ladies felt they might be useful, so they came along too. Little wonder that Clausewitz wrote, ‘The future looks forbidding to me.’

For the Prussians, the prudent course of action would be to remain on the defensive until the Russian army, 120,000 strong, arrived and then overwhelm Napoleon with superior numbers. They had no intention of doing so. The Prussian plan was to seize the initiative, surprise the French army and drive it back over the Rhine. On September 13, 1806, the Prussians occupied neighboring Saxony, adding a Saxon corps of 20,000 to Hohenlohe’s force. By September 25, the three Prussian forces, now totaling about 130,000, were concentrated on a line centered on Erfurt and stretching 55 miles from Eisenbach in the west to Jena in the east. Rüchel, with 28,000 troops, was at Eisenbach, Brunswick at Erfurt with 60,000 and Hohenlohe, with 42,000, at Jena. The line, located 150 miles southwest of Berlin, put the Prussian army in a good position to protect the capital and to strike at the French army, centered at Bamberg, 75 miles to the south. But the Prussian commanders then squandered several days holding councils of war, trying to reach a consensus about what to do next. By October 7, General Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst, Brunswick’s chief of staff, was so exasperated that he wrote: ‘What we ought to do, I know right well. What we shall do, God only knows.’

Meanwhile, at the Château de Saint-Cloud in Paris in a second-floor office overlooking the park, ‘The Monster’ was studying his maps. Napoleon was fully informed about the Prussians’ plans and had no intention of waiting on the defensive. His own plan was to destroy the Prussians before the Russians could arrive.

To do so he would employ two of his classic strategic maneuvers. First, using a manoeuvre sur position centrale — maneuver on the central position — he would insert the French army between the Prussian and the approaching Russian armies. At the same time, he would employ a manoeuvre sur les derrières — maneuver on the enemy’s communications — to interpose the French army between the Prussian army and Berlin. (In time this maneuver would become known as the manoeuvre d’Iéna or the manoeuvre de Saale.) To protect Berlin, the Prussians would be forced to give battle. Napoleon would destroy the Prussians, then turn to deal with the Russians.

The key to those maneuvers was secrecy and speed. To hide his army from the Prussians, the French emperor would use the Saale River, which ran generally south to north, as a screen between his Grande Armée and the Prussian army. By the time the Prussians discovered his army, it would be too late — the French would already be behind them.

The speed would be provided by the legs of his soldiers. To the Prussians, marching 15 miles seemed a hard day’s work. The French soldiers had proved they were capable of forced marches of 20 to 25 miles a day for weeks on end, fighting while they marched, although such treks generally left behind a trail of exhausted stragglers and marauders. Moreover, almost all of Napoleon’s soldiers were battle-hardened veterans. Their generals were young, energetic and experienced — including Napoleon himself, who had just turned 37 the previous month. Finally the Grande Armée was tightly integrated and led by a man of such martial genius that Clausewitz would later refer to him as the ‘God of War.’

Against 130,000 Prussians and Saxons, Napoleon mobilized 167,000 top rank soldiers. His army consisted of the Imperial Guard, 7,000, and the following formations, each led by a maréchal de France: the I Corps under Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, 21,000; the III Corps under Louis Nicholas Davout, 29,000; the IV Corps under Jean de Dieu Soult, 29,000; the V Corps, led by Jean Lannes, 22,000; the VI Corps under Michel Ney, 19,000; the VII Corps led by Pierre François Charles Augereau, 20,000; and the Cavalry Reserve under Joachim Murat, 14,000. In addition to these, there was a Bavarian Auxiliary Corps of 6,000 under Général de Division Prince Karl Philipp von Wrede.

Napoleon arrived at Bamberg on October 6. The following day he received the Prussian ultimatum. That same day, the officers of the French army read a proclamation from Napoleon to their assembled troops: ‘Soldiers! The order for your return to France was already given; triumphal feasts awaited you. But cries of war have been heard from Berlin. We are provoked by an audacity that demands vengeance. Soldiers! There are none of you who wish to return to France by a road other than that of honor; we will not return except by a route that leads under triumphal arches. What! Have we braved weather, seas, deserts, beaten a Europe united against us, gathered glory from Orient to Occident only to return to our country as refugees, having abandoned our allies and to hear that the French eagle has fled before the Prussian army?’

The following day the French launched their 19th-century-style blitzkrieg. Screened by horsemen from Murat’s Cavalry Reserve, the Grande Armée advanced via three parallel roads, one column on each road. The V Corps was to lead the left column, followed a day’s march behind by the VII Corps. The I Corps was at the head of the center column, followed in turn by the III Corps, the Cavalry Reserve and the Imperial Guard. The right column was made up, in order, of the IV, VI and Bavarian corps. The frontage of the whole army was about 38 miles, and its depth was about the same, or two days’ march, so that Napoleon would be able to concentrate his entire strength within 48 hours. The result was a flexible formation able to attack in any direction, a formation that would go down in history as the bataillon carré.

On October 9, Murat’s cavalry and Bernadotte’s I Corps encountered the Prussians at Schleiz, 26 miles southeast of Jena, and after some difficulty, drove them back. Casualties were light on both sides.

The situation became more serious the next day when Lannes’ V Corps ran into Hohenlohe’s advance guard at the town of Saalfeld, about 22 miles south of Jena. The Prussians were commanded by General Prince Ludwig Ferdinand, the king’s nephew, who according to Clausewitz had the potential of becoming the leading Prussian commander of his time. It was not to be. Lannes drove in the Prussian lines and captured the town. The Prussians collapsed. Prince Ludwig led a desperate cavalry charge in an attempt to stem the French advance, but was killed by Sergeant Jean Baptiste Guindey of the French 10th Hussars. The prince’s force of 8,000 was effectively destroyed, losing a third of its strength killed, wounded or captured. French losses were light.

Tags: 19th Century, Historical Conflicts, Napoleonic Wars

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.