The Day of Doom: The Battle of Gravelotte/Saint-Privat
By Dennis Showalter

Military History  | no comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

On the morning of August 18, 1870, Helmuth von Moltke—best known to history as a consummate staff officer rather than a battle captain—committed the Prussian army to a maneuver so daring it might well have daunted Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville. Moltke, as Prussian chief of staff, launched fewer than 200,000 men against a French army of 110,000 that occupied some of the best defensive positions in eastern France: the high ground west of the fortress of Metz, between the villages of Gravelotte and Saint-Privat. His force fell far short of the numerical superiority considered sufficient for attacking field defenses.

As if the odds were not risky enough, Moltke also reached this first major battlefield of the weeks-old Franco-Prussian War by marching his entire army across the rear of the French. Had the similar Lee-Jackson flank march gone amiss, the Confederates had the option of falling back to Richmond. But the Prussians in France were attacking toward Germany—if they lost the battle they would be trapped. Even a local defeat would have cut their supply lines, likely triggering a catastrophe.

The Battle of Gravelotte/Saint-Privat was not a Prussian “crowning mercy,” as Oliver Cromwell described one of his battles. By day’s end, the French had inflicted more than 20,000 casualties on their attackers, eviscerating some of the best regiments in the Prussian army. They took some 13,000 casualties on their side, then abandoned the field and fell back to Metz, one of Europe’s strongest fortresses. The Prussians, counting their losses and re-forming their ranks, might well have quoted Shakespeare’s Henry V at Agincourt, “I know not if the day be ours or no.”

But in a single day of fighting, France’s main army, including most of its best troops, had been cut off from its country. After August 18, France was constrained to fight on Moltke’s terms in an improvised war against a master of preparation. The short, bloody fight at Gravelotte/Saint-Privat was the first battle of the first modern European war, fought as it was with advanced weapons and obsolete tactics. It was no more than half a victory for Prussia, but it was the event on which a whole war turned, a soldiers’ battle that opened the way to the downfall of an empire and the reconfiguration of a continent.

The Franco-Prussian War was a come-as-you-are collision, a war that had been expected by neither army when hostilities opened on July 19. Moltke saw the war’s true objective not as French territory but the French army. Decisively defeating it was the best way to convince other powers, Austria in particular, to let half-drawn swords return to the scabbards. And the surest way to engage the French army was to advance on Paris. The city—the very heart of France and of the Second Empire—could not be sacrificed without a fight to the finish. So Moltke resolved to attack as soon as possible.

Once war had been declared, Moltke used the German railway network to concentrate his main force in the Rhineland-Palatinate, swing south of the French fortress complex at Metz, then advance northwest toward the Moselle River to force a major battle with the French army. Although what Carl von Clausewitz calls “fog” and “friction” hindered the Prussians at every turn, they were aided by France’s own highly disorganized mobilization, and with their south German allies from Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria, they were able to win a series of victories on the frontier and to push steadily into France.

On August 16, 1870, the Prussian 1st and 2nd Armies swung around the left flank of the French army of the Rhine. The French Army had been making its way past Metz and through Verdun toward Paris when two Prussian corps got ahead of the French and cut the Metz-Verdun road, at the cost of some 16,000 casualties in what became known as the Battle of Vionville-Mars. Prussian artillery, with cast-steel long-range rifled cannons deployed en masse, silenced the French guns and accounted for many of the 15,000 French casualties. But the superior French rifles, the breech-loading chassepots with better accuracy and longer range than the older Prussian needle guns, time and again halted the Prussian infantry. At day’s end in most sectors, the French were holding their ground in front of fields carpeted with Prussian bodies. There seemed to be no reason why the French army should not on the next day move to vanquish the Prussians.

Tags: 19th Century, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, Weaponry

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.