You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [30]
Finally able to bring the Russian army, which had retreated ahead of him for months, to battle at Borodino, Napoleon won, driving the Russian army from the field and leaving the roads to Moscow open. A few days later, his army entered Moscow. Okay, he had their capital — well, the winter capital anyhow — and largest city. So Napoleon waited for the delegation to determine the terms of the new treaty he would impose on a conquered Russia. And that was Napoleon’s other blunder, he waited. And waited, and waited until the last minute.
The army was tired, and Moscow was large enough to house it all comfortably, even after a part of the city burned. There the French sat for weeks, awaiting a response to the offers sent to the tsar in St. Petersburg. It wasn’t until late in the fall that Napoleon accepted the fact that no surrender was coming.
Just sitting in Moscow for all that time was the second decision that led to Napoleon’s fall.
Finally, with food getting scarce and winter approaching, Napoleon reluctantly accepted the inevitable and led his army back toward the Vistula River and friendly Poland. The original plan was to march back by a different and more southern route than the one the army had entered on. This had the advantage of taking it through new areas in which to forage for food and fodder. But one nasty engagement, the movement of the Russian forces, and the desire to add to his retreating army the tens of thousands of men stationed at the depots and cities along his route, caused Napoleon to decide to retreat along the same route he had entered Russia by months earlier.
This change of route was the third mistake, and perhaps the worst. It sealed the Grand Army’s fate.
The problem was that this route had already been not only stripped bare by both his and the retreating Russian armies when he entered, but that what little remained was ordered burned by Kutusov, the Russian commander. The lack of food, combined with an early and fierce winter, turned most of the still-undefeated French army into a mass of struggling fugitives. The majority of the more than half million soldiers who had so triumphantly marched into Russia months before were lost. Units that began the war with thousands of men in them disappeared entirely. Napoleon hurried back to France to raise and train a new army, but too many experienced officers and men were lost. Worse yet, those whom the emperor had dominated through intimidation lost their fear. They united to defeat this last army at Dresden the next May, 1813. A few months later Napoleon Bonaparte was in exile on Elba. Three decisions made a thousand miles away in Russia did more than anything else to put him there. He would briefly return to power, but that is another tale of another fateful decision.
You Gave Command to Whom?
Sometimes a lot of history is the result of putting the right man in the right job. Or in the case of Napoleon, the wrong man in that job. This is the tale of two marshals of France and why Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo.
NAPOLEON
WATERLOO, 1815
Bill Fawcett
The highest military position, over general officers even, is the rank of marshal, which was a holdover from the monarchy and was resurrected by Napoleon when he made himself emperor of France in 1804. In total, he appointed twenty-six marshals who had or did actively command troops. These appointments varied from being a reward for past service to the Revolution to recognition of their position in command of the newly conceived corps. The new formation, the corps (which was really a