1/17/2024 0 Comments Napoleon total war french units![]() Regional governments ordered the destruction of bridges, roads, railways, and telegraphs to deny their use to the Prussians. The new government abandoned Paris, declared a Levee en Masse - a callback to the wars of the French Revolution in which all men aged 21 to 40 were to be called to arms. Instead, Napoleon III’s government was overthrown and a National Government was declared in Paris, which promptly declared what amounted to a total war. The French had lost both of their trained field armies and their head of state, and ought to have given in to Prussia’s demand (namely, the annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine region). Many were terrified by what happened after Sedan.īy all rights, Moltke’s masterpiece at Sedan should have ended the war. However, not everyone in the German military establishment looked at the Franco-Prussian War as an ideal. My objective here is not to “bust myths” about blitzkrieg or any such trite thing. In a certain sense, the German military establishment spent the next half-century dreaming of ways to replicate its victory at Sedan. In the conventional narrative, these great encirclements became the archetype of the German kesselschlacht, or encirclement battle, which became the ultimate goal of all operations. The Prussians had executed their platonic ideal of warfare - the encirclement of the main enemy body - not once, but twice in a matter of weeks. Helmuth von Moltke - the man of iron and bloodįrom an operational perspective, this sequence of events was (and is) considered a masterclass, and a major reason why Moltke has become revered as one of history’s truly great talents (he is on this writer’s Mount Rushmore alongside Hannibal, Napoleon, and Manstein). Let’s go back, all the way to 1870, to the Franco-Prussian War. They had valuable ideas to teach their colleagues - and perhaps us. There were also many prominent pre-war German thinkers who professed fear, anxiety, and unmitigated dread. ![]() However, this was far from the only emotion. To be sure, there is an element of truth to it, as there were many elements of German leadership which possessed an unseemly degree of overconfidence. This is an interesting and satisfying story, which posits a rather traditional hubris-downfall cycle. Pride, as they say, goes before the fall. Prussia in this era also produced three of history’s iconic military personalities - Carl von Clausewitz (a theoretician), Helmuth von Moltke (a practitioner), and Hans Delburk (a historian).Īs the story usually goes, this century of victory and excellence created a sense of hubris and militarism in the Prusso-German establishment which led the country to march impetuously to war in the August of 1914, only to founder in a terrible war in which new technologies frustrated its idealized approach to warmaking. In this period, the Prussian military establishment won a series of spectacular victories over Austria and France, establishing an aura of German military supremacy and realizing the dream of a unified Germany through force of arms. The century intervening from the fall of Napoleon in 1815 to the beginning of the First World War in 1914 is usually regarded as a sort of golden age for Prusso-German militarism. The dying dignity of a French warrior - L'Oublié! (Forgotten) by Émile Betsellère (1872)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |