1805 Sea of Glory

[Kentop]

Hi Eric, you make salient points, but during the entire battle including Qatre Bras and Ligny, the opposing forces never lost contact with each other.. What links Qatre Bras with Ligny was that on July 16th, in the center, Napoleon sat with his Imperial guards and the reserves, ready to commit his forces to either Ney or Grouchy. He could have committed his troops either way. He planned it that way. It sounds like the same battle to me. As it happened, Blucher was routed and Napoleon committed his troops to his left instead of his right. Wellington fell back and parked his troops with the forrest behind him leaving him no real escape route. Nappy believed he could defeat Wellington before any Prussians could arrive.

I know my viewpoint is considered heresy, but what I see with conventional historical interpretations is a breaking up of a very fluid, ongoing battle into individual "quanta". This has the effect of separating the actions as if they happened independently from each other, which is certainly not the case.

Thinking about the battle of Waterloo the same way historians in 1850 thought about it is not the way you should be looking at it. New insights can be gained into the way Napoleon worked his magic if you look at his actions in a modern way, using modern concepts.


I read Chandler in high school a loooooong time ago (late 60's maybe). I'll give it a reread and see if it changes my mind.

[Berthier]

This is a tricky one. I was going to say this was 4 battles in one campaign which they were but...then I thought of the Battle of the Bulge which was multiple battles, but called one, stalingrad- multiple battles in a campaign but sometimes called one battle. Fundamentally this is probably a semantics argument. All campaigns tend to have "fairly" continous contact in this period, even the 1812 campaign spread over 6 months and thousands of square miles had continual contact between scouts of both sides and then periodic battles when the Russians or French could be brought to bay, but you wouldn't call the campaign a single battle. Yet the battle of smolensk and borodino dont occur without the preceding invasion so by your logic ken they are all part of the one battle.

I would prefer to go with the Eric's view of battles within an operational campaign.

[Kentop]

The problem with looking at them as separate battles is that it makes you draw the wrong conclusions about each. Historical analysis of each individual action leads one to conclude that Ney was incompetent, Napoleon was sick or past his prime or not paying attention or delusional, etc. and made horrendous mistakes. Grouchy was lazy and stupid. Wellington was a genius, and Blucher was a sideshow. If you take the old fashioned psychological/behavioral nonsense out of the analysis you can make a much more satisfactory conclusion about it.

Napoleon knew Blucher was coming. He was expecting Grouchy to head them off. Instead, Blucher arrived with 30,000 men and made a flanking attack on Napoleon's right and the battle was essentially over. It took too long for the grand battery, in muddy ground, to get set up to bombard Wellington's left center. The strategy was sound and classic Napoleonic tactics. The implementation and execution sucked, starting at Quatre Bras, because the army was formed too quickly and didn't have the cohesion earlier French armies had. The marshals did not know their troops at all, and their troops were suspicious of their generals. If you were fighting under Ney, who a couple of weeks ago said he would bring Napoleon to Paris in an iron cage, you wouldn't trust him either. I think that the fact that the army had no time to train and get used to their new generals before the battle led to poor execution of orders. Could Berthier have made a difference? Maybe, but with such troops, probably not.

"Nevertheless, when all was said and done, he remained a giant surrounded by pygmies; his reputation survived his fall, for his basic greatness was inviolable." (David Chandler - "Waterloo - the hundred days" p 41)

[Herkybird]

Hmm, semantics aside, I would have to say I think a series of connected battles is not one battle, its a Campaign!

[Kentop]

Hmm, semantics aside, I would have to say I think a series of connected battles is not one battle, its a Campaign!

Hey, let's slice and dice away. How about the battle of Hougoumont farm, or the battle of La Haye Sainte? There have been books written on those "battles" (Hougoumont: the Key to Victory in Waterloo (Battleground Europe) Paperback – 27 Jul 1999 by Julian Paget (Author), Derek Saunders (Author)}, The Longest Afternoon: The 400 Men Who Decided the Battle of Waterloo Hardcover – 25 Sep 2014 by Brendan Simms (Author)

How about the battle of Who took my Rum Ration? July 17th, 1815, by Skirmisher Claude DeFussy (Author).

Sorry, my sarcasm is showing.

C'mon, everybody say "Blah, blah blah, blah blah."

[Herkybird]

Hey, let's slice and dice away. How about the battle of Hougoumont farm, or the battle of La Haye Sainte? There have been books written on those "battles" (Hougoumont: the Key to Victory in Waterloo (Battleground Europe) Paperback – 27 Jul 1999 by Julian Paget (Author), Derek Saunders (Author)}, The Longest Afternoon: The 400 Men Who Decided the Battle of Waterloo Hardcover – 25 Sep 2014 by Brendan Simms (Author)

How about the battle of Who took my Rum Ration? July 17th, 1815, by Skirmisher Claude DeFussy (Author).

Sorry, my sarcasm is showing.

C'mon, everybody say "Blah, blah blah, blah blah."

Nah, I don't Blah!

IMHO -- Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte, Placenoit etc were all parts of the same battle. Quatre Bras and Ligny were different battles of the same campaign. I rather suspect this is what most people think.

BUT IT DOESN'T REALLY MATTER!

Think happy thoughts!