Originally Posted by
Kentop
Waterloo was a stirling example of the way Napoleon won battle after battle. The coalition armies Napoleon fought were really predictable. If, say, the English army planned to defeat Napoleon with the combined forces of Prussia, Napoleon would send a smaller force against the British and pin them down without doing a full frontal battle. All he had to do was stall the advancing British long enough so that he could attack the Prussians before they merged with the British. This is exactly what happened at Waterloo. Napoleon split his 300,000 plus men (green troops untested in battle). He put Ney in charge of the left flank facing Wellington. He then took the right flank and marched, met, and defeated Blucher. He put Marshal Grouchy in charge of chasing Blucher's rearguard and making sure the Prussians didn't cut through the woods and join the Brittish. Ney, in one of the stupidest moves any general has ever done, actually countermanded Napoleon's order to route the Prussians and ordered Grouchy to join him at Waterloo. Napoleon was furious. He had half the force allied against him totally defeated. Ney then made another blunder that cost him his cavalry. He attacked Wellington's center, thinking that the defensive squares of British troops were falling apart. They weren't and Ney squandered his greatest asset by making at least 12 charges against Wellington's defensive squares. Between each square were the cannons. Every time the french cavalry wheeled and attached, the artillery crews would run and hide within the squares. After the cavalry were repulsed, those crews would leave the squares and man their cannons again. The cavalry was supposed to spike the cannon as they over ran them but they didn't. There is a famous episode where Ney is seen pounding on a cannon with the flat of his sword and yelling at his men to spike them. By the time Napoleon had taken over the center the battle was lost.
You could say that Napoleon lost at Waterloo because he simply could not be two places at once. Marshall Nay was an incredibly brave and able cavalry commander, but his incompetence at Waterloo and the idiotic actions of Grouchy sealed Napoleons fate before he could do anything about it. The strategy Napoleon used was sound. The execution of the tactics was abominable. You can read account after account saying that Ney really didn't screw up at Waterloo, and that Napoleon blamed everybody but himself for the defeat. You can find all kinds of apologetics about Grouchy, too. But the tactics were the same used at Austerlitz and Borodino, battle proven tactics that would have worked if Napoleon's Marshalls had not screwed up royally.