The fall of fortress Kolberg in 1761 (Seven Years’ War) to Russian
troops
Between 1721 and the opening of the Seven Years War, Swedish military prowess had fallen almost as far as that of France. ‘They were brave once’, said the Russian commander Saltykov, ‘but now their time is past’ (Montalembert, 1777, 11,62). Their military spirit inevitably suffered from the way Count Rosen maladministered the army, and from the bitter arguments among the politicians. Their engineers could still build imposing fortresses, and men like Major Rook and the generals Carlsberg and Virgin could still propose ‘systems’ of interest and originality, but the Swedish means of waging offensive fortress warfare had declined considerably since the days of Charles XII. Arms and equipment were antiquated, and the siege artillery was notably cumbersome by the standards of the second half of the eighteenth century.
Nowhere were the operations of the Seven Years War more
repetitious and circumscribed than in Swedish and Prussian Pomerania.
Campaigning was mostly confined to Swedish forays from the bridgehead fortress
of Stralsund against the line of the Peene and its small strongholds at Demmin,
Anklam and Peenemiinde. These works were almost always lost again when the
Strelasund froze over with the coming of winter, for the Swedes had to hasten
back to Stralsund and the offshore island of Rügen to prevent the Prussians
from getting there first by marching across the ice.
There was no chance whatsoever that the Swedes would fulfil
their part in the strategy that was sketched out for them by the French staff
officer Marc-Rene Montalembert, who urged that ‘the Swedish and Russian armies
will accomplish nothing useful for the common cause until they have taken the
town of Stettin’ (March 1759, ibid., II, I I). This was a powerful Prussian
fortress on the lower Oder, which effectively blocked the way from Swedish
Pomerania to the Russians operating on the east side of the Oder. As for the
Russians, they claimed that any siege of Stettin would require ‘200,000 men and
more artillery than Russia and Sweden can possibly furnish’ (31 August 1759,
ibid., II, 62). Perhaps also the Russians perceived that Montalembert
deliberately wished them to waste their time and strength in this enormous
operation, for by now the French lived in fear of the westward advance of
Russia.
The Austrians, however, still looked to the Russians for
positive help. Founded by Peter the Great, the Russian engineering corps had
been reorganised by Field-Marshal Münnich in the 1730S, and by the time of
the Seven Years War it comprised the very respectable total of 1,302 officers
and men. Unfortunately, nearly all of these people were inextricably committed
to civil engineering and topographical projects, leaving the Russians bereft of
technical expertise when they came to attack fortresses.
The chief burden of Russian sieges therefore rested upon the
gunners, not the engineers. The Saxon officer Tielke wrote from direct
experience that:
the Russians differ
from all other nations, in their method of carrying on sieges – instead of
first opening trenches to cover themselves from the enemy’s fire, and making
batteries with strong parapets for the cannon and mortars, they advance as near
as possible up to the town, bring up their artillery without covering it in the
least, and after they have cannonaded and bombarded the town about forty-eight
hours, they begin to break ground and make regular trenches and batteries. They
think that this method inspires the assailants with courage, at the same time
as it intimidates the defenders, and may possibly induce these latter to
surrender. Both officers and soldiers are on these occasions equally exposed to
fire. (Tielke, 1788, II, 133)
Since the Russians conducted their battles and sieges in a
nearly identical fashion, the Master-General of the Ordnance, the brilliant and
wayward Petr Shuvalov, embarked on a search for a universal general-purpose
artillery piece. The result was a curious long-barrelled howitzer called the
‘unicorn’, which fired an explosive shell to a considerable distance but with
no great accuracy. In 1758, after the futile cannonade of Küstrin,
General Fermor complained that he would rather have more of the conventional
siege artillery instead, but Shuvalov was adamant in defence of his ‘unicorns’,
claiming that
although their bombs
are not especially weighty, they travel with such speed, and along such a flat
trajectory that, according to the experiments we have conducted here, they
penetrate seven feet into an earthen rampart, and produce a large crater when
they burst. (Maslovskii, 1888-93, I, 331-2)
The Russian operations in the Seven Years War fall into two
clearly defined phases. The first objective was to reduce the Prussian enclave
of East Prussia, which was isolated on the Baltic coast and surrounded by
Polish territory on every landward side. The small defending army was beaten in
the open field in 1757, and although the Russians fell back to winter quarters,
they came on again in January 1758 and occupied the capital of Konigsberg.
The Russians could now embark on the second stage of their
war. By taking East Prussia they had opened the way to the River Vistula
(Weichsel), which gave them a shield for the conquered lands and a start-line
for the advance into Brandenburg. The Prussian heartland was ultimately saved
by five strongholds. First of all the works at Kolberg offered the Prussians a
base for partisan-type warfare in eastern Pomerania, and denied the Russians
the use of the only sizeable harbour on the 150-mile stretch of sandy coast
between Danzig and the mouth of the Oder. The lure of Kolberg repeatedly
induced the Russians to weaken their army to form siege corps, and they finally
reduced the place only in December 1761, after months of blockade and siege.
The other four fortresses, the Oder strongholds of Stettin, Kustrin, Breslau
and Glogau, managed to defy the Russians for the rest of the war. In 1759 and
again in the summer of 1760 the Russians and a powerful corps of Austrians
joined forces on the Oder, but the generals could not summon up the energy or
the resources to attack the quartet of Prussian fortresses. This was why
they [the Russians] were never able to establish themselves
in winter quarters. It never crossed their minds to secure themselves supplies
or points d’appui on the Oder, and so they always had to march back to quarters
behind the Vistula. These retreats deprived them of the fruits of the campaigns
they had just fought, and of all the advantages they had gained. By the same
token they experienced considerable delays in opening their next campaigns, and
every time they had to re-do everything from the beginning. (Silva, 1778, 41)
Frederick’s field army, the other prop of the Prussian
monarchy, was, however, reduced to a parlous state, and without its support the
fortress would certainly have fallen in a couple of campaigns. Old Fritz was
saved in the nick of time by the death of Empress Elizabeth of Russia on 5
January 1762, which brought in its train the collapse of the anti-Prussian
coalition
