Search Results for: Napoleonic Wars
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Battles of the Fluvia, (April-May 1795)
BarthĂ©lemy-Louis-Joseph SchĂ©rer (1747-1804) The battles of the Fluvia made up the opening offensive in the 1795 French campaign in the eastern Pyrenees. They constituted the last major attempt by the French to invade Spain before peace was signed between the two countries during the summer. Following the battles of Figueras…
Battle of the Marne: What If? Part I
In short the Battle of the Marne was actually three separate but interrelated battles—one on the Ourcq, one on the “Deux Morins,” and one on the Marshes of St. Gond. While a German breakthrough in any of these places could easily have spelled disaster for France, the strategic pivot of…
PORTUGAL’S AFRICAN COLONIES
Portugal was both the first and the last of the great European colonial powers. For 500 years Portugal had colonies in Africa. In 1960, as liberation movements swept across colonial Africa, the Portuguese flag still flew over vast expanses of territory across the continent. The spread of decolonization and the…
Attack on Basque Roads, (11–14 April 1809)
Battle of the Basque Roads The flamboyant, Captain Lord Cochrane, had rockets sent out onboard the transport Cleveland, to Basque Roads the same year, for his attempt on the French fleet anchored there. These rockets were fired from the rigging of the fire ships when sent in to attack the…
Strategic Intelligence II
The charge of the Bayreuth Dragoons at the Battle of Hohenfriedberg. Real-time intelligence, except over very short distances, was inherently difficult to acquire in the medieval world. It simply could not be carried quickly enough ahead of the movement of enemy forces. That would remain so for centuries to come.…
Wellington’s Generalship
Reviews of the battle at Waterloo almost always look at the multitude of mistakes made, primarily on Napoleon’s part. While it is true he made more than was his wont, it still took a commander able to take advantage of those mistakes in order to emerge victorious. In considering the…
Pandours
The Pandurs (Croatian: Panduri, German: Panduren, French pandour) were a skirmisher unit of the Habsburg Monarchy. The term pandur made its way into military use via the Hungarian language-being used in Hungarian as a loanword, in turn originating from the Croatian term pudar, though the nasal in place of the…
The Master of the Battlefield Part I
“Battle of Moscow, 7th September 1812”, 1822 by Louis Lejeune Bonaparte was first and foremost a military man, a soldier, a general, a commander of armies, and a deadly destroyer of his opponents’ military capacity. His aim throughout his career was to move swiftly to a position where he obliged…
Emigrés from the French Revolution
ArmĂ©e des ÉmigrĂ©s at the Battle of Quiberon. The Ă©migrĂ© armies of the French Revolutionary Wars were armies raised outside of France by and out of Royalist Ă©migrĂ©s, with the aim of overthrowing the French Revolution, reconquering France and restoring the monarchy. These were aided by royalist armies within France…
REVOLUTIONS IN MILITARYÂ AFFAIRS
These boosts in weapons technology do not necessarily occur at a smooth pace or a predetermined rate. To the contrary, it often appears that technological innovation in military matters is marked by episodic discontinuities – sudden jumps in weapons capabilities that inject radically new performance possibilities. These seismic shifts, characterized…