georgeob1 wrote:Was it then a thing that came to a slow and, for the royals, late fruition?
One could simply refer to the inertia which grips all organizations, and especially an essentially conservative profession such as that of arms. However, in this case, the changes had been brewing for a long time. When i was writing yesterday--doing it off the top of my head, which is the case when i'm not challenged--i couldn't recall all of the names i needed. However--during the War of the Austrian Succession, France's "expert" in mountain warfare had planned an invasion of Piedmont (Kingdom of Sardinia) which involved nine separate columns, operating within mutual supporting distance, and crossing the mountains through nine separate passes. The plan involved each commander operating semi-independently and moving on an axis of operation which was suited to his circumstances. Each commander was to keep in touch with the columns on his flanks, and if he were opposed in the pass he was approaching, he was to screen that force and move north or south to join another column as circumstance dictated. The French crossed the mountains through three of the passes, isolating and neutralizing the defensive garrisons, and reached the plains below with an army larger than the Piedmontese and moving rapidly while the Italians were scurrying to get organized--they failed, and France knocked the Italians out of the war in what was a "lightening" campaign by the standard of the day, and which would have been acceptable even by Napoleon's standards.
Maurice de Saxe (Moritz von Saxe, the eldest and bastard son of Augustus the Strong of Saxony) proposed many of the ideas which eventually came to be at the core of the new doctrine. During that same war, and most notably at Fontenoy, he had units as small as regiments moving on independent operational axes, as well as deploying skirmishers in large numbers. Additionally, he informally provided for semi-independent commanders by employing the services of a Dane and a Swede as Lieutenant Generals (to the annoyance of French officers), which was outlined as a principle in his book
Mes Reveries (My Dreams or My Musings), and can be seen as the genesis of the corps structure of an army. Prior to Gustavus Adolphus, all armies confronted one another in parallel lines--facing off in roughly equivalent formations, and then trying to get an advantage by attacking one flank or the other of the enemy. The Swedes were trained to manoeuvre regiments independently, so that at Breitenfels near Leipsic in 1631, after the foolish and unauthorized attack of the Imperial cavalry, Gustavus had his troops back in line and facing Tilly's line in well under an hour, before Tilly could respond--then when the Saxons unceremoniously decamped, heading back to Dresden as fast as their little legs would carry them, Tilly attempted to attack what he assumed would be the exposed flank of the Swedes, only to find that the Swedes had realigned, changed front, and were suddenly attacking
his flank. What had happened to him was not understood outside of the counsels of Gustavus and Oxensteirn (sp?), and the concept was "lost" for many years.
But Frederick the Great introduced a modification which he called oblique order formation, which had a small portion of the army screening the enemy and "fixing" them in place, while the rest of the battalions would be "stacked up" and hurled at the enemy flank, or a supposed weak spot, in echelon (
echelle=ladder,
echelon=rung of a ladder). This was nowhere more evident than at Hohenfriedberg in 1745. He began moving his troops out at about 3:00 a.m. A strongly posted Austrian cavalry unit was encountered on a hill to the north shortly after the foot were in the road, so the position was screened, the attack battalions moved by the right, and slammed into the Saxons as the sun was rising. By 9:00 a.m., it was all over, the Austrians and Saxons in full flight and Frederick master of the field. This was only possible because of first rate staff work and units moving on separate operational axes. Nevertheless, Frederick still approached a battle in parallel order, but had simply made a significant adjustment.
Maurice de Saxe proposed that the army be divided into rationalized units for maneouvre on the battlefield to operate on separate axes, and to operate independently where expedient. He also called for different formations to be adopted to conform to realities of each battlefield situation. If it were possible to approach under cover, then the regiment should be hurled at the enemy in a dense column as soon as it came out of cover, relying upon momentum and the fear of the bayonet to break the enemy line (exactly what he did to the advance of the redcoats of the right of the Pragmatic Army at Fontenoy). Where there were little cover, or a large area to be secured by a small force, the troops should be placed in an extended line, with skirmishers out to slow an enemy attack and give their parent organization time to conform and change front.
During the American Revolution, brilliant battlefield commanders such as Benedict Arnold and Nathaniel Greene had used militia as what the French would come to call "a cloud" of skirmishers, largely because they were unreliable in a stand up fight in regular lines. At Hannah's Cowpens, Daniel Morgan went around the militia campfires the night before the battle and told them: "Just give me two good fires, boys, and then you can skedaddle." The following morning, as Tarleton approached, they did just that, and the English, thinking they had their enemy (of whom they were contemptuous) on the run, came forward hurriedly in a ragged line. At that point, Morgan's little band of Continentals appeared on the crest of the hill that formed the base of the American position, poured a well-directed volley into the English, and came down the hill with a shout and the bayonet did the rest of the work (the only war in which Americans frequently used the bayonet). Tarleton lost
80% of his force as killed, and wounded and captured or simply captured. Morgan rejoined Greene, and then Greene did essentially the same thing at Guilford Courthouse. When Greene's Continentals repulsed the attack of the brigade of Guards, Greene sent them down the hill in a bayonet charge which broke and scattered the line of the best infantry the English had on offer. Cornwallis only saved the situation by turning the guns on the Americans and his own troops, the latter hopelessly disorganized and fleeing before the former. Although no French troops were present, the lessons of battles such as these were not lost on the French.
When the Austrians attacked France at the beginning of the Wars of the Revolution, the French commanders did not always succeed in bringing off the desired marches and operations--so it was not apparent to the Austrians what was going to happen to them. When they saw huge formations of skirmishers, they assumed that the
levée en masse were untrained, undisciplined troops who could not be relied upon take a regular formation. They were in for many nasty shocks when they would discover a line of intermitten battalions behind the skirmishers, with artillery sections in the intervals, and cavalry troops supporting the guns and protecting the infantry flanks. This was the
ordre mixte--what we call combined arms.
No greater expression of the system in action can be found than at Auerstadt. There, Davout defeated the repeated attacks of a greatly superior Prussian force because each regimental commander was capable of independently responding to his local situation. Desparate to drive Davout from his high ground, the Prussians launched a massive parallel order infantry attack, and shortly thereafter, Blucher lead an "oblique order" cavalry "charge at speed." The French infantry, well supported by guns in the intervals of the battalions, made minced meat of the Prussian infantry, and immediately changed front to face and repel the cavalry attack. The Prussians had advanced in three columns before that battle--Davout dispatched the largest column of about 45,000, which had been joined later by about 10,000 reinforcements--Davout had 18,000 men in his corps, and had received 2,000 reinforcements. Meanwhile, down the road at Jena, Napoleon with the main army easily crushed the smaller Prussian column of about 35,000 men. The Prussians never knew what hit them.
The system had evolved over a period of about forty years, and it gelled and was given form and made into regulation by St. Germain and de Broglie. Napoleon was a student at Brienne and later the
École Militaire in Paris when the new instructions to officers were being issued. There was just sufficient time for French officers (and most importantly) NCO's to learn to apply the new system before revolution and the
levée en masse created the huge armies which would lead to the spectacular battles of the Wars of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.
