I hope all of you had a wonderful Easter weekend this past week. I finished Kenneth Williams's work, Lincoln Finds a General. I will write a review for it next week. Secondly, I added more to my next book on the battles of Belmont, Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh. I am working through the events surrounding the Battle of Iuka. Reading some of these letters also takes me longer than usual due to the ink fading over time. Nevertheless, I push on.
Napoleon is a favorite topic of mine in these posts, but there is so much to cover. However, after David Chandler’s The Campaigns of Napoleon, I read that Napoleon had a perfect chance of winning the Battle of Leipzig or, as some refer to it, the Battle of Nations. This analysis should not be surprising, considering that Napoleon fought some of his greatest battles during the War of the Sixth Coalition (Lutzen, Bautzen, and Dresden). However, Chandler referred to these battles before the Battle of Nations as operationally and strategically “meaningless.”
Just to the south of Leipzig lay the town of Wachau. Throughout the back-and-forth fighting over Wachau and the chateau of Dolwitz, there was an opportune moment for French forces. Jean Pierre Doumerc ordered a cuirassier division to charge the flank of Eugen of Wittenberg’s command. This charge almost pushed as far as Tsar Alexander’s command post. Despite driving a wedge through the Allied lines, Doumerc and Joachim Murat failed to support their cuirassier division to exploit their great success. David Chandler stipulates that had Napoleon been at his command post and seen the French cavalry charge, he would have sent proper reinforcements to exploit their success. It is primarily believed they could have won the day here and wheeled around to aid Marmont and Ney near Mockern north of Leipzig.
So many moments in Napoleonic Europe could have led to a French victory or stalemate with the remains of a Napoleonic French Empire, but it is difficult to say how long it was to last without Napoleon’s authoritarian hand. Strategically, Napoleon stumbled in the War of the Sixth Coalition. If it is to be argued that his strategy was sound, then his diplomatic skills failed him. His battles of Dresden, Lutzen, Bautzen, and Leipzig are all impressive. However, his skills as a battlefield commander cannot translate to success at the strategic level. Had Leipzig been won by Napoleon, it is difficult to imagine a continental Europe in which Napoleon kept Spain and launched another major offensive.
Question of the Week: What other moments on the battlefield could have changed the course of history?