Frederick the Great

A Military History

Dennis Showalter

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781783034796
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

A biography of the Prussian king and military legend from " America's leading historian" (Jeremy Black, author of Imperial Legacies ). Famed for his military successes and domestic reforms, Frederick the Great was a remarkable leader whose campaigns were a watershed in the history of Europe, securing Prussia's place as a continental power and inaugurating a new pattern of total war that was to endure until 1916. However, much myth surrounds this enigmatic man, his personality, and his role as politician, warrior, and king. From a renowned military historian and winner of a Pritzker Literature Award, this book provides a refreshing, multidimensional depiction of Frederick the Great and an objective, detailed reappraisal of his military, political, and social achievements. Early chapters set the scene with an excellent summary of eighteenth-century Europe and the Age of Reason; an analysis of the character, composition, and operating procedures of the Prussian army; and an exploration of Frederick's personality as a young man. Later chapters examine his stunning victories at Rossbach and Leuthen; his defeats at Prague and Kolín; and Prussia's emergence as a key European power. Written with style and verve, this book offers brilliant insights into the political and military history of the eighteenth century—and one of history's most famous rulers.

Chapter 1

Matrices and Probabilities

In an era of secular relativism, military history remains dominated by Whigs and Calvinists. The military Whig interprets war as a contest between progress and obscurantism with progress, whether represented by technology, social attitudes, or clear understanding of war’s principles, inevitably emerging triumphant. The Calvinist takes that approach one step further by interpreting victory and defeat as judgments on the militarily righteous. The generals, armies, and societies taking the straight and narrow path are admitted to the scholars’ Valhalla. Those failing to perceive and act on war’s revealed truths are cast into darkness.

WAYS OF WAR IN THE AGE OF REASON

Nowhere are these mind-sets more apparent than in studies of eighteenth-century warfare. For the Whigs the era of Marlborough, Eugene, and Frederick is at best a stepping stone to the ‘real’ wars that began in 1793. The French Revolution, with its patterns of general mobilization, ideological justification and national aggrandizement, is perceived as establishing norms followed and developed ever since. However sincere the original anti-militarist rhetoric of the revolutionaries may have been, they ultimately developed wholly new patterns of military organization, structured for waging a wholly new kind of war. Henceforth annihilation, political when not social or cultural, became for governments a normative risk of defeat. By the mid-twentieth century, physical annihilation had become established as a possible fate for losers. Whigs seldom present total war as desirable. Its bitter necessity, however, remained virtually unchallenged until the midpoint of the nuclear era. In such a context eighteenth-century conflicts usually appear no more than a series of gavottes, a form of Noh drama whose outcomes were determined by their structures.¹³

Military history’s Calvinists have usually contented themselves with depicting the collapse of ancien régime armies in the face of a Revolutionary/Napoleonic challenge that pitilessly exposed every flaw of the old ways of war-making. And those flaws are legion. David Chandler describes armed forces consistently unable to execute in the field the strategic and political designs of their governments. Martin van Creveld alleges an arteriosclerotic fortress-and-siege mentality imperfectly camouflaged by false issues of logistics. Geoffrey Parker argues that wars ‘eternalized themselves’ because strategic thinking was trapped between the rapid growth in the size of armies and the relative inability of states and societies to support those armies. Russell Weigley offers a counterpoint by describing the eighteenth century’s obsessive tactical focus: a search for the fata morgana of a decisive battle that would in a single day determine a war’s outcome by destroying an enemy’s army. While states bankrupted themselves pursuing this mirage, Weigley argues, wars remained exercises in futility. Battles only killed more men – they decided nothing in themselves.¹⁴

Weigley certainly appears at times to argue that only permanent resolution of the sources of intra-state conflict merits definition as decisive. Certainly he overlooks the wider consequences of defeat and victory on the battlefield – especially the negative ones. Steenkirk in 1692, for example, left a French army in possession of the field, but too badly hammered to pursue the campaign’s original objective of capturing the fortress of Liège. Frederick the Great’s victories at Leuthen and Rossbach did not end the Seven Years War. They did, however, encourage both Prussia’s king and Prussia’s soldiers to keep the field even in adversity, believing that these triumphs could one day be repeated. Leuthen and Rossbach also encouraged Frederick’s enemies to pursue war to the hilt. A state and an army capable of achieving that kind of double triumph seemed too dangerous to be treated as merely another partner in the diplomatic minuet.

Weigley nevertheless establishes a point vital to any understanding of eighteenth-century warfare. The generals and the statesmen alike sought decisions. Commanders and theorists alike warned against the risks of basing military operations on the possession of certain fortresses, or the establishing of certain supply routes, while neglecting operations in the open field. The elaborate manoeuvring was not an end in itself, but a preliminary to establishing conditions for battle. If those conditions were favourable enough to encourage one’s opponent to concede without risking a test, then so much the better!¹⁵ In diplomatic contexts the eighteenth century’s principled commitment to balance-of-power politics must not be exaggerated. Major and middle-sized powers regularly contemplated and frequently attempted significant aggrandizement at the expense of weaker and declining states. Poland, Sweden, the Ottoman Empire, even Spain, were regularly targets of their neighbours’ ambitions.

Pragmatically, even the best of the ancien régime’s armed forces could not hope to dominate its adversaries enough to implement the diplomats’ grand designs. Only with the untaming of Bellona in the Age of Democratic Revolution could maps be redrawn and destinies reshaped to the degree later generations have considered a norm. To speak of ‘limitation’ in this context, however, is to misuse that term in the same way Weigley arguably misuses ‘decisiveness’. Any conflicts between organized political systems are limited. Even in a nuclear context, war’s goals do not include as ideals the complete annihilation of an opposing population and the total destruction of its economic base. At least the adversary’s material resources are expected to be at a conqueror’s disposal. It is correspondingly appropriate to examine the particular structures that shaped the particular limitations of eighteenth-century conflict.

Intellectual factors played a major role in the process. Every era defines ultimate truth in its own way. The biological determinism of the nineteenth century gave way to the computer printout of the twentieth. The eighteenth century’s intellectual life was dominated by a concern for first principles, for integrating social phenomena into an order borrowing its essential rationale from the world of mathematics. It is hardly surprising that military theorists and practical soldiers alike sought to tame that process which is above all the province of confusion, not so much to put the conduct of war and the behaviour of armies under artificial restrictions as to express them in terms comprehensible and acceptable to the societies and systems the military establishments existed to serve. The Thirty Years War marked the end of the temporary ascendancy of the military enterpriser and his soldateska. Whatever the financial and moral costs of bringing armies under the control of governments, the alternatives were perceptibly worse. The process generated a certain reciprocity, as soldiers sought to justify their existence to their now-permanent paymasters in universal rather than craft-specific terms. It would be surprising if they had done so in any other way than in terms of l’esprit géometrique.¹⁶

Moving from the metaphysical to the concrete, fortifications did much to structure eighteenth-century ways of war. The complex and expensive systems beginning with the ‘Italian trace’, and culminating in the exotic designs of Vauban, Coehorn, and their less familiar imitators, seldom became strategic objectives in themselves. Nor were they regarded as impregnable. Even the most skilfully conducted defence was expected to end with a capitulation on terms. Fortresses, however, could not simply be bypassed. Until well into the eighteenth century, undeveloped road networks created a correspondingly large number of choke points that in enemy hands could prove disastrous for an army dependent on its own magazines for supplies and, increasingly, ammunition. Rapid-firing flintlocks required predictable resupply on scales that, if modest by contemporary standards, nevertheless put unheard-of pressure on logistical systems. Moreover, the often-noted requirement of modern fortifications for ever-larger garrisons increased the risks of leaving such positions in the rear of one’s own lines of operation. Even the most passive of governors was likely to be able to mount serious threats to weak screening or blockading forces.

In central Europe neither budgets nor terrain would support the kinds of fortress systems familiar in the Low Countries, northern France, and northern Italy. The fortresses of Prussia, Austria, and the lesser German states were more of the traditional model: extended protection for cities like Prague or Dresden, or points d’appui like Schweidnetz, Kolberg, or Olmütz. This did not mean that they could be ignored with impunity. The region’s relatively limited road network, which by mid-century fell significantly behind the growing size of the region’s armies, meant that even an isolated fortress could play a major role as a choke point. Nor could siege guns be brought up with anything like the speed possible in more developed theatres of war. A related problem involved the difficulty in obtaining the large amounts of construction material necessary for the elaborate system of saps and trenches necessary for a formal eighteenth-century siege. Finally, neither the Russian, Prussian, nor Austrian armies paid much attention to their respective engineer corps. The combined result of these factors, particularly during the Seven Years War, was a general preference for bluff and bombardment: threats from the pages of Grimmelshausen combined with throwing a few hundred rounds over the walls almost at random. A governor willing to ignore both words and deeds could usually count on pinning a significant number of the enemy beneath his walls until they gave up in disgust or a relief force came close enough to invite them to take their chances in the open field.¹⁷

Fighting meant moving, and moving meant supply. The exact role of logistics in determining the nature of eighteenth-century warfare remains a subject of debate. In typically sweeping fashion, Martin van Creveld denies the tyranny of magazines. Armies, he asserts, lived off the countryside because existing transportation technologies made it impossible to move more than 10 per cent of an army’s requirements – non-improvisable essentials like ammunition, uniforms, and medical supplies. The scales of baggage allowed to officers may seem extreme by later standards, but that had more to do with social issues than logistical ones and in absolute terms did little to clog supply lines. Instead van Creveld stipulates that eighteenth-century armies were not particularly good at living off the land compared to their mercenary predecessors and Napoleonic successors. That, however, reflected another organizational problem: a general failure to provide for a field quartermaster system able to feed large bodies of troops under operational conditions.¹⁸

Van Creveld’s numerous critics describe a broad spectrum of technical and institutional factors making it anything but ‘relatively simple’ to supply an army on the move.¹⁹ Requisitioned grain usually needed to be threshed as well as baked. In supply terms the eighteenth century was at a watershed: conscious enough of the perils of digestive diseases to take pains in their prevention, but not yet sophisticated in the techniques of food preparation on a large scale under improvised conditions. Ovens as well as wagons significantly constrained the movement of armies. Requisitioned cattle could not simply be butchered on the spot and the meat issued still quivering. Vegetables too required some preparation; raw or half-cooked they were worse than nothing.

Psychological factors played an often-overlooked role in the process of logistics. Eighteenth-century armies were far more contractual than is generally recognized. Soldiers may have enlisted under what amounted to absolute terms of service. In practice they had very solid ideas of their implied rights. Men fed poorly enough to perceive their short commons as a breach of contract might not go so far as to respond by deserting. They could and did, however, develop a broad spectrum of maladies ranging from incapacitating boils to debilitating homesickness: the nostalgie du pays dreaded by all armies. It is worth noting that eighteenth-century Europeans were not a healthy lot. Poor diets and outright malnutrition combined with hard physical labour from early years to produce men who were fragile beneath their surface robustness, and correspondingly vulnerable to a broad spectrum of camp diseases. Keeping them fed with a minimum of effort on their part was the kind of obvious insurance policy no sensible commander was likely to ignore.²⁰

The pattern of eighteenth-century warfare was also determined by the structure of eighteenth-century armies. These were high-tech forces. Relative to the economic, administrative, and technological infrastructures supporting them, the fleets and armies of the Age of Reason represented as close to total mobilization as developed societies could achieve and sustain. A state-of-the-art ship of the line was among its era’s most complex technological artefacts, in the category of a space shuttle rather than an aircraft carrier.

A similar point might be made regarding land warfare. For all its shortcomings in a ‘Whig’ context, the flintlock musket and socket bayonet that was the dominant weapons system of eighteenth-century armies increased both the offensive and defensive capacities of the infantry to a point where, for the first time since the Roman legions, European battlefields were dominated by a single arm of service. Even at his peak the medieval knight never possessed the flexibility of the Frederician musketeer in his variant forms.

At the same time the flintlock was a system whose optimal use demanded levels of training, discipline, and commitment that created what amounted to a professional outlook. Man and weapon must be able to function as a single entity, in the context of a battlefield experience increasingly remote from even the most violent sectors of civil society. And that was only the initial step. The musketeer could not become so absorbed in the process of loading and firing that he became unresponsive to orders. The eighteenth-century soldier, far from being the automaton of so many later legends, had to combine mechanical skill and mental alertness in ways more familiar to the contemporary tanker or infantryman than to the uniformed civilians of the two world wars.

The other combat arms, cavalry and artillery, faced similar challenges. No longer could cavalry decide an action by riding at will through and over enemy footmen. Timing was everything in a mounted charge. Knowing when to launch one was the product of combinations of experience and insight impossible to calculate precisely, but devastating in their presence – or their absence. Such an attack depended in its initial stages on dash and aggressiveness on the part of all ranks: the much-vaunted, often-derided ‘cavalry spirit’. Yet the adrenalin rush needed to be choked off the moment the trumpets sounded ‘rally’. Heedless pursuit of a beaten enemy, or the less spectacular but more common pattern of continuing a stalemated mounted melee, were as high-risk prospects as was excessive caution. Combining the qualities of warrior and soldier in a cavalryman was by no means an automatic process; as late as the Napoleonic Wars the British army had failed to master the trick.

Throughout the eighteenth century artillerymen remained primarily technicians – a circumstance exacerbated by their relatively low status in the army’s pecking order. Yet by the Seven Years War the gunners played a crucial ongoing role in any major battle. Not only were they expected to shoot their guns, but to move them and fight for them on a regular basis. The jealously guarded status of the artillery as a ‘scientific’ branch of service, in short, was being challenged by a new role as a fighting force.²¹

Were these complexities not enough, eighteenth-century armies had to fight with an underdeveloped nervous system. Tactical organizations above the regiment were for all practical purposes non-existent. Even brigades were frequently improvised from operation to operation. Higher formations were entirely ad hoc. General texts frequently use the words ‘division’ and ‘corps’ as convenient shorthands. The terms, however, are sufficiently misleading that the following narrative substitutes ‘battle group’ and ‘task force’ as more clearly indicating the nature of the bodies.

The decision not to implement a more comprehensively articulated organizational structure is one of the major uninvestigated negatives of eighteenth-century military history. In part this reflected a point made by Thomas Kuhn: the conditions for a paradigm shift remained unmet. Between the 1650s and the 1750s, for example, armies increased in size rapidly but steadily. There was no sudden explosion of numbers to shatter the limits of existing structures of thought about how those armies might be organized for optimal effectiveness. Both the mentalité of the Age of Reason and the wisdom of great captains like Turenne and Montecuccoli favoured command from the top: a single will shaping and directing the campaign and the battle. To a degree this was a response to the later Thirty Years War, when tactical control often tended to disappear within minutes after the shooting started. In more general terms the legacy of Wallenstein still survived, if only as a ghost-memory of the potential risks of over-mighty subordinates. Nor did officer corps dominated by still proud, still economically independent aristocracies offer promising material for elaborate hierarchic systems of command and obedience.²²

This point was highlighted even in Prussia, where in 1717 King Frederick William had established a Corps of Cadets whose adolescent members were drawn from the ranks of the aristocracy. The King’s intention was to integrate these young men into state service even if, as sometimes happened, they had to be enrolled by force. Specific programmes of general and professional education took second place to that goal. The eventual result was to establish a pattern of noblemen’s sons attending a state institution.²³ An equally significant, but unintended, consequence was the development of Prussia’s officer corps as a collegial community where lieutenants as well as generals could in principle address the King on a footing of comradeship.

Another factor retarding the development of articulated organizations was the relative heterogeneity of senior officer corps. One-sixth of Frederick the Great’s generals between 1740 and 1763 came from outside Prussia.²⁴ In countries like France and England, ethnic origins might be more homogeneous but professional competence was a matter of accident. An officer was still expected to master his craft by a mixture of direct experience and force of character. This process worked well enough at regimental levels. Higher achievements were essentially random, both in absolute terms and relative to the system as a whole.²⁵ Erratic genius can be as dangerous as predictable mediocrity. In the context of multiple unpredictability it was the better part of common sense to limit risks by limiting opportunities for failure – particularly when battle was increasingly perceived as the best way of cutting the Gordian knots of ‘forever wars’.

A final element facilitating the acceptance of rigid control involved the symmetrical nature of eighteenth-century armies. At least in western Europe they were trained, armed, and organized in essentially identical fashions. They kept abreast of one another’s innovations, not least through the st...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Matrices and Probabilities
• Chapter 2 - Wars for Silesia: 1740 – 45
• Chapter 3 - Breathing Space and Renewals
• Chapter 4 - Prussia Ascendant
• Chapter 5 - Years of Balance: 1758 – 59
• Chapter 6 - Prussia Contra Europe, 1760 – 63
• Chapter 7 - Coda: 1763 – 86
• Reflections
• Further Reading
• Index