How have the theories of Carl Von Clausewitz and/or Henri Jomini influenced the birth of combined arms warfare? In your conclusion, suggest the significance to today’s military professional.

The 1812 Campaign

by Jonathan M. House

THE NAPOLEONIC THREAT

The French revolutionaries and their heir, Napoleon Bonaparte, not only posed a social-political challenge to European monarchies but redrew the map of Europe, making the French Empire and its satellites into an intolerable threat to the existing order. We have therefore come to regard Napoleon as another Alexander the Great, a brilliant general with no sense of natural boundaries who went to war at the least provocation until he overreached himself and was defeated. British propaganda at the time portrayed him as the “Corsican Ogre,” and later the example of Adolf Hitler caused the popular mind to regard the two dictators as identical bloodthirsty autocrats.1 By contrast, a group of ardent supporters of the emperor have tried recently to portray Napoleon in a different light: a brilliant but increasingly reluctant conqueror who was remarkably generous to his defeated foes, who wanted nothing more than to perfect the French government and economy but could never get the monarchs of Europe to leave him in peace. In December 1800, the British government and French royalists even attempted to assassinate Bonaparte with the nineteenth century equivalent of an improvised explosive device, killing dozens but leaving their target unharmed.2

The truth undoubtedly lies somewhere between these two images. For example, Prussia forced war on a reluctant Napoleon in 1806, and suffered the consequences. Similarly, the Russian court encouraged Tsar Alexander to violate his 1807 agreements with the French emperor. Since both emperors had come to power through violence, neither could afford to appear weak to his compatriots. Alexander first refused to marry his sister to the Corsican upstart, and then took offense when Napoleon married an Austrian archduchess instead!3 On the other hand, Napoleon’s continued sponsorship of an independent Poland (the Grand Duchy of Warsaw) was a clear threat to Russian imperial rule. Not only did the Poles provide ardent troops to support the emperor, but the duchy seemed to be a convenient lever to pressure Russia by encouraging Polish nationalism.

The primary cause of renewed conflict in 1812, however, was enforcement of the Continental System. Britain was the center of gravity of Napoleon’s enemies, the organizer and financier of all the allied coalitions against France. Yet, after Admiral Nelson’s defeat of the French-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, France had no chance to invade England and thereby confront its primary opponent directly. Instead, Napoleon conceived of the Continental System, a sort of reverse blockade by which all of Europe would refrain from trade with the British. This was Napoleon’s principal tool to weaken his opponents,

1 See Steven Englund, “Napoleon and History,” The Journal of the Historical Society VI:1 (March 2006), 161–169. 2 See, for example, Michel Franceschi and Ben Weider, The Wars Against Napoleon: Debunking the Myth of the Napoleonic Wars (New York and El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2008) and Ben Weider, La Sagesse de Napoleon (Ottawa: Editions Lemeac, 1983.) In the interests of full disclosure, let me note that I am a fellow of the International Napoleonic Society, although I do not necessarily subscribe to all of Weider’s revisionist ideas. 3 Franceschi and Weider, Wars Against Napoleon, 148–150.

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yet he sometimes violated the rules himself, authorizing limited trade to obtain British gold. Tsar Alexander had agreed to enforce this system as part of the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit. Quite apart from the Russian nobility’s distaste for doing Napoleon’s bidding, however, such a blockade would have disrupted Russia’s traditional trade with Britain, seriously damaging an already weak economy. On 31 December 1810, the tsar formally declared that Russia was no longer bound by the Continental System; the same decree demanded that Napoleon renounce the creation of a Polish state.4 After eighteen months of diplomatic maneuvering, France invaded Russia when Napoleon ran out of options.

THE 1812 CAMPAIGN

There are numerous historical parallels between the invasions of 1812 and 1941 (See Lesson H207 for the latter.) The first was the defining moment of the Imperial Russian Army, while the second became the core experience of its successor, the Red Army. In each case, the invader sought in vain to overcome the vast distances of European Russia by defeating the defending armies as far westward as possible, while the defender was caught in the midst of mobilization. Napoleon’s and Hitler’s failure to accomplish this made both the Imperial French and the Nazi German armed forces into the poster children of the “Western way of war,” condemned to attrition when their enemies refused to accept defeat. Each invading army was hobbled by logistical systems that forced repeated halts while the combat forces waited for resupply. In both instances, Western observers and historians tended to explain failure in terms of the severity of Russian weather and the mistakes of the invading commanders, downplaying the central role of the Russian defenders. As a result, historians of both invasions usually focus on the actions of the invaders rather than on the Russian response. The outline of this campaign is legendary, but the subject is so important that the balance of this paper will elaborate on various aspects of the campaign, including leadership, strategy, and maneuver.

Unfortunately for the Russian soldiers, 1812 found their country between generations of commanders. A. A. Suvorov and most of the great leaders of the eighteenth century were dead before Bonaparte made himself emperor. Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov, the man usually credited with victory, was sixty-seven years old in 1812—he was crafty and cautious but too old for command, and in fact died after a brief illness in April 1813. Kutuzov was in many ways an eighteenth century general, seeking to use maneuver to preserve his force and avoid unnecessary battles. Tsar Alexander I suspected the old general of involvement in his father’s downfall and death, but appointed him commander in August 1812 to satisfy the popular clamor for a “Russian” general as opposed to officers of Baltic German name and origin.5

The best generals of the next generation were not only non-Russian but relatively young, characteristics that encouraged jealousy and criticism among their peers and subordinates. Pyotr Ivanovich Bagration, an ethnic Georgian, had served a brilliant apprenticeship under Suvorov but was only forty-seven when he received a mortal wound while defending the Russian left at the battle of Borodino (7 September 1812). Michael Barclay de Tolly was fifty-three years old, but the tsar had promoted him so rapidly (from division commander in 1807 to minister of war in January 1810) that most of the other generals were senior in service to him. He was a fourth-generation resident of Lithuania who was raised by his uncle, a brigadier in the tsar’s army, but Barclay never lost the German accent of Riga, causing many contemporaries to label him falsely as a “foreigner.”6 Both Kutuzov and Alexander found Barclay a convenient scapegoat that allowed them to evade responsibility for their own decisions. The

4 Richard K. Riehn, 1812: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign (New York, etc: McGraw-Hill Publishing, 1990), 26. This magnificent study is a gold mine of information not only about the campaign but also about the problems of Napoleonic tactics and logistics; much of the information discussed below comes from it. 5 Roger Parkinson, The Fox of the North: The Life of Kutuzov, General of War and Peace. (New York: David Mckay Co. Inc., 1976), 117–120. 6 Michael Josselson and Diana Josselson, The Commander: A Life of Barclay de Tolly. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1980), esp. 1–8, 72–73, 211–17.

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fact that Alexander later recalled Barclay to field command demonstrates that, in the tsar’s opinion at least, the brave Lithuanian had not failed in 1812.

In the two-and-a-half years before the French invasion, Barclay labored to bring the Russian army up to the standard of Napoleonic France. He encouraged junior officers to take a greater interest in the welfare of their men, oversaw three major troop levies to expand the army, chaired a complete revision of Peter the Great’s 1716 military regulations, and introduced the corps level of command.7

Barclay also reached agreement with the tsar that, in the event of invasion, they must employ Fabian tactics, avoiding decisive battle until Napoleon’s army was weakened by the sheer effort of penetrating the vast Russian land mass. They correctly deduced that Napoleon could not defeat Russia unless the Russian government accepted that defeat by diplomatic negotiations. The tsar made no secret of this strategy, and in fact propounded it to the French ambassador, Armand de Caulaincourt, in an effort to warn off Napoleon.

“If the Emperor Napoleon makes war on me,” the Tsar Alexander said to me, “it is possible, even probable, that we shall be defeated, assuming that we fight. But that will not mean that he can dictate a peace. The Spaniards have often been defeated; and they are not beaten, nor have they submitted. But they are not so far away from Paris as we are, and have neither our climate nor our resources to help them. We shall take no risks. We have plenty of room; and our standing army is well organized, which means, as the Emperor Napoleon had admitted, that we need never accept a dictated peace, whatever reverses we may suffer . . . I shall not be the first to draw my sword, but I shall be the last to sheath it.”8

Yet, while Caulaincourt certainly reported this conversation to his master, the strategy was apparently a closely-held secret in Russia itself. The initial dispositions of the Russian army seemed to anticipate fighting close to the western boundaries of the empire. In practice, Napoleon advanced so rapidly that he preempted the concentration of the three Russian field armies, almost necessitating a retreat. Not only junior officers but even senior commanders such as Bagration were outraged when the Russian army repeatedly failed to make a stand, allowing the invader to advance hundreds of kilometers into the motherland. Tsar Alexander, as noted above, allowed first Barclay and then his successor, Kutuzov, to take the blame for this unpopular policy.

Despite the tsar’s brave words, no Russian leader anticipated the true depths of the French invasion. Out of a welter of possible contingency plans to deal with an invasion, Alexander had endorsed the proposal of General Ernst von Phull, his military advisor. Phull proposed the dispersed deployment of the Russian armies as a means of threatening the flanks of the French advance, a proposal that suggests ignorance of the true scale of Napoleon’s invading army. Phull also envisioned that, as a fall-back position, the two main Russian armies would unite at Drissa, a point that he hoped would cover the east- west roads leading to both Moscow and St. Petersburg. Originally a Prussian staff officer, Phull intended to make Drissa into a fortified camp in imitation of Frederick the Great’s similar expedient at Bunzelwitz in 1761. Phull also cited the advantages of Wellington’s Torres Vedras defenses in Portugal. In theory, such field fortifications could enable a numerically inferior force to halt further invasion by posing a threat that no enemy dared bypass; in practice, the positions at Drissa were poorly sited and incomplete.9 Carl von Clausewitz visited the camp at the end of June and was dismayed to discover that the rear of the camp was secured only by the Duna River. He communicated these concerns to the tsar, who toured the

7 Ibid., 77–84. 8 Armand de Caulaincourt,, Memoirs of General de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza, 1812–1813. Ed. Jean Hanoteau, trans. Hamish Miles. (London, Toronto, etc: Cassell and Company, Ltd, 1935), 69. 9 Riehn, 1812: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign, 35–36; Josselson, The Commander, 93–94, 101–4.

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site on 8 July and reluctantly agreed that Drissa was indefensible. Meanwhile, however, Phull had actually urged Barclay to retreat more quickly, in order to reach Drissa before the enemy!10

Phull’s faulty dispositions and various miscommunications between commanders, as well as the interference of the tsar and his brother Constantine, all caused the Russian army to conduct an unintentional but very effective delaying campaign. Kutuzov, appointed to replace Barclay on 20 August, adopted his predecessor’s delaying tactics as a matter of policy, so that by the time of Borodino the two sides were almost evenly matched.11

Much has been made of Napoleon’s repeated hesitations and less than brilliant command performance during the 1812 campaign. It would be equally true to say that his failure depended upon the Russian refusal to surrender and the French difficulties of supply. The latter problem was not, as sometimes suggested, that the French lacked the supplies they needed, but rather that they experienced the same problems as their opponents in terms of moving and distributing those supplies across the sparsely populated, landlocked terrain of Russia. As early as 1807, Napoleon had recognized the need for organized transportation units to distribute supplies to his increasingly large armies. By 1812, he had seventeen “train” or support battalions totaling six-thousand heavy wagons and capable of carrying forty days’ supply. However, the draft animals of these battalions suffered as heavily from the heat and dust of Russia as did their cavalry cousins. The same conditions caused a steady wastage of stragglers. By 29 July, Napoleon had to pause to rest the troops and allow his supplies to catch up with his spearheads; by that time he had already lost thirty-thousand troops and eighty-thousand animals without major combat. By October the supply problem was far more acute.12

The Russians had their own supply problems. In particular, the initial supply dumps were located too far to the west, resulting in the capture of at least one magazine and the forced destruction of several others as the Russians retreated. Still, every step to the east lengthened the Imperial supply lines while shortening those of its opponents.

The retreat from Moscow is usually told from the French point of view, without examining the corresponding Russian problems. Suffice it to say that Kutuzov’s cautiousness, which had earlier preserved the Russian army from destruction, now caused that army to allow its disorganized foe to escape repeatedly. Even before Napoleon left Moscow, flanking forces under General Count Peter Wittgenstein to the north and Admiral Pavel Tshitshagov to the south had virtually cut off the route of retreat. On his way west, the French emperor showed occasional flashes of his old brilliance, such as when he bluffed the Russians at Krasnoi in mid-November and escaped the trap at the Berezina River at the end of the month. Of equal significance, however, were Kutuzov’s overcaution and the continued disunity in the Russian command structure. These problems permitted the French to rescue a precious few thousand disorganized troops, which provided the cadres for renewed armies in 1813 and 1814.

One final piece of good planning, probably on Kutuzov’s part, was to assign Carl von Clausewitz to the Russian vanguard during the pursuit. Although his ignorance of the Russian language had frequently limited his utility during the campaign, in the depths of winter Clausewitz was able to contact his compatriot, General Graf Ludwig Yorck (usually referred to as von Yorck), the commander of the Prussian contingent within Napoleon’s X Corps. At the end of December, Clausewitz and von Yorck negotiated the Convention of Tauroggen, by which the Prussian contingent changed sides.13 This, plus the foot dragging and eventual neutrality of Prince Karl von Schwartzenburg, leader of the Austrian

10 Carl von Clausewitz, La Campagne de 1812 en Russie, Trans. M. Bégouen. (Paris: Librairie Militaire R. Chapelot, 1900), 11–27. 11 Riehn, 1812: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign, 236–41. 12 Ibid., 139–51, 199–200. 13 Clausewitz, La Campagne en Russie, 187–201.

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contingent, critically weakened the French Imperial forces at the end of the 1812 campaign and made possible the subsequent Russian advance into central Europe.

In short, blaming the 1812 defeat solely on Napoleon is a gross oversimplification, although he certainly contributed to the disaster. It would be more accurate to note two factors. First was the relative improvement in the Russian army by comparison to its imperial opponent. More fundamentally, the Russian campaign, like that in Spain, represented the fact that Napoleon’s adversaries no longer fought according to the eighteenth century rules that had permitted his earlier victories. The Grande Armée could and did still defeat these adversaries on the field of battle; the difference was that such tactical defeats did not translate into decisive political outcomes. The classic problem of the Western way of war was that rapid, decisive victory was only possible when the adversary’s entire army could be defeated in a single battle and when that adversary would accept battlefield results as final.

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