Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon

Author: Rory Muir
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300147686
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 502

Book Description
This historical study of Napoleonic battles and tactics examines firsthand accounts from soldiers’ memoirs, diaries, and letters: “A major work” (David Seymour, Military Illustrated). In this illuminating volume, historian Rory Muir explores what actually happened in battle during the Napoleonic Wars, putting special focus on how the participants’ feelings and reactions influenced the outcome. Looking at the immediate dynamics of combat, Muir sheds new light on how Napoleon’s tactics worked. This analysis is enhanced with vivid accounts of those who were there—the frightened foot soldier, the general in command, the young cavalry officer whose boils made it impossible to ride, and the smartly dressed aide-de-camp, tripped up by his voluminous pantaloons. Muir considers the interaction of artillery, infantry, and cavalry; the role of the general, subordinate commanders, staff officers, and aides; morale, esprit de corps, soldiers’ attitudes toward death and feelings about the enemy; the plight of the wounded; the difficulty of surrendering; and the way victories were finally decided. He discusses the mechanics of musketry, artillery, and cavalry charges and shows how they influenced the morale, discipline, and resolution of the opposing armies. "Muir has filled an important gap in the study of the Napoleonic era."—Library Journal

Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 1807-1815

Author: Rory Muir
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300064438
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
This account of the final years of Britain's long war against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France places the conflict in a new - and wholly modern - perspective. Rory Muir looks beyond the purely military aspects of the struggle to show how the entire British nation played a part in the victory. His book provides a total assessment of how politicians, the press, the crown, civilians, soldiers and commanders together defeated France. Beginning in 1807 when all of continental Europe was under Napoleon's control, the author traces the course of the war throughout the Spanish uprising of 1808, the campaigns of the Duke of Wellington and Sir John Moore in Portugal and Spain, and the crossing of the Pyrenees by the British army, to the invasion of southern France and the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Muir sets Britain's military operations on the Iberian Peninsula within the context of the wider European conflict, and examines how diplomatic, financial, military and political considerations combined to shape policies and priorities. Just as political factors influenced strategic military decisions, Muir contends, fluctuations of the war affected British political decisions. The book is based on a comprehensive investigation of primary and secondary sources, and on a thorough examination of the vast archives left by the Duke of Wellington. Muir offers vivid new insights into the personalities of Canning, Castlereagh, Perceval, Lord Wellesley, Wellington and the Prince Regent, along with fresh information on the financial background of Britain's campaigns. This vigorous narrative account will appeal to general readers and military enthusiasts, as well as to students of early nineteenth-century British politics and military history.

The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon

Author: Gunther E. Rothenberg
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253202604
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
Some 12 years ago it was estimated that well over 300,000 works existed on this period and since then several thousand more have appeared. Therefore, it might be reasonably argued that there is little room for another volume. Nonetheless, this vast outpouring of literature has usually dealt with major leaders, specific battles or campaigns, and with certain branches of the service. Moreover, at least in English, the literature tends to concentrate primarily on the French or British armies. There appears to be a lack of works combining a description of the major changes and trends in the art of war, especially at the cutting edge of events, with a discussion of the French military establishment and the armies of the major opponents, British as well as continental. And while this book is only a brief survey, I do believe that it may serve as a contribution towards filling this gap in our historical knowledge of military institutions and fighting men.

With Musket, Canon And Sword

Author: Brent Nosworthy
Publisher: Da Capo Press, Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 552

Book Description
Battle Tactics of Napoleon and His Enemies

The Face of Battle

Author: John Keegan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440673993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
John Keegan's groundbreaking portrayal of the common soldier in the heat of battle -- a masterpiece that explores the physical and mental aspects of warfare The Face of Battle is military history from the battlefield: a look at the direct experience of individuals at the "point of maximum danger." Without the myth-making elements of rhetoric and xenophobia, and breaking away from the stylized format of battle descriptions, John Keegan has written what is probably the definitive model for military historians. And in his scrupulous reassessment of three battles representative of three different time periods, he manages to convey what the experience of combat meant for the participants, whether they were facing the arrow cloud at the battle of Agincourt, the musket balls at Waterloo, or the steel rain of the Somme. The Face of Battle is a companion volume to John Keegan's classic study of the individual soldier, The Mask of Command: together they form a masterpiece of military and human history.

Fighting Techniques of the Napoleonic Age

Author: Robert Bowman Bruce
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312375874
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
Fighting Techniques of the Napoleonic World explores the tactics and strategy required to win battles with the technology available during the Napoleonic period (1789-1815), and points out how the development of such weapons technology changed the face of the battlefield. Divided into five sections it highlights: - Individual components of the armies: the foot soldier, the cavalryman and the artilleryman, the equipment they wore and used, and how they fought together. - Technology change, the emergence of military professionalism, and the impact these changes had on the battlefield. - How units were used together on the battlefield, and strategic positioning of battle units. - Specialist techniques and equipment developed for artillery. - Naval warfare, from the ships in which the men fought to the weapons they carried.

The Evolution of Strategy

Author: Beatrice Heuser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113949256X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Is there a 'Western way of war' which pursues battles of annihilation and single-minded military victory? Is warfare on a path to ever greater destructive force? This magisterial account answers these questions by tracing the history of Western thinking about strategy - the employment of military force as a political instrument - from antiquity to the present day. Assessing sources from Vegetius to contemporary America, and with a particular focus on strategy since the Napoleonic Wars, Beatrice Heuser explores the evolution of strategic thought, the social institutions, norms and patterns of behaviour within which it operates, the policies that guide it and the cultures that influence it. Ranging across technology and warfare, total warfare and small wars as well as land, sea, air and nuclear warfare, she demonstrates that warfare and strategic thinking have fluctuated wildly in their aims, intensity, limitations and excesses over the past two millennia.

The Background Of Napoleonic Warfare: The Theory Of Military Tactics In Eighteenth-Century France

Author: Professor Robert S. Quimby
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1786255057
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546

Book Description
Professor Emeritus Robert S. Quimby examines the strategic and tactical revolution that swept through the French military hierarchy in the Eighteenth Century and forged the superb instrument that became lethal in the hands of Napoleon and his generals. “The period from the opening of the War of the Spanish Succession to the meeting of the Estates-General is generally looked upon as a period of decadence in the history of the French Army. Compared with the great days of Louis XIV or with those of the Revolution and Napoleon this estimate seems correct enough. It was a period of many humiliations. The disasters inflicted upon France by Marlborough and Prince Eugene were followed by the much more humiliating failures of the Seven Years’ War. Yet the record is not without its glorious moments. During the War of the Austrian Succession, a series of brilliant successes was won under the leadership of the great Saxe. If the combat record of the French Army was, to say the least, uneven during the eighteenth century, such was not the case with its intellectual achievements. The French Army stood foremost among all those of Europe in this respect. Throughout most of the years of the century, there was a great intellectual ferment within the Army leading to major developments in ideas and in material improvement. Within a few years after the War of the Spanish Succession, books began to appear, pointing out defects in the tactics then in use and proposing changes. After the Seven Years’ War, the number of such books greatly increased. The result was to stimulate an ardent and at times acrimonious debate. Book countered book; pamphlets and memorials multiplied. Gradually, through the abandonment of more extreme ideas, a compromise was worked out. Embodied in the Ordinance of 1791, this became the basis for the tactics of the Wars of the French Revolution and of Napoleon.”-Introduction.

1805 Austerlitz

Author: Robert Goetz
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1473894239
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 500

Book Description
This in-depth study of The Battle of Austerlitz, considered Napoleon’s greatest victory, won the Napoleon Foundation’s History Grand Prize. Sometimes called The Battle of Three Emperors, Napoleon’s victory against the combined forces of Russia and Austria brought a decisive end to The War of the Third Coalition. The magnitude of the French achievement against a larger army was met by sheer amazement and delirium in Paris, where just days earlier the nation had been teetering on the brink of financial collapse. In 1805: Austerlitz, historian Robert Goetz demonstrates how Napoleon and his Grande Armée of 1805 defeated a formidable professional army that had fought the French armies on equal terms five years earlier. Goetz analyses the planning of the opposing forces and details the course of the battle hour by hour, describing the fierce see-saw battle around Sokolnitz, the epic struggle for the Pratzen Heights, the dramatic engagement between the legendary Lannes and Bagration in the north, and the widely misunderstood clash of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard and Alexander’s Imperial Leib-Guard. Goetz’s detailed and balanced assessment of the battle exposes many myths that have been perpetuated and even embellished in other accounts.

Artillery Of Napoleonic Wars

Author: Kevin F. Kiley
Publisher: Frontline Books
ISBN: 1853675830
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Book Description
In this detailed study Kevin Kiley looks at artillery in use throughout the Napoleonic period. He examines Napoleons own artillery as well as that employed by his enemies, and he evaluates the gunners contribution to warfare in the period. By looking at particular battles in detail, Kevin Kiley shows just how the effective employment of artillery could tip the scales of victory.