Frederick the Great: A Military History by Dennis Showalter

Author:Dennis Showalter [Showalter, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, History, Non-Fiction, War & Military
Amazon: B00DN5V4UO
Publisher: Frontline Books
Published: 2012-10-23T23:00:00+00:00

The King had not exactly left the composition of this force to chance. The 26th Infantry was one of the army’s best. Recruited from Pomerania, its ranks included a large number of Slavic Wends speaking their own dialect and possessing the kind of strong in-group loyalties that, properly utilized, can produce a formidable fighting unit. The 13th was a Berlin outfit, known for its rigid discipline as the ‘Thunder and lightning’ Regiment, with an NCO corps that was the terror of clumsy and unwilling privates and amateurs and a combat record that had time and again affirmed the worth of hard peacetime training. As for the supports, the royal grenadiers were case-hardened veterans who saw their normal place as at the head of any forlorn hope while the 18th was a crack Brandenburg formation, no more than a cut below its comrades of the 13th and the 26th.

Frederick had learned from his previous experiences that speed was vitally important on a modern battlefield. Getting inside an enemy’s loop of initiative was a valuable step towards victory. Haste, however, often made waste as well. Whatever the Austrians might have been in the Silesian Wars of the 1740s, Prague had indicated and Kolin had proved they could no longer simply be turned out of their positions by a series of limited attacks. This time the Prussian army would hit its enemy with the controlled power of a karate strike, everything focused behind the three battalions that began their advance on the Austrian positions around 1 p.m.

The Austrians in the threatened sector had neither been entirely idle nor remained entirely ignorant. The commander, General Franz Nadasdy, was a veteran hussar who had faced the Prussians too many times to trust entirely in either Fortuna’s or Bellona’s good will. As the Prussians crossed his front Nadasdy sent repeated requests for support to Charles and Daun. They remained unacknowledged – everyone knew that Hungarians tended to start at ghosts and shadows!

Nadasdy had also been assigned most of the army’s Reichstruppen. These formations, recruited like their counterparts at Rossbach from the dwarf states of the Holy Roman Empire and middle-sized Austrian allies like Wurttemberg, were widely and legitimately regarded as unreliable even with a season’s victorious campaigning under their belt. Nadasdy’s decision to deploy them on the far left of his position was defensible enough as long as the Prussian attack was expected to come from the front and strike further north. The army’s weakest links would be correspondingly posted where they were likely to do the least damage. Given Frederick’s actual axis of advance the Germans were at exactly the wrong spot, for Nadasty and for the whole Austrian army.

Once they recovered from their initial shock the Imperial colonels on the spot did the best with what they had, refusing their flank and deploying their commands to take advantage of a shallow ditch facing the Prussian line of attack. Most of the men in the first line were Württembergers, Protestants whose willingness to fight the Prussians had been widely questioned in the Austrian camp.

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