Meanwhile, the siege was progressing. Night of August 13–14, the Prussians had dug their second parallel, of a zigzag sort, which was answered by the foe almost immediately. The latter launched another, more involved sortie. The effort was gallant, and it did indeed succeed in driving back some of the enemy progress, but ultimately the sortie was beaten back. This was accomplished with heavy loss to the garrison. Even though the besiegers apparently lacked real world experience. The composition of Frederick’s army was decidedly “younger” compared to the beginning of the war. Many of the Prussian forces besieging the place were youth, some barely past boyhood. Duffy describes how they would often welp like little pups at the approach of the enemy.21 This is a world away from the tough, well-seasoned veterans who had first marched into Saxony in August 1756.
There could be no denying that the army was undergoing a precipitate decline in these latter years of the war. This would continue on into the declining years of the king’s reign. Sadly, for Prussia, even after that. Indeed, the journey towards the fateful battlefield of Jena in 1806 was already inexorably underway.
Meanwhile, the effort to nab Schweidnitz had to be a supreme one. Back-to-back assaults during the nights of mid–August, particularly two launched on Aug. 21–22, tested the mettle of both the besieged and the besiegers alike. This time, the struggle was a draw, with the Austrian defenders being capably led by Major Jakob Brady.22 Still, Guasco realized that his position was desperate. On August 22, the commandant sent a parley to Tauentztein, offering to surrender the whole compound so long as he and his whole command could march away. Any delusions along those lines would be speedily dashed. The Prussian general replied rather succinctly that the only way Guasco and his men would depart from Schweidnitz now were as POWs. In retrospect, this was a wise move. The force of Guasco, once freed from virtual shackles at Schweidnitz, would have been free to join up with Daun’s field army. This could then have opened up another set of difficulties. Problems that Frederick, at this twilight of the great struggle, was no longer willing to tackle, especially as Silesia, by the surrender of Schweidnitz, would inevitably be relinquished to him.
Meanwhile, Lefèbvre had decided to uncage his effort at mining under the Jauernicker fort. Mining was as much of an exact science as existed in eighteenth century warfare. That being said, the engineers functioned with some degree of secrecy. By August 22–23, Lefèbvre’s men were working on their third parallel. They “sank a sixteen foot deep shaft on the left of the new trench.”23 This development allowed the besieging force to open an underground attack to put more pressure on the defenders of Schweidnitz. Unfortunately for the attackers, flooding in the tunnels posed a serious menace, and there was simply no way to go under or around the countermining undertakings of Guasco’s garrison. At the same time, the latter were burning through the available shot and shell at an alarming rate, but the continuing progress of the Prussian siege works began again to falter.
There was an underlying problem or two. Unfortunately, for the king’s army, there was no way to press a vigorous siege of Schweidnitz, in spite of Lefèbvre’s efforts, and the Prussian effort flagged. Lefèbvre tried to the best of his ability to dig a tuunel under the Austrian lines thereabouts, in order to destroy that section by blowing it to smithereens. He sent a miner to try to secure proper measurements to the Austrians ensconced in their works. This apparently very jittery individual took his time in carrying out his assignment, ducking for cover behind whatever obstacle he ran on to, yet still stopped well short of the walls of the enemy-held compound. The rest of the matter was a mere guesstimate. Regretably. A tunnel of corresponding length (which was “estimated” at 96 feet) to the calculations was dug; it was filled with black powder, to the tune of more than 5,000 pounds’ worth. The tunnel, accordingly, was blasted on September 1. This just after nightfall.
Then, and unfortunately not a minute sooner, was it discovered that the previous calculations had been woefully in error. The resulting explosion was still far short of the Jauernicker and vicinity (to the tune of some 30 yards), leaving a crater “ninety feet in diameter”24 and little else to work with. This was surely a setback, but it was not fatal to the planned capture of the compound. Not by any means. Nothing daunted, the bluecoat enginners resumed the task at hand.
From the confines of the crater, the digging parties resumed working. Once more, the final target in all of this effort was the Austrian works. Meanwhile, one element of the defense was taken from Guasco’s hands early on. The defenders tried, in the beginning of the siege, to pound the Prussians on a regular basis with artillery fire, but it quickly became obvious that the supplies of ammunition and shot could never hold out long enough to let the artillerymen keep up this work. But the disturbance of the ground thereabouts and the explosions that were occurring in that immediate vicinity had created unsettling conditions in that area, more than enough to cause problems. As a result, as the bluecoats worked feverishly, the tunnel unexpectedly collapsed. The engineers had gone barely ten yards in this latest effort, but Lefèbvre, nothing daunted, drove a double tunnel from the truncated one over towards the enemy’s lines. Meanwhile, the Austrians, as was their want, fell to countermining in an effort to trip/explode the Prussian tunnels.
In this way, with the bluecoats desperately trying to tunnel into the Schweidnitz Compound, and the whitecoats, in their turn, trying just as hard to trip the enemy explosives and thus cave in the work, the siege dragged on into September. The Austrians did their very best, under the most unfavorable of circumstances, to keep hold of Schweidnitz, and Guasco, as we have observed, was left pretty much on his own to undertake the defense of the place with as much determination as he could. For instance, the night of September 9–10, Austrian countermining efforts paid off. They ended up exploding the bluecoat tunnel.
The Prussians once again tried to calculate as best they could the distance to the fortress, and renewed efforts were then dug into the willing earth in an attempt to undermine (in this case quite literally) the Austrian defenders of Schweidnitz. All of this effort took some time. Time which the defenders of the place tried to put to good advantage as well. So the seemingly endless procession of mining and countermining went on. It speaks volumes for the real difficulties encountered by the Prussian engineers now that one of Lefèbvre’s mining officers, a Major Signoret, was threatened with arrest if he did not step up the pace of the mining operation against Schweidnitz. Make no mistake; none of the available accounts suggest the Siege of Schweidnitz was anything other than what it appeared: a hard won, slug it out feat for the Prussians. Signoret apparently replied to his commanding officer he would rather be in irons instead of making further mining efforts. Under those circumstances, the outcome was almost inevitable. Lefèbvre “forced him to go on mining.”25 Often Prussian efforts to tunnel would be spoiled by undetected streams of water, or even by the occasional ineptness of the miners. As for Frederick, with Marshal Daun no longer a real factor in this siege (the latter had retired behind the mountain range about Tannhausen), he moved his headquarters from Dittmansdorf to Peterswaldau, then to Bögendorf, only a few miles from Schweidnitz.
Daun had, indeed, pulled back to the Wolfsberg in the period immediately following the fight at Reichenbach. This position was still within about ten miles of the Prussian posts laying siege to Schweidnitz. The marshal was immediately, and effectively, opposed by a large part of the bluecoat forces of Frederick. The latter force, consisting of some 90 squadrons of cavalry and 50 battalions of Prussian infantry, was close by. The enemy were deployed in the region from Reichenbach to a post hard by Waldenburg. It was plain that the Prussian monarch wanted to keep Daun busy while the effort against Schweidnitz was finished.
Meanwhile, Daun was about as on edge as was possible. The pressure to do something more to relieve the Austrian garrison yet trapped within Schweidnitz was still there. Marshal Daun had been concerned there was just no way to realistically get to the relief of Guasco, but there were o
thers in the Austrian camp who remained of the opinion that there was still hope of rescue. Communications from Vienna left no doubt, the Austrian High Command still wanted the main Austrian army to try to perform the task, despite its many obstacles, yet again. On September 12, Daun sent a communication to that effect to Guasco, this by a number of brave dispatch riders. This time the effort was to be accomplished by hitching round Kunzendorf to try to reach the embattled lines. The marshal even hinted that Guasco should try, if he felt his position within Schweidnitz were hopeless, to break out and join up with the rescue force in the open country beyond the walls of the compound.
Then the skies opened. The rains caused the immediate postponement of the rescue move towards Schweidnitz. While the downpours continued, Daun kept stepping up preparations to proceed with the planned expedition. The problem now was not just the rain-soaked paths and the overall wet weather conditions that were weighing against the whitecoats. Also factored into the equation, Frederick’s army was more confident than ever. The latter would not be an easy enemy to try to overcome, by any means.
On the other hand, long years of war had taught the Austrians that their foe would be no pushover. We have already observed the Prussian refusal to let Guasco march away from Schweidnitz. The last thing the king wanted was Guasco and his force marching away from Schweidnitz into the open. Besides, part of the reason that Laudon had refused the supreme command in Silesia in 1762 was the lack of cooperation among the junior officers of the Austrian army. In mid–September 1762, it appears that the majority of these same men were set against making a last try to relieve Schweidnitz.
In the end, even Laudon, who had at first openly postulated on the feasibility of making that same last-ditch attempt, had to question whether the mission could be carried off. Certainly without risking the safety of the entire Austrian army in the process. In a cause likely lost or not. In the end, as of September 24, the effort to undertake the relief of Schweidnitz was forthwith abandoned. Daun would try no more to salvage the unsalvageable. This effectively sealed Guasco’s fate, more than anything else. The position of the Austrians now trapped there within Schweidnitz could not but deteriorate, compounded by the advent of the wet weather and increasing weariness by all of the combatants. Clutching at straws, Guasco tried once more to secure an honorable peace, again Tauentzein would simply not hear of it.
Meanwhile, the siege continued apace. Another tunnel, dug by the Prussians in the immediate area, was blown skyward (September 16). Apparently the bluecoats had learned precious little from their previous experience with regard to the tunneling. Once more, the distance to the enemy lines was underestimated, this particular time by more than 60 feet. Nothing daunted, Lefèbvre undertook a new digging from the bottom of the resulting crater. As for the Austrians, they were not intimidated in the least. Their leaders still had the capacity to inspire confidence. Gribeauval was most capable, and he, in turn, was capably aided by Captain Pabliczek, head of the garrison’s miners, along with Colonel Steinmetz and his engineer corps.
With all of this in mind, especially regarding the soundness of the Austrian command, it should come as no surprise that this new offshoot tunnel was very quickly destroyed by three countermines prepared by the defenders. The latter continued to stand their ground, most stubbornly we might add. Guasco offered reward money, and even large quantities of alcohol to inflict as much injury on the enemy’s efforts as was possible. By this point, the bluecoats had taken to post and were literally living within the tunnels, sheltered to some extent from the fairly wet autumn weather pattern. By contrast, the Austrian defenders had few sources of shelter from the weather, outside of the compound’s buildings.
Guasco at this point sought the opinions from his officers about what to do next. The posed question involved what the men of the garrison should do with regard to Schweidnitz. Should the defenders simply wait on events, like an outside rescue force coming to spring them from their trap? Or, should the soldiers seize the moment and try their best to break out from the Prussian web encasing them on their own? The majority of the officers in attendance (19 out of the 21) at the meeting were dead set against trying to break out from Schweidnitz. This largely because of the logistics involved in such an effort.
One of the two officers who did not favor the majority view of waiting on rescue, just in case we might not have already guessed, was the aforementioned Giannini. The latter did not want to wait out the fall/rescue of Schweidnitz. Meanwhile, Lefèbvre continued his work. In mid–September, Prussian engineers pressed in closer to the compound. Night of September 23–24, the bluecoats exploded another bomb, creating a crater some 29 feet deep, most importantly, this time within just six feet of the Jauernicker Fort. All told, Guasco’s engineers exploded a total of nine countermines in trying to head off the Prussian effort as offshoot tunnels were developed from this latest crater. All of this provided an unpleasant development for Guasco, and the whitecoats had little choice but to resort to an immediate counterattack. One such effort, overnight on September 24–25, flared up all right, but the bluecoats were prepared for the event, and it did not produce much success.
Still, the Austrians summoned up the strength to try again. This time, during the night of September 25–26. For this effort, the counterattack was mounted by part of a Hungarian regiment under Lieutenant Michael Waldhütter. The Prussians had taken refuge before this in the crater right beside the Austrian lines. The whitecoat engineers proceeded to blast a hole into the crater and their troops made their way into the Prussian posts thereabouts. The brunt of this charge drove the Prussian survivors back to the parallel, which exposed the craters that had been in enemy hands to the machinations of Steinmetz and his minions. The latter promptly set to work trying to wreak havoc as much as was possible to the Prussian posts. Meanwhile, Lefèbvre’s troops set to work themselves trying to contain and seal off the Austrian effort against them. The invaders, after much effort, were finally turned back, after suffering some 22 killed and dozens of others injured.26 The damage inflicted on the Prussian casements? It was substantial enough to delay the further progress of their siege of Schweidnitz for a few days.
October 8, a chance round from Prussian artillery blew up one of the Austrian magazines, causing heavy damage and confusion. The resulting explosion inflicted significant damage on the garrison, most especially psychologically. Not to mention the loss of personnel in the resulting blast. As concerns the latter, a total of some 300 of the defenders of Schweidnitz were killed instantly in that explosion. Interestingly, Lefebvre had driven a deep tunnel this particular time, and the amount of explosive powder amounted to some 5,000 pounds’ worth. The fortress accordingly received extensive damage. This did nothing but encourage the Prussians that their enterprise on Schweidnitz was going to end up in a positive way. With this new encouragement, we might add, Lefèbvre pressed home his now considerable advantage.
The very next night, the bluecoat engineers blew up another bomb that still further damaged the Austrian hold upon the fortress/compound.27 Guasco, despite his many delaying efforts, was now near the end of his rope. All hope of relief courtesy of Marshal Daun had been dashed by now. The assailants, by this point, had pressed their siege works right up against the glacis of the Schweidnitz Compound. Supplies of ammunition and gun shot within were running periously low, although food rations yet remained in sufficient quantities. But the material for war was another matter altogether. The amount of ammo, as of an inventory on October 8, was estimated to last no more than three more days. That was the last straw. Guasco now asked for terms, sending Major Rasp, one of his aides, under a flag of truce to the Prussian headquarters with an offer to surrender both the compound of Schweidnitz and the garrison. The terms were to be only as POWs. So, on October 9, the defenders threw in the towel. Austrian losses during the siege had been substantial. Guasco’s men moarched out as prisoners, now reduced to less than 9,000 men standing. Some 3,472 men, 85 officers, three generals, were wounded o
r dead; 219 officers and 8,474 men were surrendered as prisoners. Prussian losses, including those sustained at Burkersdorf and Reichenbach, amounted to 2,929 men and 86 officers (all of these figures are approximations). The last siege of Schweidnitz in 1762 had lasted some 62 days and had occupied virtually the entire attention of the Prussian monarch and his army, as the attention had been fixed thereabouts in the Silesian campaign.
The Austrian defense of Schweidnitz, though in the end both futile and unquestionably a failure (though we can argue to what degree it was a failure) had used up a great quantity of material, assembled at great expense. Among them were approximately 14,293 mortar bombs, 85,858 roundshot and 3,489 rounds of canister.28 There was no longer any question but that Frederick, after three wars, the last almost debilitating, had finally achieved his aim of wrestling away Silesia. Conversely, Maria Theresa, even with the knowledge that she could not regain her valuable lost province, was left no choice. Peace was finally and truly inevitable!
Following the fall of Schweidnitz, Frederick settled in round it with his tired army, as it was now October and too late for an invasion of Austria this year. Prussian irregulars harassed Daun, causing him to draw off reluctantly into Bohemia. Frederick would have no more trouble with the old marshal, who died soon after the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1766. He did agree with the king to a winter truce, although not before Frederick, who had already detached Wied with 10,000 men to march to Saxony to aid Prince Henry after the fall of Schweidnitz, had moved towards Saxony and left Bevern in command opposite Daun. Both sides in Silesia now realized that the war was nearly over, and by both there were few further movements. In point of fact, most of the combatants were anxiously awaiting the coming of peace.
Frederick the Great and the Seven Years' War Page 106
