This was hardly a triumph of resolute leadership, but it demonstrated the potency of the weapon fashioned by Frederick William I. The battle of Chotusitz on the Bohemian-Moravian border (17 May 1742) exhibited some analogous features: on this occasion the Prussian cavalry was worsted by the Austrian horse early on in the action; it was the infantry, deploying with rigour and flexibility on uneven terrain, that broke the Austrian lines with tightly focused enfilade fire. Frederick’s rather inept dispositions on the eve of the battle gave as yet little hint of the strategic talent for which he would later be celebrated. At Hohenfriedeberg, perhaps the most decisive of the battles fought during the Second Silesian War, Frederick was more securely in control of events and showed an impressive ability to tailor his plans to changing conditions on the field. Here too, the decisive strokes were delivered by the infantry, advancing three ranks deep towards the Austrian and Saxon lines, shoulder to shoulder with sword bayonets fixed, at the regulation speed of ninety paces a minute, slowing to seventy as they closed with the enemy – relentless, unstoppable.26
Frederick had opened hostilities in December 1740 with a spontaneous and unprovoked attack, and historians of the later twentieth century viewing these events through the lenses of two world wars have sometimes seen Frederick’s invasion as an unexampled act of criminal aggression.27 Yet there was nothing exceptional in the context of contemporary power politics about an attack of this kind on another’s territory – one need point only to the long history of French aggressions in Belgium and the western German lands, or the seizure of the island of Gibraltar by an Anglo-Dutch raiding force in 1704 during the War of the Spanish Succession, or, closer to home, to the bold partition plans of Saxony and Bavaria. One impressive feature of Frederick’s war planning was his capacity to stay focused on a specific, circumscribed objective (in this case the acquisition of Silesia) and not to be seduced by allies or good fortune into gambling for higher stakes. This helps to explain why Prussia spent fewer years at war during Frederick’s reign than any major European power.28
What amazed contemporaries about Frederick’s Silesian adventure was the combination of its speed and success with the apparent mismatch between the two opponents – Prussia, a third-rank player in the European system, and Austria, the leading dynasty of the Holy Roman Empire and an established member of the great-power club. Prussia’s achievement seemed all the more striking for the fact that it contrasted so sharply with the contemporary fortunes of Bavaria and Saxony. The Bavarians suffered a chain of defeats, in the course of which the Elector Charles Albert was forced to seek refuge outside his country. The Saxons fared little better; having found that there was nothing to gain through their collaboration with the League of Nymphenburg, they changed sides to fight with the Austrians in 1743, in time to stand against Prussia on the losing side at Hohenfriedeberg. This unimpressive record cast the Prussian success in sharp relief. In 1740, Prussia had been just one – and certainly not the wealthiest – of a group of German territorial states with the potential to transcend their status within the Holy Roman Empire. But by 1748, Prussia had pulled ahead, eclipsing its closest German rivals.
It was by no means clear, however, that Frederick would succeed in holding on to his booty. The taking of Silesia had created a new and potentially very dangerous situation. The Austrians absolutely refused to be reconciled to the loss of the monarchy’s richest province, and declined to sign the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, because it formalized Prussian possession of the stolen province. The creation of an anti-Prussian coalition capable of prising Silesia out of Frederick’s hands and thrusting Prussia back into the ranks of the lesser German territories now became the leitmotif of Habsburg policy. Russia could already be counted on: alarmed at Prussia’s unexpected military success, Tsaritsa Elisabeth and her chief minister, Chancellor Alexis P. Bestuzhev-Riumin, came to see Brandenburg-Prussia as a rival for influence in the eastern Baltic and a potential block to Russian westward expansion. In 1746, the Russians signed an alliance with Vienna; one of its secret clauses foresaw the partition of the Hohenzollern monarchy.29
So powerful was the Habsburg fixation with Silesia that it brought about a fundamental reorientation of Austrian foreign policy. In the spring of 1749, Maria Theresa convened a meeting of the Privy Conference (Geheime Konferenz) whose purpose was to sort out the implications of the Silesian disaster. Present at the meeting was a brilliant young minister, the 37-year-old Count Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz. Kaunitz argued for a fundamental policy rethink. Austria’s traditional dynastic ally was Britain and her traditional foe was France. But a detached look at the history of the British alliance, Kaunitz argued, showed that it had yielded little of real use to the Habsburg monarchy. Only the year before, the British had played an ignominious role in the negotiations at Aix-la-Chapelle, pressing the Austrians to accept its loss as irreversible and hurrying to guarantee Prussian possession of Silesia. The root of the problem, Kaunitz argued, lay in the fact that the geopolitical interests of a maritime power such as Britain and those of a continental power such as Austria were objectively too divergent to sustain an alliance. The interests of the monarchy thus demanded that Vienna abandon her unreliable British ally and sue instead for the friendship of France.
This was a radical stance in the Austrian setting, not only because it involved a transformation of the traditional alliance structure, but also because it was grounded in a new kind of reasoning framed not in terms of dynastic authority and tradition, but of the ‘natural interests’ of a state, as defined by its geopolitical position and the immediate security needs of its territory.30 Kaunitz was the only participant at the Privy Conference debate of 1749 to take this position; the others, all of whom were older than he, shrank from his extreme conclusions. Yet it was Kaunitz’s view that Maria Theresa chose to adopt, and he was duly sent off to work towards a French alliance as ambassador to the court at Versailles. In 1753 he was appointed state chancellor with responsibility for the Habsburg monarchy’s foreign policy. The Silesian shock thus dislodged Habsburg foreign policy from the web of assumptions in which it had traditionally been embedded.
The Seven Years War (1756–63) that followed happened because these Austrian and Russian calculations became entangled with the escalating global conflict between Britain and France. During 1755, there were skirmishes between British and French troops in the remote watery plains of the Ohio river valley. As London and Paris drifted back into open war, King George II of Britain looked to prevent Prussia, an ally of France, from falling upon Hanover, the king’s German homeland. Just as the French had used the Swedes to menace the Brandenburgers in Pomerania in the early 1670s, the British now offered to finance Russian troop and naval deployments along the borders of East Prussia. The details were set out in the Convention of St Petersburg, which was agreed (though not yet ratified) in September 1755.
Frederick II was deeply alarmed at this threat on his eastern frontier – he was well aware of Russian designs on East Prussia and always tended to overestimate Russian power. Desperate to alleviate the pressure on his eastern frontier, he entered into a curiously open-ended agreement with Britain, the Convention of Westminster of 16 January 1756. The British agreed to withdraw their offer of subsidies from the Russians and the two states decided to undertake joint defensive action in Germany in the event that France should attack Hanover. This was a hasty and ill-judged move on Frederick’s part. He did not take the trouble to consult his French allies, although he ought to have guessed that this unforeseen pact with France’s traditional enemy would infuriate the court at Versailles and drive the French into the arms of the Habsburgs. Frederick’s panic reflex of January 1756 exposed the weakness of a decision-making system that depended exclusively on the moods and perceptions of one man.
Prussia’s position now unravelled with perilous speed. The news of the Convention of Westminster sparked fury at the French court, and Louis XV responded by accepting the Austrian offer of a defensive alliance (the First
Treaty of Versailles, 1 May 1756), under which each of the two parties was obliged to provide 24,000 troops to the other in the event of its coming under attack. The withdrawal of the British subsidy offer also enraged Elisabeth of Russia, who agreed in April 1756 to join in an anti-Prussian coalition. Over the next few months, it was the Russians who were the driving force towards war; while Maria Theresa took care to confine her preparations to relatively inconspicuous measures, the Russians made no effort to conceal their military build-up. Frederick now found himself encircled by a coalition of three powerful enemies whose joint offensive, he believed, would be launched in the spring of 1757. When the king demanded categorical assurances from Maria Theresa to the effect that she was not combining against him and had no intention of starting an offensive, her answers were ominously equivocal. Frederick now resolved to strike first, rather than waiting for his enemies to take the initiative. On 29 August 1756, Prussian troops invaded the Electorate of Saxony.
Here was another totally unexpected and profoundly shocking Prussian initiative, and the king was alone in deciding upon it. To a certain extent, the invasion was based upon a misapprehension of Saxon policy. Frederick believed (wrongly) that Saxony had joined the coalition against him and had his officers search the Saxon state papers (in vain) for documentary proof. But his action also served broader strategic objectives. In his Anti-Machiavel, published shortly after his accession to the throne, Frederick had delineated three types of ethically permissible war: the defensive war, the war to pursue just rights, and the ‘war of precaution’, in which a prince discovers that his enemies are preparing military action and decides to launch a pre-emptive strike so as not to forgo the advantages of opening hostilities on his own terms.31 The invasion of Saxony clearly fell into the third category. It allowed Frederick to start the war before his opponents had amassed the full strength of their forces. It provided him with control of a strategically sensitive area that would otherwise almost certainly have been used as a forward base – only eighty kilometres from Berlin – for enemy offensives. Saxony was also of considerable economic value; it was ruthlessly milked during the war, supplying more than one-third of Prussia’s entire military expenditure, though it is difficult to establish how heavily the issue of finance and resources weighed in Frederick’s calculations.
The invasion of Saxony might have been defensible in purely strategic terms, but its political impact was nothing short of disastrous. The anti-Prussian coalition acquired the momentum of self-righteous outrage. Russia had already put an offensive construction upon the alliance, but the French had not. They might well have remained neutral if Frederick had bided his time and become the victim of an unprovoked attack by either the Austrians or the Russians. Instead, France and Austria now contracted a Second Treaty of Versailles (1 May 1757) with an openly offensive character, in which France promised to supply 129,000 troops and 12 million livres each year until the recovery of Silesia had been accomplished (France was to be rewarded with control of Austrian Belgium). The Russians joined the offensive alliance with a further 80,000 troops (they planned to annex Polish Courland to Russia and compensate a Russian-controlled Poland with East Prussia); the territories of the Holy Roman Empire put forward an imperial army of 40,000 men; even the Swedes joined in, in the hope of grabbing back some or all of Pomerania.
This was not, in other words, just a war to decide the fate of Silesia. It was a war of partition, a war to decide the future of Prussia. Had the allies succeeded in their objectives, the Kingdom of Prussia would have ceased to exist. Shorn of Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia, along with the lesser territories claimed by various members of the imperial contingent, the Hohenzollern composite state would have returned to its primordial condition: that of a landlocked north German Electorate. This would have been in precise accordance with the plans of the key Austrian policy-makers, whose objective was, as Kaunitz crisply put it, ‘la réduction de la Maison de Brandebourg à son état primitif de petite puissance très secondaire’.32
That Frederick should have prevailed against such a massive preponderance of forces appeared miraculous to contemporaries and still seems remarkable to us. How can it be explained? Clearly the Prussians enjoyed certain geographical advantages. Frederick’s control of Saxony gave him a compact territorial base (excluding East Prussia and the Westphalian principalities, of course) from which to launch operations. He was sheltered on the southern fringes of Silesia by the Sudeten mountains of northern Bohemia. His western flank was covered by the British-financed Army of Observation in Hanover; this sufficed to keep the French at bay for a time in that sector. For the four years 1758–61, Prussia received a hefty annual subsidy of £670,000(roughly 3,350,000 thalers) from the British government, a sufficient sum to cover about one-fifth of Prussian war expenditures. Frederick (who decided early on not to defend either East Prussia or the Westphalian territories) also enjoyed the advantage of internal defensive lines, while his enemies were operating (with the exception of Austria) at a great distance from home. Dispersed around the periphery of the main theatre of operations, the allies found it difficult to coordinate their movements effectively.
There was also, as in virtually all instances of coalition warfare, a problem of motivation and trust: Maria Theresa’s obsession with the destruction of the Prussian ‘monster’ was not shared by most of the other partners, who had more limited objectives. France’s concerns were focused primarily on the Atlantic conflict and French interest in the struggle with Prussia dwindled fast after the devastating Prussian victory at Rossbach (5 November 1757). Under a renegotiated Third Treaty of Versailles, signed in March 1759, the French cut their military and financial commitments to the coalition. As for the Swedes and the assorted German territories represented in the imperial army, they were in it for easy pickings and had little inclination to persevere with an exhausting war of attrition. The strongest link in the coalition was the Austro-Russian alliance, but here too there were problems. Neither wished to see the other benefit disproportionately from the conflict and, on at least one crucial occasion, this distrust translated into Austrian reluctance to commit forces to the consolidation of a Russian victory.
But this should not be taken to imply that Prussia’s ultimate success was in any sense a foregone conclusion. The Third Silesian War dragged on for seven years precisely because the issue proved so difficult to resolve militarily. There was no uninterrupted string of Prussian victories. This was a bitter struggle, in which success, for Prussia, meant surviving to fight another day. Many of the Prussian victories were narrowly won, costly in casualties and insufficiently decisive to shift the balance of forces engaged in the conflict definitively in Prussia’s favour. At the battle of Lobositz (1 October 1756), for example, the Prussians managed to gain tactical control of the battlefield, at heavy cost in men, but left the main body of the Austrian army unbroken. Much the same can be said of the battle of Liegnitz (15 August 1760) against the Austrians in Silesia; here Frederick accurately assessed enemy positions and moved quickly to strike at one of the two separated Austrian armies and disable it before the other could respond effectively. This initiative was successful, but left the Austrian forces in the area largely intact.
There were a number of battles in which Frederick’s intelligence and originality as a field commander were brilliantly in evidence. The single most impressive victory was at the battle of Rossbach (5 November 1757) against the French. Here 20,000 Prussians found themselves outnumbered two to one by a combined French-imperial force. As the French-imperials wheeled around the Prussian position, hoping to outflank them on their left, Frederick redeployed with impressive speed, despatching cavalry to sweep away the regiments of horse at the front of the allied advance and repositioning his infantry in a lethal scissors formation from which they could subject the French and imperial columns to heavy fire and attack. Prussian losses totalled 500 men to the enemy’s 10,000.
One of the central traits of Frederick’s battle-craft
was a preference for oblique over frontal orders of attack. Rather than approach in parallel frontal array, Frederick tried where possible to twist his attacking lines so that one end, often reinforced by cavalry, cut into the enemy position before the other. The idea was to roll the enemy up along his own lines rather than assault him head on. It was a mode of manoeuvre that required especially skilled and steady infantry work, particularly where the terrain was uneven. In a number of battles, Prussian attacks from the flank using complex infantry deployments worked with devastating effect. At Prague (6 May 1757), for example, where Prussian and Austrian numbers were roughly matched, Frederick managed to wheel the Prussians around on to the right flank of the Austrians. When the latter redeployed in haste to meet his advance, local Prussian commanders recognized and exploited a gap in the ‘hinge’ between the old and the new positions and drove a salient through it, irreparably shattering the Austrian force. The classic example of the oblique marching order in action was the battle of Leuthen (5 December 1757), where the Prussians were outnumbered by the Austrians nearly two to one; here a Prussian feint attack gave the impression of a frontal approach while the mass of the Prussian infantry swept around to the south to scoop up the Austrian left wing. In this extraordinary set piece, the ‘moving walls’ of the Prussian infantry were flanked by coordinated artillery fire as the Prussian guns moved from firing position to firing position along the line of attack.
However, the very same tactics could also fail if they found the enemy prepared, were not supported by sufficient troop numbers or were based on a faulty understanding of the situation in the field. At Kolin (18 June 1757), for example, Frederick tried as usual to wheel around the Austrian right flank and roll the enemy up from the wing, but found that the Austrians, in anticipation of this, had extended their lines across his route of approach, committing him to a disastrous uphill frontal assault against heavily defended and numerically superior positions – here it was the Austrians who won the field, at a cost of 8,000 men to Prussia’s 14,000.33
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