What I am interested in was whether Napoleon screwed up or got unlucky or some weird combination of things.
My sense is it was pretty close and could have gone either way. Wellington said the fighting at Hougoumont Farm was the lynch pin of the battle (I am paraphrasing) but was it?
Marshal Ney’s charge by the French seems a big screw-up.
Then you have the new (I think new) box formation to foil French cavalry. Which was fine till artillery got close enough to pummel those boxes which could not maneuver well.
It is an interesting battle. I am unsure if Wellington out generaled Napoleon or got lucky or some combination. Was Napoleon doomed before it began?
And don’t forget the Prussians which were in there and certainly had an effect.
The strategic campaign leading up to Waterloo was one of Napoleon’s most brilliant ever.
Napoleon was very much outnumbered by the combined allied forces, but he succeeded in preventing Wellington and Blücher from joining forces, he fooled Wellington as to which way he was moving, and held back Wellington’s forces at Quatre Bras while throwing most of his army against the Prussians and defeating them at Ligny, then he left Grouchy with a corps to hold back the Prussians while switching the bulk of his forces against Wellington.
By a really heroic effort the Prussians regrouped and made a forced march towards Wellington, and Grouchy made the major error of the whole campaign by failing to prevent them from getting past him.
Ney made several errors, or Wellington would have been defeated in any case, by the time the Prussians arrived.
It wasn’t entirely Napoleon’s fault for giving crucial posts to Ney and Grouchy. Most of his really good marshals had gone over to the Bourbons, or were not available for other reasons, so he had to do the best he could with those he had.
Infantry squares, which I think is what you mean by ‘boxes’ had been well known for centuries.
I think what Wellington was getting at with the “damn near run thing” comment was that there were many points that could have broken the other way, which could in turn have reversed the battle’s outcome. GreenWyvern mentions most of them.
Just one relatively minor example that doesn’t always get mentioned: Blücher got a bad hit on the head in the earlier battle; we would call it concussion today. In spite of that, he was able to lead his troops to help Wellington. If he hadn’t been able to gut it out, and the Prussians hadn’t arrived in time?
That’s not meant to slag Wellington - he did a magnificent job. But so did Napoleon, and in the heat and fog of battle, things can always break a different way. Everything broke for Wellington.
Napoleon recognized that in a general way: when a new officer was proposed to him for a task, one of his standard questions was: “Is he lucky?” That’s a recognition of the intangibles that can flow from hard work and effort.
Sure, but it was Grouchy’s job to prevent them from showing up. He failed. (“You had one job!”) What if he had carried it out and blocked the Prussians, so they never showed up? Certainly a possible outcome.
So it would be fair to say Wellington was out matched and got lucky? Luck in part due to less than capable subordinates that Napoleon was saddled with?
Bernard Cornwell, in one of the Sharpes novels (yeah, I know, prose fiction isn’t the best of sources, though Cornwell is one of the better-researched authors) says that Napoleon was stuck with the model of attacking in dense columns, which had worked very well in the previous decade against the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians, but which the English had countered by thin lines with constant fire, lapping over the flanks of the columns.
Any validity? If Napoleon had adapted with a more linear tactic, would he have gained enough to win? (If he had trained the troops to linear tactics, not just inventing it right then on the fly.)
(Is Cornwell respected as a historian or historical researcher?)
Indeed it’s very clear that Wellington didn’t take the final decision to make the stand at Mont St-Jean until he’d received the assurance from Blucher on the 17th that he would be coming in support. A retreat into the forest and back towards Brussels would likely have been his reluctant, but sober, decision otherwise.
The phase that always makes me nervous, even knowing the final outcome, was the avoidable crisis of the Hanoverians running out of ammo and having to give up La Haie-Sainte. That loss made Wellington’s centre very vulnerable, albeit rather late in the day.
From memory one of the problems between the coalition was the mistrust between Wellington and Blucher, or rather the mistrust between leaders in their respective military commands. One of Blucher’s commanders in particular was certain that Wellington would not stand and fight. I think it took a lot of persuading on both sides for the coalition armies to trust one other.
The biggest mistake in hindsight might have been leaving Davout in Paris. He was probably the best of Napoleon’s marshals period. It was an understandable mistake, as he was valuable where he was. But still a mistake - at that point a successful short-term defense against the allied invasion outweighed in importance just about everything.
Wellington was certainly no Marlborough, the greatest general England ever had, but he was a good commander. Most good generals make their own luck but it is fair to say that events did conspire against Napoleon that day whilst the Fates were smiling on Wellington.
Blücher and Wellington seemed to have gotten on well enough, it was Blücher’s Chief of Staff/second in command (von Gneisenau) who mistrusted the English. If Blücher had not recovered from his injuries at Ligny, Gneisenau might well have withdrawn the Prussians from the area.
Wellington had his share of luck, but remember that the commanders had different objectives; Wellington was standing on defensive, containing and holding Napoleon in check until other allied troops could be put in the field. Napoleon had no time and knew that the Allies could eventually mass troops to crush him; his only chance was to administer a massive defeat to the English and Prussian forces to force their governments to consider peace in lieu of raising (very costly) armies to defeat him.
And he damned near pulled it off. He was a genius at this, after all.
Based on reading your posts, you seem to want to disparage Wellington; in this I dissent, the man choose ‘good ground’, he held his position despite leading a polygot (and somewhat inexperienced) army against all attacks, and when the French ‘Old Guard’ was repelled late in the day, he had the stones to order an attack that broke the French army beyond repair and led to Napoleon’s abdication a few days later.
In speculation, if the Prussians had not arrived, Wellington would probably have held his position until the end of the day and then retreated to Brussels that evening. what the future would have brought is unknown.
I do however think Wellington is given too much credit as the one guy who could defeat Napoleon (since he was the one guy who defeated Napoleon). Seems to me Wellington was a solid and competent commander who needed a fair bit of luck on his side and got it.
Luck in war certainly counts. A win is a win. But if we replayed this battle ten times who would your money be on?
Marlborough and Wellington are the perennial #1 and #2 English generals from the gunpowder age, but everybody seems to disagree with which was which. Wellington never won as thoroughly as Marlborough and perhaps had less impact on military development in his time.
However Marlborough mostly had the advantage of going up against a lower average quality of commander - most were mediocre and one good one ( Vendome at Oudenarde ) was handicapped by being saddled with an incompetent royal co-commander. The one time he faced truly top flight generals across the board ( Villars and Boufflers at Malplaquet ) he got horribly mauled when they correctly predicted his usual pattern of attack and counter-planned it neatly. He also had the stealth advantage of having Eugene of Savoy as his junior commander in many of his signature battles - an exceptional general in his own right.
Wellington by contrast fought more consistently skilled generals over a far wider area and under rather more varied circumstances ( including experience in India ), with less help.
I might still give Marlborough the nod, but Wellington really was a quite good general ( though not quite in Napoleon’s class overall IMHO ).
A short-term defense was important, but then? I am not a student of this period in European history, so please forgive this potentially stupid question: Waterloo, so what? That is, if Napoleon had won at Waterloo, what is the best he could have expected going forward? Would the rest of Europe plus Britain been so weakened by this defeat that he would have been able to re-establish and defend his rule in France from all opponents domestic and foreign? Would his former satellite states have reverted to supporting him? It’s hard for me to see a future for France under Napoleon after all of his and their previous losses.
I don’t believe you have been overly disparaging of Wellington. However, I do believe the fact that Wellington stood and fought was in itself a victory. It’s basically all that was required of him.
Also, I do have a quibble with the use of the word luck. Sure, Wellington benefited from mistakes made by Napoleon and his commanders. Does this count as luck, or, incompetence by his opposition? Had Wellington made the same blatant mistakes during the battle would this show Wellington was unlucky, or, would it show Wellington simply as a commander capable of making blatant mistakes?
One bugbear of mine is some Napoleon’s sycophants(thats not aimed at you) who regularly attribute bad luck to Napoleon’s major military setbacks; the ground was too muddy, cavalry didn’t arrive on time, incompetent generals, not enough artillery etc etc. At some point you have to simply conclude that Napoleon’s military greatness was just getting a bit too irregular. When I read anything on Napoleon I am struck by how often authors attribute bad luck to Napoleon’s setbacks from his 1812 onward. Personally, I think something changed around then and the change was greater professionalism from Napoleon’s opponents on land.