I’m sorry but I don’t understand your train of thought.
Russia wasn’t exactly a Napoleonic victory. Why pick that one to point out, rather than the string of victories? Are you trying to say something like “if Napoleon was such a genius, how come his 600K weren’t able to beat up the 160K Russians”?
Napoleon’s big skill was that his army was usually more organized than his opponent’s. Warfare had still been a pretty haphazard affair; the king would gather as many soldiers as he could and they’d all ride out in whatever direction they thought they’d find the enemy in.
Napoleon developed a few elementary ideas like figuring out how many soldiers he had, organizing them into smaller equal-sized units with a designated chain of command, figuring out how many tons of supplies he’d need each day and making plans for having it delivered to his army, mapping out routes and organizing the route each unit would follow to a common destination, having specific units of scouts to gather intelligence about the surrounding countryside and location of enemy units, having an intelligence corps to gather all this information, having specific courier units to maintain communicate between his seperate units, giving each officer in his command instructions on what their role was in the overall plan, etc. Most of these ideas had occasionally been used by past commanders but Napoleon was the first commander to organize it all and make it general practice.
The result was that Napoleon controlled the pace of the war; he fought battles when and where he held the advantage. Until the other side started imitating his organization and bringing more resources to the war than France had.
Exactly. My reason for pointing out the invasion of Russia was to highlight the size of his forces. And to show that his army, despite it’s size, was crushed, indicating that if it were luck, his luck may have run out…
Thank you, Little Nemo. Thinking of things that way helps me figure this whole thing out.
What strikes me as the most awesome achievement of Napoleon’s is political not military: to stay in power for so long in spite of throwing away that amount of lives and wealth in gratuituous wars, to no profit for France. After viewing Minard’s famous chart of the Russian campaing I wonder what kept his generals from ordering up a firing squad.
The OP’s question is the very one that Leo Tolstoy asks in War and Peace. Tolstoy clearly believed that Napoleon was NOT a skilled strategist, because he believed that there really was no such thing, and that he was consequently lucky most of the time. Throughout the book, he uses well-documented events from the life of Napoleon, and shows you what might have been going on in his (and others’) minds. In every case, he shows that what is happene=ing is NOT the way it’s usually interpreted, and tries to present the case that Napoleon had no more influence over the course of events than anyone else in his story.
This is because Tolstoy had this weird and fascinating interpretation of History as the Grand Calculus of Integrating the Differentials (people) of Events. He really does use that mathematical language. It’s like he was writing about PsychoHistory decades before Isaac Asimov wrote the Foundation books*. SF fans really ought to read War and Peace.
I don’t buy this, myself. I can see that leaders really and obviously do influence the course of events, that a bad leader can really screw things up and get lots of people killed, while a skilled (and/or lucky) leader can orchestrate a good result. Luck plays a part, and there are certain circumstances that even good leadership won’t save, just as there are good situatyions that even bad leadership can;t muck up. But no leader has the absolute control they’d like. It’s more a statistical process than Tolstoy’s implied determinism.
*Actually, Asimov’s view of PsychoHistory seems more like Statistical Mechanics as applied to population dynamics. I don’t buy that that would work, either. But it’s closer to my tastes, as my statement about statistics above shows.
Napolean was a skilled strategist, because he assembled a fairly modern army. He also understood the new technologies of war and how they affected traditional tactics, and used them in non-traditional ways (such as firing his cannons at an ice-lake to drown his opposition).
Napolean was lucky in that he came to power when the French Assembly had every man under arms they could lay hands on, because the chaos of the Revolution had led many monarchial powers in Europe to think they could divy up France and/or reinstate the aristocracy.
Russia is irrelevent, the Russians didn’t beat Napolean. They abandoned Moscow and let Napolean be shut down by the Russian winter. The Russians, in other words, kept running across Siberia until Napolean’s extended supply line was shutdown by winter. You can’t use that campaign as any indication of Napolean’s skill as a military commander, or at least the numbers from it- what “sane” people slash and burn their own fields to deny forage to the enemy? The overwhelming majority of the losses of le Grand Arme were from the retreat in an extremely harsh winter without food. Not Russian action at all.
Now, as to Napolean’s ultimate loss- he was the innovator, and he was beaten by those who understood what he did and then improved on it. Does this make him less of a brilliant strategist? No, because they were his innovations in the first place.
BrainFireBob- First off, welcome to the Dope. Hope you stick around! Now, I have to disagree with your assesment of the Russian tactic. The Russian policy of trading ground for time has been debated numerous times around here, usually in regards to WWII. While I think that most folks would consider the tactic to be insane, the Russians are one of the few folks that can get away with it… their country is just so frickin’ BIG.
But I don’t think one can downplay the harshness of the Russian tactic… they intentionally gave up one of their most important city, with plans in place to destroy it after it had been seized by the French. They put up token resistance (save the Battle of Borodino, which did not break the Russian army as hoped) in order to utilize the harsh Russian winter.
If I lure an invading army into my heartland, then let winter cut him off and destroy his supply train, then use partisan and other forces to harrass his attempts to retreat until his force ceases to exist, I don’t think you can blame it all on the weather.
I remember reading a book that praised him for several strategical moves. For instance, splitting up the enemy army into two parts, holding off one part, while eliminating the other. A large part of his successes were due to his superior intelligence gathering. But he also used it massively to his advantage. And he won a large number of battles where he was the outnumbered one.
True, Tristan- but I’d draw a distinction between winning the war against Napolean and defeating him on the field. The Russians did the former, but the OP was using the Russian victory in war as evidence of them having done the latter.
The Russians let Napolean wage war on the weather and lose, they didn’t defeat him. They beat him, but that’s a bit of a different thing.
I’ll take the tack that Napoleon was a superb tactician, rather gifted when it came to operational matters, but made some pretty dismal strategic decisions. In addition to the Russian fiasco we have the Spanish one too, where he basically backstabbed an ally and thus gave Great Britain a free beachhead on the continent.
The verdict on Napoleon I has always been that he was perhaps the greatest tactician in history, strategically he was fairly dismal, Spain is one example, invading Russia another.
I would kinda disagree. Kinda. He wasn’t bad at strategy, but only on the state and super-state level. He might not have been much for planning campaigns, but he was capable of organizing and leading a people, mobilizing them for vast effort, and putting the energy he unleashed to use.
Actually, that sort of goes beyond strategy. What do we call that?
