The Battle of Lützen was the first major engagement of the War of the Sixth Coalition of the Napoleonic Wars.

Following the disaster of Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812, a new Coalition formed against Napoleon I of France. In response to this, he hastily assembled an army of just over 200,000 comprised largely of inexperienced, barely trained recruits and severely short of horses (a consequence of the Russian fiasco, where most of his veteran troops and horses had perished).

He crossed the Rhine into Germany to link up with remnants of his old Grande Armée, and to quickly defeat this new alliance before it became too strong. On May 2, 1813, the Russian commander, Prince Peter Wittgenstein, attacked Napoleon's advanced column near Lützen, Germany, in an attempt to undo Napoleon's capture of Leipzig. After a day of heavy fighting, the combined Prussian and Russian force retreated, but without cavalry the French were unable to follow their defeated enemy.

Prelude

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On April 30 Napoleon crossed the river Saale, advancing on Leipzig in three columns led by an advanced guard. His intention was to work his way into the Coalition's interior lines, dividing their forces and defeating them in detail before they could combine. But due to inexperienced cavalrymen and faulty reconnaissance, he was unaware of 73,000 allied troops under Wittgenstein and Graf (Count) von Blücher concentrating on his right flank to the south. Marshal Ney's corps was surprised and attacked on the road from Lützen to Leipzig.

The battle

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Napoleon was visiting the 1632 battlefield, playing tour guide with his staff by pointing to the sites and describing the events of 1632, in detail from memory, when he heard the sound of cannons. He immediately cut the tour short and rode off toward the direction of the artillery fire. Arriving on the scene, he quickly sized up the situation and decided to set a trap using Ney's corps as bait. He ordered the Marshal to make a fighting withdrawal toward Lützen, meanwhile he would send Ney reinforcements which would take up strong, defensive positions in and around two villages south of the city. Once these divisions were ready, the rest of the corps would withdraw towards them, luring the allies to attack, while Napoleon, leading the main 110,000 strong French force, would come around the allied flank and counter attack.

Wittgenstein and Blücher took the bait, continuing to press Ney until they ran into the "hook" Napoleon had prepared. Once their advance had halted, with the perfect timing of old, he struck. While he had been reinforcing Ney, he had also concentrated a great mass of artillery ( Grande Batterie ) opposite Wittgenstein's center. With a thunderous roar they unleashed a withering barrage. Then Napoleon himself, along with his Imperial Guard, led the massive counter assault into the allied flank. Wittgenstein and Blücher were in danger of suffering another defeat on the scale of Austerlitz, but the green and exhausted French troops, who had been marching and fighting all day long, could not follow through. In addition, darkness was closing in as night approached. This allowed the allied force to retreat in good order. The lack of French cavalry meant there would be no pursuit. Both sides lost around 20,000 men, with some debate about which side lost slightly more. But casualties aside, by nightfall Wittgenstein and Blücher were in retreat while Napoleon controlled Lützen and the field.

Aftermath

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The Coalition had been very fortunate. Had the battle started earlier that day when Napoleon had fresher troops and more time, Lützen could well have become a second Austerlitz. But what was almost a decisive defeat turned into only a marginal, tactical one. Wittgenstein and Blücher withdrew towards Dresden. Lützen had shown the allies Napoleon was still very dangerous. They decided on a new strategy of avoiding direct battle with him while seeking out and attacking his subordinates instead, thus weakening his army. Meantime they would assemble an overwhelming force against which The Emperor, for all his abilities, could not stand (See the Trachenburg Plan ).

Also during the battle of Lützen, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, one of the brightest and most able Prussian generals, serving as Wittgenstein's Chief of Staff, was wounded. Although the wound was minor, due to the hasty retreat it could not be tended to soon enough. Infection set in and he died as a result. A tragic but all too common occurrence in warfare of the period.

References and links

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• The Encyclopedia Of Military History: From 3500 B.C. To The Present. (2nd Revised Edition 1986), R. Ernest Dupuy, and Trevor N. Dupuy. pg 760
• A shorter account of Lützen at napoleonguide.com
• The Russian Army of the Napoleonic Wars

1813 | Battles of Prussia | Battles of Russia | Battles of the Napoleonic Wars

Batalla de Lützen | Bataille de Lützen (1813) | Slaget vid Lützen (1813)