Stratadies of War?

[JasonC]

To kije - it is a journalist and schoolboy level of thought - fit for a BHL Hart lol - that pretends imaginative and successful equals "going around". Frontal assault and attrition tactics are not unimaginative - they imagine the enemy center broken and his army decisively destroyed, for starters - and going around is not smarter or more clever or always successful.

And oh, it takes a special kind of arrogance to pretend you have something to teach Napoleon Bonaparte in the matter. He conquered Europe. He commanded a dozens of major battles, nearly all of which he won. Not to put too fine a point on it, you haven't. And no, he didn't lose whenever he didn't go around and win whenever he did.

His greatest single victory was Austerlitz, in which the imaginative Russians tried to go around his right and he let them think they were succeeding at it just long enough to put half their army in his intended bag. Then he broke their center by advancing his rapidly, cut off that turning movement wing of their army, which had marched itself out of support distance from the rest, and spent the rest of the day annihilating it utterly.

When Napoleon rejected Davout's plan for Borodino he did not cite any need for rapidity or even for decisive victory rather than turning the enemy out of position. He said and I quote "it is too dangerous a maneuver". He was fully cognizant of the ability of the Russian army to do to his army, what he had done to the Russian army at Austerlitz.

Napoleon was the master of central positioning. An army that seeks to completely envelope its opponent grants that opponent central positioning for nothing. There are times and circumstances and overall odds situations, terrain, etc in which that may be worth the risks and may succeed, certainly. And there are others in which it is a decisive blunder. At Austerlitz, the Russian plan was so predictable and predicted that Napoleon could have been issuing orders to both armies and the movements would have been the same.

As for Waterloo, it was the outlier success of the British heavy cavalry against D'Erlons I corps that allowed the British to survive. People saying it was dumb of Ney to attack with cavalry and suggesting that infantry be sent instead kind of overlook the facts that one it was tried first, two that it failed pretty spectacularly, and three that the thing that came nearest to destroying the allied army anyway was the highly effective combined arms cooperation of the French artillery with the cavalry attacks. The allied infantry was forced to stand in square for hours under very heavy artillery fire and many battalions lost a third to half their strength doing so. Practically every other army on every other occasion would have come apart under those losses and the allied army nearly did so; only the Prussians saved them.

Those citing supposedly dumb frontal attacks as supposedly dumb also typically leave out Wagram, which was a frontal assault if ever there was one, and entirely successful and decisive.

The reality is, in the Napoleonic era battles were typically decided by the last reserve, not by getting anywhere first with the most. When turning movements did succeed it was usually due to the pressure they put on the "join" where the enemy refused that flank, which became a kind of center and at which Napoleon typically directed the decisive blows late in the day. Battles of the era were attritionist affairs, and armies fled the field when they had taken 25 to 33% casualties. Only outlier incompetents lost before that.

Anyone who thinks like modern maneuverist ideology that such battles could be won practically without fighting by going around, would be epically wrong.