Nonetheless, the unpleasant new reality of the French position was inescapable the strategic situation, in a matter of days had changed completely. In the face of one disappointing report after another, the Emperor still maintained his aplomb.
Soon, additional good news reached the Allied Headquarters: a French force under Marshal MacDonald, it was learned, had been dealt a severe check on the 26 th, losing some 15,000 men and 100 cannon and on the 30 th, near Kulm, Marshal Vandamme’s corps was overwhelmed by a vastly superior Allied force, and - although over half of the French troops engaged in the action managed to escape - the gallant marshal and 13,000 of his soldiers fell into enemy hands. In the west, Marshal Oudinot incomprehensibly abandoned his drive against Berlin after a single minor setback at the hands of an inferior Prussian force. Again, with the Allies retreating in disarray in the aftermath of Dresden, encouraging tidings from several fronts soon reached the Coalition high command which quickly restored their morale and rekindled their resolve.
Battle of nations game crack#
Coalition losses from this engagement were very heavy and the confidence of the Allied high command again wavered and began to crack in the face of yet another defeat at Napoleon’s hands.
At Dresden, on 26-27 August, Napoleon defeated a combined Austrian, Russian, and Prussian force of some 170,000, under Schwarzenberg, with a much smaller French army of 120,000 men. Nonetheless, the French campaign began auspiciously. Unfortunately for Napoleon, the repeated military failures of his marshals were again fated, as they had been in the spring, to undermine any battlefield successes that the Emperor was able of achieve on his own. Outnumbered and facing four different enemy armies, the French Emperor nonetheless did not hesitate, but immediately resumed the offensive. Austria had at last openly joined the Allies, and even more deplorable: the ever duplicitous former French marshal and current King of Sweden, Bernadotte, had also entered the war against his former sovereign and benefactor. Thus, when hostilities resumed in late July, France faced a much stronger enemy coalition than it had in May. Moreover, Allied spirits had been largely restored by the news of Wellington’s victory in Spain against Marshal Soult at Vittoria. Napoleon had made good use of the temporary truce to reinforce, reorganize, and reconstitute his forces, but his foes had also been tireless in their own preparations. After hesitating for several days, Napoleon - his own army worn down from its nonstop campaigning - reluctantly accepted the Austrian plan. Thus, with the Allies now increasingly desperate to avoid yet another crippling defeat, Austria intervened to broker a temporary armistice with the French Emperor. These victories did, however, badly shake the morale of Napoleon’s adversaries.
In both of these major engagements, failures on the part of his marshals and a paucity of cavalry deprived the French Emperor of the decisive battlefield success that he realistically needed to bring about a peace on favorable terms. Napoleon had opened his military operations to regain control of Germany in the spring of 1813 with a set of auspicious victories against the newly-formed alliance of Prussia and Russia: first at Lützen on 2 May, and then at Bautzen on 20-21 May, 1813. The Battle of Leipzig, also known as the Battle of Nations, was the disastrous climax to a French campaign that had begun promisingly only six months before.
If the sun rose on Napoleon at Austerlitz on 2 December 1805, it set on the French Emperor at Leipzig on 19 October 1813. THE BATTLE OF NATIONS was designed by Edward Curran and published by Simulations Publications, Inc. This game was offered as one of four titles in SPI’s NAPOLEON AT WAR QuadriGame and also, in the version described here, as an independent folio game. The battle was fought near the ancient Saxon city of Leipzig between the 16 th and 19 th of October, 1813. THE BATTLE OF NATIONS: The Encirclement at Leipzig, 16-19 October 1813 is a grand tactical simulation of the climactic battle between the Grand Armée of Napoleon and the opposing coalition armies of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Sweden, under the Austrian general, Prince Karl Schwarzenberg, and Tsar Alexander I.
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