On June 24th, 1812, the French Emperor
Napoleon led 450 thousand men across the Niemen River into Russia, beginning one of the
most notorious military disasters in history. Throughout this 6-month campaign,
both French and Russian commanders would struggle with forces far greater than any army:
politics, logistics and of course, Nature. Strategic Overview In 1805 and 1806, Napoleon crushed
the armies of Austria and Prussia, extending the French Empire over much of Western
Europe. Part of his success came because the Russian army started far from the theater of war,
and could not reinforce the Germans in time.
When Napoleon finally faced the Russians in
1807, the results were much less one-sided: Eylau was a draw fought in atrocious winter
conditions, while at Friedland the Russians, while badly defeated, successfully withdrew back
to the border.
Nevertheless, the battles convinced the Russian Tsar Alexander to ask for peace.
The resulting Treaties of Tilsit carved up Continental Europe between Napoleon and Alexander:
France would dominate Central and Western Europe; Russia would have a free hand in the East. Both
pledged to defend the new order against the overseas enemy, Great Britain, and accordingly
Russia joined France’s ‘Continental System’, under which it would stop all trade with
Britain as a form of economic warfare.
Despite this, neither side really accepted
the other’s hegemony. Alexander still expected Napoleon’s Empire to eventually collapse, and
had no interest in helping him solidify it: when Austria fought France again in 1809, the
Tsar would only give token support. In turn, neither was Napoleon ready to grant Russian
desires in either Poland or the Balkans.
But the chief irritant in the relationship would
be Alexander’s increasing reluctance to abide by the ‘Continental System’. As Britain was Russia’s
chief export market, the Tsar’s embargo had done considerable damage to his own economy, which only
added to the anti-Napoleonic sentiment amongst the Russian aristocracy.
In late 1810, Alexander
finally gave in, and resumed trade with Britain under quote-unquote ‘neutral shipping’.
Napoleon’s response was to begin preparing for war, and when this failed to deter
Alexander, finally committing to it in mid-1811. The stage was set for the
Emperor’s greatest challenge yet.
French Strategy
Napoleon’s goals were deceptively limited: on
the surface, he simply wanted Russia to re-join his ‘Continental System’. But that meant forcing
the Tsar to accept a deeply unpopular policy – so Napoleon planned for a decisive campaign that
would end Alexander’s ability to resist him.
Achieving such an outcome in the vast
expanse of Russia would be a formidable task. Seeking inspiration from history, Napoleon studied
the records of the last great invasion of Russia, led by Sweden’s Charles the
12th from 1707 to 1709.
Charles initially invaded Poland with 44 thousand
battle-hardened Swedes, hoping to destroy Russia’s main army there. At the time, Sweden was known
for mounting rapid, long-distance strikes, that were sustained by its army living off the
land as it went.
In this way, Charles hoped to outmaneuver, trap and destroy the Russians.
Instead, the Russians repeatedly withdrew ahead of Swedish maneuvers, scorching the earth
in their wake to deny forage to the Swedes. After months of this, the Swedes
were lured deep into modern Belarus, their numbers halved by starvation, disease,
and the need to garrison captured territory.
Charles had hoped to aim for Russia’s capital
Moscow, where Russia’s army would surely have had to confront him. But now he was forced to
abandon the chase, call in reinforcements and focus on finding supplies – and that was when
the Russians struck. They scattered Charles’ reinforcements, harassed his army, and lured
the Swedes even further into modern Ukraine. At Poltava, Charles’s force was finally
confronted by a Russian force twice its size, and the result was Swedish annihilation.
Charles’ misadventure taught Napoleon several things. First, Napoleon largely followed
the Swedish invasion route through Belarus, which isn’t surprising considering
the sparse infrastructure there. And although Moscow was no longer Russia’s
capital by 1812, it was still of immense spiritual importance, and its central
position would allow for additional options towards Russia’s actual capital of St
Petersburg or its breadbasket of Ukraine.
Second, Napoleon agreed with Charles that the
Russian army was key to the Tsar’s resistance, and its destruction would win the war.
But as
shown, the Russians were unlikely to fall for Napoleon’s preferred tactics of outmaneuver and
entrapment, which would give the French an easy win on the cheap. Brute frontal assaults might
well be needed to get the Russians to fight.
Third, given the high possibility that the
Russians would lure him deep into their territory, Napoleon needed an army that would absorb the
inevitable attrition, provide detachments to hold the flanks, and still be large enough
to fight a battle under reasonable odds.
Accordingly, the Emperor increased the draft,
diluted the officer ranks, and called on his German, Italian and Polish allies to provide
troops.
The result was a 600-thousand-strong Grande Armee – the largest Napoleon had ever led
– even if its quality left much to be desired, especially in the infantry arm.
And finally: fourth, a supply system was needed to invade Russia, especially for an army
of this size. But by 1812, the French had long since ditched the pre-Revolution supply system,
replacing it with extensive foraging as the army went. Like Sweden a century before, forage
gave French armies extensive reach and speed, demonstrated in 1809 when tens of thousands
smoothly redeployed from Spain to Austria.
But Russia was far less densely-populated than
Western Europe. In particular, the expected theater of war – modern Lithuania and Belarus
– only had about a million people in an area slightly smaller than modern France. Even without
the inevitable Russian scorched-earth tactics, the local region clearly couldn’t sustain
an army numbering half its population.
Napoleon therefore returned to the pre-Revolution
supply system. He assembled thousands of wagons, barges and animals, grouped into 26 transport
battalions. Some would establish depots in the army’s rear; others would travel from
these depots to troops on the front line. In this way, Napoleon hoped to maintain a
reasonable supply level as he advanced.
In hindsight, some of these preparations were
insufficient: the wagons were not designed for Russia’s often-muddy roads, and only the worst
soldiers were assigned to this low-prestige work.
But more importantly, Napoleon failed
to adjust his operational method to the new logistics reality. Pre-Revolution generals
limited themselves to slow, methodical, limited campaigns because they knew how unreliable
their supply systems could be. By contrast, Napoleon still hoped to conduct post-Revolution
aggressive, long-distance maneuvers.
For all his preparations for an
extensive invasion of Russia, Napoleon’s ideal campaign remained one
where the enemy fully cooperated with him: either by attacking Poland, or staying near the
border. Either would allow the French to trap and annihilate them in a month, and that outcome wasn’t
entirely unlikely, given what he knew of Russian strategy. Russian Strategy Napoleon had advertised his war preparation
in the hope of scaring Tsar Alexander, so the Russians had ample time to design their
response.
Since late 1810, the Russians were already disengaging from border wars, re-aligning
with Britain and subverting French hegemony in Germany. These initiatives bore fruit just before
the invasion, as Russia made peace with Turkey, allied with Sweden and Britain, and got Austria
to limit its contribution to the upcoming war.
Reforms since 1805 had increased the
effectiveness of Russian artillery and infantry, while its light and irregular Cossack
cavalry were already the best in Europe. Mobilization efforts by 1812 yielded a
600-thousand-man army including reserves, backed up by 1 million militia of varying
quality. But the Russians lacked trained engineers to support a defense, and were further
hampered by an inefficient command system, ridden by mutual suspicion not just between the
generals, but also between them and the Tsar.
There were also broader constraints on Russian
strategy. Russia’s economy was in terrible shape, which the Continental System only exacerbated:
it could only get by through printing money, which caused its currency to depreciate
by half over a decade.
Even accounting for British subsidies and the low cost
of Russian soldiers, the country couldn’t maintain extensive mobilization for long.
Added to this was the weak political position of Tsar Alexander. His father had been overthrown
in a coup in 1801, and the British believed that they could do the same to him by destroying the
Russian fleet. Napoleon certainly believed that capturing Moscow would force his surrender, and
even Russian generals during the invasion felt entitled to demand the Tsar change ministers.
As a result, the traditional Russian strategy was long-ranging offensive campaigns, which would
both allow the Russian army to live off the enemy, and fit with the ‘cult of the offensive’ that
characterized Russian military honor at the time. By contrast, letting the enemy spoil Russian
lands was seen as an absolute humiliation.
Up until 1812, Russia thought of
striking the French in Poland first, with the help of a defecting Prussia. But
as the true scale of Napoleon’s army became known – though as a state secret, it was
known only to the Tsar, his War Minister de Tolly and their staff – it became clear
that such an attack would play into Napoleon’s hands.