"Why did Napoleon take so many men into Russia?" Topic

I've read that Napoleon assembled as many as 550,000 to 600,000 men to invade Russia.

To invade Spain in 1807 / 8 he used about 200,000; to invade Austria in 1809, he used about the same.

Even allowing for the possibility that he'd have used the total – 400,000 – to invade Russia if they'd all been available, why did he take so many into Russia?

Wouldn't he have been better off with a smaller, easier-supplied force?

Er, Russia is bigger than Spain or Austria, and there were a lot of Russians?

And megalomaniacs like making grand gestures…

Imagine Borodino with fewer men on Napoleon's side…

Multiple armies making multiple avenues of attack. Napoleon was only with one of them.

Dan

Maybe I'm wrong but I think that most of them guarded the long line of communications, escorted the supply trains and garrisoned the cities occupied. At Borodino he had about 130.000 men, isn't it? And during the campaign he received both new units and replacements to fill the losses, perhaps all of them are counted in the total

The ideal was not to have to march to Moscow and destroy Alexander's armies. The ideal was to bring Russia into line with a grand display of power and martial might. That is also why it was important to have a 'coalition of the willing', to demonstrate that Prussia and Austria and all of Europe was united against Russia.

There was no stealth involved. This mustering had to be particularly impressive because Russia used their massive population to support their strategies. Napoleon had to hope to make Alexander doubt the ability of Russia army size to be up to the task.

But from the sublime to the ridiculous is a single step.

In Spain, in the peak of the French occupation, Napoleon had 350,000 men. And Spain is a lot smaller than Russia.

"perhaps all of them are counted in the total"
Probably not. The attrition rate from marching in the summer heat and constant skirmishing leading up to Smolensk decimated the army. If you ever play any kind of operational level Napoleonic boardgames the attrition is what kills off your forces more than the battles do!

A LOT of the 400,000 were recently conquered Germans and Austrians. I suspect he also wanted to keep them out of mischief behind his lines.

"In Spain, in the peak of the French occupation, Napoleon had 350,000 men"

And a fat lot of good it did him! :o)

The Otto von Pivka book has a startling graph that depicts the rapid attrition of the Grande Armee. It is a must see.

I can't think of any general who has said;
'Y'know what? We've got enough men here. Why bother calling up more? Lets do this thang!'

As noted, how many you start with is usually a lot more than you end up with, especially at the end of a long logistical chain

There's this graph too:

link

Fritz – was the graph Minard's graph? link

I recon he couldn't trust them all at home alone.

There's a scene in a Sam Neil movie about some Australians watching the moon landing, and the TV comentator says 'the astronauts will be travelling 300 000 kilometres from earth to the moon',
and one hosewife says to the other – " I wouldn't trust my man to be that far away, would you?"

I concur with Der Alt Fritz's comments. Reading Pivka I was strck by the losses that Boneparte suffered getting his army into Russia so that be the end of September the French had lost about 1/2 of the army getting into Russia.

Another factor was certainly the wastage of horseflesh. Without adequate forage the horses died off en masse in the summer heat. And the French were never known as particularly good equine caregivers. Lose enough horses and you eventually lose the riders/drivers as well, at least as functional assets.

I believe it was because Napoleon was a people kind of person ;-p

But seriously, I think it was because he did not want to fail. To Napoleon numbers was everything and the taking of over half a million men into Russia was simply following the maxim of gaining victory from having the most in the right place.

Shane

I'm still puzzled.

@ Dan Cyr: there were surely only two axes of attack, the minor one that stalled at Riga and the major one that got to Moscow. The main body was dispersed across a wide axis for supply reasons, but it was still one axis, no?

@ magister equitum: Napoleon's assumption was that there'd be a meeting engagement with the Russian army, or a strategic entrapment of it, within a few weeks or months. The need for a guarded supply line all the way to Moscow arose because this didn't happen so cannot explain why he invaded with 600,000 men.

@ John the OFM: my sources suggest a total of about 55,000 were Austrians or Prussians. The multinational nature of the force is understood, the question is more about why he thought he needed so many.

@ basileus: There may have been 350,000 in Spain at one point, but then the whole country was supposedly being occupied. This was not the case in Russia, so all he'd have needed was the main thrust itself.

@ royaleddy: apparently Nimitz before Okinawa and Schwarzkopf before Desert Storm both indicated they had enough men to do the job. So while rare, it does happen.

@ malcolmmccallum: apparently it's a myth that Russia had an enormous population. According to my reading the Russian population and French population in 1812 were about the same. As Russia is much larger spatially, this must mean that constructively, Russia's "recruitable" population was actually smaller because at least some of it was on the other side of the globe.

If you asked him now he would tell you he didn't bring near enough. Supply was never a strong suite in an army that was asked to live off the land and on the backs of the conquered. Presuming the enemy would neveer adopt a scorched earth policy appears to have been a mistake. Anyway in the French army a wagon's best use was for hauling around loot not supplies.

4th Cuirassier: according to Wikipedia the Russian population at the start of the 19th century was 176 million subjects. The French population in 1789 was only 28 million. Even assuming some discrepancies or fudge factors, that's a huge difference.

Regarding Okinawa and Desert Storm, the geographical areas are to say the least vastly different. You can only pack so many men at a time into one square mile of turf.

In addition to the detached Austrian Corps of 34,000 under Schwarzenberg there were some 95,000 Poles, 90,000 Germans (24,000 Bavarians, 20,000 Saxons, 20,000 Prussians, 17,000 Westphalians and several thousand from smaller Rhineland states), 30,000 Italians, 25,000 Neapolitans, 12,000 Swiss, 4,800 Spanish, 3,500 Croats, and 2,000 Portuguese. In addition there were Dutch and also a number of tiny Belgian contingents. In short, every nationality in Napoleon's vast empire was represented. Perhaps he was looking to set up a "we did it" victory? I also support the notion of "shock and awe" that would make the Russians see the futility in resisting and give up a bloodless campaign. Remember, absolutely no one but the Russians doubted Napoleon's success. As history showed, nothing is automatic.

@ John the OFM: my sources suggest a total of about 55,000 were Austrians or Prussians. The multinational nature of the force is understood, the question is more about why he thought he needed so many.

As shown by 21eRegt, the army was less than half French. (I have never seen the 550,000-600,000 figure you quote. I have always seen ~400,000.)
I suggest that many of those were there to keep them out of trouble, and perhaps as hostages. The Poles certainly needed no such ploys.

Perhals the real question is why do you think fewer troops would have been adequate?

It could be argued that the plan to intimidate the Russians backfired. As Sun Tzu said, if you wish to defeat your enemy in battle, you cannot make yourself appear to be unbeatable.

Perhaps if Napoleon's army (and his reputation) had not been so daunting, Kutusov could have stood earlier and fought. Napoleon might have got his decisive battle if he had not stacked the deck so much in his favour.

Wikipedia must be joking.

Go have a look at Dominic Lieven's superb study, Napoleon and Russia, published (I think) last year. Answers all the questions you could have about the invasion of 1812, the Russian war effort and the pushback strategy of 1813-14.

In my opinion Napoleon had a better grasp of the realities of warfare in Russia than we do. To maintain an edge over the Russian army, he needed to plan in advance for:

A) Normal campaign wastage of men and horses.

B) Sizeable garrisons in his LoC (the distances involved would have made a risky proposition to leave only token forces, as he had no way to stop the Russians of sending strong columns to cut his communications with Poland).

C) Prussians and Austrian contingents were probably intended as much as hostages as actual supports. When Napoleon started to plan the invasion of Spain he took pains to send some of the better Spanish troops to Denmark, both to get rid of a potential enemy and to held the Spanish troops as hostages in his negotiations with the Spanish. In 1812 it was probably the same.

D) Besides strategical motives, it's probable that, like some posters had already said, Napoleon intended to overawe Tsar Alexander with a show of force. During the campaign Napoleon wrote several letters to Alexander, trying to convince him to sit at the negotiations table. That Alexander didn't yield (some say that he was more afraid of a coup in case he tried to negotiate with Napoleon, than of the French army), doesn't mean that Napoleon didn't tried. After all, Napoleon never had a single plan, but he worked with several probabilities at the same time.

21e: I can't recall what my source was for the French / Russian population point, beyond that it's something I've read in the last few months. I suspect it was Zamoyski's "1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow".

Although this was a novel claim to me, on reflection it's plausible. France is the second-largest country in Europe, and Catholic. Russia is and was sparsely populated east of Moscow, and the space west of Moscow is not hugely different in size to France.

I do not believe the 176 million figure. That would suggest the Russian population declined by 15% between our period and WW2. If so, it would be the only European country of which this was true. I believe that this is an error, and that Wikipedia's 176 million is the population of all of Europe.

It's borne out by this link:

link

which – admittedly without sourcing – says 180 million in Europe overall, 145 of them split as follows:

• 16 million in Great Britain inc Ireland
• 9 million people in Prussia
• 10.5 million in Spain
• 17 million in Italy
• 27 million in the Austrian empire
• 28 million in France
• 38 million in Russia.

The Russian army was no more than about 300,000 men at this point. In general we should defer to the view of General Buonaparte on what was the right level of force, but on this occasion he got it wrong, so we can speculate a bit. I would have said that the Napoleon of 1805 would have attacked Russia with not more than 180-200,000 men. Typially fast marching, an Ulm-type event, and a few Eckmuehl-type engagements would have preceded a Wagram somwhere a lot closer to Poland than Borodino.

The point that he used a lot of allies is understood, but is also circular. Having decided he needed 600,000 men, he brought 600,000 men and found them among his allies and vassals, but why did he think he needed 600,000 men? He didn't have to use them. The distance from Poland to Moscow is not so different from the distance between, say, Strasbourg and Austerlitz. There seems little in the geography that demands an army three times that size.

There seems to be an inverse correlation between army size and strategic success under Napoleon. The bigger he got, he the harder he fell.

nice research mate, well done.

For my own opinion I also think that Napoleon felt that if he was going to play in such a big back yard as that of Russia on their home turf that they would surely be able to call on most of their army. In order to assure victory he had to first, estimate the numbers they would be able to call on and secondly, estimate the numbers he would have available and ensure that he outnumbered the Russians at least 2:1. This would ensure that when the big battle (Borodino) occurred he would outnumber the Russians on that day. Ultimately he did gain victory by shear numbers in the end but this only meant more corpses than the enemy by the close of 1812 and defeat. It was recorded that the attrition going in was "as much" or worse than the attrition going back out of Russia.

So my conclusion is that if he went in with less he would not have reached Moscow and if he went in with even more the end result would have been simply more dead.

Shane

Strategic consumption in the vast spaces of Russia, as correctly predicted by Napoleon, was also vast. Many troops straggled or died of disease in summer, but equally huge numbers were needed for LoC duties.

He thought he'd need them.
-Kle.

The recently released '1812' by Adam Zamoyski goes into a lot of detail about the numbers involved. Pretty harrowing stuff when he writes about the retreat though.

Great book, I recommend it

IT was a major blunder … that army was too big to support in an area too vast. An army half that size may have been the better option.

Well yes. I mean an army 1/3 of the size would have found 3x as much food.

A lot of people forget that during the retreat from Moscow the Russian army suffered just as badly as the French army did. The weather, poor logistics, and the vast spaces affected both sides during the campaign.

" I mean an army 1/3 of the size would have found 3x as much food."

But wouldn't have had enough men to actually beat the Russians in battle.

Bit of a dilemma for poor old Boney.

IIRC La Grande Armee relied heavily on wagon convoys rather than foraging as there wasn't that much foraging to be had. I must re-read Van Crefeld.

Funny thing is, it was all a numbers game in the end and as Martin said, Boney was in a dilemma because of this. Basically, if committed to the plan he had to take in with him every man he could, and so he did.

People keep mentioning Zamoyski's book in this thread; what no one has mentioned is that Zamoyski credits the Russians with 392,000 troops along the border at the time of Napoleon's invasion:

First army:
127,800 front line, 159,800 total;
Second army:
52,000 front line, 62,000 total;
Third army:
45,800 front line, 58,200 total;
Ertel's reserve corps:
55,000 front line, 65,000 total;
Zakomelsky's reserve corps:
31,000 front line, 47,000 total;

And in addition to these 392,000, Alexander also managed to free:
28,500 front line, 37,200 total from Finland (arrangement with Bernadotte's Sweden), and
54,500 front line, 70,000 total from Moldavia (peace with Ottoman Turkey).

That gives a total of 499,200 troops at Alexander's disposal. Even if the arrangements with Sweden and Turkey came as a surprise, well over 200,000 Russian troops were already poised to invade the Duchy of Warsaw even before Napoleon made his move.

Armies in 1812 simply happened to be a lot larger than they were in previous years; only in Spain, where the old concepts of taking and holding territory still held (rather than making the enemy army the only objective), were the armies still small.

Because he had them.