"Albuera 1811-2011 Refight with Black Powder " Topic

Dear all,

Happy Albuera Day to any with connections to The Queen's Regiment!

Please find a link to my BATREP of our game to commemorate the bicenntennial of this battle:

link

Very nice. A small comment: I don't think the Spanish need to have special rules. Holding off a mob of French and taking hits for a few turns will take care of their steadiness.

Just imagine what the battle would have been like if they didn't hold up for a couple hours.

One of these days I'll get a Albuera scenario going. You have some good ideas to crib, er, pay homage to.

great report Sparker,

I was wondering where Mark and John were yesterday!

cheers
matt

Gorgeous stuff, Sparker, thanks for the beautiful pics.. lots of eye candy and a great read. Thanks for sharing!

Cheers,
Bob

Splendid!

Nice write up! I like how you used the paint program to color-out the "outside world." (I do the same on my batreps!).

Thanks for posting.

Ted

Vive l'Empereur! A fascinating battle to study that always gives a great game as well. Congrats.

Well thank you kindly gentlemen!

I think your previous post about planning the Albuera game really sells the Spanish short. Especially this comment:

"The problem comes with the Spanish contingent. In many Peninsular campaigns and battles their contribution was more in the form of intelligence and partisan activity rather than sustained formal combat."

It may be true that the Spanish didn't take part in many of the same battles as the British for most of the war, since they didn't work well together. However, I believe the Spanish fought in many more battles overall than the British did. So you could just as easily say that in many Peninsular campaigns and battles, the British contribution was more in the form of money, or nothing at all, than actual combat. You just happen to prefer fighting the battles that have British in them.

@ Albino Squirrel,

Thank you for your comment. However I completely disagree. Yes the Spanish did have a great victory at Bailen, when a French army, promised honourable conditions, later ignored, did surrender when cut off.

But prior to Albuera, the Spanish record of fighting pitched battles in the open was poor, and in my previous blog I was trying to express this diplomatically. At Talavera an entire Spanish Division ran from the sound of their own, negligent, musketry volley!

So to suggest that the Spanish fought on their own in many more battles than the British did is perhaps, marginally, correct, but generally they were of very short duration and rather one sided so hardly worth wargaming. As I said in my earlier blog, their very real contribution was in guerrilla actions, providing intelligence, and the occasional insurrection such as Sarragossa.

The real difference in a modern perspective on this is to attribute these failings to fight the French successfully in pitched battle is not to ascibe the cause to some pseudo-scientific national difference in temperament, but to realise that it was due to the woeful shortcomings of the Spanish leadership to look after the administration of their men, to fail to train them properly, and sometimes a lack of battlefield leadership. All factors which would have plagued any army, any time.

Which makes their gallant and steadfast performance at Albuera all the more worthy of commemorating.

"At Talavera an entire Spanish Division ran from the sound of their own, negligent, musketry volley"

Sorry, Sparker, that's not true. It was a single militia battalion, which run before the battle was even joined. The said battalion had been mustered two weeks earlier, and had just three former regular soldiers as all expertise. The rest of the story was one of those myths dear to xenophobic racists like Napier (by the way, do you know that Whittingham defied him to a duel for what he perceived as a libel against the Spanish?)

Zaragoza, Ciudad Rodrigo, Gerona (nine months of siege!), Tarifa, Tarragona (bloody affair for the French too)… As for formal battles won to the French: Bailen, El Bruch, Puente Sampayo, La Bisbal, Alcaņiz, San Marcial, and of course the battles that the Spanish fought together the British and Portuguese, and countless of smaller actions where the French lost -literally- thousands of men.

Honestly, there were more to the war in the peninsula than Wellington and his boys.

….wargamers prejudice or myopic eye? The Spanish were involved in a most significant way.

This is a nice webpage that has good info.

link

Battles won and lost? The webpage above goes into some details and is worth a read. Here's a list of the number of engagements whic includes numerous Spanish victories.

"To my surprise there was a high number of battles, sieges, combats and actions fought between the Spaniards and the French. Actually more than between the French and the British".

- 26 battles, combats and sieges in 1807-1808
- 19 battles, combats and sieges in 1809
- 13 battles, combats and sieges in 1810
- 21 battles, combats and sieges in 1811
- 10 battles, combats and sieges in 1812
- 9 battles, combats and sieges in 1813
- 1 battles, combats and sieges in 1814

"Honestly, there were more to the war in the peninsula than Wellington and his boys."

…indeed there is.

HappyW

If you seriously believe that the Spanish Army was as successful at fighting the French as the Anglo Portuguese Army, which later incorporated a properly trained and administered Spanish contigent, then good luck to you, and I hope the sky is an interesting color on your planet.

I will stick to the written record, even that written by modern revisionist historians who would be only too happy to be able to belittle the record of Wellington's army.

Lovely stuff!