"Wellington's Dispaches." Topic

"These British Army dispatches give a fascinating insight into the nature of operations in the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns during the Napoleonic Wars. They also reveal a thoughtful yet stern Arthur Wellesley, whose many concerns as commander-in-chief included the needs of his officers, the feeding of his men and endless negotiations with British, Spanish and Portuguese leaders. The ravages of politics however, did not leave these dispatches unmarked. In at least one instance – the Battle of Albuera – Wellington ordered his officers to re-write their combat reports in order to present more optimistic impressions than those really existing in the field. He sometimes attached detailed correction notes for leaders back in England. The final result were two series of dispatches: those crafted for public and political consumption, and those written to inform his superiors of actual events.

The Peninsular campaigns of 1808 through 1814 were a grueling series of struggles which strained the resources of all the major participants. The resulting battles were not the easy victories that are often imagined today, and on various occasions all of the major combatants suffered defeats and lost opportunities. Certainly it was only after he arrived in Spain that Wellington came to appreciate the full value of the many captured French documents regularly passed on to headquarters by the Spanish. Much like later eras when good intelligence made a difference, the details of British Intelligence successes and the people responsible for them were only vaguely alluded to in the text of these dispatches.

A number of contemporaries criticized Wellington for treating his men's lives as "no more than mice in an air pump," but he was also known to have agonized over losses suffered at numerous battles, so the former accusation is unlikely. It should be remembered that there commonly was a need to capture enemy fortresses by storm before regional French forces could mobilize. This sometimes forced Wellington to make bloody bids for success before his numerically superior enemies combined their full strength against him. His apparent habit of giving preferential treatment to high-born officers might have contributed to the varying opinions of his motives. Ultimately most people understood that regardless of these other issues, Wellington was a vital link in the string of successes enjoyed by the multinational Allied armies that served in Spain and Belgium between 1808 and 1815…"
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