"This, the fourth and final, small battle prior to the surrender of the Austrians at Ulm in the Austerlitz Campaign, is a puzzling one. That it was a French victory was pretty certain. In fact, Napoleon was so pleased with Marshal Ney's performance in it that he gave him a title for the victory, le Duc d'Elchingen. But why it was a French victory was not so clear. If you read the narratives it seems as though, at the outset, the Austrians had all the advantages; initial superior numbers of both infantry and cavalry, and a strong position on the high ground overlooking a marshy river crossing with a single, narrow bridge (one span of which had been burned). They also had two strong points to anchor their flanks, the villages of Ober- and Unter-Elchingen. But they folded, and fairly soon (the battle was over by early afternoon). And this after only a fraction of Ney's forces had hit them. It was like one of those football games where one team just knows it's going to lose, and so proceeds to lie down and wait for the inevitable.
What I want to explore in this post is why the Austrians, with all their tactical advantages, still buckled. Were you to play a wargame of it, the Austrian player should always win (unless it was one of those wargames where the rules are artificially stacked in favor of the historical winners). All he would need to do would be to cover the Danube crossing with a crossfire of artillery and infantry and chew up the French as they attempted to repair the wooden bridges.
Part of it, in my opinion, is just the result of bad leadership, specifically of General Mack again (see my previous posts, Wertingen, Haslach-Jungingen, and Günzburg). It is a study of how loss of confidence, not in one's abilities but in one's leaders, can cause a fiasco. The disaster for the Austrians came from the top down, not through any inherent weakness on the part of the fighting men…"
Full article here
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Amicalement
Armand