"The Great Cavalry Battle of Liebertwolkitz" Topic

Of possible interest?

" Much has been written about the Napoleonic Wars and certainly the cavalry of the period has not been neglected, but outside of the charge of the Union Brigade at Waterloo and Murat's great achievement at Eylau, little else of the numerous cavalry actions both small and large has attracted as much attention. The largest cavalry action of the period was at Liebertwolkwitz in Saxony, south of Leipzig, and it was one of the several battles which preceded the greatest clash of arms prior to the world wars of this century, that is, the Battle of Leipzig.

This cavalry action lasted the best part of a day and was very much a confused affair, which is reflected in the contemporary accounts of the fighting. Little is certain, but sufficient information is available to be able to gain a good overall impression of the battle, the forces involved and the commanders. A number of scholarly works were produced by both the German and Austrian General Staffs at the turn of the century and reference has been made to them in preparing this series of articles. The French works consulted tended as a whole not be of such a high standard, but they nevertheless contained sufficient information to warrant being included in the bibliography which will appear at the end of this series…"

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Amicalement
Armand

Wow, that's a lot of detailed info !
Including photos, order of battle, etc.
I need time to digest it :-)

Excellent read!

This is from an old Miniature Wargames issue. I remember reading it ..

Classic outrageous and unsupported statement by Hofschroer! :)

What he really means is that he personally felt that his accounts of Prussian cavalry actions were not well published enough for his liking! :)

There is plenty of readily available coverage of cavalry actions across the period:

1805: There are several excellent accounts of the cavalry actions at Austerlitz between the French and Russian Imperial Guard horse regiments and the swirling cavalry melees on the northern end of the battle lines.

1806: We have numerous accounts of the cavalry actions in the Auerstadt battle, and its all Prussian cavalry too with only 3 French light cavalry regiments present and staying well out of the way of all that Prussian heavy horse in the early part of the battle.

1807: AS Peter suggests in his Introduction, the famous charge of Murat's Cavalry Reserve at Eylau couldn't be better documented and James Arnold's coverage of Friedland includes lots of detail of the huge cavalry actions fought there when a large chunk of the French line of battle was held solely by cavalry for the first few hours.

1809: Both John Gill and James Arnold do good jobs of covering the all cavalry, twilight action at Alt Eglofsheim and then the cavalry actions within the battles of Aspern-Essling and Wagram – huge quantities of cavalry actions at both battles.

And so on and so on and so on … lots of accounts of cavalry actions across 1812, 1813 & 1814 and readily available. Yes, Liebertwollwitz was a huge all cavalry battle and his coverage in this article is a good one but its not the only one available and, really, …. his statement … well …

Its just Hofschroer being controversial and arrogant thats all! I think most of us now know the truth about "Publicity Pete". :)

The original article came with pictures of wargaming figures. Made it more interesting.

So he cites two German-language sources.

One wonders if they actually say what he says they say. We only have Hofschroer's word for it.

"We only have Hofschroer's word for it." I would take that before anyone living today!

I honestly thought he was still alive. Incarcerated was what I imagined his sentence…..not death!

I remember reading the original version of this in Miniature Wargames. It's nice to see it again.

I remember this article – never realised it was The Hoff who wrote it – I am so bad at reading the piece's author – sorry to all the magazine contributors out there…

If others want to trust Hofschroer's bona fides that's fine, but in June his appeal against being extradited to Austria to face further child pornography charges was denied. In addition, further charges are to be added, including possession of 16 VHS tapes of child sexual abuse; threatening a judge; and a charge relating to firearms.

In July Hofschroer then absconded from where he was staying, and is at large in the UK.
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What an impeccable historical source he is!
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The only surprise is that he's so interested in the Prussian army, which as far as I know had no boy soldiers in it.

I particularly enjoyed the way this particular Hofschroer fan has psychic readings in which she gets in touch with her dead father, who reassures her as to Hofschroer's safety. Phew! He's safe! That's a relief!

I'm surprised Mad Hoffy's on the run, I thought he was safely put away as a guest of Her Majesty.

Hoffy has gone way down in my opinion following the revelations that he's a lazy history at the most generous description and a dishonest one at worst. I've enjoyed his work in the past because I do enjoy in having my preconceptions challenged.

So, was Lieberwolkitz the biggest cavalry action of the Napoleonic Era? Rather than relying on character assassination (which, honestly it sounds like the man has none), let's stick to facts. One of the things that stuck in my mind about Borodino was the cavalry to infantry ratio, though at this point I can't remember what it was precisely.

Google the term 'character assassination' and you get the definition

the malicious and unjustified harming of a person's good reputation
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It is factual not malicious, and relevant not unjustified, to note that Hofschroer's potty defence was debunked in a court and his equally potty historical claims have been demolished by proper historians. Hence he has no good reputation to harm, as he is a convicted criminal and a patent crank.

The OP and the discussion relate to information Hofschroer says he has read in some German-language source. Well, has he? Who knows? Maybe it was the voices in his head?

But to return to Liebertwolkwitz, the first time I had heard of this 'battle' was when I read that Hofschroer article in the 1980s. Chandler barely mentions it, the Cambridge Modern History characterises it as "the greatest cavalry fight of the campaign" (my emphasis) and says Murat had 10,000 cavalry. Leggiere (Napoleon and the Struggle for Germany) barely mentions the cavalry action; Voigt's 1848 account mentions 8,000 French cavalry but doesn't enumerate the Allied numbers. Zabecki (Germany at War: 400 Years of Military History) gives it half a line. The German Wikipedia says there were 7,000 cavalry but also doesn't number the Allied, although it does later say there were 14,000 cavalry engaged.

So to be frank one is left scratching one's head. Each side had eventually about 50 to 60,000 men of whom 15% were cavalry – so far, so commonplace, and fewer than the French committed at Waterloo, say, or a dozen other battles. I struggle a bit to see what is so significant about an inconclusive encounter on the eve of Leipzig.

That's the most interesting thing I have read today 4th – genuinely. So thank you. I had always assumed it was a real battle, and had never got around to looking into it. So to see your comments has been of real interest.

Thank you

Marc

Perhaps 'character assassination' wasn't the right term, but disproving his statement "Lieberwolkitz was the largest cavalry action" by saying "He's a fugitive pedophile" doesn't really work for me. Leipzig was the largest battle in the Napoleonic era and it wouldn't surprise me to have the largest cavalry action as part of it. It also seems like there was so much to cover in a history of that battle that the cavalry action may not get that get much press. I'm not as well read on it as others though.
No opinions here on one side or the other, but 'largest' should be a measurable amount and I'm curious if anyone's measured it.

It might not surprise you, but it wouldn't make it true. Who other than Hofschroer claims that Liebertwolkwitz was a significant cavalry engagement? At best we have a cite that says it was the largest cavalry action of the 1813 campaign.

The question then is whether it's wise to rely on the judgment and analysis of someone who has been found to distort the historical record and lie ludicrously in court.

Holly crap.
Mad Hoffy is on the loose!

Creepy. Hope he's not close to any young kids.

Regarding the "battle" it reads like it was just a large cavalry action but I'm not sure if there were any larger cavalry actions. Clearly though it wasn't just a cavalry action as lots of infantry see to have been there.

Nafziger has a detailed describtion of it. To say it is not relevant shows a complete ignorance of the pivotal 1813 campaign. If Murat had fought a better battle he could have hindered allied deployment and broken their scattered approach even moreperhaps changing the outcome of the first day of Leipzig – which was a very close run thing indeed.

@ Sparta

The dual claim Hofschroer makes is that this is a (i) comparatively little-documented battle and (ii) the 'largest cavalry action of the period'. Anything that Hofschroer or Hamilton-Williams, two peas in a pod, claims must be treated with great scepticism unless someone else says it too. Like his assertion (despite the Waterloo Despatch itself) that "Germans" received insufficient credit for Waterloo, for which he has never provided one single cite, the claim that Liebertwolkwitz is little-documented is also unsupported, and easily refuted. I've given several cites above that long precede Hofschroer. You've given Nafziger. So that claim is debunked.

The second claim is that this was a very large cavalry action. Well, was it? Who else says so? Was the cavalry action on the scale of Eylau or Waterloo, or was it simply, as the Cambridge Modern History has it, just the largest of the 1813 campaign? Other sources suggest about 14,000 cavalry fought, which makes them about 15% of the forces engaged.

At Austerlitz Napoleon had 11,000 cavalry. At Wagram and Borodino he had 29,000 cavalry. At Leipzig he had 41,000. At Waterloo, 16,000. So at four of those five battles, Napoleon's army had more cavalry on its own than did both sides together at Liebertwolkwitz.

My question then is how this was the 'largest cavalry action of the period'. There may have been some event whereby at Liebertwolkwitz, the entire 15,000 or so cavalry of both sides all managed to take part in the same gigantic melee. If that had happened that would be quite something. I would expect someone else to have mentioned it somewhere on the 200-year historical record, however, and nobody has. From what I have read, there was a series of charges and counter-charges, much like, well, Austerlitz, Eylau, Wagram, Borodino, Leipzig, and Waterloo.

Alternatively, when he says it was the 'largest cavalry action of the period', maybe the period to which he refers is, oh, the middle ten days of October 1813. That would then be a more accurate claim, but one so unremarkable that one questions anyone would bother to make it.

So as I say, I struggle to see what is so significant about it – as a cavalry action, I emphasise. The ideas that it is little-known and a big cavalry deal both appear to originate with the crank Hofschroer. To my scant surprise, five minutes' scrutiny shows both his claims to be nonsense.

But as Armand would put it – glad you enjoyed it, boys! (smile)

I want to take another stab at this because I think it's an interesting subject, but I think we need to define what a 'cavalry action' is. This is what I had in mind for size of a cavalry action:
A cavalry general on one side points at the enemy and says 'let's go'. All the cavalry that step off at that point, plus any added later specifically to support that attack, plus any enemy cavalry thrown in counterattack, that is the size of the cavalry action.
For example, The British attack on D'erlon's corps at Waterloo, 2 brigades of British heavy cavalry at ~2000 men conducted the attack while 2 brigades of Cuirassiers plus 2 regiments of lancers counterattacked at ~2100 men so that's a total of 4100 men.
A second example, Platov's attack at Borodino, cossacks plus 1st cavalry corps ~8000 men, (no enemy cavalry that I could find easily) would total 8000 men.
Using these criteria, Ney's attack at Waterloo, Lieberwolkitz, Murat's attack at the Fleche's at Borodino, Murat's attack at Eylau all seem like good candidates for further research. Unfortunately I can't find easy numbers on the web, but it's an interesting thing to work on.

"Cavalry Action". Yes. I was fascinated on the Dragoon skirmishing that was so effective from horseback.

Friedland would surely qualify too. Uvarov sent 60-odd squadrons – 6,000 to 8,000 men – against Grouchy, who counter-attacked with his dragoon division and Nansouty's cuirassiers – about 6,500 in total. That cavalry battle of 14,000 cavalry or so ebbed and flowed for several hours until Uvarov gave it up.

At Alt-Eglofsheim in 1809 12 to 14,000 cavalry fought.

At Ionkovo in 1812 3,000 French fought 7,000 Russian cavalry.

(BTW, how many of you started doing the math on whether you could pull off one of these battles in your preferred scale?)

Here you have a good example in 1/72 by my friend Rafael Pardo…

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Amicalement
Armand

for more, thanks to Steve Smith

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