"Did the Austrian Grenadiers Ever Stay With Their Battalions?" Topic

Each Austrian infantry battalion had two companies of grenadiers, but in wartime these here habitually taken to form converged grenadier battalions which were kept with the army reserve. I was wondering if there were ever any times when the grenadiers stayed with their parent battalions?

Scott, that silence you hear is everyone on TMP who does Napoleonics thinking "no, of course not: but if I say that, someone's going to show it happened to a single regiment in Dalmatia for one morning during the Hundred Days."

More correctly every Austrian line regiment--not battalion, and not jaeger or grenzer--had a division of two companies of grenadiers, which were combined in wartime into four or six-company grenadier battalions. Those companies didn't have a parent line battalion to stay with. Mack in 1805 tried briefly to reorganize the regiments into four battalions, one of which would be grenadiers, but that still won't get you a line battalion with a grenadier company.

Now watch some smart aleck produce a regiment in Moravia one afternoon in 1810…

Never be afraid of saying what you believe to be true for fear of being proved wrong, this is how we learn.
I salute you for posting!

Hardly that, Herky. When people ask what was normal, usual or customary, I'll expose my ignorance with the best of them. It's the words "ever" "always" and "never" I'm leary of, especially in the context of the Napoleonic Wars or the World Wars. They're so vast, diverse and well-documented that I tend to work on the assumption that any flat generalization--that X was always the case or Y was never done--I assume to be wrong. I just don't always know when and where the exceptions were.

only in 1805

I don't want to start any arguments, I was just curious. :)

To the best of my knwledge and belief they're consistent throughout the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, with the big thing being whether the grenadier battalions were four companies or six, which looks to me as though the theater commander got to decide, though I could easily be wrong.

But 1805 is weird. Mack pulled a reorganization at the start of the war to make the regiments four battalions each of four companies all the same size--normally the grenadier companies were smaller--and the first battalion was supposed to be a grenadier battalion. My understanding is that the entire first battalion were now supposed to be grenadiers, though they couldn't have been retrained or reuniformed. But if someone said they were supposed to be two grenadier and two fusilier companies like the first battalion of 1808 Spanish I couldn't prove him wrong.

Anyway, you never see an Austrian battalion like French, British or Russian with the grenadier company in the battalion on the right. Like the Prussians, they start the war by forming grenadier battalions.

I only have a passing familiarity with Napoleonic Austrians, so this discussion was illuminating for me. I never knew that about the grenadier companies -- will try to remember this whenever I come to organize and paint and field an Austrian force. I hope my source materials will remind me of this as well (since it is so hard to go back and search the TMP archives for old posts/topics). Appreciate the information!

Interestingly the first diagram in "Auszug aus dem Exercier Reglement für die K und K K Infanterie 1807" has all 3 battalions in a line with the 2 grenadier companies deployed one to right and the other to the left of the line formation!

After that the diagrams appear to work on the basis that the grenadier companies have been detached.

Downloadable version link

Piper (and everyone else possible interested) I always copy interesting conversations like this to Word, change the text by "clear formatting", save in universal fond and save in a map "Historical information". In that map of course also an indication of period. So I create my own little database ;-)))

PoE, that is very interesting! At the start of the Civil War Silas Casey published a new tactics manual for the Union Army. For some reason he decided to make two companies in each battalion the designated skirmishers for the battalion and he had them march separately from the rest. All the diagrams show the eight center companies doing their maneuvers with the two skirmisher marching separately nearby. The War Department decided they did not want this, but rather than have Casey redo the whole manual (there was a war on and they needed this ASAP) they just put a note at the start of the book saying "Ignore the parts about the skirmisher companies" and left everything else as is. The Austrian regulations sound like a similar experiment!

"Austrian Grenadier 1809 Help" Topic at TMP link has a listing of the grenadier battalions (which were named after their commanders) and breakdown of the regiments contributing their grenadier companies.