Vitoria, 1813 - Dr. Mark Gerges

okay maybe a quick 30 seconds but hi my name is Joey Hensler and I'm a member of the Dole Institute Student Advisory Board so I'd like to welcome you to the Dole Institute and thank you for attending this afternoon's program the Dole Institute Student Advisory Board is composed of kayuu students committed to the work of the Dole we attend regular meetings assistant events like this and plan an essay be sponsored program every semester the members of the essay B receive great opportunities to network with our special guests if you are a student and would like to join please contact the Dole Institute the Dole Institute would like to hear from you if you enjoyed this afternoon's program please let us know by contacting us on facebook twitter or through our website email your attendance and feedback help shape future programming to view let past programs visit our online video archive at WWDC org a video of this afternoon's presentation will be available soon before we begin today I'd like to remind you to please turn off your cellphone's after the presentation we will have some time for audience questions and answers if you have a question please raise your hand and I'll come by with a microphone to help you out please just ask one brief question and it's also important to have the microphone when asking your question for video audio finally if at any time during the program you have trouble hearing ask a staff member or a student volunteer who will assist you but now please welcome dr. rich Barbuto deputy director of CGS seas Department of military history thank you it's great to have a large crowd here today first off a public service announcement there's only six brownies left so if you want when you better great women right now thank you for coming one of these days we're gonna have one these presentations where it's not 33 degrees outside so hopefully the spring will come maybe summer the next time we get together it is my great pleasure today to present to you to introduce for you a colleague and friend of mine professor mark Kyrgyz Marcus had a full career as an army officer at following his graduation from Norwich and Vermont he was an armor officer which I was so we are kindred spirits in that regard he had a fairly illustrious military career to include service during the first Gulf War when he was commanded a tank company during combat operations he's been awarded two Bronze Stars one with a V device for valor so this is the real thing that's going to be talking you today he also taught history at West Point his last job in the Army was to be teaching military history at the command and General Staff College and following the completion of his military career retirement as a lieutenant colonel he continued on with us for the past 10 years as a civilian instructor and we're thrilled to have him in the Department of course he is a bonafide expert in Napoleonic warfare and his focus on that is cavalry operations British French and Portuguese and the Kings German Legion in Wellington's campaigns in the Iberian Peninsula he's been to most of Wellington's battlefields on the Iberian Peninsula and of course Waterloo in the the Belgian campaign as well he's done archival research in Britain and France and Portugal his book will probably be become the standard study of this when it is eventually published he continues to do other research he gives papers he's invited to give public lectures he reviews books he writes articles he does all of that today we're going to study something that you all know the Duke of Wellington and the Battle of Waterloo and maybe those of you take European history know that Wellington went on to be a represent his country at the Congress of Vienna which pretty well retraced all of Western Europe early in the 19th century he went on to become Prime Minister twice of Great Britain those of you who were here last month when we talked about the battle of Plattsburgh the war of 1812 ended without us losing because the Duke of Wellington convinced his government to cut everyone's losses and just sue for peace so Wellington's a pretty big character he became a pretty big character pretty much from what happens in the presentation today so without further ado Marc please well thank you rich I always hate when people give you such a good introduction then you don't want to let them down and I did pick this photograph for this this image up here this is a twist pontus the one Oh towns will talk about three bridges that's the 15th hasar 's one of the Calgary regiments in this battle and I do have to say of all the branches of the army cavalry plays the smallest role in what we're going to talk about today unfortunately but you know one of the the best things about this program and doing this is it gives you the opportunity to kind of reflect on something you think you know very well and this this third fort leavenworth series is this idea of lesser-known decisive battles and so as it was playing with this idea I kind of had to really wonder what do you mean lesser-known this is what it says the Dolans to website lesser-known vitals but of all the battles we've talked about so far and I'm not gonna disparage any of those other decisive battles this is probably the only one that Beethoven decided right and opus about Wellington's victory there's ODEs there's poems Wellington makes his reputation here this this battle and we'll talk about it in a little bit really is one of the things that allows the Allies to go back to war in the summer of 1813 and keeps has Austria actually join or from the neutrality so it has huge repercussions and it's it's ironic that today it's not so well-known but let's talk a little about what the situation is in Iberia in 1813 this is the fifth year of the war in Spain and Portugal France has gone into Portugal in November of 1807 to stop the trade the Continental System the thing that's gonna end up leading us to go to war with with Britain is going to be basically blockading British goods from getting into the continent and Portugal is the one outlet that Britain is still trading with the continent and so Napoleon will go in send troops to Lisbon to try to seize the the prince region down there and to stop the trade he will disband the Portuguese army and the next year about five months later French troops who have been working and this is was a joint operation with the Spanish are gonna start taking over key fortresses and towns in Spain finally in May of 1808 they will the the Spanish king will be invited as well as son up to France both of them will be convinced or tricked to renounce their claims to the throne and since there's nobody on the throne Napoleon will then put his brother Joseph on the throne this is going to lead to an uprising that actually starts on the 2nd of may dos Tamayo of 80 known 1808 which starts the Spanish war the sport wharfs of Spanish independence as they call it and it's going to be the peace that for Britain look at a way of getting back getting into this war and they will deploy troops and there will be British troops from that period August of 1808 up through 1814 operating in the peninsula the war hasn't been going all that well for the most part British troops have been doing is defending Portugal Wellington himself who's going to come there he originally comes there as Arthur Wellesley not that Wellington yet he doesn't become there that name until talavera and 1809 initially goes into Spain in it to the Talavera campaign and just absolutely disgusted with working with the Spanish allies they don't feed him as the his army as they aprama they don't provide the the horses that they promised and worst off after the battle Talavera british soldiers are in a field hospital there and the spanish general will abandon the field hospital leaving the British wounded to be captured by the French and Wellington in in that summer will move back to Portugal and just be disgusted with his Spanish eyes and spend the next two and a half three years defending Portugal from French invasion that changes in the summer of 1800 in early 1812 what is going on is the preparations for the invasion of Russia by Napoleon he will pull approximately a hundred thousand troops out of Spain and Portugal to build up his army of six hundred thousand that's going to go into Spain and this changes the dynamic this allows Wellington with his anglo-portuguese army to move into central Spain up along the area of Citadel Rodrigo and sub monk and I'll get you a map in a second and the summer will show see a large maneuvering campaign with the two armies within close contact and finally at the battle Salamanca a Wellington will defeat the French army after the defeat then he will march to Madrid liberate Madrid be hailed as a conqueror and then move up to the castle of Burgos up along the great road leading to the Pyrenees and tried to beseech that that fortress unfortunately he doesn't have the siege trains the heavy or the heavy cannons he needs to knock down the walls of the castle and in the fall November he will march back to Portugal retreat and when he starts to do this the discipline of the army falls apart and it's really one of those things that the British Army does so well in the day of battle and once the battle is over once the opportunity to kind of lute or pillage or the weather conditions turn bad they fall apart and what Wellington will write is a letter that BIC gets to be known as the infamous letter and he's referring to the army and I quote during the retreat the officers lost all command over their men irregularities and outrages of all description were committed with impunity and losses have been sustained which ought to never have occurred I have no hesitation in attributing these evils that habitual inattention of the officers the to their duties as prescribed by the standing regulations of the service and by orders of the army as you can probably imagine pointing the thing directly at saying it's the officers it's your fault for this army has fallen apart was not taken too well nor has this retreat ingloriously back to Portugal after he had liberated Madrid that summer and so during the fall of 1812 there's a lot of talk there's also a lot of pressure upon Wellington to do something and he has some people outside of the government who are really looking for his head they are always these political parties back and forth Wellington has some strong support his brother Lord Warrington his older brother is in the cabinet almost became becomes prime minister in 1808 but he has these Croaker's is what he calls them these officers who write letters talking about every single bit of the campaign what they're gonna do how they're gonna do it they write these letters home he complains they keep coffee houses they sit around discuss operations and how they're not going to work or whether they're going to work and so what this means for the 1813 campaign is Wellington will and suppose a real almost a cone of silence on everything in his operations he will not talk to the government about what he's planning on doing he will not talk to his soldiers his his his other subordinate leaders and pretty much everything he's gonna do is kept with himself personally there's also a lot of issues going on with his two allies the Portuguese in the Spanish in December of 1808 excuse me 1812 happy with the liberation of Madrid after four years Wellington will finally become general chief of the Spanish armies sounds great except for the fact that he doesn't have the ability to raise the armies feed the armies or discipline the armies all he has is what we would call today tactical control of these soldiers they come out to the battlefield and he fights them but the problems that he's been facing throughout the the entire war is on discipline is on the feeding the armies the paying the office of the army keeping them together and so he has no means of really keeping them together and making them an integral part of his army the other aspect is Portugal Portugal has the the country we really don't talk about Oh wat that has suffered greatly throughout this war it has seen French invasions three different French invasions British troops stationed there for almost five years and by this time it's getting just sick and tired of the British begin there a lot of the officers will talk about things that saying that the Spanish would rather it with just as well kill a British soldiers killed a wild dog and that the Portuguese peasants all walk around with knives and then that they know how to use and so the relationship with his two allies are not that good the other aspect that's going to go on in the early portion in the 1813 is Napoleon in central Germany December of 1812 Napoleon has come back from Spain from from Moscow he's limped back across the border he goes with six hundred thousand soldiers in June of 1812 gets to Moscow then comes back and he gets back into his empire with 30,000 troops left five hundred and seventy thousand have disappeared and really the Allies at this point the sixth coalition think he's pretty much on the ropes how could he possibly recover from this sort of loss and in the first five months of 1813 Napoleon's gonna do amazing amazing repairing of his army he's gonna pull soldiers from Spain approximately a hundred thousand particularly Calvary but also infantry he's gonna take the Gunners off the ships of his Navy he's going to graduate people from Military Academy early take the Mount of John to Arms the Mounted Police and put them into the army and he's gonna come out in May of 1813 and suddenly have a brand new army of 250,000 he fights the Prussians and the Russians and in two battles in May of 1813 beats them and Europe is just absolutely stunned how can the Polian who has lost all this army come back five months later with an army that's good enough to beat us all over again and they are gonna ask for an armistice and so they will be only as we go into the summer of 1813 Europe is very much in a state of war but right now not fighting as they see what's going on what they're trying to do is convince Austria to come in on the ally side remember Austria is the father-in-law of Napoleon he had married an Austrian princess and so Austrian is supposedly neutral but the Allies are trying to get him onto their side so those are the the context of what's going on as this campaign begins let's talk a little bit about two opposing commanders and we'll start off with Wellington at this point he's general Wellington Marcus of Wellington 44 years old that painting up there is by Thomas Lawrence painted the next year so you really see him what he would have looked like at this time period he has a reputation napoleon likes to call him the Sepoy general because he makes his most of his experiences in india fighting with native troops and British troops he also fights underneath his brother Richard Wellesley he's Lord Mornington and so many people view Wellington as a political general he isn't necessarily competent on his own point he only gets to this these positions because of his brother and his family influence he has been there in in Portugal in Spain and this is not where the British want to put their their main effort it's too far from France to really have a good influence on the events that's going on in Central Europe they would much rather put their forces in Hanover they would much rather put them in wallström Islands in the Low Countries and so there's always a constant fight of taking troops out of Portugal in Spain and putting them again into US Central Europe underneath him I just marked two of the major commanders that will play a role in this one is Lieutenant General Thomas Graham and the other one is rolling hill Hills relatively young 41 years old very very good reputation solid commander and one of the things he's known as is Daddy Hill his soldiers call him daddy Hill because the care he takes to them to make sure they are fed and taking Erik Arif the other person here Thomas Graham interesting character he does not join the army to lose 42 years old at the Battle of Victoria his 65 one of the oldest commanders on the battlefield he's a successful farmer in 1792 up in Scotland his wife he skin is sick his doctor says to take her to the South of France so she can recover they go to France and she dies while they're there happens to be bad timing for him it's just as the French Revolution is starting to enter its violent phases so as he comes back with her body he's met by some French revolutionaries they want to see if he is sneaking weapons in her casket and basically dump her her bodies out onto the ground and this so incenses gram that once he gets back home he volunteers for the army and then he'll later on get a commission raised up in the ranks to buy this period he is of lieutenant-general even though he's 65 he's very vigorous and a very very good commander on the French side you have joseph bonaparte napoleon's older brother who is the king of spain they're only because he is Napoleon's brother this is his third Kingdom he had first spent the king of Holland and then his brother needed someone to be the King of Naples and moved him down there and now when he moves to Spain he needed an appoint goes into Spain needs a loyal family member to be on the crown there and moves Joseph there Joseph doesn't have a real good reputation right Joseph doesn't like to do the day-to-day hard work of actually governing he would much rather sit back as an aloof monarch let his ministers run the kingdom but unfortunately for him Spain is not in that state that he can just sit back and open art galleries and and go and and have balls and parties he gets the nickname from the Spanish as Pepe a bowtie a basically Joseph of the bottles because of his drinking his womanizing and not very well respected but one of the things Joseph is trying to do is he says if I'm gonna be a Spanish King I have to have Spanish forces I have to have Spanish troops and he will constantly try to raise a Spanish army and we'll see some of those here at the Battle of Vitoria to actually run the army the French troops under Joseph is marshals Jordan Jordan say an old soldier he had been enlistment in the old Royal Army had fought at the siege of Savannah in the US revolution with French troops during the Revolutionary War so get a commission and we'll fight very very well and when Napoleon makes the first group of March he will become one of the initial marshals in 1804 he follows Joseph his military advisor to Naples and then comes with him to Spain but Jordan and Joseph have had a problem since 1809 Napoleon has tried to direct the war in the peninsula directly from Paris and what you've had after Napoleon he only spends three months in Portugal and Spain he spends and leaves his marshals there and so for most of the time he tries to direct these guys from Paris directly Jordan and Joseph have very very limited authority they only control the army of the center right around Madrid and it's only when the pullian goes to Russia in 1812 that he's gonna give full authority to all the French armies in Spain to Joseph and Jordan but of course by this time they've had three and three and a half years of autonomy three and a half years of not listening to anybody other than Napoleon and so you're gonna see a lot of problems of just getting these subordinate officers to follow up you have what's really the remnants of three different armies underneath Jordan you've got the army of the south of the center and of Portugal each of these armies had huge provinces of Spain for most of the peninsula war the army of Portugal was fighting against Wellington up around the area of cidade Rodrigo in the north the army of the south down along Cadiz down near Gibraltar was conducting the siege of Cadiz for three and a half years and the army center around Madrid they were all commanded at that time by marshals of France but as the 1812 campaign goes on Napoleon has pulled those marshals back and what you now have is division commanders ghazan der Laan and Rey who are now in charge of these armies so they don't necessarily have the experience to be able to command these armies effectively plus the other issue is many of these forces are going to be off doing other missions particularly fighting the guerrillas trying to keep their lines of communications open so even though they look like army has not talked a bit in a second about the actual organization there's not that many forces with them when we talk about the British forces in the peninsula you really have to talk about what's known as the angled Portuguese Army Britain goes there with a very very only about 30,000 soldiers and the only way that they're able to build up and be able to confront the French is by integrating the Portuguese army Portuguese army was disbanded by the French the best soldiers and officers were actually shipped as part of the Grand Army up and up to the Low Countries they take all the horses they take most of the arms and so when Wellington comes there the prince region basically gives him and marshal Beresford full authority to raise and train a new army for Portugal and they're gonna do that over the next three and a half years by 1810 at the Battle of the Saco this Portuguese army is integrated into the British Army and if you look at the actual units that I have here you see almost all of them have a sliver of green and what this is showing is the Portuguese troops that have been embedded into these British red British divisions for example the 5th division has two brigades of British and one brigade of Portuguese troops in there and when you look underneath that to the Portuguese brigades and regiments if the Portuguese regimental commander is a Portuguese officer then the second command is a British officer below that if it's a British officer as a company commander the second-in-command is a Portuguese officer so these two armies are truly linked together operating on the same discipline the same standards and fight very very well it allows Wellington to have a much greater strength than just the thirty to forty thousand British soldiers that are actually there and I say British soldiers because that also is a little bit of a misnomer he also has an argent number of German soldiers rich Barbuda had talked about the Kings German Legion George the third had been the elector of Hanover and when Napoleon reorganizes and creates the Confederation of the Rhine he takes basically Hanover away from George the third at that point about fourteen thousand loyal Germans loyal to the British monarch will flee Hanover go to Britain and able to create what they call the Kings German Legion these are organized cavalry infantry and artillery troops and about six to eight thousand of them will be in the peninsula at any one time very very good soldiers they they are well respected through the the british army but they are integrated in i don't mark them separately because they are truly they're British and everything except they speak German and when they write their letters home they're writing in German you also have the Spanish fourth army and another one of these odd type of organizations the Spanish army that's operating with Wellington will be pretty much kept at a arm's length for most of the fight the first division up here current longa is actually a guerrilla division and we can talk about guerrillas during the the question-and-answer because you have to kind of think about what does that mean to be a guerrilla division they have cavalry regiments they have infantry regiments they have artillery batteries and yet they are operating as a standard division as we would know it throughout this in the line of battle throughout the the fight and it really calls into question how do you classify this guerrilla war that that the the French are fighting when you look at the numbers there's about a hundred and four thousand Allied forces in the campaign of which about to me seventy thousand will be available at the Battle of Vitoria the rest of them will be off securing lines and communications are blocking the French forces and other parts of the peninsula the French armies in Spain I'd already mentioned that the three of the South the center and the army of Portugal and I have two different colors here marked you see the infantry divisions which are going to do the main portions of the fighting at Victoria marked in the dark the dark blue but you also get this light blue and these are all the Calvary divisions and if you notice a huge portion of the French army is they're mounted armed why is that important well Calvary's great on the plains it's great when you're doing maneuvering it doesn't help you in a defensive battle very very much and when we talk about the Train actually a vittoria and what the French are trying to do those French cavalry men Dumont nuts much nothing other than block up the roads and do not play much of a role in the fight there's also about six thousand loyal Spaniards who are going to be fighting for the French these are the the Royal Guards of King Joseph both Foot Guards and Horse Guards so the French will have about 68,000 so even though the Wellington leaves with about a hundred four thousand when you actually get to the battlefield the numbers on the field itself are about equal about one to one selects we'll talk a little bit about what the Train looks like in the Victoria Campaign it's a huge portion of Spain that Wellington's gonna fight over this northern portion and I need to while we have the big map on talk a little about logistics Wellington has been able to support himself in Portugal for the last five years because of the Royal Navy Royal Navy has been able to to keep the lines of communications open supply everything they need horses cannot feed off the fodder they find on the fields their care there at there their weight goes down too quickly they have to be augmented with grains and so these lines of communications as the campaign goes becomes a huge vulnerability for Wellington's army and this is what has happened in the 1812 campaign is as Wellington moves to this area between Cidade Rodrigues Salamanca up to valle de lead and back again the French constantly tried to cut behind him try to cut his lines of communications every time he was threatened Wellington was forced to fall back closer and closer to Portugal until he finally ended up spending the winter in northern Portugal and once it is look at that that vulnerability and has spent the last five months trying to convince the Royal Navy to support him of ship shifting his lines of communication up to Santander on the north coast and when you look at this you think about this for a second first off the problem is is there's a squadron from the Tagus River here and they have the responsibility from Gibraltar all the way around up to Caronia the channel fleet has this responsibility in the Bay of Biscay channel fleets not really worried about the northern coast of Spain they're much more worried about the French fleet in Brest about the French fleet Nant were about keeping the channel open and so most of the time there is a single frigate of the Royal Navy maintaining the north coast of Spain and so one of the things London has to constantly do is try to get further improvements of the the Royal Navy to support him once he actually starts the campaign what you see is his supply lines here get cut and the British Army will then go for about a three-week period with no lines of communications they are basically moving with whatever they can carry on their back now Wellington's had to do a lot to get to this point to make the soldiers be able to carry enough ammunition and food to be able to survive he's had to lighten up the soldiers load and what he has done has gotten rid of the big heavy overcoats that they wore he's able to do that because he's going to have them have tents one tent for every six soldiers but to carry those tents he has to figure out some way of getting the mules that were before carrying these huge soup kettles that they they would cook their food and so what they've come up with is these tin kettles tin kettles that are light enough for a soldier to carry they could carry one tin kettle for every six soldiers and by allowing the soldiers now to carry these tin kettles it means the mules don't have to carry the big cast-iron kettles the big the mules now can carry the tents you don't need to have the overcoats the soldiers can carry more food and ammunition and again this is all the type of care that Wellington has to put into his campaigns and if you ever take a chance so you can find Wellington's dispatches online University of Southampton has them in the amount of detail he puts in he'll write by hand 20 or 30 letters a day where he will talk about everything from what's the soldiers load how the ammunition is going to be carried how close to the front the forge carts that are actually making the horseshoes for the cavalry are to the front all these type of areas so nothing is - no details - fine for the for Wellington look at during this campaign let me zoom in a little bit on this on this particular portion of the battlefield that's pretty much that square that was yellow before it's about 350 miles by 125 miles so it's a lor large portion of Spain and it's really marked by large planes you have this Sierra Kenta Bree mountains guadarrama mountains down and there and you start to see then the the foothills as you're starting to get up into the baske area and then the the Pyrenees behind it the major road network goes right down through the center this is the Royal Road that runs from northern Portugal cidade Rodrigo Salamanca Burgos and then up to Victoria and that's where each of these campaigns have been taking place as you have to have that road and be able to supply yourself but if Wellington doesn't have to go back to Portugal or to Lisbon for his supplies the road is really not necessary and there of course is Victoria up on the upper right hand corner of the map that we're gonna be focusing on in a few moments the first phase is to cross the frontier and Wellington knows that the French are going to be looking for him looking for him again coming off that main road to Salamanca the French have placed themselves along on the Douro River line trying to block that road and any sort of routes up there and what had happened in 1812 is Wellington had come up this main road and he had a single Calvary Brigade of Portuguese troops that had come out of northern Portugal through terrible terrible mountains and had wandered up here looking for the French flank and what they do for almost two and a half weeks is they realize there's no Frenchman up here in 1812 and he is planning on using that all over again and if he could have done it with a single Calvary Brigade in 18 in 1812 in 1813 he's now going to do it with six infantry divisions he feints along the main road with three divisions and the mass of the the British cavalry and then since the other six divisions up through the mountains of Portugal the conditions are absolutely horrible the Douro River is is in flood from the the the the spring Foss of although yes snow French or excuse me British soldiers have to cross the build a pontoon bridge they're gonna actually cross by holding onto the stirrups and the Mane's of the horses as they swim across it but they're going to be able to get a cross get into across the the Douro River line and at this point the French realized they can't even find it there's no way that they can fight it and they're gonna give up that line with almost out of shot being fired and so the first part of the campaign has been successful in the first week and the French will then do is they'll set up a second line along the Pescara River and again if Wellington's forces are up here at some point he has to get back down to the road so he can re-establish his lines of communication and if Wellington's up here the French here they can confront his lines communication and at this point they still just don't get the fact that Wellington has no lines of communication that he is waiting for the Navy when it gets up to Santander and once again Wellington will just pretty much ignore the French continue marching up to the Northeast there are gonna be some small cavalry fights basically a brigade on Brigade fight it really has no effect on the campaign other than pushing the French back from the outpost but again the French have to abandon this line of their defense and they will take up a third line of defense just in front of the City of Victoria and this is where Wellington will actually go and offer a set battle Joseph once he starts falling back here has to abandon Madrid and at this point the French army starts to become it almost looks like a circus it has thousands of wagons not only the normal supply of gunpowder cannon balls all those type of things but you have officers they're all there their baggage you have their wives you have their children you have all the civil court of Madrid so all the civil administrators everything like that they have to go somewhere where's the king he's with the army so they go with it they're dragging and leading you know these huge herds of cattle there's approximately 3,000 wagons of just really the loot of six years of the French occupation of Spain that is moving along moving along with their the entire Spanish royal collection has been cut out of its frames rolled up and put into carriages so it's an amazing route but at some point Joseph has to offer a battle you can't be a king without a kingdom without a capital you have to stop the enemy and so he's gonna decide Victoria is the place that he's going to offer the battle so here's the terrain of Victoria it's approximately a ten mile deep plain it has a mountain range off to the north the braava devatta it has the heights of pueblos in the south meandering through the center of that plane is the Sidora river marked by twelve different bridges all across here these are stone bridges and when you look at this what really that the victory area does is it creates a huge horseshoe with the city of Vitoria to the rear the only way to come in is along this main east-west road or at least that's the way the French look at it if Wellington's going to come in here they're gonna cut he's gonna have to come along this road and so they're gonna defend in that low grant here's Wellington's plan he looks at it and says okay they're gonna expect me to come this way so I'm gonna take two of my divisions and I'm gonna faint to the front I'll take three divisions under hill and they are going to climb the the heights of Pueblo get up on the heights and they are gonna threaten the French southern flank so now the French have got forces to the front forces to the south and they're gonna have to react at the same time he does what's really going to be bold is he sends Thomas Graham with 18,000 soldiers meandering up through the mountains these guys are going to take about a 25 mile road detour up and round out of contact with Wellington and with the French to come back to the rear backed by the town of Victoria and they're gonna try to time that so as they get there they're able to cut the lines of communications for the French and then the other port is Lord Dow who's and Thomas picton who's that commanding the 3rd division they are supposed to be part of this and once the French react to the south they hear the guys coming in from their rear he I'm gonna punch with the majority of the army into the straight and try to destroy them and in capture him it's a very very ambitious plan and if you think about warfare in the early 19th century once Wellington gives the orders on the 20th of June to do this he is out of contact with his commanders he can do nothing except wait for them to try to execute his plan and hope that they understood him and hope that they're going to do it according to his plan just give you another view of the battlefield here's an aerial view in the Front's there you have the the heights of Pueblo the town of Victoria is the Dora river running down through the the center três pontas that painting I showed you in the beginning is that village there su viana which we'll talk about the fighting there in a few minutes and this is where Joseph is going to have his headquarters on the hill of Aran s Joseph interesting character III guess all you can really say about him he is so confident he's gonna win that he spends his time having stands created so that the people of Victoria could come out and watch the victory at the same time he doesn't have any of the bridges across the Sidora River destroyed so when you look at this every bridge of the 12 bridges along here are still open and his army is located across in that direction the other aspect too is he thinks that Aaron Eze Hill is is going to be a lure to Wellington that Wellington is gonna have to take that and it really goes back to history Edward Prince of Wales the Black Prince and 1366 will be fighting in this area his advanced guard will get up to the hill of Hermes 300 english knights and archers and they will be defeated by six thousand spaniards there and so joseph thinks that Wellington's going to know this and somehow that's going to have a magical lure that he's gonna have to take this hill Avera is to take off that black spot from the British military history there's the route that he expects Wellington to come in so the morning at 21st of June even though it's middle of the summer in Spain you're starting to enter the vast region Victoria today is the capital of the Basque region so it's very similar to today drizzly cold weather the soldiers at this point we're really this we really wish they had their heavy coats that had been left back in the in Portugal but eight o'clock in the morning down the South those forces are going to start to cross one of the other aspects and you just saw the army of Portugal start to move is that these reports up in the mountains that there are British troops there force Joseph and Jordan to move some forces back to try to protect against it in the south Rayo his Spanish troops are gonna start crossing climbing the heights of Pueblo you're gonna get severe portuguese division in the second division and they are going to begin to attack and they're gonna get down to that middletown assume jana they're gonna get there about 9:30 in the morning and what they're gonna find is they don't have enough strength to push through that town but nor do the french have enough strength strength to push them out and so the fight is gonna stay back and forth along that town pushing back trying to push each other out to try to move along on the hill there hills going to put take the city first Highlanders and put them up against with with the Spanish troops try to support them and again we talk a little bit about connections and how all these people are related the commander of the 71st Highlanders as a Colonel Cadogan he is was the brother-in-law of Wellesley of Wellington his sister had married Henry Wells Wellesley his younger brother and then in 1808 had run off with Henry Paget a Calvary Commander Cadogan will want to resign his commission to take care of his sister if she just leaves his lover or her lover and she refuses so then he'll offer a duel she did pageant miss some pageant purposely miss Cadogan the honor then is it's taken care of and Cadogan would rejoin the army he'll be wounded up here and he will end up dying sitting back on a knapsack watching his soldiers fight so I know which barb you the last week and talked about packing ham blunt ins other brother-in-law who's gonna die in New Orleans he loses another brother-in-law or former brother-in-law here Battle of Vitoria as the morning goes on French troops continue to move down to the south to try to stop this pressure and this is exactly what Wellington expected this fight trying to do he is continuing pulling from this army the south down here more and more forces and making the center of the French line weaker and weaker in about noon time what'll happen is a Spanish peasant will come up to Wellington he has his farm here trans pentas and he will come up to Wellington say that the bridges are open there's no French soldiers there and Wellington a fork of course at first doesn't believe it peasant says I just walked across the bridge I saw no one there and Wellington will go and take and take the light division and tell them to cross the bridges and get across and the peasant was right there were no French soldiers there there's only two cannons covering the bridge unfortunately for the poor peasant one of those two cannonballs that are fired at these troops will hit him in the head decapitating him yes and and so Wellington will pay his family a reward for helping there you see the third division start to come into the fight about this time they've been moving under Lord now who's who's got the seventh division and the third division and the third divisions commanded by Thomas picked in and picked is another one of these interesting characters from the Peninsula a very crusty vulgar guy he he is waiting there and he's under Lord now who's because during the 1812 retreat he disobeyed Wellington's orders and went down a road he wasn't supposed to and since then Wellington hasn't trusted him and so the third division has gotten up there about 8 o'clock in the morning and picked in a sitting on his horse and he's just taken his riding crop he's just hitting the main he's just getting madder and madder and madder and finally at noontime Wellington his Senate aide to go find the work Dowell who's in the 7th division and the 7th division is still up here somewhere kind of lost in the mountains and they come up depict in and they ain't where's Dada who's Andy he was I don't know what's your orders I have orders from Lord Davos well what are the orders well the 7th division followed supported by the third division supposed to attack the bridges down here this time picked him just is so mad and he just says damn it tell Lord Wellington that the 3rd division will take the bridges and we're going to take him now and he immediately turns to his soldier says come on you're Rascals come on you're fighting villains and leads them forward and it's really going to be one of the key actions at this part of the battlefield 3rd division comes down just as the French have pulled most of their strength down this way the fight starting to come in here and suddenly the 3rd division comes in to the northern portion of this line and so the French army they're under ghazan is suddenly faced with three different directions of fight and it's going to cause the army to start to break by this point Wellington has the vast majority of his army to the south as the Dora River so those bridges that the French should have blown that should have held has not done any good because they've never bothered to do anything with it you also start to see Thomas Graham's forces the first division the 5th division and longest division starting to come in and so you're a French soldier sitting down there fighting all of a sudden behind you you start to hear 20 cannons starting to open fire it's going to focus on mainly in the town of Gamera boy or and I'll show you a photo or a sort of painting for a second of what that's going to look like but the pressure is going to keep building as these troops continue to move along the top of the ridge line out flanking the French positions and the French have to continue to withdraw now French soldiers are still fighting very very well one thing to notice here is this fight started at 8 a.m. and here we are getting up to a 4 o'clock in the afternoon and they are still fighting very well but they are starting to get orders by Joseph to fall back closer to Victoria to form a new line and as the pressure starts to build what Joseph and Jordan do is they basically build a new line with the army the Center here and then the army of the south the one that had been in front in this portion of the line and they start to get back farther and farther towards Victoria Thomas Graham really misses an opportunity here as he starts to his attacks start to come in as the pressure builds and as the French line continues it but get back closer and closer to Victoria his itself he does not come straight down into Victoria if he had done this he would have cut both of these roads leading back towards France and what he ends up doing is more and more of his strength starts going over here to Gamera memoria Gamera Mort mayor which cuts the road to Pamplona and Bayonne but still leaves the French a route of escape by 4:00 in the afternoon the French line is like this in Gamera war is where the heaviest fighting the battle is going to take place primarily stone buildings this painting was done in the 1880s a pretty accurate representation I've actually seen photographs of these buildings with this building these this painting next to it but one thing though when you look at warfare at this time period usually think of these straight lines of soldiers firing volley after volley and this really kind of talks to a little bit about how the British Army in the peninsula fights a lot of skirmishers almost entirely broken not in a solid line but for getting into the fight the French soldiers in among the buildings the French are going to take their cannons and have cannons putting us directly down across the bridges with light troops on either side protecting it and so for most the afternoon what it'll continue to happen is the 5th division will continue to force more and more troops in here and about half the British Calvary's of the battle will take place in this one town by late afternoon situation for the French are getting is getting bad the army of the centre that one has taken the pressure since 8 o'clock this morning finally ends up starting to leave on their own volition and you then have the French trying to restore the situation will bring up the line of cannons 73 guns and Wellington's chief of artillery Lieutenant Colonel Dixon will bring up 71 guns and for the first time in the peninsula you have 100 forty cannons lined up on each other firing a cannon cannon Cade against each other this fight will hold off the British for almost two hours as troops start to the French troops begin to retrieve back through Victoria itself but as it starts getting closer and closer to dark more and more French troops pull out of the town of Victoria the big purple mob is the two thousand wagons that are left of the the French Luke convoy there had been three thousand in the morning before however a thousand of them had moved off to towards France that morning but two thousand were still sitting there and as the French troops off move in this smaller and smaller area down the one road and then British troops start to come down through this way just as it gets to be dusk they run into these 2000 wagons on there it's an absolutely incredible sight I have a quick quote ation from it some of the people who see this I never witnessed such a scene wines concubines baggage brokes military chests all taken cask of brandy barrels boxes of dollars into blooms wearing apparel silk laces satins jewelry painting sculpture some soldiers even had state robes and court dresses on there's 1.5 million rounds of a ball there's parrots there's monkeys there's five hundred women of loose virtue shall we say it is a French convoy after all cousins family and his daughter there's five million francs of the military chest that had just been arrived from France and what ends up happening is the soldiers begin to lose they stop the pursuit of what they should have been doing and they begin to loo many soldiers are just filling their pockets full of any kind of gold they have the there's four different markets that'll take place that night we're infantry division's instead of sleeping and resting ready to fight the next day we'll set up basically market stalls on the back of captured wagons 70 in treating goods and items and Wellington unfortunately for some of these Calvary regiments reputations will actually come across them and their officers pillaging and filling their pockets not all regiments do this the older regiments the regiments that have been in the peninsular while have a better discipline one of those regiments is the fourteenth light dragoons fourteenth light dragoons actually has a soldier who rides up to the side of this of the carriage the Kings carriage shoots a pistol into one window as King Joseph jumps out the other side to get on a horse to get away what they find inside there is interesting though they have it's the Spanish royal collection of art that has been rolled up and it's probably because it was all rolled and it didn't really look like it was very valuable that the soldiers left it alone so 168 pieces of just absolutely brilliant masterpieces are gonna get sent to England for safekeeping about 80 of those pieces or an absolute house today King Ferdinand the seventh when he comes to the throne to thank Wellington for his victory will donate or give those to Wellington but one of the other things the 14th nitrogen gets is what they call the Emperor that is the silver chamber pot of Joseph and this has become a key portion of the 14th doones there now the white Dragoon regiment it's part of their their their tradition when they have a mess and they have other they're a big celebration they fill that with six bottles of champagne and then the officers will drink out of that and then the junior officer has to wear that on his head I assume they've had 200 years to sanitize it that's actually a picture of a young lieutenant from Afghanistan it had been on loan while the regiment was in Afghanistan it had been on loan to museum and he had to go and recover the Emperor and bring it back to the British mass when they returned from Afghanistan so let's talk a little about the aftermath allied losses approximately 5,000 dead and wounded half of those a British or a little bit more than half of those British about half in Gamera maor themselves French loss is a little bit harder to calculate there's about a thousand killed and wounded about a thousand prisoners but when you start to look at the material costs they brought a hundred and fifty three cannons into the battle a hundred and fifty two of them are now in British hands five hundred caissons of artillery ammunition the personal baggage of King Joseph the marshals baton of Jordan and interestingly enough what they had done was one of the cavalry regiments had captured Jordans marshals baton and the soldier had taken off the end caps and then a bunch of drunken infantryman came along and took it from him and the next day they give it to Wellington saying look we captured this and the Calvary regiment comes back the day after said yeah they might have captured after they stole it from us here's the game caps that we took off to show you five thousand RC five million francs out of the five million francs two hundred thousand of them will actually go into the British military chest the vast majority of that money goes into the soldiers pockets or into the people in Victoria the Spanish peasants pockets Wellington will actually put out officers on all the roads and make anyone leaving the army going on that area to empty their pockets to try to find and recover the money but what are the results well first off the Bonaparte kingdom of Spain ends Joseph will flee back to France two weeks later Napoleon will remove him from this the Spanish crown the discipline problems again this is where the famous phrase scum of the earth is first uttered he writes back to Earl Bathurst who's the Secretary of State for war in the colonies two weeks after the battle he says it's quite impossible for me or any other man to command a British army under the existing system we have in service the scum of the earth as common soldiers and of late years we've been doing everything in our power by both law and publications to relax the discipline which alone such men can keep an order he reports he has five thousand out of dead and wounded from the battle he's lost more than that to straggling and desertion since they have captured everything from the the loot lacking the other aspect it does though is the French right of Spain other than marshal su Shay's forces in Kent ellonija everybody else other than the fort's of San Sebastian Pamplona so most of Spain has now liberated from French forces and most importantly the bulk of the Allied army Wellington's army will fight a few battles in the Pyrenees over the next two three months but by 1 October is sitting there basically in France ready to invade France as the new year comes up it's important because as the Allies are looking in the armed assist that had started in May of 1813 and Austria is trying to decide whether we should go to war or not this battle shows that the French can be beaten and this battle is one of the key things that's going to allow the Austrians to come in on the sixth coalition side and go to war it's a huge concern of Wellington's if the war does not start if the Armistice stays and becomes a peace treaty Wellington's fears that Napoleon will then turn with that French army that's in Germany to come down towards Spain and try to recover Spain but this victory makes it that that will not happen a couple of things to consider we might want to talk about during the question answer this reputation Wellington has as a defense of general the maneuver that leaves the Victoria does not seem very defensive in my role the role of Spanish guerrillas not really mentioned much in this campaign that ends this the French rule coalition warfare and also the significance to the events in Germany so that's if you have any questions please use the microphone because I've seen this a couple months and it's always he's running around trying to get people so could ask a question first oh cool okay yes sure so you talked about how Duke Wellington wasn't in contact with the government at all so does that mean that there was no like civic or civil civilian authority over the military back then was that like concept not developed no no no there is there is military control what I mean was is that he really is not telling them the details of the plans of what he's going to do in the 1813 campaign for when you find in ones dispatches are these long dispatches saying here's what my plans are and if this works this way I'll do this and I'll do that what it happens is his orders go back to what's known as the Horse Guards basically it's the the equivalent of our Pentagon at the time and officers will read this and then they will talk to somebody else in somebody else and you have friends of friends reading these dispatches that are really private and confidential for the government and so what happens very quickly is these secret dispatches and confidential dispatches get out in the press and so Wellington just doesn't tell them the specifics of what he's gonna do at this point he's finally got enough of a reputation that they trust him that he can say look I'm gonna go into Spain I will get the French out I think I can do it and they they aren't asking the detailed questions like they had been other years or I asked him to justify his actions hello I'm just going to take from your first question and I think it's well intended offensive general what do you mean by that can you explain that further for me many people talk about Wellington is this defensive general that he just knows how to sit back and let people attack him much like he does at the battle Waterloo where he takes this reverse slope position and Wellington throughout his career whether it was in India whether it's the early years in the peninsula war has taken the offensive he has attacked when he sees opportunities he attacks it's only when the situation doesn't is bad that he sits there and lets the enemy attack him and it's really about seizing the initiative his reputation that he has in many Monty modern historians as a defense of general as someone who lets the the enemy attack first really just doesn't fit with much of his campaigns that he's done up to his career up until Waterloo but we can talk about why that is defensive bad thing or is that just an observation that while he's offensive at the right as opposed to offensive is it a bad it usually means that you're allowing the enemy to see is the initiative usually you want to influence the enemy you want to seize the initiative and try to make him react to what you're doing as opposed to sitting somewhere and making him attack you which he has the initiative he can break off the attack he can do something you weren't expecting and so many people characterized Wellington is this general who just gets to an area and sits down hides his troops behind the the military crest of the hill and allows the enemy to attack but really when you look at his campaigns most many of his campaigns are offensive in nature I mean actually going in and splitting your Army up into four columns of about 20,000 soldiers each and then spreading them over 25 miles of mountain side with no communications is pretty bold you can wonder if it's a risk or a gamble or whether it's a calculated risk but it's a pretty bold thing that he's trying to do and his ideas of what the French are gonna do when he does these were actions works almost perfectly to a tee he understands he's gotten what we talked about he's gotten inside their decision cycle I'm interested in communications but on a kind of more minut level you said that the people that were heading up the different units were of the two different nationalities but how would they communicate since they spoke different languages yeah the interesting question because the Portuguese in the front and the British are actually integrate locked in there Britain has a large expatriate population in Portugal at this time period the oldest existing commercial treaty in the world goes back to the 13th or 14th century between Great Britain and Portugal there's a number of great Portuguese or if you like port wine many of the Great Houses that make port wine are British houses they're Brits in expats in Portugal itself so living there for years they still keep their British identity but they've picked up the local languages so you get large people like William Beresford which I really didn't talk about he doesn't play a role here but he is one who's marshal of Portugal and he is is raising and commanding Portuguese army he speaks fluent Portuguese the other aspect is they all speak French the French is the language of Education and what you see when they don't have a common language they don't speak English you'll see them writing letters back and forth to themselves in French and so you'll see Wellington he of course went to school as a young man in France C's fluent in French he's picked up pretty good Spanish he writes it well his speaking is indifferent that he says it but he can he can do it but if he wants to communicate with another educated officer they do it in French yeah I have a question about the drive across the ridge mm-hmm how much of that is kind of winging it by his officers and how much of it was directed by Wellington when you say winging it by his officers once he lets him go he's really sitting back and has no influence of what they're doing it but that's the nature of really 18th and 19th century warfare we teach in the college the command General Staff College this idea of mission commands Wellington really doesn't make a lot of big decisions during the battle he has gotten all the troops to the areas they need to do and he says go and then he sits back and he hasn't really twiddle his thumbs he gets very impatient when things aren't happening in the way he's going to do but he has very little that he can do to influence the battle once he tells them to start he has to trust subordinate leaders to be able to understand his intent and then to execute his intent and the only thing he can really do is give them additional resources so if they're not doing it he can send another regiment there may be another brigade there but for the most part he pretty much sits back and does not try to take a mini money command of it and so it's not really winging it it's the nature of warfare at that time period and this trust between commanders the other thing I didn't really I mean I should have discussed a little bit more is this army in 1813 is is really the product of five years of Wellington he does not leave the peninsula he comes in he comes back to the pencil on April 1890 he does not go home until April of 1814 once the French have been defeated and Napoleon has been deposed he stays there in every aspect of the army from military justice the medical the feeding everything he has his fingers in while they're backing in Katonah and he's really establishing systems he's establishing procedures so that when they go in campaign the army functions the way he wants it to function so it's in many ways this army is it's a function of his personality and that's why I brought up Waterloo Waterloo these aren't the army at Waterloo is a terrible army compared to this army the majority of this army is sitting in New Orleans later on when you know are getting ready to come back from New Orleans when the Battle of Waterloo is going on there's more British cavalry at this battle than there is in the Battle of Waterloo about a thousand more horses but most of these Peninsula regiments the experienced regiments that he really has has relied on they're in America fighting against us and so the army he has in Belgium two years later is not one of his best armies and it really factors and how he can react and what he can trust them to do he would never do something like he did here in 1813 in 1815 you mentioned not mentioning the girl is it seems after you know five six years that the guerrillas are getting increasingly sophisticated and that Wellington has to rely on them to guide those troops through the mountains that nobody goes through those mountains without the guerrillas permission I would agree with your first part and I would disagree absolutely with your second part and I say that they are becoming very very much more sophisticated but what has happened is these two Villa there's a division of what they call the Navara which is the area back behind kind of that central part if you have the northern section with sense san sebastian that middle part of the the pyrenees there's a division of guerrillas there it has eight infantry regiments four cavalry regiments and artillery two artillery batteries that doesn't look like guerrillas that looks like a regular division and they are when we say gorillas we tend to think of this this this very romanticized type of thing with a pitchfork out there maybe you know a cat looks like well they actually called them the torso the land torso they they the land pirates was one of the nicknames in in Spain kind of a pirate look to it but they're not they're part of the Spanish army these guys have commissions in the Spanish army and what its ends up happening by 1813 is almost a frame are most of the French troops are out of Spain the troops aren't going into the Spanish army they say oh I'm a gorilla I don't I don't go into the Spanish army well that doesn't help their recruitment and so some of the guerrilla forces like besitos guerrillas are spending more time fighting bandits then they are fighting the French in quite frankly he's got 70,000 troops the guerrillas aren't stopping them the guerrillas will stop five or six hundred French troops but they're not stopping they're not stopping a thousand French troops once you have any sort of numbers like that the problem is the French to fight the girls have to spread out so much I've gotta wait for the microphone there's some criticism of Graham pushing but didn't Wellington tell him not to put too much pressure on someone who's read done his homework I see before the the battle yes absolutely and that's one of the the issues what he's telling him let me go back to a slide real quick that shows that that portion of the battlefield what he has told Graham to do initially in the first part of the battle is he doesn't want to put too much pressure on it because of the French realized that their alliance communications are getting cut that they're going to try to retreat and not be able to be caught like he expects them and what he's told Graham is he wants to time it so as this attacks coming down this attacks going in so the to happen simultaneously the problem is the Graham doesn't go this way he kind of goes this way he sees this road and cuts that road not a bad thing it would have been a much better thing if you cut both of these roads though because then the French really had no alliance communication no way to get out this would have been cut down in the south and there was no organized way out of there but you're absolutely right part of that is that those instructions you give to Graham Wellington as this attack is initially going in because the size of the battlefield because of the hill of Aron des and here he cannot hear the fighting that's going on so he really thinks his plans not working well about noon time he thinks the grant has not pushed in it's actually going exactly like he wants the only problem is is Graham veers instead of coming straight down a great point you get extra points for doing your homework you spoke about Wellington's groups reflecting his personality don't you think that's still true today that the commanding officer they're armed example Patton and Bradley that I think we I suppose remove that you still even present day and Afghanistan or anyplace isn't that usually true absolutely I agree with that saying and I guess it's not just he reflects his personality what he has done is created a system where modern day an officer has to adapt to the the system that the army is created you know the way the army operates in Afghanistan is very similar to the way the army operating in Iraq or that army operates in Korea you go to place the place and you adapt yourself to that system Wellington didn't have that luxury the systems that were set up in the British Army were so irregular that he really built the system and he built it the way he wanted to so it's it's it reflects his commanding control system and style I think much more than a modern one does now the personality aspect you know if your fiery if you're a you know thing yes and no because one of the things wantons absolutely frustrated with this army is it's there ill discipline once you get a little bit of you win a battle they they get so Furyk and you fork and then they start looting in drinking there's actually some scenes in the retreat of Caronia and then also the retreat back to Burgos where they come across you know these huge wine vats and so what sotius will do is they'll take their muskets they'll blow a hole in it so you get a nice 75 caliber musket hole they'll lay down and just kind of drink from it and they'll find soldiers actually not just passed out but have drowned in wine in villages as they go I guess they went happy but I mean that this this aspect because the Duke of Wellington in his life he is very very disciplined personally not a very fancy you know in dress in manners and yes and no the army has that certain aspects but once you get drinking you start getting any kind of money the discipline falls apart quickly part out of curiosity their distances that the attacking forces are making there and the elevation of the darkened area are those scrubs foothills high mountains they're high miles in distance yeah when you look at this from here to here is about 12 miles from here to here is about three miles okay so that's what the size of this plane in these troops have marched over 20 miles that previous night to get up there these troops not much of a March these troops 15 to 20 miles and the hills are pretty high you saw the the aerial view over the pleb low and you could see these mountains here now the entire area is high is high plateau as you start to get there it starts to drop down towards San Sebastian so it's very cold at night it's rainy the temperatures probably only in the 50s and 60s during the daytime but it's it's it's good Hills you're not going across trackless scrub you're staying to the mountain paths and roads in there many other questions I shouldn't one other thing real quick when we go to my slide for advertising for next month says since the presenter for next month is sitting in the back of the room the next talks is on the fifth of June and it's going to be on the big week February of 1944 so if you like b-17s in the 8th Air Force dr. John Kerr Toula in the back there we'll be talking all about it

Channel: The Dole Institute of Politics

Views: 34,689

Rating: 4.7802196 out of 5

Keywords: Robert J. Dole Institute Of Politics (Building), 2014, 1813, Vitoria, Britain, Army, Ft. Leavenworth, Mark Gerges, Spain, Portugal, Military History, Dole Institute of Politics, Dole Institute, Fort Leavenworth, KU, University of Kansas

Id: RHnUVIjD1Sc

Length: 73min 36sec (4416 seconds)

Published: Thu May 01 2014