Prussians lose Sadowa and developments hereafter
- Thread starter FesteringSpore
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There is a very specific combination of factors that maybe means the Austrians win:
1) At 11am, Moltke insists on keeping the 5th and 6th Divisions in reserve for First Army rather than commit them to the battle.
2) Coincidentally, at 12 noon, Benedek has the option to secure his right flank against Second Army and hit First Army with II, III and IV Corps. However, Benedek asks Archduke Wilhelm for his opinion, and then concurs with him that it's too risky to go on the attack.
If Moltke isn't there, and if Benedek musters up the courage he's basically lacked all campaign, you might get a situation where the Prussians take a severe mauling. But what nobody's yet explained is how badly the Austrians get mauled in return. The one battle they won in the war, Trautenau, cost them five times as many casualties as the Prussians: it's entirely possible that the casualty ratio of an Austrian victory at Königgrätz is not that much different from the Austrian defeat.
The Austrians are in the same position, though. Benedek halted them on the wrong side of the river at Königgrätz, with the Elbe blocking their retreat, specifically in order to sort out their supply chaos - which has been made worse by the decision to have the supply trains cross the river.
'The knot of Austrian supply trains blocking the Elbe bridges... only complicated the situation... The seven Austrian corps and five cavalry divisions camped along the Bystrice felt this confusion keenly. None had eaten a square meal since Dubenec... An officer in III Corps recalled that Benedek's campsite above Sadova offered "nothing to eat, not even bread. All our wagons were gone; there were no sutlers or peasants selling food, and we had to sleep on wet ground covered with excrement." Things were no better in I Corps. Its train had crossed to the left bank of the Elbe without leaving anything for the men to the right' (Wawro, Austro-Prussian War p.203)
Before the Austrians can advance, they're going to have to bring their supply trains back over the river. Furthermore, whereas the Prussians are going to be falling back on their lines of communication, the Austrians are going to be advancing. And we've already seen in this campaign how well Austrian logistics cope when they're on the advance:
'to reach the Iser and join forces with Clam-Gallas and the Saxons, North Army would have to make an extremely arduous flank march. Six Austrian infantry corps and four cavalry divisions - each trailed by 800 supply wagons - had to be moved from Olmutz to Josephstadt on two hardened roads and three dirt tracks. Frequent traffic jams meant that Austria's march battalions were chronically short of hot food and intoxicating drink, the two things that made nineteenth-century soldiering tolerable... On June 23, a typical day, Archduke Leopold's entire VIII Corps - 25,000 hungry souls - went hungry because its supply trains stuck in traffic early in the day and never succeeded in overtaking Leopold's famished brigades... While Moltke's armies hurried through the Bohemian mountain passes, Benedek's haggard brigades inched across the vast space between Olmutz and Josephstadt, some days covering less than twenty kilometers.' (Wawro, p.126)
On 3 July 1866 the Austrians are at Koniggratz, and the forces of southern Germany are around Fulda trying to get VII and VIII Corps to link up before the Prussians defeat them in detail. Via Prague, which is the way they'd have to go, it's 276 miles as the crow flies for a single Austrian corps to go join them. And if the southern Germans don't get any reinforcements, the most likely outcome is the historic one - in which they lose.
Could they? This isn't the retreat from Moscow, with muzzle-loading muskets versus Cossacks: the Prussians have the needle rifle. As long as they have cartridges left, Austrian cavalry are more likely to get picked off than be picking off.
France hasn't got the troops. In the immediate aftermath of Sadowa Marechal Randon said he could have 450,000 men in the Rhineland within a month, but it rapidly emerged that it was more like 40,000. Moreover, what does French entry into the war do to the South German states? Do the Bavarians, Badenese, Hessians, and so on, really want the French to own the Rhineland, sitting right on their doorstep?
No. I mean, think about it. The Prussians smashed the Austrian armies in battle after battle, then camped out in some of Austria's richest provinces - and even then they only got to annex a few minor states they'd completely overrun. If the Austrians demand Prussia hand over the Rhineland and Lusatia on the strength of a single battle, they're going to get laughed at. The Austrians may just about have the capacity to defeat the Prussians at Königgrätz, but defeating breech-loader infantry fighting on the defensive, and doing so over and over again until Prussia gets desperate enough to make meaningful concessions, is a completely different matter.
I do think the Thuringian enclaves of Prussia could be reassigned. As far as growing medium-sized states, perhaps Hanover gets to annex Brunswick and potentially Oldenburg. Wuerttemberg likely gains Hohenzollern Sigmaringen. Perhaps Schaumburg Lippe annexes Lippe and maybe Saxe-Meiningen can pick up land from other Ernestine duchies.
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Indeed. At the very least Oldenburg is almost certain to get pruned. Her enclaves in Holstein are pretty certain to go to whoever gets S-H (esp if he loses North Schleswig back to Denmark) and whoever gets the Rhineland likely gets the enclave by the Moselle. OTOH its ruler is a close relative of the Tsar, so the main body may be spared
Moltke would not have tossed the battle by keeping critical troops out of the fight. As for Benedek, as you point out, it would require him to act wholly out of character to do what's necessary to win. But I'm also skeptical that a counterattack would have worked out particularly well anyway. Advancing to close range against the Prussians concedes the long-range advantage they thereto had, probably forces the superior Austrian artillery to cease firing against the Prussian infantry, etc. It could well end up just being a bloodbath that ties down even more Austrian troops to be destroyed when Prussian reinforcements arrive on their flank.
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This is getting pretty ridiculous now. Oldenburg doesn't order mobilisation until 6 July, three days after Königgrätz: one might conclude that a Prussian defeat might change their decision to participate. Who exactly is going to annex territory from a state that is not actively participating in the conflict, and how are they going to do it?
I don't think the Austrians are going to feel too generous towards Schaumburg-Lippe, given that on 14 June, after its representative cast the deciding vote of the 16th Curia in favour of the Austrians, the government announced that he had done so without instructions and it had intended to vote against. How much of this is a realistic estimate of what might have achievable in the event of Austrian victory, and how much just colouring in the awkward bits on the map of Germany?
Other way round. Historically, both Friedrich Karl and the King want to commit the 5th and 6th Divisions to support Fransecki in the Svib forest, but Moltke insists on retaining them as a reserve. Here, with Moltke killed by a shell at 9am, Friedrich Karl probably throws those troops in at 11, which in turn might have meant that his army was overextended in the face of a potential Austrian counterattack at 12.
Historically, the Austrians got all the advantage they could have from long-range fighting. However successful it might have been in the early part of the battle, long-range fighting wasn't enough to do what the Austrians needed to do and defeat one Prussian army before the other one came up. However, there's nothing that killing Moltke - the POD proposed here - can do in order to change the speed with which the second army comes up. Consequently, the only real way of getting any sort of different outcome is to defeat the first army - and, in turn, taking the offensive is the only real way of doing that, as historians of the battle have highlighted (Wawro pp. 233-7, Dennis Showalter in The Wars of German Unification pp.183-5). It's not so much that it would have worked, as that this implausible series of events is the only real way of getting the outcome stated in the OP with the given POD.
It's going to end up being a bloodbath no matter what. All the Austrian battles of this war were, defeat or victory: it's the inevitable result of taking on breech-loaders with columnar bayonet charges. But it's important to point out that all Austria's choices up to the point of departure have left such a bloodbath as the only really valid pathway to victory at Königgrätz. It's a valuable corrective to the people who seem to think one shell killing Moltke means the Austrians can win the battle with 10,000-12,000 casualties, harry the Prussians all the way to Berlin, and annex whatever territory they want.
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So basically killing Moltke, the King and Bismarck and nothing else actually does nothing to change the battle?
Not really, no. The nature of tactics had moved on from Waterloo, where Napoleon, Wellington and Blucher's personal input was far more significant. Even if it hadn't, though, Moltke was a very different type of general. As the Atlantic said: Von Moltke is all the commander-in-chief: the battlefield is not his arena... Moltke sways by no direct personal effluence; he is no electrifying presence in the van of his hosts, moving through the soul of his legions like a thrilling force of nature... The situation does not demand these ideal possessions. He is a man at the rear of an army; Napoleon was a man at the front.. Other than those couple of small instances I've highlighted where he intervened directly to stop a tactical decision that threatened his strategic conception, Moltke ran the campaign and let his army commanders run the battle. If Moltke had died at 8:30pm on the 2nd of July, before he had issued revised orders to Second Army to march against the Austrian's right flank rather than send a corps across the Elbe to mark the fortress of Josephstadt as Friedrich Karl had ordered, that would have had a real effect on the battle. Moltke, Bismarck and the King dying at 8:30am on the 3rd does a phenomenal amount to change Prussian history, but not as much as you might initially assume on the day of the battle.
In your opinion, what would be some of the changes that would result from all three men dying? The most obvious change is that Frederick becomes King of Prussia in 1866, but what else?
I would imagine that Prussian Morale would suffer, hearing their king has died, even if he was not leading the troops, could lead to a more cautious Kronprinz slowing down the 2nd army's advance to the battlefield. Does anyone know who would succeed Von Moltke if he had died, the asst Head of the Gen Staff?
It's a big question and one that is probably well covered elsewhere on the boards, but as a very brief summary: Replacing King Wilhelm and Bismarck with Friedrich and whoever he chooses as chancellor most probably puts Prussia on a far more liberal pathway than otherwise. Friedrich argues against unifying Germany by blood and iron rather than by moral persuasion; it is highly unlikely that he provokes a war with France to do so, although it might well be necessary to fight France if the somewhat ambiguous outcome of the Austro-Prussian war persuades them that defeating Prussia is not only vital but feasible. Not having Moltke will be a blow, and the General Staff will be less exceptional than it was historically - but the Prussian military as a whole is still probably strong enough to defeat France.
I understand Prussian troops on the field of battle losing heart: what I don't really see happening is their reinforcements hearing that their king is dead - let alone the crown prince hearing his father has been killed - and moving slower.
There isn't one: Moltke has three section heads under him, but they're all colonels and below. The royal staff also includes a quartermaster-general, one Inspector-General of Engineers and another of Artillery, but the most likely outcome (given the way the Prussian General Staff works) is that when the crown prince assumes overall command he takes the Second Army chief of staff, von Blumenthal, with him. von Blumenthal had been chief of staff in the war of 1864 against Denmark, and had previously served with Friedrich Karl before the crown prince requested him personally as his army chief of staff, so he has a reasonable level of command experience and relationships with the key players.
Nah. This is not the Middle Ages where it all rests on one man, and the Prussians took the modern trend of decentralization to a higher degree than normal . Morale collapse is highly unlikely, and at any rate Prussian commanders were extremely aggressive. 2nd Army is not going to lag at all.
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