The Austro-Prusso-Piedmontese War:
How Penny-Penching Inadvertently launched the Age of Firepower:
Waged in a relatively short span of time, the Six Weeks' War, also known as the Austro-Prusso-Piedmontese War in Viennese sources, and the Austro-Prussian War in English sources, was a strange conflict. While the war itself both wound up preventing any prospect of Prussia dominating a united Germany by force of arms, the conflict launched the age of modern war only by virtue of a strange set of circumstances. With the Austrian military having adopted the new Gatling Guns, the Austrians were able to save valuable funds that would have otherwise been allotted to raising troops and equipping them. In a practical sense both Archduke Albrecht and Benedek were to command armies whose artillery advantages over both Prussia and Italy were to be enhanced by the presence of the Gatlings.
The war had originated out of its precursor war with the Danes over Schleswig-Holstein, and Otto von Bismarck, in what was evidently intended at the very least to consolidate Prussia's leadership over the German Confederation, was to launch the war via a controversial decision to declare the Confederation ended over the issue of the two duchies. The analyses that expected veteran Austrian troops who had fought, if not successfully, in the war with France in 1859, would triumph over the Prussians were to be validated, but in fashions none expected.
Curiously this war also featured the first clash of ironclad fleets, which produced the Austrian victory in the Battle of Lissa.
In the war with the Italians, the Italians were to find themselves defeated by Archduke Albrecht in a battle where poor tactical handling on the Italian side was magnified by both Austrian superiority in artillery, and by scenes of the Gatlings wreaking the kind of murderous slaughter on the Italians that had characterized the US War of the Rebellion.
In the clashes between Prussia and Austria, the Prussians initially were to prove to have the better of the fighting. The Austrians, whose handling of the earlier battles was marred by poor tactical handling and poor choices, nonetheless were able to exploit both superiority in conventional artillery and in the first uses of concentrated Gatling batteries. It was the Gatlings that permitted the Austrians to gather in an orderly fashion under the command of Feldzugmeister Benedek in the region of Sadowa, albeit in one of the most controversial aspects of the war despite severe maulings of Prussian forces, the Austrians overlooked an opportunity to defeat and destroy an entire Prussian army as both armies were to wind up gathering near Sadowa/Koniggratz. The Austrians, at Trautenau, had however neglected the advantages of their newer weapons to launch an attack that had in another controversial instance taken more casualties than was necessary.
Indeed, the lead-in to the Prussian concentration at Koniggratz was rife with the views of both contemporaries and later historians that without the role of the Gatlings the Austrians in all probability might have actually been defeated by the Prussians, as historians and contemporaries both gave superior points for strategic handling to Moltke, not to Benedek, who was considered to be both lackadaiscal and in general the kind of commander who reigned but did not rule.
Yet in the massive battle between the Prussians and the Austrians, it was to be the Gatlings that proved the decisive factor. The Prussians, whose concept in this largest of all the battles boiled down to attempts to attack with bayonets, in no small part from overall artillery inferiority, were to successively attempt to charge the Gatlings, the product of Moltke's dismissal of the concept that well-trained troops were vulnerable to firepower. This belief reflected Moltke's belief that the Confederate army had been a poorly-led mob of ragamuffins, and a bit of chauvinism in the belief that the heirs of Frederick could not but triumph by willpower alone. To be fair to Moltke, his own doctrines had emphasized a superior concentration of firepower at a small-arms level, and his emphasis on a quick and decisive victory did not permit much in the way of strategic flexibility.
But as it was for the first two days at Koniggratz, the Prussian attacks at the Gatlings were to produce frightful losses, though it would only be on the third day that Benedek, realizing how depleted Prussian forces actually were, attempted what was to be an over-ambitious attempt at a battle of envelopment. What his attempt did produce was the Prussian army, depleted and damaged after heavy losses, retreating in near-rout from the field, but the Prussians managed to retain good order due to the difficulties Austrian cavalry experienced in pressing the retreat.
Sadowa was to be the decisive battle of the war, as Franz Josef, not willing to press his luck in the wake of what was a victory that for the Austrians had been concurrent with heavy losses, poor handling on the field, and was narrower than it might otherwise have been, was to accept the entreaty from the Prussians for a peace, the two sides inaugurating the negotiations that would become the Treaty of Prague.
While indeed an Austrian victory over both Italy and Prussia, the legacy of 1866 would be one that would be complex and multi-faceted, though it was immediately to launch the further growth in all armies of an orientation to ever-more-sophisticated means of increasingly rapid and more lethal firepower......