WI Bazaine doesn't surrender at Metz

Hi all,

Quick question on the Franco-prussian war. Bazaine surrendering was horrendous, in strategic term but also for morale.

So what if he hadn't? What if he had tried to fight on or not outright surrendered?

Would that have left more time for Gambetta to do his thing?
 
Buys Paris some time at least? Don't see it making any major long-term changes...
It's also a matter of morale. The fact that Gambetta kept fighting after Bazaine's surrender was seen as misguided, as adding undue suffering on the country.
If everybody thinks the country is done for, not many people will try to do anything.

Of course, the Prussian did seem to have military superiority but funny things can happen in war. Maybe if more time had passed, the Bavarian would have found an excuse to back out and the alliance would have broken down?
 
Well, the principal problem is getting Bazaine to the point where he doesn't have to surrender. In military terms, Bazaine is well placed at Metz for fighting against the Prussians. It was an excellent fortress with interior lines of movement, which meant that the French would be able to rapidly concentrate their army, consisting of their still very formidable and numerous soldiers, achieving numerical superiority against any of the besieging forces. At that point Bazaine's army could have broken out, and operated in the German's rear (with its very large cavalry forces), or attempted to rendezvous with MacMahon at Sedan. The besiegers meanwhile had to cover over 80 kilometers of front to mask the forts and were divided by the Moselle into two forces. Defensively of course, with all of the fortifications, the French could hold out in combat terms for a long time, but they only had limited supplies of food and polluted water to drink.

More problematic however, is the political aspect. Bazaine was either defeatist and cowardly as a result of the poor treatment dealt out to him from the failure of the Mexico campaign and simple personality, or defeatist in the idea of preserving the army as a tool in peace talks. Either way, the problem is Bazaine. Bazaine's later performance was nothing stellar, but at least he could claim that with the army broken at Sedan, there was nothing to go and fight to, and while his actions were treasonous to the new regime, holding his army intact for a restoration of the Emperor made some sense in the political fashion. During this period, he simply squandered all of his opportunities, and slipped into a miasma of inaction.

So something has to be done to change around Bazaine's personality entirelty and make him a vigorous man of action who chooses to break out of the siege. But then, if that was the case, Bazaine wouldn't have lost Gravelotte, and things would have been different before that. I suppose maybe Bazaine could stub his toe and die or something, but most of his subordinates were equally cautious in their councils of wars, so I doubt that anything would change because of that.

Changing at the time of the surrender to just have Bazaine not surrender isn't possible, since by that time Bazaine was running out of supplies, morale was atrocious (not helped by Bazaine who actively sabotaged his army's morale by writing stuff in the bulletins about the "invincible redoubts" of the Prussians), the horses had been rendered unfit for service so the cavalry and artillery were combat inneffective, his forces were falling ill from the polluted water of the Moselle. By that time too, the main French armies were already defeated. The change has to come earlier, which is in military terms entirely possible, but in psychological and political terms highly difficult.
 
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What do you mean? People bump their own threads all the time when they don't initially get any replies, and I've never seen anyone disciplined over it.
Calbear doesn't seem to think so.He made it clear in several threads that it's not acceptable.One member,Joshuapooleanox,was kicked a while ago apparently for bumping.In the words of Calbear,you shouldn't bump your own thread unless you have something new to add.
 
Changing at the time of the surrender to just have Bazaine not surrender isn't possible, since by that time Bazaine was running out of supplies, morale was atrocious (not helped by Bazaine who actively sabotaged his army's morale by writing stuff in the bulletins about the "invincible redoubts" of the Prussians), the horses had been rendered unfit for service so the cavalry and artillery were combat inneffective, his forces were falling ill from the polluted water of the Moselle. By that time too, the main French armies were already defeated. The change has to come earlier, which is in military terms entirely possible, but in psychological and political terms highly difficult.
It's a bit extreme but could we see a Japanese style change of leadership?

Surely if Bazaine is acting like this, he is being a traitor to France. It's a shame, he just slipped on a bullet...


If they had enough bullets but not enough food, could they have tried to go on the offensive? You did note that the front was quite wide and that the French could move fairly easily in their own perimeter. Could they actually have broken through, maybe gone to Belgium or raided less defended German supplies?
 
It's a bit extreme but could we see a Japanese style change of leadership?

Surely if Bazaine is acting like this, he is being a traitor to France. It's a shame, he just slipped on a bullet...


If they had enough bullets but not enough food, could they have tried to go on the offensive? You did note that the front was quite wide and that the French could move fairly easily in their own perimeter. Could they actually have broken through, maybe gone to Belgium or raided less defended German supplies?
Who replaces Bazaine? His subordinates were generally just as defeatist. General Bourbaki might have argued for a break-out, and Lebouef sulked about agreeing to the plan to stay put (but didn't seem particularly aggressive either), and everybody else was happy to keep the army in Metz. Everybody slipping on a bullet except for Bourbaki seems difficult to achieve.

The basic problem of French high command in 1870 is that everybody needs to slip on a bullet....

As far as supplies, they did have sufficient ammunition - some 3.8 million cartridges, 140 for every soldier, and they should have been able to break out, since their hesitant break out attempts still saw the Prussians take quite some time to be able to concentrate enough forces to oppose the lethargic French movements. If they did break out, then they have a host of different options in the pre-Sedan era, with raiding with their cavalry and destroying the rear-lines of the Germans, or working along the Belgium border to rendezvous with the army at Sedan, shielded by the forts in that region, being their main possibilities. Thionville had even accumulated food and supplies expecting that the army at Metz would do exactly that second option,
 
The basic problem of French high command in 1870 is that everybody needs to slip on a bullet....
There's always the cabal of junior officer :D

It seems like the people below were quite patriotic and willing to fight


As far as supplies, they did have sufficient ammunition - some 3.8 million cartridges, 140 for every soldier, and they should have been able to break out, since their hesitant break out attempts still saw the Prussians take quite some time to be able to concentrate enough forces to oppose the lethargic French movements. If they did break out, then they have a host of different options in the pre-Sedan era, with raiding with their cavalry and destroying the rear-lines of the Germans, or working along the Belgium border to rendezvous with the army at Sedan, shielded by the forts in that region, being their main possibilities. Thionville had even accumulated food and supplies expecting that the army at Metz would do exactly that second option,
So, it's basically a stab in the back on the part of the Senior Officers? Lions led by sheep?
I'll say, knowing they had enough ammo kinda goes against the common myth exemplified by the classic and ironic "ready to the last brass button" meaning they were actually not prepared at all.

How prepared was the French army?
 
They have to do it before the disease problems they had OTL get too severe. I wonder if they broke out what the cohesiveness would be like - how many would have to stay behind to keep an escape corridor open. What would their losses be as they retreated (to who knows where) to find another base of supply. Admittedly, by breaking out and making themselves a nuisance for the Prussians they do more good than simply surrendering, but I expect most of the forces Bazaine had would end up being expended as opposed to rejoining the rest of the French Army. Getting "trapped" in a fortress only works if you have adequate supplies and they didn't (water is a supply) and you either can expect relief or you can wait out the enemy, both of which were not happening.
 
So, it's basically a stab in the back on the part of the Senior Officers? Lions led by sheep?
I'll say, knowing they had enough ammo kinda goes against the common myth exemplified by the classic and ironic "ready to the last brass button" meaning they were actually not prepared at all.

How prepared was the French army?

I was going to say something about how it depends how you look at it, but the truth is that the French army was miserably prepared for the 1870 war. It wasn't necessarily that they were a bad army, they had their flaws, but a war with Prussia, the best European army for fighting such a war, was the one where the French army would be at its worst fighting. It was very good fighting colonial wars and limited engagements like beating up on the Austrians, it was atrocious for fighting a modern industrial and total war against the Prussians. Organization was chaos, logistics were awful, mobilization terrible, European cavalry scouting wretched, communications awful, conscript forces horrifyingly bad (the garde mobile was essentially a paper force and almost worse than useless), intelligence poor (both for espionage and such but also for the officers too often...), military education backwards and poor (most French officers didn't get any additional military education after their academy years - which were in of themselves, not as good as the Prussian equivalents - while every German garrison had military discussion societies), planning non-existent (the French didn't even have an offensive plan for the war, all they had was a defensive plan), they didn't even have maps of the front, the idea was that officers would buy roadmaps for the front. They were also dreadfully out-matched in regards to artillery, and no proto-machine gun of the mitrailleuse was going to match Prussian field artillery, no matter if the French had actually figured out how to use it or not. Tactical doctrine was also pretty awful, the French went for grouping their men into tight trenches to concentrate their firepower, and then these got blown up by the Prussian guns. They didn't even deploy their skirmishers as actual skirmishers, they kept them with the formations instead of putting them on the flank and skirmishing ahead, to add to the feu de bataillon. Officers were defensive and listless, they didn't even march to the sound of the guns of their comrades when they were under attack, preferring to stay in their fortifications. Metz is the largest army which simply sat there, but army after army in the initial phase of the campaign simply did not move when formations next to them were under attack.

The French army had been an army which had prided itself on aggression and the système D, using attack columns and initiative, just a few years before. It changed this to focus on defensive tactics after the results of the Austro-Prussian war came back, when Austrian formations, which had themselves moved to the French style attack columns and adopted French artillery tactics, had been brutally crushed by the Prussians, when their attack columns got shot to ribbons by Prussian needle rifle fire and artillery. In changing to this defensive army it seems to have picked up all of the negative aspects of an army focused on the defense, while maintaining precious few of those of its previous offensive spirit.

This all being said, we shouldn't undersell the French army in 1870. Battles like Gravelotte show them at their best, when the French army inflicted horrifying casualties on the Prussian forces attacking them. The French might have had all of the terrible organizational flaws previously discussed, and their troops might have lacked for discipline and often been drunks, but the French troops did subscribe to that système D: one example which The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France 1870-1871 (great book by the way, it is where I base almost all of my responses to this thread on, if you don't have it I would recommend getting it and I could send my digital copy of it to you if you want) had presented was an inspection of French troops in Aix-la-Provence. Rifles and equipment were dirty, troops undisciplined, chorists could not sing, fencers could not fence, a high proportion of NCOs were in jail or had been demoted to privates for small crimes. But the troops did do excellently at shooting, and to the French, that was proof that when it actually came down to fighting, they were the best. The French army, in tactical engagements, tended to fight well, it just was miserably bad operationally and strategically so that by the time the tactical engagements opened up, their fate was often sealed.

Does that make them prepared for the war? I'd say probably not. Just the ability to fight well tactically does not a war-winning army make.
 
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