Review: French Guardsman vs Russian Jaeger: 1812-14

French Guardsman vs Russian Jaeger: 1812-14 by Laurence Spring

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I’m not decided about this new Osprey Combat series yet. Not surprisingly, this series feels a lot like the Duel series where tanks, combat planes and ships are compared. The results there are mixed, and I’m less a hardware man than a tactics man, so I have only bought one or two of those.

It’s a good thing that Osprey’s taking a few lesser known Napoleonic actions and focussing more on the tactics, but the series is hampered by combining tidbits you’d expect in Warrior series (recruiting, equipment), Essential History (Background), Campaign (Into Combat) and Elite (tactics). In this case it meant that it took a long time before you got to the actual battles.

Author Laurence Spring has a good knowledge of the period and, most importantly, first hand accounts of the battles (although those on Leipzig are very limited, but I guess they needed to include one big battle) which add spice to the narrative. In fact the account of the Young Guard Voltigeurs’ destruction ay Krasnyi had me holding my breath. But this is what I would have wanted more of, and less historical introduction.

Also, the choice of Russian Jaeger and French Young Guard is not the most obvious, because they are not wholly different troop types. In fact, as Spring shows, they both could use light infantry tactics and operate in close formation.

This doesn’t mean that the idea behind the series can’t work. But there have to be significant differences in tactics or equipment between the two sides to make it work. I can see how Zulu Warrior vs British infantryman could work, or Greek hoplite vs Roman legionary or in even terms of Napoleonics: Cuirassier vs infantry (I would actually love to see an Osprey book about horse artillery in action). But the present choices seem too similar.

So my gripes so far with this series is not that I don’t like the idea, but that they make the wrong choices of adversaries and what to focus on. The choice for small and lesser known actions combined with tactics and first hand accounts has my blessing. I’ll catch another one from the series later, but don’t hold my hopes too high.




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Prussian Napoleonic Tactics by Hofschroer

Prussian Napoleonic Tactics 1792-1815 is a refreshing departure from most Osprey books in that it wants to make a point. Although Peter Hofschoer uses a chronological approach to make it, at least it provides a starting point for discussion. 

Hofschroer is out to disprove the historical narrative of a decrepit and outdated Prussian army getting humiliated by Napoleon and Davout at Jena and Auerstädt and that national heroes like Gneisenau and Stein revamped the army so that it could redeem Germany from 1813 to 1815. You can see how well that fits in with 19^th and 20^th century nationalist historiography.

In the opposite corner, Hofschroer posits that reforms had been ongoing all the time since Frederick’s late reign and that the post-Jena reforms were therefor not so revolutionary. Hofschroer shows that the regulations indeed kept pace with developments elsewhere, for example the introduction of light infantry: riflemen were added to regular infantry units in 1787 and specialist battallions of Fusiliers in 1793.

But Hofschroer goes further by also showing that the tools provided by the regulations were used on the battlefield, in particular on the Revolutionary Wars and the 1806-7 campaign. Although it is hard to tell how representative the examples are, they show what the Prussian army was capable of. This suggests wider application and that Prussian soldiers were tactically on par with the French rather than mindless automatons.

But if the tactical capabilities of the Prussian army were not the problem in 1806-7 this means that the full weight of the defeat lies at the hands of the commanders. So what exactly changed between the Revolutionary Wars and 1806-7 and then the German Wars of Liberation? Because there seems a considerable continuity in commanders over time. Brunswick and Rüchel commanded both in 1792-5 and 1806-7, and with credit in the first period. Yorck and Blücher were also exponents of the Frederician army and seem to have done a reasonable job after 1807.

Given the size and scope of the book the answers to these questions are not found here. Considering the point Hofschroer wishes to make, it is not surprising that the focus of the book is on the period up to 1807. The later reforms and campaigns get only a third of the pages.

Apart from the different angle and the extensive examples, what are the other strong point of the book? It contains ample illustrations and maps, which are useful although in some cases the narrative is so complex that it would have been more informative to have a sequence of smaller maps. It is also not common for Osprey writers to extensively use of sources in languages other than English. So, in conclusion, this is a very good Osprey.