Battle of Kunersdorf, 1759: how Russians and Austrians shattered Frederick the Great's army

That evening, in a peasant hut at Ötscher by the Oder bridges, the king of Prussia wrote to his minister in Berlin. Of an army of 48,000 men, he said, he did not have 3,000 left; everything was fleeing, and he was no longer master of his troops. "I will not survive it," he added. "I believe all is lost. Farewell forever." Kunersdorf was the worst defeat of Frederick the Great's life and one of the bloodiest days of the Third Silesian War, the central European half of the Seven Years' War.²

Why was the Battle of Kunersdorf fought?

By 1759 Prussia was fighting Austria, Russia, France and Sweden at once, and Frederick II had already lost the initiative. In May the Russian empress Elizabeth gave command of her army to Pyotr Saltykov, who marched across Poland through Poznań toward Brandenburg. On 23 July he beat a Prussian corps under Carl Heinrich von Wedel at Kay (Kije), near Züllichau, today Sulechów in Poland; Polish historians, summarized by the Polish History Museum's portal, put Wedel's force at 28,000 to 30,000 against about 50,000 Russians.³

The road to the Oder was open. The Russians entered Frankfurt an der Oder on 31 July. In July the Austrian commander Leopold von Daun had sent Lieutenant General Ernst Gideon von Laudon north with a corps to join them, and he marched hard through Lusatia to get there first. Laudon met Saltykov on 2 August and asked him to send 30,000 men to Daun and, when that was refused, to move his army across to the west bank; Saltykov would not listen, and the two armies camped on the high ground on the east bank, opposite the town.⁴

Frederick, who had been watching Daun in Saxony and Silesia, gathered every unit he could. He drew in Wedel's beaten corps and the division of Friedrich August von Finck, and by 9 August he had about 50,000 men near the Oder below Frankfurt. He meant to crush the allied army in a single battle.⁵

Armies and commanders at Kunersdorf

The Prussians. The French historian Richard Waddington, who reconstructed the battle from Russian, Austrian and Prussian archives, writes that almost every author puts Frederick's army at 48,000 to 50,000 men; Britannica gives some 50,000. Its quality was uneven. Finck's men and the old corps of Prince Henry were good troops, but Wedel's battalions, raised largely in East Prussia, had just been beaten at Kay, and Frederick did not trust them. The cavalry served under Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz, whose charges had saved the day against the Russians at Zorndorf the year before.⁶

The Russians. Saltykov had taken over from Count Fermor only that spring. His figures are the hardest to pin down: Waddington, comparing the Russian sources, estimates about 48,000 men including some 6,000 Cossacks and hussars, while the official Russian return that he quotes counts 39,411; Grzegorz Podruczny, the archaeologist who has studied the battlefield since 2009, puts the Russians at about 60,000. They had a large and modern artillery, which Polish researchers count among the main reasons for the outcome.⁷

The Austrians. Laudon, a Livonian who had served in the Russian army as a young man before joining the Habsburgs, was by then Austria's most enterprising general. His corps numbered a little over 18,000 men by Waddington's count, about 20,000 by Podruczny's, with grenadiers, dragoons and hussars. Together the allies had roughly 60,000 to 80,000 men, depending on the count; the Polish archaeologists give about 80,000 against about 50,000 Prussians.⁸

The Russian camp on the Kunersdorf heights

The allies did not wait in the open. They spent the days before the battle fortifying a chain of sandy hills between the village of Kunersdorf and the bridgehead suburb of Frankfurt: the Mühlberge (Młyńskie Wzgórza) in the east, the Great Spitzberg in the middle and the Judenberg, near the Jewish cemetery, in the west. Marshes and lakes covered much of the approach, and woods closed the south and east.⁹

The allies prepared above all for an attack on their front. They dug trenches and batteries, cut trees for abatis and, so that the houses could not shelter an attacker, burned the village of Kunersdorf itself. The Austrians held the western end of the position, toward Frankfurt and the Judenberg, and the Russians the long line east to the Mühlberge.¹⁰

How the Battle of Kunersdorf unfolded

On the night of 10 to 11 August the Prussians crossed the Oder downstream at Göritz on two bridges, unseen, and on the 11th they marched south to the woods north and east of the allied camp. Frederick decided not to attack the strong northern front. Instead the main army made a long march through the woods and around the lakes to fall on the eastern end of the position, the Mühlberge, while Finck's corps showed itself to the north to hold the enemy's attention.¹¹

The march took far longer than planned. The columns were kilometers long, the heavy guns needed twelve horses each, and the brooks could be crossed only at a few bridges; it was nearly midday on 12 August before the Prussian batteries opened fire. After about half an hour of bombardment by some 60 guns, eight or nine battalions of grenadiers stormed the Mühlberge. The defenders broke, and the Prussians took the guns on the hill and pushed the Russian left wing back toward Kunersdorf.¹²

Waddington compares the moment to Leuthen, where Frederick had rolled up an Austrian army from its flank two years before. But this success could not be exploited. Prussian cavalry was not at hand, the heavy guns could be dragged up the sand only slowly, and the infantry crowded onto the narrow hill in deep, useless masses under Russian fire. Saltykov and Laudon used the time to turn fresh regiments to face east across the ravine of the Kuhgrund.¹³

The Spitzberg and Laudon's counterattack

By mid-afternoon the Prussians had crossed the Kuhgrund after hard fighting and taken more guns, but they had been on their feet since the small hours, in a hot August sun, without water. Several generals, Finck among them, advised the king to hold what he had won and let the enemy retreat in the night. Frederick refused. He wanted the whole plateau and the destruction of the Russian army.¹⁴

The key was now the Great Spitzberg, a sandy knoll packed with Russian guns that swept the ground beyond Kunersdorf. The ground in front of it was so narrow between the ruined village and the lakes that the Prussian brigades could not deploy; they piled up in deep masses and were cut down. Frederick then ordered Seydlitz to attack with the cavalry. Seydlitz hesitated, the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie records, because he did not think horsemen should charge entrenchments, then obeyed. The charge failed among the lakes, abatis and grapeshot, and Seydlitz was badly wounded in the hand.¹⁵

Laudon had waited for exactly this moment. With fresh Austrian and Russian horsemen he struck the Prussian cavalry in the flank and drove it from the field, then turned on the infantry around Kunersdorf. The Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie credits his best squadrons with deciding the day. At the same time the Russian infantry, which had held its ground for hours, went over to the attack and retook the Kuhgrund and its batteries.¹⁶

Frederick did everything he could to rally his men. Two horses were shot under him and bullets went through his coat. But the army no longer responded. Late in the day the last Prussian troops were driven off the Mühlberge, and what had been an army became a crowd of fugitives running for the bridges over the Hühnerfließ. At the very end the king himself was nearly taken by Cossacks; Captain von Prittwitz and a few hussars held them off while the king's companions led him away.¹⁷

Casualties: how many died at Kunersdorf?

Kunersdorf was one of the bloodiest battles of the century. Britannica says Frederick lost more than 18,000 men in six hours. Waddington, using the German staff studies, counts 530 officers and about 18,000 men killed, wounded, captured or missing, nearly 20,000 with the deserters; Carlyle gives about 19,000. Podruczny's figures, published by the Polish History Museum's portal, are higher: about 25,000, including 7,600 killed and 2,000 deserters.¹⁸

The victors paid heavily too. Waddington puts Russian losses at about 14,600 and Austrian losses at a little over 2,300, some 17,000 in all; Carlyle, again after Tempelhof, has nearly 18,000. The Prussians also lost much of their artillery: Waddington lists 172 guns among the allied trophies, while Carlyle counts 165 abandoned at the bridges.¹⁹

Among the dead was the poet Ewald Christian von Kleist, a Prussian major and the author of the much-read poem Der Frühling (Spring). He was badly wounded leading his men against the Russian batteries and was taken into Frankfurt, where he refused an amputation and died some days later in the house of the Nicolai family. He was buried in the town, where his grave monument still stands.²⁰

Archaeology has added to the written record. Since 2009 teams led by Podruczny and Jakub Wrzosek have surveyed the battlefield. Among their finds are the remains of soldiers killed in the battle; one of them, found in 2010, Podruczny and Wrzosek identified by his badge as a grenadier of the Russian army.²¹

Frederick's despair: "I believe all is lost"

The note to Count Karl Wilhelm Finck von Finckenstein, the minister who ran Prussian affairs in Berlin, is one of the most quoted letters Frederick ever wrote. He told him Berlin should look to its safety and that "the consequences of the affair will be worse than the affair itself", and he signed off with "adieu pour jamais", farewell forever. Finckenstein, his biographer notes, kept his calm and moved the court and the government out of the capital; according to Carlyle, the queen and the court went to Magdeburg.²²

The next day Frederick crossed back over the Oder and handed command of what remained of the army to General Finck. The Neue Deutsche Biographie writes that he had sought death in the battle, considered everything lost and seriously thought of suicide; Britannica also speaks of despair and thoughts of suicide. Within a few days, as stragglers came in and no enemy followed, he took the command back and began to rebuild his army east of Berlin.²³

Why didn't the allies march on Berlin? The Miracle of the House of Brandenburg

Berlin was only a few days' march away, and the road was open. Britannica's verdict is that if the defeat had been effectively followed up, Frederick could not have continued the war. It was not. There was almost no pursuit on the evening of the battle, and in the weeks that followed the Russian and Austrian commanders argued about what to do next.²⁴

Each side had its reasons. Laudon pressed for a march to finish off the Prussian army, according to both the old and the new German national biographies, but could not move his allies. Saltykov's army had suffered heavily and was short of supplies. Waddington suggests that the Russian staff also felt it was now Austria's turn to strike, after two bloody battles fought by Russians, and that political considerations weighed in St. Petersburg. Daun, for his part, wanted the Russians to cover a campaign in Silesia rather than risk his own army against the king.²⁵

At the end of August the allied armies turned away toward Lusatia instead of Berlin. When Frederick understood it, he wrote to his brother Prince Henry that he could announce "the miracle of the House of Brandenburg". The phrase stuck. The Austrians and the Imperial army took Dresden in September, and in November Finck was trapped and forced to surrender at Maxen, but Prussia survived the year.²⁶

Why the Battle of Kunersdorf mattered

Kunersdorf showed how far Prussia had been worn down. The attack on an enemy flank that had won at Leuthen in 1757 failed against a fortified position, a strong artillery and an infantry that would not break; as Waddington observes, the narrow ground beyond Kunersdorf left no room for the king's favorite attack in echelon. After 1759 the king could put fewer and fewer men in the field, and as Britannica notes, by 1761 his position was desperate.²⁷

It also showed the limits of the coalition. The allies could beat Frederick in a single battle but could not agree on how to end the war. Prussia was saved in the end by the death of Empress Elizabeth on 5 January 1762: her successor, Peter III, an admirer of Frederick, made peace and even an alliance with him. For the Russian army, Kunersdorf was a victory won above all by the tenacity of its infantry and the weight of its guns, as both Waddington and the Polish archaeologists stress; for Austria, it made Laudon's name, and he beat the Prussians again at Landeshut the next summer.²⁸

Where was the Battle of Kunersdorf fought? Kunowice today

Since 1945 the battlefield has been in Poland. Kunersdorf is now the village of Kunowice, and the old Frankfurt suburb on the east bank of the Oder is the town of Słubice, in the Lubusz voivodeship; Polish sources usually call the battle bitwa pod Kunowicami. The hills of the Russian camp still rise between the village and the town, and the meadows of the Oder valley still lie below them.²⁹

The field has been studied on the ground since the regional museum in Gorzów surveyed it in 1982 and fixed the main landmarks of the battle in the landscape. Since 2009 excavations led from the Polish-German research institute at the Collegium Polonicum in Słubice have recovered weapons, uniform fittings and the remains of the fallen, and have shown that the fighting reached farther west, toward Słubice, than was long assumed.³⁰