Battle of Leuthen, 1757: Frederick the Great's masterpiece

A month after he had routed the French at Rossbach, Frederick the Great faced a worse problem in the east. An Austrian army had taken Silesia, the province he had seized from Austria in 1740, and its capital Breslau. On 5 December 1757, near the village of Leuthen, he attacked that army with half its numbers and destroyed it before nightfall. EBSCO's account calls Leuthen one of the most decisive victories of the century; BritishBattles.com calls it his most successful battle.²

Conquer or die

Frederick pursued the beaten French for only two days after Rossbach before turning his army toward Silesia. On the way he learned that the Duke of Bevern had been defeated outside Breslau and that the city had surrendered to the Austrians under Prince Charles of Lorraine. He reached Parchwitz on the Oder on 28 November and waited there for his scattered corps; Zieten brought in what was left of Bevern's army.³

The king worked on the morale of his men, sleeping among them in the open and handing out extra rations. Most of the foreign soldiers had deserted by then, and the army that remained was largely native Prussian, Pomeranians and Brandenburgers at its core. On 3 December he called his generals and battalion commanders together. In the words reported by Prince Ferdinand, he told them he was marching to attack an entrenched enemy and that in his situation he must conquer or die.⁴

He expected to storm the entrenched camp outside Breslau. Instead, on the night of 4 December at Neumarkt, where his hussars had just captured the Austrian field bakeries, he heard that Prince Charles had left his fieldworks and was coming out to meet him. The Austrians would fight in the open, on ground Frederick knew well: his army had held its autumn maneuvers there every year between 1746 and 1756. What he did not know, BritishBattles.com notes, was that the Austrians had about 65,000 men, not the 40,000 he had reckoned.⁵

The feint and the hidden march

The Prussians marched at 5 a.m. on 5 December. At Borna their advance guard overran Austrian hussars and took about 600 prisoners. From a hill above the village Frederick could see the whole Austrian line, some four miles long, running from Nippern in the north to Leuthen in the south.⁶

He sent his advance guard and hussars down the road toward the Austrian right, as if the whole army were coming that way. Prince Charles took the bait and moved his reserves to his right. Meanwhile the Prussian columns turned south behind a chain of low hills, marched across the Austrian front unseen, and at about noon wheeled east beyond the Austrian left flank near Lobetinz. BritishBattles.com says the Austrians mocked the apparent Prussian advance as the Berlin Watch Parade, and that when no attack reached his right, Prince Charles concluded that the outnumbered Prussians were retreating.⁷

On the Austrian left, Nádasdy saw what was coming and sent messenger after messenger to Prince Charles at the other end of the line. Charles was not convinced, and his line was so long that moving infantry from one end to the other took the best part of an hour.⁸

The oblique order

Soon after 1 p.m. the Prussian infantry attacked. The battalions went forward from the right in echelon, each starting fifty paces after the one before, so that the full weight of the army fell on one end of the Austrian line. BritishBattles.com calls Leuthen the only battle in which Frederick delivered a complete attack in this oblique order; EBSCO's account calls it the textbook example. The first blow fell on Württemberg regiments in hasty field works, which broke after a short fight. Zieten's cavalry drove off Nádasdy's horsemen and took 15 guns, and heavy batteries moved forward behind the infantry.⁹

The Austrians had to swing their whole army round to face south. Prince Charles packed troops into Leuthen, where the crowded infantry made a target for the Prussian guns. At about 3:30 the Prussians stormed the village, battering breaches in its walls, and needed half an hour to clear it. Then General Lucchese led the Austrian cavalry from the right against the Prussian flank. Driesen's Prussian squadrons charged it from the side and the hussars struck it from behind; the Austrian cavalry was driven back into its own infantry, and the line collapsed. Darkness, coming early on a December day, made an immediate pursuit impossible. That night, BritishBattles.com relates, the Prussian soldiers on the field began to sing the hymn Now Thank We All Our God.¹⁰

After Leuthen

BritishBattles.com puts the Prussian loss at 6,382 and the Austrian at 22,000, half of them prisoners; EBSCO gives the same Austrian figure and says it was more than three times the Prussian loss. Breslau surrendered on 21 December, and thousands more Austrians went into captivity there. Prince Charles was forced to give up his command and Nádasdy was dismissed. Silesia was Prussian again, and the victories of 1757 made Frederick the hero of Protestant Europe.¹¹