Who won the Battle of Liegnitz in 1760?
Prussia won. On 15 August 1760 Frederick the Great, hemmed in near Liegnitz (Legnica) in Silesia by three Austrian armies, left his camp by night. At dawn General Laudon's corps marched straight into his waiting army and was beaten in about two hours, before Daun and Lacy could join the attack.1
In August 1760 Frederick the Great was caught in Silesia between three Austrian armies, with a Russian army across the Oder and only days of bread left. The Austrians planned to fall on his camp at Liegnitz from several sides at dawn on 15 August. But in the night Frederick moved his army out of the camp, and at first light General Laudon, marching to cut him off, ran into the whole Prussian left wing. Our 15 August page lists the other battles of the date.2
Not the 1241 battle. Legnica has given its name to more than one battle. This page is about the Prussian victory of 1760 in the Seven Years' War. The famous battle against the Mongols, fought nearby in 1241, has its own page: the Battle of Legnica, 1241. Both Archenholz and Archenholz even placed the 1760 fight on the field of 1241, and Carlyle notes that Wahlstatt, where the older battle was fought, lies a few miles away.3
Why was Frederick trapped at Liegnitz?
In 1760 the war was still going badly for Prussia after the disaster at Kunersdorf the year before. On 23 June 1760 the Austrian general Laudon destroyed General Fouqué's corps at Landeshut, then took the fortress of Glatz, and tried, without success, to seize Breslau. For the wider war, see the guides to the Seven Years' War and the Third Silesian War.4
Frederick hurried from Saxony to save Silesia. Field Marshal Daun and General Lacy followed his march so closely that the three armies moved across the country almost side by side. He dragged a train of about 2,000 wagons with him, because his magazines lay at Breslau and Schweidnitz, deep in Silesia.5
Once over the Silesian border he found Daun's main army, Lacy's corps and Laudon's corps joined in front of him along the river Katzbach. Carlyle reckons the three armies at 90,000 men, Archenholz at 100,000, against Frederick's 30,000. For several days the king marched back and forth along the river looking for a way through, and found every road blocked.6
Laudon, Daun and Lacy: the three Austrian commanders
Ernst Gideon von Laudon was the most aggressive of Frederick's opponents. Born in 1717 in Livonia, he first served in the Russian army, asked in vain for a commission in Prussia, and found one in Austria. He made his name in raids and ambushes, above all the destruction of a great Prussian supply convoy at Domstadtl in 1758, and at Kunersdorf his cavalry helped decide the day.7
Leopold Joseph von Daun commanded the main army. He had beaten Frederick at Kolín and surprised him at Hochkirch, but he was known as a careful, slow commander, and Laudon, who always pressed for a decisive battle, chafed under his caution. The third army was led by Franz Moritz von Lacy.8
The Austrian plan: a second Hochkirch
The Austrians were under pressure to act. The Russian commander, Saltykov, was camped across the Oder and was impatient with Austrian caution. If the Prussians reached the Oder and joined Prince Henry's army, he said, he would pull back. Daun had to beat Frederick before that happened.9
On 14 August Daun drew up the plan. After dark the three armies would converge on the Prussian camp west of Liegnitz and attack it at daybreak from several sides: Daun's main army against the right, Lacy around the right flank, and Laudon, crossing the Katzbach downstream, against the left. The aim was to cut Frederick off from the Oder and from Glogau, his last magazine. Archenholz, who was in the Prussian army, called it an attempt to repeat the surprise of Hochkirch.10
Both camps used the same trick that night. The Austrians left their fires burning and their drums beating as usual to hide their march.11
The night march: Frederick leaves his fires burning
Frederick had already decided to leave. With bread almost gone, he meant to march by night across the Schwarzwasser, a marshy stream north of Liegnitz, rest on the heights of Pfaffendorf until dawn, and then head for Parchwitz and Glogau. That afternoon he rode out with his generals and showed each of them his post.12
Later in the afternoon a deserter from the Austrian army came into the Prussian camp and warned that an attack was planned for the night. Carlyle, following Frederick's own account, describes him as an Irish officer, very drunk, who had to be sobered up before he could be questioned.13
From about eight in the evening the Prussian columns marched out, some of them through the streets of Liegnitz, while peasants kept the camp fires burning and a few hussars and drummers made the usual night noises. By about one in the morning the whole army was across the Schwarzwasser and drawn up in a long curved line on the heights between Pfaffendorf and Panten, facing the Katzbach. Zieten held the right wing, the king the left.14
Archenholz, then a young officer in the Prussian infantry, remembered a beautiful starlit night. No one slept. The soldiers lay with their muskets in their arms, talking quietly, and the king sat by a fire, some say on a drum.15
Dawn: Laudon runs into the whole Prussian army
Laudon had left his camp east of the Katzbach late on the 14th, with orders to seize the same Pfaffendorf heights. His scouts had told him the Prussian baggage was moving that way, and he hurried ahead with his best troops, without an advance guard, hoping to catch it. He expected an empty plain. He found Frederick.16
At about half past two in the morning a hussar major galloped up with the news that strong Austrian columns were coming from Bienowitz against the left wing and were already very close. Frederick mounted at once. General Schenckendorff's brigade swung to face the enemy and its heavy guns, on a low hill called the Wolfsberg, began firing case shot at close range into the Austrian grenadiers.17
Laudon understood at once that a retreat in the dark would be a disaster, so he attacked. The ground was against him: broken, bushy and so narrow that he could put only about five battalions in front. Again and again his infantry and cavalry came forward, and each time they were thrown back. The Anhalt-Bernburg regiment, disgraced by the king after a failed action at the siege of Dresden a few weeks before, went in with the bayonet.18
An Austrian column that had reached the village of Panten, on the edge of the battlefield, stayed there. Prussian troops of Saldern's brigade, including Möllendorf's battalion of the Guard, drove the Austrians out, and Prussian howitzers set the village on fire.19
After about two hours Laudon gave up. He fell back across the Katzbach, with his artillery covering the retreat, and by about five in the morning the battle was over. The Prussians did not follow far: Frederick needed his left wing in case Daun attacked the right.20
Daun and Lacy: why did they not come?
Daun's own march had gone slowly in the dark. Around eleven at night his light troops found the Prussian camp empty, but the news reached him only hours later. When he finally crossed the Katzbach near Liegnitz, the fight was over. He had heard nothing: the wind, he said, had carried the sound of the guns away.21
He saw the smoke rising beyond the Schwarzwasser and understood that Laudon had been beaten. On the far bank Zieten's wing stood ready, with batteries covering the crossings. Daun pushed cavalry, by Kronoskaf's count some 30 squadrons, over the stone bridge at Töpferberg, but Zieten's guns drove them back. He tried to come closer, could not cross under that fire, never committed his main army, and later returned to his camp.22
Lacy, marching around to the west, reached the Schwarzwasser near Waldau and found its marshy banks impassable for anything but a few hussars, who raided the Prussian baggage and were beaten off. For holding the right wing, Frederick made Zieten a general of cavalry on the battlefield.23
How many died at Liegnitz? Casualties of the battle
By the Prussian count, which both Carlyle (after the officer and historian Tempelhof) and Archenholz give, the Austrians lost about 10,000 men: some 4,000 killed and wounded and 6,000 prisoners, with 82 guns and 23 to 28 flags. The Prussians admitted about 1,800 killed and wounded. These are the Prussian figures of the time; later counts, drawn from the records of both armies, differ from them.24
A Prussian broadsheet printed soon after the battle gave much the same picture: more than 10,000 Austrians lost, two generals, 86 officers and over 5,000 men taken prisoner, 82 guns and 23 flags captured, and a Prussian loss of 500 dead and 1,200 wounded. These were figures meant for the public; the plan printed in Vienna told the story from the Austrian side.25
Who won the Battle of Liegnitz?
Prussia won, and quickly: the battle was over in about two hours, before most people in the town were out of bed, as Archenholz put it. Laudon's corps was badly beaten, and the Austrian plan to crush Frederick between three armies was ruined. Daun's biographer in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie calls it the unlucky meeting of Laudon's corps with the king that wrecked Daun's great blow.26
Frederick himself did not overrate it. On 27 August he wrote to his friend the Marquis d'Argens that in other times the affair of the 15th would have decided the campaign, but now it was only a scratch, and a great battle was still needed to decide his fate. The victory, he added, had cost him only a horse and a coat.27
Luck or design? Did Frederick know Laudon was coming?
Historians have argued about how much was luck. Carlyle thought the question still open: Frederick had probably guessed an attack was coming, but Laudon certainly did not expect to find the Prussian army where he did. He called the result the best of management crowned by the luckiest of accidents.28
Archenholz, who was there, disagreed. In a note to his history he argued that the king meant to wait for Laudon and fight him: otherwise, why would he have halted in battle order on strong ground from midnight to dawn, when nothing stopped him from marching on? Both writers agree that Frederick's night march had already thrown the Austrian plan into confusion.29
The Austrian view: Laudon left alone
For Laudon the defeat was bitter. His biographer Alfred von Arneth writes that he said openly that if Daun's army and Lacy's corps had attacked at daybreak, as agreed, a complete victory would have been won, since even with his own inadequate force he had twice made the Prussians give way. The modern Neue Deutsche Biographie also describes him as left in the lurch by Daun and Lacy.30
The Austrian plan of the action, printed in Vienna by the court printer Trattner in 1761, frames the day in the same spirit. Its title calls it an action between General Laudon with a corps of Austrian troops and the whole Prussian army, commanded by the king in person. Its key marks the battery of Laudon's artillery that covered his retreat.31
Laudon's career did not suffer for long. He took the fortress of Schweidnitz by storm in 1761, and in 1789, near the end of his life, he took Belgrade from the Ottomans.32
The Russians across the Oder
The Russians were not idle spectators. Saltykov had sent a corps under General Chernyshev, Carlyle and Kronoskaf say 24,000 men and Archenholz 20,000, across the Oder towards Auras, ready to join Laudon. From the Russian side the Austrians seemed to be leaving all the risk to them: Saltykov did not want to be caught alone between Frederick and Prince Henry.33
After the battle Frederick was still in danger: Chernyshev stood on the road to Breslau. Both Archenholz and Carlyle tell how the king wrote a note to Prince Henry announcing his victory and his plan to attack the Russians next, and had a peasant carry it so that he would be caught. Chernyshev, they say, read it and crossed back over the Oder at once.34
What happened after the Battle of Liegnitz?
Frederick did not wait. By nine in the morning his army was on the march with its prisoners, its captured guns and the wounded of both sides loaded into the empty bread wagons, after a salute fired in celebration on the field. The regiment of Anhalt-Bernburg got back the swords and honors it had lost, and the king told it that all was forgotten.35
Two days later he was safe near Breslau, and he could join his brother Prince Henry. The Russians and the Austrians never united, and Daun fell back into the mountains, then returned to Saxony. There, on 3 November, Frederick attacked him at Torgau.36
Liegnitz belongs to a run of battles that decided whether Prussia would survive the war: Leuthen in 1757, Zorndorf in 1758, Kunersdorf and Maxen in 1759, then Landeshut, Liegnitz and Torgau in 1760.37
Where was the Battle of Liegnitz fought?
The battle was fought just north-east of Liegnitz, today Legnica in south-western Poland, on the low heights between the villages of Pfaffendorf and Panten. The Katzbach river, the Kaczawa in Polish, ran in front of the Prussian line, and the marshy Schwarzwasser covered its right.38
Legnica remembers several battles. The city's own guide lists the battle against the Mongols in 1241, the Prussian victory over the Austrians in 1760 and the defeat of Napoleon's army by Blücher's allied troops in 1813. For the Prussian and Polish story of the region, see the military history of Germany and the military history of Poland.39
