Battle of Lobositz, 1756: the first battle of the Seven Years' War

On 29 August 1756 Frederick II of Prussia crossed into Saxony without declaring war, opening what would become the Seven Years' War. His plan, as the historian Jiří Hofman sets it out in a two-part study published by the Military History Institute in Prague, was to seize Saxony quickly, march on into Bohemia and take enough land there to winter his army, ready for a decisive campaign in 1757.²

Saxony did not fall as fast as he hoped. The Saxon army was surrounded in a fortified camp at Pirna on 10 September, but it did not surrender, partly because food was smuggled in across the Bohemian border. Maria Theresa's commander in Bohemia, Field Marshal Maximilian Ulysses von Browne, an officer of Irish family, was ordered to rescue it.³

Two armies blunder into each other

Browne planned a daring march along the right bank of the Elbe to Pirna. To hide it, he moved his camp on 30 September to the plain between Lobositz (Lovosice) and Sulejovice, as if heading for Saxony on the left bank. Frederick believed it. Marching south that day, he saw the Austrian camp below him and occupied the heights between the Lobosch (Lovoš) and the Ovčín hills. Hofman counts about 18,000 Prussian infantry, more than 11,000 cavalry and 102 guns, against 24,000 Austrian infantry, some 9,000 cavalry and 94 guns.⁴

Browne chose a defensive line behind marshes and ponds from Čížkovice through Sulejovice to Lobositz, with his right on the Elbe and an easy road of retreat to Prague behind him. He left the Lobosch outside it, holding its eastern slopes with Croatian light infantry, and filled Lobositz itself with troops as a strong outpost.⁵

Cavalry in the fog

On the morning of 1 October thick fog lay over the valley. The Prussians advanced around six, and Frederick sent the Duke of Brunswick-Bevern with six battalions to take the Lobosch. When the fog thinned after seven, about 200 guns opened fire. The Swiss conscript Ulrich Bräker, whose memoir Hofman quotes, remembered cannonballs tearing men out of the ranks like straws.⁶

Frederick grew impatient with the cannonade and ordered General von Kyau to charge the Austrian center with the cavalry. Kyau objected that the ground was bad for horsemen, and was asked whether he feared for his life. About 30 squadrons, some 5,000 riders, rode down the slope, ran into flanking fire from Sulejovice and a crossfire of muskets and guns near Lobositz, and fled back up the hill.⁷

Then, to the king's surprise, the whole Prussian cavalry, more than 11,000 horses, re-formed and charged again, probably still acting on the first order. They drove the Austrian horse back, until a counterattack under Prince Löwenstein broke them. Hofman calls the clash probably the largest cavalry battle ever fought on Czech soil, and writes that the Prussian regiments that went through it were still shaken a year later.⁸

The fight for the Lobosch

Frederick turned to his left. From about eleven, Bevern's men fought their way up the Lobosch through terraced vineyards. Browne sent Colonel Count Moritz Lacy with six grenadier companies and three battalions to reinforce the Croats, and for a time the Austrians seemed about to win; Frederick, by some accounts, had already ordered a retreat. Then Prussian guns reached the summit, Lacy was wounded, fresh Prussian battalions arrived, and the Austrians fell back from wall to wall down the slope, in order.⁹

Bevern, without orders, went on to storm Lobositz. The streets were fought over house by house for about an hour, until the Prussians pulled back, set fire to the suburbs and brought up guns to batter the buildings. By about three in the afternoon the town was in flames, and its defenders withdrew behind it. Browne brought them out in good order and lost only three guns, whose crews and horses had all been shot.¹⁰

Who won?

Hofman gives 2,863 Austrians and 3,304 Prussians killed, wounded or missing, about a tenth of each army. Alfred von Arneth, in his biography of Browne in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, writes that the Prussians held the field but lost so heavily, and Browne's retreat was so orderly, that Frederick could draw no further advantage from it. After the battle, Hofman adds, Frederick remarked that these were no longer his old Austrians.¹¹

On 2 October Browne withdrew to his camp at Budyně. On 6 October he took 8,000 picked men across the Elbe and marched through the hills to Bad Schandau, where he waited three days in vain: the Saxon breakout failed, and the Saxons at Pirna surrendered on 16 October. Browne returned to Bohemia unmolested, and on 23 October the Prussians left Bohemia for winter quarters in Saxony. Arneth concludes that it was Browne, above all, who wrecked the king's plan to knock Austria down at the first blow.¹²

Lobositz still remembers the battle. A memorial chapel of Our Lady of Einsiedeln stands on the field, the historian Libor Jůn notes in Deník N, and the tomb of the imperial general Radicati, killed in the battle, is in St. Stephen's Cathedral in nearby Litoměřice.¹³