Battle of Ocaña, 1809: the rout that opened Andalusia

Sir Charles Oman, the great historian of the Peninsular War, could not speak of the Spanish general at Ocaña with patience. For rashness and vacillation, he wrote, Areizaga's generalship outdid that of any other Spanish general in the whole war. On 19 November 1809, on a bare plain 60 kilometers south of Madrid, a Spanish army of more than 50,000 was destroyed in a few hours by one barely two thirds its size. In the front line of the attack stood a division of Polish infantry from the Duchy of Warsaw.²

The march on Madrid

In the autumn of 1809 the Spanish Supreme Junta planned to retake Madrid. The Army of the Left would draw the French reserves north around Salamanca, while the Army of La Mancha under General Carlos Areizaga marched on the capital. Areizaga started with 55,000 men and moved fast, fifteen miles a day, reaching La Guardia, only 35 miles from Madrid, on 8 November, when barely 10,000 French troops stood in his way.³

Then he hesitated. For three days he stayed at La Guardia, worried by Marshal Victor on his flank. He pushed on, was briefly held up by a small French force at Ocaña, swung east to cross the Tagus at Villamanrique, then changed his mind again and fell back toward Ocaña. On 18 November French cavalry crossing at Aranjuez beat the Spanish horse near the town in a sharp fight, a defeat that left Areizaga's cavalry badly shaken for the next day.⁴

A Polish division in Spain

Among the troops the French brought up was the Polish Division of General Sebastiani's 4th Corps. According to the historian Dawid Madziar, its three infantry regiments, the 4th, 7th and 9th of the Duchy of Warsaw, had been taken into French pay under an agreement made at Bayonne in May 1808, meant for service on the Rhine, and sent instead to Spain in the autumn of that year. They had already fought hard at Almonacid on 11 August 1809, in Madziar's view the bloodiest battle the division fought in Spain. At Ocaña the Polish infantry and a German division formed Sebastiani's first line.⁵ › Battle of Almonacid, 1809

A battlefield without a position

On the morning of 19 November the Spanish army was found drawn up in two lines on either side of the town. Oman counts some 46,000 infantry and 5,500 cavalry, with sixty guns, against a French force of about 27,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry, some 33,500 in all, under King Joseph with Marshal Soult as his chief of staff; HistoryOfWar.org gives the same totals. Victor's corps, struggling across the flooded Tagus, was twenty miles away.⁶

Soult was said to favor waiting for Victor, Joseph to attack at once before the Spaniards slipped away; they attacked. Oman writes that there was, so to speak, no position at Ocaña at all. A ravine covered the Spanish left and center, but on the right it faded into open ground, and there Areizaga's line hung in the air, guarded only by his shaken cavalry under Freire.⁷

The rout

Soult's plan was simple. The Polish and German divisions would attack the Spanish right; once they were at close quarters, more than 3,500 French horsemen, hidden by olive groves and folds in the ground, would drive off Freire's cavalry and fall on the flank of the Spanish infantry. Thirty guns on a knoll battered the town and the Spanish center.⁸

The attack began well for the Spaniards. The divisions of Lacy, Castejón and Girón left their line and made a furious counter-charge that threw the Poles and Germans back in disorder, and Mortier had to send in Girard's division to hold the line. Areizaga, Oman notes, was watching from the top of the church tower and left his subordinates to fight their own battle. Then the French cavalry arrived. It scattered Freire's horsemen in minutes and turned on the infantry, charging the flanks of both Spanish lines before most regiments could form square. Brigade after brigade was rolled up, and the fugitives wrecked the troops still fighting in front.⁹

As the right collapsed, the French center crossed the ravine and took the town. Areizaga came down from his tower and fled. Only Zayas's division on the left kept its order, fighting a rearguard action for several miles until it too broke near Dos Barrios.¹⁰

The price of Ocaña

Oman puts the Spanish loss at about 4,000 killed and wounded and 14,000 prisoners, with thirty flags and fifty of the sixty guns; three weeks later only some 21,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry were back with the colors. The French lost about 1,990 men by his count, almost all in the Polish, German and Girard's divisions; the Polish division alone had 23 officers hit, according to the lists he cites. HistoryOfWar.org gives the same figures in round numbers.¹¹

The defeat left Andalusia open. Early in 1810 the French marched south, took Seville, and drove the Junta to Cádiz.¹²