Battle of Wittstock, 1636: Banér and Leslie restore Sweden's fortunes

Two blows in two years seemed to have finished Sweden's war in Germany. At Nördlingen in 1634 the Swedes were heavily defeated, and in the Peace of Prague of 1635 the Elector John George of Saxony made his peace with the Emperor Ferdinand II. Saxony now fought against its former ally. To finish off the Swedes, the main Imperial army shadowed them along the Elbe, while a smaller force under General Klitzing moved into Brandenburg looking for a chance to deliver the fatal blow.²

The Imperial and Saxon commanders thought they had found it in the autumn of 1636, when the opposing forces came together on the hills outside the small town of Wittstock, in the northeast of Brandenburg.³

An army of many nations

Facing them was the Swedish main army under Field Marshal Johan Banér, joined by a second force, the Army of the Weser, made up mostly of German and Scottish regiments under the Scottish field marshal Alexander Leslie. According to Steve Murdoch, Kathrin Zickermann and Adam Marks, only about a third of the combined army were Swedes and Finns; the rest were Scots and Germans, with some English soldiers among them.⁴

How many men fought is disputed. Some reports give the Imperialists only 12,000 men and the Swedes 22,000, but more usually the Swedes are estimated at just over 15,000 and their enemies at 22,000; Leslie and Banér both wrote that they were outnumbered.⁵

A risky plan

On the morning of Saturday 4 October Banér divided his army into four parts. He himself, with Lennart Torstensson, held the right wing facing the Saxons with 17 cavalry squadrons and 700 musketeers. Leslie commanded the center, five brigades of foot and five squadrons of horse, 4,342 men, directly in front of Hatzfeldt's Imperial army. Lieutenant General James King led the left wing, some 18 cavalry squadrons, and Johan Vitzthum the reserve.⁶

The plan was audacious. King's cavalry was to make a sweeping march to the west, around the enemy's position and into his rear. Banér would attack the Saxons head on, supported by Torstensson's artillery, while Leslie made a feint against the Imperial center to keep it from helping the Saxons. If all went well, the Saxons, broken by Banér, would be driven straight into the path of King's horsemen.⁷

The day the plan nearly failed

It did not go to plan. The Saxons held firm, and Banér reported that every one of his squadrons had to charge them at least six times, some as many as ten. His wing began to waver; he blamed King's slow progress through the swamps and woods to the west, and a reserve that was slow to come up. Leslie, already engaged with Hatzfeldt, marched across the battlefield to help. Banér himself told Queen Christina that his men would have fallen into total disorder if Leslie, with his five brigades of foot, had not come to their aid just in time and turned back four enemy brigades that were about to take them in the flank.⁸

King's horsemen finally appeared in the enemy's rear. Banér later said they had little to do that day, but King's own report claims that it was their arrival, together with Leslie's support for the right wing, that started the enemy's retreat, and that at nightfall two of his regiments under Torsten Stålhandske destroyed three enemy regiments despite orders to stop. The Imperial and Saxon army broke; a report written in Stockholm days later spoke of the total defeat of all its infantry. The Scots also accused Banér of letting the beaten enemy escape by holding back the pursuit.⁹

The cost

It was a bloody victory. Murdoch, Zickermann and Marks write that between 7,000 and 10,000 men are generally agreed to have died that day, with many more wounded and maimed. One brigade of 892 men had only 308 survivors, and in one Scottish brigade of 800, 350 died; the most senior officer killed on the Swedish side was Colonel Robert Cunningham. A mass grave of soldiers from the battle, found at Wittstock, has since been studied by archaeologists. In his novel Simplicissimus (1669), Grimmelshausen described the field of Wittstock as ground that, instead of covering the dead, was itself covered with them.¹⁰

Remembered and argued over

Coming after Nördlingen and the Peace of Prague, the victory showed that Sweden was far from beaten in Germany. Some historians have compared it to Hannibal's Cannae; others see it as far less important, while Peter Wilson calls it one of the most important battles of the war. Its reputation spread at once: within days a Scottish cleric in Stockholm reported that the victory was counted as great as any the Swedes had won, and a Paris engraver published a view of it which, in the copy now in the Royal Collection, wrongly dates the battle to 16 October.¹¹

The battle also began a quarrel over credit. Banér's own report was long the main source, and later histories often left out Leslie and King altogether. Leslie visited Scotland soon afterwards; from 1639 he led the army of the Scottish Covenanters against Charles I in the Bishops' Wars, and was later made Earl of Leven.¹²