On 6 September 1813, near the village of Dennewitz south of Berlin, Marshal Michel Ney's French Army of Berlin was beaten by the Allied Army of the North under the Swedish crown prince Charles John, the former French marshal Jean Bernadotte. The fighting was done mostly by Prussian troops under Friedrich Wilhelm von Bülow. It was Napoleon's second failed attempt to take Berlin in a little over two weeks, and it weakened his position on the Elbe a month before Leipzig.
The road to Berlin
After his victory at Dresden in August 1813, Napoleon sent an army north against Berlin, the Prussian capital. Its first commander, Marshal Nicolas Oudinot, was badly beaten at Grossbeeren on 23 August, and Napoleon replaced him with Ney. John Rickard writes that Ney's army was cut from a planned 80,000 men to about 58,000 when 25,000 were sent to reinforce Marshal Macdonald, and that Oudinot stayed on as a corps commander under Ney.1
Facing him was the Army of the North of Charles John, crown prince of Sweden, with Prussian, Russian and Swedish corps. Britannica notes that Charles John wanted to save his Swedish troops for a war with Denmark, so the Prussians bore the brunt of the fighting.2
A battle won by the Prussians
In Rickard's account, General Bertrand's corps opened the battle in the morning, crossing the Agerbach stream to attack General Tauentzien's Prussians near Dennewitz, and when General Fontanelli's division went forward at about 11 a.m., a Prussian cavalry charge stopped it. Bülow's corps reached the field around 12:30 and pushed into the French flank, while the Saxons of General Reynier's corps took the village of Gölsdorf in the afternoon. At the critical moment Ney ordered Oudinot's corps across from the left of his line to the right; Oudinot obeyed despite Reynier's pleas, and the chance to exploit the Saxon success was lost. Rickard puts this down to Ney's poor grasp of the battlefield and Oudinot's resentment at his demotion.3
Reynier's own troops reached the field around 1 p.m., and General Durutte's division briefly retook the windmill heights by Dennewitz. By about 5 p.m. the Prussians had retaken Gölsdorf, where the Saxons lost some 1,500 men, and taken Rohrbeck, Swedish and Russian troops were arriving, and around 6 p.m. Ney ordered a retreat. The Fondation Napoléon's biography of Ney says simply that he blundered to defeat at Dennewitz, and Britannica records the bitter twist that Ney was beaten by his old comrade Bernadotte, who like him had once been a sergeant in the revolutionary armies.4
The cost
Reliable figures are hard to pin down. Rickard estimates about 10,000 French and 7,000 Allied losses in the battle itself, and some 22,000 French lost in the whole retreat to Torgau on the Elbe, including 13,500 prisoners and 43 guns, and he adds that the pursuit at Dahme on 7 September brought in about 3,200 more prisoners. He also gives about 43,000 Prussians engaged, and says the French Army of Berlin lost more than a third of its strength. We have not found a second independent source for these numbers, so they are given here as his estimates.5
Bülow, who had also commanded at Grossbeeren, was made Count Bülow von Dennewitz in 1814. In October the Allies defeated Napoleon in the decisive battle of Leipzig, his first great defeat in Britannica's words, where Ney was wounded. That battle is told in our article on Leipzig.6
Also on this day
- 1941: Battle of Changsha. In the second Japanese attempt to take Changsha, capital of Hunan, the Japanese 11th Army fought the Chinese National Revolutionary Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
