One could find a multitude of similarities between Napoleon’s attack on Russia in 1812 and Germany’s attempt to conquer the Soviet Union in 1941. The similarities range from advances and victories on Russian soil to retreat in bitter cold and eventual defeat for the attacker.
But to understand the world one has to look beneath the surface of a phenomenon and penetrate to its essential truth. A historical study of the two military actions will reveal differences that outweigh the similarities by several magnitudes.
In this essay I will give a short (and condensed) history behind Napoleon’s attack on Russia, then I will show the essential differences with the German attempt, finally I will outline a short and preliminary strategy to successfully attack and conquer Russia (in the winter no less).
The Grand Armée Marches East
Why did Napoleon and his Grand Army of a half million soldiers from all over Western Europe (French, Dutch, Italian, German, Polish, etc.) march east in the summer of 1812 and attack the vast open space of holy mother Russia? To give a satisfactory answer to this question we have to return back to the second half of the fifteenth century and follow the historical developments up to that fateful attack.
In the fifteenth century a new epic in European history started after a breakdown of about 200 years that witnessed decline in population and economic activity. The development of large-scale-short-distance water transport made possible light-scale-long-distance travel (i.e. using big cargo ships to store enough water and food to transport small but valuable amounts of gold and spices).
The first country to sally forth was Portugal (going south) followed by Spain (going west), then by the Netherlands (after its independence from Spain). The two major players on the world stage were the last to enter the game (they effectively became the last by preventing anyone else from following their example); France and England didn’t join the colonial club until the seventeenth century.
Now Europe was split into two camps and smaller countries had to choose a side between the big two, either England or France. The showdown had to follow and one winner had to emerge. The showdown came in the middle of the eighteenth century and its known in history as the Seven Years War.
At that time England had a strong aggressive Navy with competent leadership and crews, but France had a bigger army and a strong network of fortifications to defend itself. To prevail England needed a strong land based ally that would take on the task of fighting France’s strong army on behalf of England, they found this ally in Frederick the Great of Prussia.
With France under pressure to defend itself on the continent, England was able to put pressure on France overseas and so emerged at the end as the victories and dominant nation in Europe. From this point until the First World War England will dominate in one form or another, even when challenged by others.
After the end of the war the bills had to be paid, for England that was easy they had rich colonies that they could squeeze, unfortunately they got a little too greedy and squeezed their richest colonies (the American colonies) a little bit too much and they subsequently lost them, but then advances in the Indian subcontinent more than made up for the difference.
The French on the other hand dumped the whole amount on the back of their citizens, while the aristocracy, which stood to gain the most from the war, contributed nothing. As the economy declined the pressure from the population increased, until all blew up in what history calls the French Revolution.
If one would judge the French Revolution with the English philosophy of Empiricism one would have to conclude that it’s an Extra-ordinary and Super-natural phenomenon. The French Republic went against the common sense that had prevailed in Europe for 300 years. Wealth was generated without access to overseas colonies or even overseas trade, Armies were built without elites to lead them, un-drilled soldiers attacked and withstood attack against the odds, and an elected body gathered all powers of the state and concentrated them in itself; new tactics new politics new ideas new men: a nation resurrected from its ashes, pulling itself by the bootstraps, withstood the attack of all the monarchies of Europe and prevailed. France shook the world, but England was still at the top.
As if all this was not enough to worry the English the French followed their success against the coalition of monarchies with a return to the world stage and the European game of colonial conquest. They didn’t just plant their flag on some deserted island, conquer a stone-age kingdom that time had forgot or set up trading posts on the periphery of Asian land empires. No, the French return was just as extraordinary and spectacular as their resurrection; under the leadership of a young and brilliant general the French attacked and conquered Egypt!
This was the East, the seductive and mysterious East. The birthplace of civilizations and religions, the seat of the world’s oldest kingdoms and empires, the forbidden East that was only accessible in the poetry of Tasso. For 500 years, since 1291, the East was forbidden to the Europeans and dreams of conquest had to be realised in distant lands. Any attempt at conquest ended with failure and defeat, while an aggressive Ottoman dominion conquered a good part of Europe and dominated the Mediterranean for a while.
After Egypt the French marched north on paths taken by the crusaders centuries before and along battlefields that had witnessed their triumphs and defeats. The triumph of this expedition had as big an impression on Europe as did the conquering of the whole American continent. People underestimate its effect now that the idea of Western superiority over the East has become ingrained in the Western historical view, but when it happened it was seen as something extraordinary.
The Egyptian adventure like most French projects started spectacularly, then rapidly declined and ended with little to show for. Despite its strategic failure the adventure greatly rattled the English (and inspired them) and when the leader of this expedition gained supreme power in France he naturally assumed the role of public enemy number one, his name was Napoleon Bonaparte.
Bonaparte’s rise was, of course, spectacular, but decline set in quite quickly. His elevation from First Council to Emperor was a sign of trouble and weakness and not of strength as the surface appearance of the phenomenon might imply. Bonaparte’s solution to stop the decline was to use the assets built by the Republic to secure his hold on power.
If France had a navy and had kept a foothold in Egypt he would have expanded the French possessions in the East, but they had neither; what France had was a strong and disciplined army with years of experience behind it and an officer corpse that had risen from the ranks to top command. The French army was the best in Europe and Emperor Napoleon was the best man to lead it.
It looked like history came back to where it was exactly fifty years before, two warring camps, one English the other French; England defended by its strong navy and France main strength its army. According to the English philosophy of Empiricism: What worked the first time must work the second time. England, with its coffers overflowing with colonial booty, started financing continental allies to attack France and defeat it on land.
But the times were not the times, Napoleon prepares a flotilla to invade England, he marches at neck-break speed from one side of Europe to the other, and he defeats armies that outnumber him; In 1805 Napoleon defeats the combined armies of Russia and Austria in Austerlitz, and next year he defeats the Prussians in Jena and emasculates the Prussian state (1806).
After the failure of Austria and Prussia to stop France, Russia takes the lead. The old ally of the Seven Years War becomes the last hope of England to destroy the ogre of Europe, but Napoleon meets the Russians and defeats them (barely) at the Battle of Eylau (1807), carves out a buffer state (the Duchy of Warsaw) and at the edge of the Russian Empire he meets the Emperor of Russia, embraces him like a brother and seal a treaty of friendship with him (Treaty of Tilsit, 1807).
The English seeing the inability of their allies to defeat Napoleon land in Portugal and use it as base to attack the French and their ally Spain. In 1808 Napoleon himself arrives in the Peninsula to dislodge the English once and for all, but political turmoil in France means that he has to leave the job unfinished having only succeeded in turning the Spanish from allies to a conquered land, sparking a popular uprising counted today as one of the reasons of Napoleon’s demise (an opinion I don’t share).
He conquers Italy, The Netherlands, and Switzerland, install his own family to the thrones of Europe, imposes his will on the oldest dynasties of Europe, but all that is a sign of weakness and not strength. He has to invade and conquer because they won’t come by themselves; he has to install his own family on the thrones of Europe because none of its dynasties has accepted him; while the image is of a rising eagle the reality is a sinking rock.
In 1809 Austria breaks its treaty and war follows, Napoleon takes the battlefield again and defeat the Austrian again, this time taking the daughter of the Emperor as his wife (an unimaginable humiliation to the old haughty Emperor). Napoleon thinks that by making the Austrian Emperor the grandfather of his heir is a grantee to have him as France’s ally, not realising that such an arrogant monarch would only give his daughter to a Corsican upstart if he had already wrote her off completely.
In 1811 Emperor Napoleon was at his apogee, with his new wife giving him a male heir. But Napoleon’s real enemy were the English, they were the ones instigating and financing all those who actually engaged him on the battlefield and Napoleon had left England in command of the seas with overseas colonies supplying the English coffers with vast sums of gold and gold has a hold on the hearts of men much stronger than sealed treaties of friendship.
When the Russian Emperor broke his treaty with Napoleon and resumed trade with England giving it an entrance to the markets of Europe, he did not just weaken France’s strategic position but delivered a blow to the ego of Napoleon himself, shattering his illusion of acceptance to the established dynasties of Europe. Instead of attacking the real enemy, England, or trying to gain overseas colonies to compete with England in their own game Napoleon chose the least effective response: Attacking Russia.
What did he want to achieve, the same thing he achieved in Jena & Austerlitz: defeat the Russian army then impose his will on the Russian Emperor. The idiocy of this course is mind boggling, but Napoleon, even at his apogee, was in a very weak position and he had few cards left for him to play. The decision to attack Russia was a desperate decision, a last throw of the dice either win all or lose all. Economic, political and social pressure forced Napoleon to become a shark ever on the move never able to stop; if he ever should stop he would sink immediately to the bottom.
So the Emperor marshals his Marshals and calls on his allies (read dependents) to send him troops, he musters half a million soldier; numbers not seen in Europe since the might of the Persian Empire crossed the Hellespont, if only Napoleon learned the lesson of their mistake. In the duchy of Warsaw they gathered and crossed into the empty wilderness that is holy mother Russia, many did not cross back.
Napoleon played his role perfectly he marched his soldiers against the odds engaged the enemy on their ground and defeated them in a set battle, only the times were not the times. Unlike the Prussians and the Austrians the Russians withdrew leaving their capital and refusing to meet Napoleon and negotiate with him (read be dictated by him). Napoleon had achieved Moscow, but Moscow was not Russia. Now he had two options: go back with nothing to show for, risking an explosion from all the built up pressure, or stay in Moscow. He stayed and Moscow went up in flames.
When Moscow burnt Napoleon had no other choice but to retreat. The retreat is famous, but reality is different than myth. The cold made life very difficult but it didn’t kill them, the strategy of scorched earth adapted by the Russians when retreating meant that the French army could not live on the ground and needed supplies to retreat, supplies that Napoleon planned to extract from the Russians after defeating them, just like he did with the others before. Everybody quotes Napoleon that an army marches on its belly, what they forget to add is that retreating armies will march on their dead.
Napoleon spent the assists of the Republic to build his empire, in 1813 all was used up. The French army was no longer the strongest or the best led, its tactics were obsolete, its élan outmatched by the patriotic enthusiasm of the new armies emerging from all over Europe. The English success in Spain led them all the way to France. Bonaparte’s own family put their own interests before his survival (as if they had any hope without him) his Marshal’s put their own interests before the welfare of the Empire. Spectacular rise, rapid decline and nothing to show for at the end.
Lebensraum for the German Nation
Similarities between 1812 and 1941 are many, but I will concentrate here on the differences. In 1941 most of continental Europe was under the control of Germany, there existed a treaty of friendship between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had vast amounts of resources, including the new strategic resource of oil, the might of the German army fuelled by Soviet resources were a formidable combination.
One would assume that the English tried their old trick and bribed the Soviets with their colonial gold and turned it against Germany, but the times were not the times and the old Russia was long gone, the new Russia was an emerging giant, combining both resource rich country with modern heavy industry and cheap labour all under a powerful central government. English gold had little effect here; although the British Empire in 1941 was much larger than the colonial possessions of England in 1812, they had much less gold if any left by that time.
So the times were not the times and the men were not the men. Napoleon was an empiricist, no doubt due to English dominance of his times, he tried a strategy against Prussia and Austria and it worked so he tried the same strategy against Russia. Hitler on the other hand was an idealist; he had risen to power on anti-Communist program, consolidated his power by smashing the German left and the workers, so now he was going to use the whole might of the German Nation to conquer, not his bitter enemy England, but his friend, bread basket and tank station: The Soviet Union!
He didn’t invade because he was under pressure to do something, he didn’t invade because the actions of the Soviet Union weakened the strategic position of Germany, and he didn’t invade to impose his will. Why did he invade? Because according to Hitler the German nation needed living space, so he set out to conquer the Ukraine, then depopulate it (wholesale genocide) and colonise it with Germans. Instead of buying the resources he needed to build an empire, he decided it was cheaper to attack his ‘friend’ and posses himself of all the resources in one easy quick campaign.
Then he can descend at his leisure on India and destroy the body of the British Empire while its head lay intact in England. A land bridge with his real ally, Japan, was a welcome side effect. So the plan was made: The Germans attack in the west and the Japanese attack in the east. Of course it was easer to divide the Russian bear before killing it. The Japanese attack in the east fizzled out quickly (battle of Khalkhin Gol) and the initiative passed from the army to the navy, which had its eyes on another target and quite another foe.
As to the Germans they went ahead and attacked and got crushed; did the cold kill them? Well the cold made everything difficult, but reality was different than myth. In my opinion it was philosophy that defeated both attacks, their mistaken and deficient philosophies killed them long before the first snow fell.
Finding the Holy Grail: In Three Simple Steps
Many have wrote about Napoleon’s attack on Russia and even more about Germany’s invasion, most who wrote discussed ‘mistakes’ that were committed and of course by exposing ‘mistakes’ one (sometimes inadvertently) presents the ‘correct’ way to achieve the goal. Now this is a curious way to find the true and certain path to success™, it would be like learning to perform surgery by studying two operations where the patients died on the table and the surgeons were disbarred for gross negligence.
No, to find the true and certain path to success™ one has to study success and not failure. The history books are filled with stories of success: The Mongols invaded successfully and for three centuries the Russians were a vassal of the Golden Horde, the Ottomans conquered vast areas and held them for a long time and of course the Finns achieved spectacular results on the battlefields of the Winter War.
If one would study these successes combined of course with all the failures-we can always learn from failure-not only the two discussed above but also other less famous failures, one would conclude that a successful invasion of Russia would be achieved if the following three conditions were met:
Attack at winter: The winter is as much a problem for the Russians as any attacker even if he should come from the tropics; the only difference is a better preparation for the winter. When the winter came in 1941 the Soviets attacked with Siberian troops adapted and trained to fight in winter conditions and obtained their first success since the start of the invasion, the regular troops were more hampered by the cold than the Germans.
The Germans had their own winter-adapted troops (Mountain Divisions) and they were more successful in winter conditions than the Soviets, the few divisions they had were sent to the Finnish-Soviet border area. The Finns themselves, in the Winter War, had great success because their soldiers were much better trained for the winter conditions, while the regular Soviet soldier was trained to fight in the summer and not the winter and so was at a disadvantage.
If one wants to conquer Russia then he must prepare for the task and attack with an army able to fight in the worst conditions just as good as in the best conditions, if one has such an army than it makes strategic sense to use the winter to ones advantage and against the Russian’s themselves (ancient armies stopped fighting at night and modern ones only fight at night).
Attack along a North-South axis: If one would study the history of colonial penetration of Africa and Asia one would notice that it usually follows the major river systems; the English start at Calcutta and move inward to Delhi, they start at Alexandria and move inward to Cairo and subsequently to the Khartoum; the French take a foothold at Saigon and then move inward into Indochina, build New Orleans then move inward all the way up to Montana along the Mississippi.
Napoleon had to cross the Niémen then the Viljia then the tributaries of the Dnieper, finally he reached the shores of the Moskova 300km from the Volga, but in reality it was as far away as the Yangtze in China. All had to be crossed again on the retreat, crossing the Berezina had to be done under bombardment from the Russians guns.
From the German invasion we will look at the experience of Army Group South, they had to cross three major natural obstacles to achieve their objectives set for them before the invasion. They had to cross the Dnieper, they crossed it; they had to cross the Don, they crossed it; they had to cross the Volga, they…they reached the shores of the Volga and to effect its crossing had to take one city of little importance in history before and since, it was called: Stalingrad. Their failure to take it, and thus cross the Volga, marked the turning point in the war for the German Nation.
Rivers in Russia flow from north to south (south to north in Siberia), hence any successful attack on Russia must follow a north-south axis. If two theoretical armies would start at the mouth of the Don and the Volga and follow these two rivers upstream they will end up in a position surrounding Moscow; one from the north and the other from the south, they could then easily envelope the hart of Russia and crush it. The march upstream has other benefits: open supply roots, flank protection and a natural root of entrance to the heartland, where the water goes out the invader can come in.
Attack fully supplied: When the English attacked the Sudan (Egyptian army with English officers) they had to cross the desert plateau from the last cataract (counting from the source) to the more tropical part of the Sudan where the Mahdi forces were situated. In this area they could expect nothing of value to a modern army on the march except sun, sand and the water of the Nile.
When the River War ended, two years later, the English had climbed the cataracts, crossed the desert, assembled modern steamers upriver, constructed a 400 km railway line, crushed the Mahdi army, prevented the French from taking a foothold in East Africa and established a land connection between Egypt and Kenya, both of which were under their rule; all that they achieved with only sun, sand, the water of the Nile and what they brought with them from home.
Simple-minded people might think that Russia is very different from the Sudan, and since geographers have decided that Russia is a European country then the conditions of Russia are similar to those found in Europe. The essential truth of most phenomena is different to the outward image; similarly most maps do not show the essential truth but only give an image of the land. Thus one would look at a map of Russia and see a vast area of land, millions of square kilometres, and think that to invade such a land would be like invading any European country but bigger, unfortunately (or luckily) the difference is not quantitative but instead qualitative.
Before invading Russia one has to prepare a map of it coloured with two different colours: The first blue, like the vast open ocean, with it one should colour most of the land; the second bruin with it one should colour an island in the heart of the blue vastness, a small island with an area less than nineteen thousands square kilometre and in the heart of this island is Moscow, to conqueror Russia one has only to achieve this island.
One would have to take all supplies that he needed to cross the vast blue wilderness, just like crossing an ocean, then be prepared to take a beachhead on the bruin island in the middle, taking the island will be completely different to marching through the blue wilderness.
Taking this island will be like fighting the Japanese on Okinawa, but once the island is taken then a central base could be set up and from it armies could march to subdue the four corners of Russia, paralleling the expansion of the Russians themselves who went out from this little island and built an empire that covered more than twenty-four million square kilometres.
To assume, as did the Germans, that Russia was just like any other country but bigger is a folly, a deadly folly. To assume, as did Napoleon, that it sufficient to enter Moscow to be victories is madness, a fatal madness. One can’t expect to find anything of value in the blue wilderness of Russia except what is available in any other wilderness were people never lived or settled. The Germans needed roads but only found mud, the Mongolians needed grass for their horses and they found plenty of it; that’s the difference between a failed invasion and three centuries of domination.
