Napoleonic Wars: Retreat from Moscow 1812

Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:

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[Music][Applause] In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia with the largest army Europe had ever seen. However, the decisive victory remained frustratingly out of reach. Russia’s resilience was unlike anything he had encountered before, and as winter approached, his army began one of the most infamous retreats in history.

On September 15, 1812, 83 days after invading Russia and a week after a costly victory at Borodino, Napoleon entered Moscow. He expected to be greeted by dignitaries formally offering the city’s surrender, but instead found that 90% of Moscow’s inhabitants had fled. A fire had started the previous night, blamed on drunken soldiers, and over the next 48 hours, fires continued to break out across the city until most of it was ablaze. Count Fodor Raevsky, the city’s governor, had ordered that Moscow be destroyed rather than allowed to fall into enemy hands. Fires were started deliberately by criminals freed from jail, and French soldiers rounded up and shot any they could catch, but the inferno was impossible to contain. In four days, two-thirds of Moscow was destroyed.

With the fires finally under control, Napoleon’s soldiers turned their attention to looting the ruined city. From his new quarters in the Kremlin, Napoleon sent a letter to Emperor Alexander in St. Petersburg, inviting him to make peace and end the war, but he received no reply. As days passed, Napoleon grew increasingly uneasy. Raids were disrupting vital communications with Paris, and the steady attrition of French forces, coupled with Russian reinforcements, meant he was outnumbered for the first time in the campaign. Rumors reached him that his reluctant allies, Prussia and Austria, were in secret talks with his enemies.

Napoleon had proposed that the army winter in Moscow, but that now seemed too dangerous. Reluctantly, he accepted that the army would have to move back to Smolensk to find safe winter quarters. He knew how severe Russian winters could be but continued to delay his departure, reassured by the fine October weather and hoping for a last-minute message from Alexander offering peace. It never came.

On October 13, the first light snow fell. Five days later, the Russians launched a surprise attack on Napoleon’s advanced guard at Vitebsk and defeated it. Stung into action, Napoleon ordered the army to leave Moscow the next day. 100,000 men of the Grand Army left Moscow in a column 10 miles long, with an estimated 40,000 carriages and carts, including women and children, army wives, and cooks. Every wagon was stuffed with as much food and loot as possible.

As they set off, Sergeant Buon of the Imperial Guard made an inventory of his pack, which contained various items, including food, clothing, and personal effects. This heavily encumbered army did not yet realize it was in a race against time. The Russians were beginning to move against the flanks of Napoleon’s army. That very day, Raevsky’s army was driving back Marshal Ney’s outnumbered force at Tarutino.

Napoleon planned to withdraw via Kuga through unspoiled country where the army could forage for supplies, but Raevsky sent General Dokhturov’s Sixth Corps to block the road at Maloyaroslavec. Fierce fighting ensued, and the Italians of Ney’s Fourth Corps drove the Russians out of the town. It was a hard-won victory reminiscent of the fighting at Borodino. Raevsky now stood between Napoleon and Kuga.

Napoleon took the unusual step of conferring with his marshals and decided that rather than seek another major battle, they would retreat the way they had come along the Smolensk road. He had hoped to avoid this route as it meant marching back through territory already stripped bare of supplies. The day after the fighting at Maloyaroslavec, Napoleon was nearly captured by a group of Cossacks and was saved only by General W. S. charging at the head of his escort. After this close call, Napoleon had a file of poison made up, which he carried around his neck in case of capture.

The army set off on its new course, shadowed at a distance by Raevsky’s army. They passed the old battlefield of Borodino, a grim site where crows pecked at half-buried corpses. Relentless marching quickly began to tire out men and horses. A few days later, the temperature fell below freezing, and the army’s overworked, starving horses began to die en masse. Discipline broke down as some drivers dumped the sick and wounded by the roadside to ensure their own survival.

As the French column became increasingly strung out, General Miller-Radovich, commanding Raevsky’s advanced guard, attacked the rear guard outside Viazma. For a few hours, the French first corps was cut off until Ney and Oudinot came to their rescue. The battle ended with street fighting in Viazma as the French hastily evacuated the burning town. For the soldiers of the Grand Army, unaccustomed to retreats, Viazma was a demoralizing blow.

On November 4, it began to snow heavily. The next night, temperatures plummeted to minus 20 degrees Celsius. Few men or women had proper winter clothing or access to shelter, and many froze to death. Overnight, wagons and guns were abandoned, and many soldiers sought to save themselves, ignoring officers, stealing horses and food, and leaving the column to scour the countryside for supplies. Many of these foragers were found by the Cossacks, some cut down or lanced, others robbed of every possession and left to freeze.

As the army struggled towards Smolensk through blizzards, Napoleon ordered Jan’s Fourth Corps to strike out for Vitebsk, where there were large French supply depots. However, Vitebsk had already fallen to the Russians, and Fourth Corps was too weak to fight its way through, rejoining the army minus its artillery and most of its baggage. A colonel who saw Fourth Corps at this stage described men without shoes, almost without clothes, exhausted and famished, sitting on their packs, sleeping on their knees, and only rousing themselves to grill slices of horse meat or melt bits of ice.

Just three weeks after leaving Moscow, a third of the army was dead or captured. About half of the rest formed a growing army of stragglers, men without units prepared to fight only to survive. Napoleon reached Smolensk on November 9. The first troops into town ransacked the supply depots, leaving nothing for those who followed, including Ney’s rear guard, which arrived six days later. Napoleon had hoped to make Smolensk his winter base, but the state of the army and lack of supplies meant the retreat had to continue. However, the five days he spent there gave Raevsky time to circle ahead and prepare an ambush.

When the French retreat resumed, Raevsky struck 30 miles west of Smolensk. In three days of desperate fighting through knee-deep snow, Napoleon used his Imperial Guard to hold open the road as Ney and Oudinot’s corps fought their way through the ambush with heavy losses. Two regiments of the Young Guard were ordered to make a sacrificial counterattack to keep the Russians at bay and were virtually annihilated. Raevsky held back many of his troops and was blamed for not trying to destroy Napoleon’s army when he had the chance. It’s possible he was concerned about the number of raw conscripts in his own army also suffering terribly in the freezing conditions.

Not every French corps broke through at Krasnoye. Marshal Ney and his 6,000-strong rear guard arrived on November 18 to find the road blocked by 60,000 Russian troops and no sign of the promised support from Oudinot’s First Corps. Ney’s men held themselves against the Russian lines with desperate courage but were mowed down, rejecting several invitations to surrender. Ney led the survivors in a daring night crossing of the Neman River, then across 45 miles of open country under constant attack from Platov’s Cossacks to reach Pora. By the time Ney rejoined the army, his rear guard was down to just 800 fighting men, leading a column of several thousand stragglers. The army regarded his escape as a miracle, and when Napoleon heard of it, he immediately dubbed Marshal Ney the bravest of the brave.

Napoleon had escaped one trap, but now three Russian armies were closing in from different directions and outnumbered him nearly three to one. From the east, Raevsky’s main army with 65,000 men; from the north, Wittgenstein with 30,000, steadily driving back Marshal Victor’s Ninth Corps; and from the south, Admiral Chichagov’s army with 34,000, having detached General Ostermann-Tolstoy with 30,000 to prevent Scharenberg’s Austrians and Renier’s Saxon Corps from marching to Napoleon’s aid.

Napoleon was heading for Minsk, a major French supply base with vast stores of food, clothing, shoes, and ammunition that his army desperately needed. But on November 21, disastrous news arrived: Minsk had fallen to Chichagov. He then marched on Barisov, driving out the Polish garrison and capturing its bridge over the Berezina River. By rights, the Berezina should have frozen solid by now, allowing Napoleon to cross anywhere, but a sudden thaw had turned the river into a torrent of ice and freezing water.

Napoleon was at least joined by the hard-fighting Marshal Udo and his Second Corps, which hadn’t suffered as badly as the main column on its retreat from Tarutino. Udo launched an immediate counterattack on Barisov and retook the town but couldn’t stop the Russians from burning the bridge. With no other bridge for miles in either direction, it seemed Napoleon’s exhausted army was finally doomed. However, there was one sliver of hope: Polish cavalry had found a ford across the river near the village of Stoudenka.

Napoleon issued a flurry of orders: Second Corps was to fake preparations for a river crossing south of Barisov, while Victor’s Ninth Corps, arriving from the north, was to form a rear guard east of Stoudenka to hold the Russians at bay while engineers worked as quickly as possible to build pontoon bridges across the river and give Napoleon’s army a fighting chance of escape.

On the afternoon of November 25, General Elad’s engineers began building two pontoon bridges across the Berezina River. They worked day and night, sometimes chest-deep in freezing water, and completed both bridges in less than 24 hours. Few of the engineers survived the ordeal. Chichagov had been totally fooled by the diversion south of Barisov and was moving his troops south to face it, allowing Napoleon’s army to begin crossing its rickety bridges virtually unopposed. Udo’s Second Corps led the way to secure a bridgehead, followed the next day by the remnants of the main army. Priority was given to formed troops still able to fight; for the time being, the army’s vast crowd of stragglers remained on the far bank.

By the time Chichagov realized his mistake and began moving north, Napoleon had troops in place to defend the crossing on the east bank. General Parton’s 12th Division, 4,000 relatively fresh troops from Victor’s Ninth Corps, formed the rearguard as Platov’s Cossacks approached from the east. The vanguard of Raevsky’s main army tried to rejoin the Ninth Corps but, caught in a swirling blizzard with visibility down to 50 meters, marched straight into Wittgenstein’s army. His entire division was killed or captured.

The next morning, Chichagov and Wittgenstein launched coordinated attacks on both sides of the river. There was desperate fighting on the west bank, where Marshal Udo was yet again seriously wounded, but his Swiss infantry held the line until General de Merck’s cavalry charged and routed the Russians at great cost. Polish and German troops of Victor’s rear guard held off the Russians until dark, then pulled back across the bridges.

For two nights, officers had been trying to get the vast camp of stragglers to cross the bridges when they weren’t being used, but with temperatures reaching minus 30 degrees Celsius, they preferred to stay put, huddled around their fires. At dawn on the 29th, with the army leaving and the Russians approaching, thousands of stragglers surged in panic towards the bridges. Dozens were crushed underfoot; others fell or were pushed into the water or tried to swim, which was certain death. When French engineers burned the bridges at 9:00 a.m., thousands were cut off and left to the mercy of the advancing Cossacks. Some became prisoners; others were simply put out of their misery.

Since the retreat began 43 days earlier, the Grand Army had marched nearly 500 miles under constant attack, starved, exhausted, and for the last 23 days in lethal subzero temperatures without proper clothing or shelter. In that time, the fighting strength of the Grand Army had been reduced from around 124,000 men to 20,000, with as many stragglers still following. As the retreat continued, the weather turned even worse, with temperatures falling to minus 37 degrees Celsius. The Russian armies held back, leaving the winter Cossacks and Russian peasants to finish off the invaders.

On December 5, Napoleon left the army, traveling incognito across Europe at breakneck speed and reaching Paris in just 13 days. Naturally, English satirists capitalized on Napoleon seeming to abandon his defeated army, and many soldiers regarded it as an act of betrayal. However, his generals supported his decision to leave; there had already been one attempted coup against Napoleon in Paris, and there was much work to be done to rebuild the army and reassure France’s allies.

On December 9, 51 days after the retreat began, around 20,000 ragged survivors of the Grand Army began crossing the Neman River back into friendly Polish territory. According to legend, Marshal Ney was the last man across.

Napoleon’s invasion of Russia had proven to be one of the greatest military disasters in history. He had made fatal miscalculations about geography, logistics, and above all, Russia’s political and strategic response to his invasion. These blunders cost his empire around half a million men, as well as a quarter of a million horses and a thousand cannons. Put another way, of every 12 men who marched into Russia with the Grand Army, one was killed in action or died of wounds, two were taken prisoner (one of whom died in captivity), seven died from disease or the effects of climate, and just two returned alive.

Contrary to myth, many more soldiers had died in the summer advance from heat, typhus, and dysentery than were lost in the winter retreat. Russian military casualties were estimated at 150,000, along with a significant but unknown number of civilian deaths. The Russian campaign was a catastrophe for Napoleon, not just in lost troops and resources but in damage to prestige and reputation. That winter, all his enemies sensed weakness and prepared to join forces against him. But the emperor wasn’t going down without a fight. Back in Paris, he admitted to his ministers, “Fortune has dazzled me, gentlemen. I’ve let it lead me astray. Instead of following my plan, I went to Moscow. I thought I’d make peace there. I stayed too long. I’ve made a grave mistake, but I’ll have the means to repair it.”

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This version removes any explicit or sensitive content while maintaining the overall narrative and historical context.