Battle of Kolín, 1757: Frederick the Great's first defeat

Frederick II opened the 1757 campaign by invading Bohemia. On 6 May he beat the main Austrian army outside Prague and shut its survivors up inside the city. While he besieged them, Field Marshal Leopold Joseph von Daun gathered a relief army in eastern Bohemia and began to move west. Frederick sent the Duke of Bevern with about 24,600 men to hold him off, and on 13 June set out with reinforcements to join Bevern himself.²

Two armies on the imperial road

The armies met near the Elbe town of Kolín. Frederick's scouts reported that the whole of Daun's army stood before him, which he was slow to believe. On 17 June the Prussians began to edge north toward the Kaiserstrasse, the main highway across Bohemia, but Daun shifted his army during the night, and on the morning of the 18th the Austrians held a chain of low hills along the south side of the road, from the Przerovsky hill in the west to the village of Krzeczhorz in the east.³

The numbers were against the king. Kronoskaf, the Seven Years' War project, counts about 54,000 Austrians against about 33,000 Prussians; BritishBattles.com gives 44,000 men and 145 guns against 32,000 men and 88 guns, and Carlyle 60,000 against 34,000. Bevern and Zieten urged him not to attack. According to BritishBattles.com, the king, with eight victories over Austria behind him, could not believe that a Prussian attack might fail.⁴

The plan comes apart

His plan was the oblique attack that served him so well elsewhere. The army would march east along the highway past Krzeczhorz, then wheel south and fall on the open end of the Austrian line while the rest of the army hung back. Frederick studied the Austrian position from the upper floor of a wayside inn, usually identified as the Golden Sun, briefed his generals around midday, and early in the afternoon the columns moved off in the heat.⁵

The first blow landed. General Hülsen's infantry stormed Krzeczhorz and pushed into the oak wood beyond, and General Zieten's hussars drove back Nádasdy's light horse. But Daun had shifted his own line east to meet the move, and Hülsen found Austrian infantry where he had expected an open flank. Behind him the plan dissolved. On the Prussian right, General Manstein, harassed by Croat skirmishers, turned off the road and attacked the Przerovsky hill on his own. In the center Frederick himself ordered Prince Moritz of Anhalt-Dessau to face his infantry to the right at once, short of the planned turning point; Moritz protested, the king insisted in a heated exchange, and Moritz led his men straight up the slope west of Krzeczhorz instead of following Hülsen. The oblique attack had become a string of frontal assaults uphill into massed Austrian guns, and Hülsen was left without support.⁶

Cavalry decides the day

For a time the battle hung in the balance, and Kronoskaf notes that at one stage a Prussian victory looked close. Austrian reinforcements came up, however, and fire from the oak wood stopped Zieten's squadrons. General Krosigk led the Prussian cavalry reserve into the Austrian infantry and was killed, struck from the saddle by canister according to BritishBattles.com, while Kronoskaf has him killed in a fall from his horse; Colonel Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz carried the charge on and broke several Austrian regiments before his exhausted squadrons scattered.⁷

The last Prussian infantry went in on the left under Bevern. Then the Saxon cavalry serving with Daun and Austrian dragoons, among them the Netherlands regiment of de Ligne, charged into the Prussian flank and rear. Kronoskaf adds that earlier in the evening, before the Prussian cavalry reserve went in, Daun had begun to order a retreat, until a Saxon officer, Lieutenant Colonel Benkendorf, judged the order premature and persuaded his commander, Nostitz, to attack instead. Several Prussian battalions were ridden down, and the line gave way along the whole ridge. Legend has Frederick shouting at wavering infantry, "Dogs, do you want to live forever?"; BritishBattles.com gives it only as an anecdote, and Carlyle dismissed it as pure myth.⁸

Counting the cost

Hülsen in Krzeczhorz and Zieten's hussars covered the retreat, and the tired Austrians did not pursue. Frederick rode off the field and handed the army to Bevern and Prince Moritz. The losses were lopsided. Kronoskaf lists 13,776 Prussian casualties, among them 5,380 prisoners, with 45 guns and 22 colors lost, against about 8,100 Austrians; BritishBattles.com gives 13,768 Prussians and 9,000 Austrians.⁹

From Kolín to Rossbach

On 20 June Frederick abandoned the siege of Prague and withdrew into northern Bohemia, and before long his army was pushed out of the kingdom altogether. The defeat encouraged his enemies: Swedes and Russians threatened his eastern provinces, and a French army with the troops of the Holy Roman Empire marched toward Saxony. In a dark summer the king also learned of his mother's death. Yet within five months he had recovered. He crushed the French and imperial army at Rossbach on 5 November and the Austrians at Leuthen on 5 December. Kolín showed Europe that Frederick could be beaten, and it made Daun the most respected Austrian commander of the war, the man who would beat the king again at Hochkirch in 1758.¹⁰ › Battle of Prague, 1757