Battle of Ocaña, 1809: the rout that opened Andalusia

Sir Charles Oman, the great historian of the Peninsular War, could not speak of the Spanish general at Ocaña with patience. For rashness and vacillation, he wrote, Areizaga's generalship outdid that of any other Spanish general in the whole war. William Napier, the other great British historian of the war, was harsher still: Areizaga, he wrote, rushed like a maniac into the midst of his foes and then stood still, trembling and bewildered. On 19 November 1809, on a bare plain 60 kilometers south of Madrid, the best army Spain had fielded in a year was destroyed in a morning.²

Background: the Junta's gamble

By the autumn of 1809 Spain had been at war with Napoleon for a year and a half. In December 1808 the emperor himself had retaken Madrid and installed his brother Joseph as king, and the Supreme Junta, the government of free Spain, now sat at Seville. In July 1809 a British and Spanish army had beaten the French at Talavera but then fallen back, and in August the Spanish Army of La Mancha was defeated at Almonacid.³ › Battle of Somosierra, 1808

Undeterred, the Junta planned an autumn offensive to retake Madrid. The Army of the Left in the north and the Army of Estremadura in the west would draw French attention, while the Army of La Mancha under General Juan Carlos de Areizaga struck for the capital from the south. Oman calls it the best army seen under Spanish banners since the battle of Tudela a year before, newly clothed and equipped, with sixty guns and an unusually large cavalry, but uneven in quality and poor in morale. Napier, for his part, blames the Junta's folly for the whole enterprise.⁴

Armies and commanders

Areizaga had taken over the Army of La Mancha after Almonacid. Oman describes him as a general known only for fighting, with no reputation for skill, though of proven personal courage. His army set out from the passes of the Sierra Morena at the beginning of November with eight infantry divisions and more than 5,000 horse; prisoners told the French it was over 50,000 strong.⁵

On the French side the nominal commander was King Joseph, with Marshal Nicolas Soult directing operations as his chief of staff. Under them were Marshal Édouard Mortier's 5th Corps, General Horace Sébastiani's 4th Corps, which included a Polish division from the Duchy of Warsaw and a German division under General Leval, the king's guards and a large mass of cavalry, while Marshal Victor's 1st Corps operated on the flank.⁶

The Polish division had fought in Sébastiani's corps at Almonacid on 11 August 1809, where it attacked head on and took heavy losses. The historian Dawid Madziar calls Almonacid the bloodiest battle the division fought in Spain, and notes that its soldiers distinguished themselves again at Ocaña.⁷ › Battle of Almonacid, 1809

The campaign in phases

The dash on Madrid

Areizaga began well. Marching fast, at nearly fifteen miles a day by Oman's reckoning, he burst into La Mancha so suddenly that, in Napier's phrase, rumor barely had time to precede him. Soult and Joseph were taken by surprise; for a few days there was little between the Spanish vanguard and Madrid but Sébastiani's Poles and General Milhaud's dragoons near Aranjuez. In a skirmish before Ocaña the French horse fell back behind their infantry, whose fire threw back the pursuing Spanish cavalry.⁸

Then Areizaga stopped. He halted for several days, nervous about Victor's corps on his flank, while the French gathered troops from every quarter. When he moved again it was not straight at Aranjuez but east, to cross the Tagus at Villamanrique and come at Madrid from that side. When Victor's corps came up in front of him he lost his nerve, took his army back across the Tagus, broke his bridges and turned back toward Ocaña to recover his road south.⁹

The cavalry battle of 18 November

On 18 November the French crossed the Tagus at Aranjuez and their leading cavalry ran into Areizaga's horse between Ontígola and Ocaña. Sébastiani attacked at once. His light horse broke the Spanish front; the Spanish general massed his reserves into a single great column, and the French dragoons charged into it and broke it too. The Spanish lost some 80 men captured and several hundred killed and wounded; among the few French dead was General Paris, commander of the light cavalry. Oman calls it the largest cavalry fight of the whole Peninsular War, and it left the Spanish horse badly shaken for the next day.¹⁰

The battle of 19 November

Next morning the French found Areizaga's army drawn up in two lines on either side of the town. Oman counts some 46,000 Spanish infantry and 5,500 cavalry, Napier 45,000 and 7,000, both with 60 guns. Against them Oman gives the French 27,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry, about 33,500 in all, and Napier 24,000 infantry, 5,000 cavalry and 50 guns. Victor's corps was still far off. Soult, by Oman's and Rickard's account, would have waited for it, but Joseph insisted on attacking at once before the Spaniards could slip away.¹¹

The ground did the Spanish no favors. A ravine ran past the north of the town, deep in the west and shallow in the east. It covered the Spanish left so well that those troops could neither attack nor be attacked, while on the right the line ran out across open ground with nothing but the shaken cavalry to guard its flank. Oman writes that there was, so to speak, no position at Ocaña at all.¹²

Soult's plan used that weakness. The Polish and German infantry would attack the Spanish right, supported by Girard's division of Mortier's corps; General Sénarmont massed thirty guns against the Spanish center; and the cavalry under Sébastiani, hidden by olive groves and folds of ground, would swing around the open flank. Dessolles's troops faced the town, and the king held his guards in reserve.¹³

The attack began badly for the French. As Leval's Germans and the Poles pressed in, the Spanish infantry of the right suddenly counterattacked, threw them back in disorder and wounded Leval; Mortier himself was hit. Mortier brought Girard's division up through the broken first line and steadied the fight.¹⁴

Turning point: the cavalry on the flank

Then the French cavalry came in. It drove off the Spanish horse in minutes and turned on the infantry, charging the flanks of the first and second lines before most battalions could form square. A whole column, about 6,000 men by both Oman's and Napier's accounts, was cut off and laid down its arms. The fugitives ran back into the troops still fighting in front and carried them away, and as the right broke, Dessolles crossed the ravine and took the town.¹⁵

Areizaga, who had issued few orders, sent conflicting instructions to his left wing and then left the field. Only Zayas's division on the far left kept its order, fighting a rearguard action for several miles until it too broke near Dos Barrios. The rest of the army broke and fled across the plain toward Dos Barrios and the Sierra Morena with the French cavalry in pursuit, taking prisoners by the thousand until nightfall. Victor's cavalry, arriving from the east, captured the Spanish baggage train.¹⁶

Aftermath

The two great histories disagree on the cost. Oman puts the Spanish loss at about 4,000 killed and wounded and 14,000 prisoners, with thirty flags and fifty of the sixty guns, and the French loss at about 90 officers and 1,900 men, almost all in the divisions of Leval, the Poles and Girard. Napier gives 5,000 Spanish killed and wounded and some 18,000 rank and file taken, against 1,700 French killed and wounded. Rickard's modern summary follows Oman's figures, and adds that three weeks later only some 21,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry were back with Areizaga.¹⁷

The disaster left Andalusia open. In January 1810 Soult led the French over the Sierra Morena, Seville fell the same month, and the Junta fled to Cádiz, which became the seat of Spanish resistance. Ocaña, together with the defeat of the Army of the Left at Alba de Tormes eight days later, ended the Junta's attempt to win the war with regular armies in the open field.¹⁸

Legacy and memory

Ocaña became a byword for Spanish military failure in the British histories of the war. Oman blamed the Junta's insistence on an offensive as much as the general, but concluded that responsibility reduced Areizaga to vacillation; Napier saw the whole campaign as madness. Both stressed how much the battle turned on cavalry: the Spanish chose to fight on a vast plain where everything depended on the mounted arm, and theirs had already been beaten.¹⁹

For the French it was one of their cleanest victories in Spain, won by a smaller army against a larger one in a few hours. For Poland it is part of the long Spanish service of the Duchy of Warsaw's troops. The Polish infantry stood in the first line of the attack and took the brunt of the Spanish counter-charge, and with Leval's Germans and Girard's division it suffered most of the French losses.²⁰