Battle of Rossbach, 1757: Frederick the Great's ninety-minute victory

Few battles were decided so quickly or so completely. At Rossbach the French and Imperial commanders tried to march around Frederick the Great's flank, believed he was running away, and blundered into a cavalry charge and then a wall of Prussian musketry. The fighting lasted less than an hour and a half. Coming after a summer of defeats, the victory restored the name of the Prussian army, and across Germany it was cheered far beyond Prussia's own borders.²

Who won the Battle of Rossbach and why?

Prussia won, decisively. Frederick the Great's 22,000 men beat about 41,000 French and Imperial troops because the allies marched around his flank in long columns, convinced he was retreating. Hidden by a low ridge, Frederick swung his whole army around, Seydlitz's cavalry broke the allied horse, and Prussian volleys shattered infantry that never deployed.³

A desperate autumn for Prussia

The Seven Years' War had turned against Prussia in 1757. Frederick was beaten by the Austrians at Kolin on 18 June and had to give up the siege of Prague. His enemies went over to the offensive. The Russians invaded East Prussia and beat a Prussian army at Gross-Jägersdorf on 30 August; a French army overran Hanover, the home state of Prussia's British ally; and a second French army under Prince Soubise joined the Reichsarmee, the army of the Holy Roman Empire, to drive the Prussians out of Saxony.⁴ › Battle of Gross-Jägersdorf, 1757

Frederick had to split his forces. He left the bulk of his army to watch the Austrians and marched west with only some 20,000 to 25,000 men, about half the strength of the enemy he went to meet. He reached Gotha in mid-September, but for weeks the allies would not give battle, and threats elsewhere kept pulling him away: in October Austrian light troops even raided Berlin.⁵

The campaign had its lighter moments. When the Prussians marched out of Gotha, French troops moved into the town, and Seydlitz rode back with a small force of cavalry and chased them out again, a first glimpse of what his horsemen could do.⁶

In late October the allies at last moved east toward Leipzig, and Frederick turned to meet them. He concentrated his scattered corps at Leipzig, where Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, Prince Moritz and Field Marshal Keith brought in their troops, and found his soldiers in high spirits and eager to fight after weeks of marching.⁷

Two very different armies

Frederick's army was small but finely tuned. Years of drill and annual reviews let Prussian battalions change formation and direction faster than any other army in Europe, and its cavalry was superbly drilled. It also had, in Major General Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz, a cavalry leader of rare skill.⁸

The allied army was the opposite: large, divided and hungry. The Reichsarmee was a patchwork of contingents from many small German states, of very uneven quality, and soldiers from the Protestant states had more sympathy for Lutheran Prussia than for the Catholic emperor they served. Supplies were short, and by early November the Imperial troops were living on whatever food they could find among the peasants.⁹

Command was divided too. Prince Soubise led the French and Prince Joseph of Saxe-Hildburghausen, an Austrian field marshal, led the Reichsarmee; the sources disagree on which of the two held the higher authority, but it was Hildburghausen who pressed for an attack. When Frederick rode out to look at the allies, BritishBattles.com says, he found about 41,000 men, though rumor made them 60,000. The Project Seven Years War gives the detail: 30,200 French and 10,900 Imperial troops, against some 16,600 Prussian infantry and 5,400 cavalry. EBSCO, rounding differently, puts the allies at about 45,000 against 22,000 Prussians.¹⁰

Maneuvers on the Saale

At the end of October Frederick reached Weissenfels on the Saale and found the French escaping across the river and burning the bridge behind them. On 3 November his columns crossed the Saale at several points, at Weissenfels, Merseburg and Halle, and joined again west of the river before the allies could fall on any one of them.¹¹

Frederick rode out to look at the allied camp near Mücheln and found it too strong to attack: to assault it at odds of two to one, Reddaway writes, would have invited a second Kolin. He drew back under cannon fire and camped on a line between the villages of Bedra and Rossbach, with his headquarters in Rossbach itself. In the allied camp the bands played, and the Prussian withdrawal was taken for fear.¹²

That suited Frederick. Short of food, the allies could not stay where they were for long, and he meant either to strike them when they moved or to follow on their heels when hunger forced them to retreat.¹³

The allied plan

On the morning of 5 November the allied council of war adopted Hildburghausen's plan: march south and east around the Prussian camp and strike its left flank from the heights. Getting the army moving took hours. The Project Seven Years War describes Soubise insisting on a new order of battle and waiting for foragers to return, so the march began only around 11:30 in the morning. BritishBattles.com paints the columns as noisy and loose, with bands playing and the regiments spreading out the further they went.¹⁴

The plan was bold but careless. The allied generals believed Frederick's army to be far smaller than their own, and their chief fear was that he would slip away to Merseburg before they could catch him. So their cavalry hurried ahead, the infantry followed as best it could, and the whole long column moved with its left flank turned toward the Prussians, behind a ridge that hid what Frederick was doing.¹⁵

To hold Frederick's attention while the columns marched, the French light troops of Saint-Germain stayed behind on the heights around Schortau, facing the Prussian camp from the west and firing their guns as if they meant to attack.¹⁶

Frederick's decision

Frederick watched from the attic of a building in Rossbach, the inn or the manor house in different accounts. At first he would not believe the reports that the allies were trying to go around him. Just after 1 p.m. he saw the allied cavalry and infantry swinging around his left and grasped what they were doing. He ordered his army to march east at once and gave command of all 38 squadrons of cavalry, about 4,000 horsemen, to Seydlitz, over the heads of more senior officers.¹⁷

Within minutes the Prussian tents were struck. The army broke camp at about 2:30. Seydlitz's horsemen disappeared behind a low ridge, the Janus Hill, while the infantry followed at the double. From the allied side it looked like a retreat toward Merseburg. Soubise and Hildburghausen ordered a fast pursuit, and their cavalry trotted ahead of the infantry columns.¹⁸

Seydlitz's charge

Prussian tradition remembers Seydlitz waiting for the moment with a short clay pipe in his mouth, and tossing it into the air as the signal to charge.¹⁹

At about 3:15 p.m. a Prussian battery on the Janus Hill opened fire on the leading allied cavalry. On that signal Seydlitz led his horsemen over the crest in two lines and fell on the front and right flank of the allied squadrons while they were still climbing toward him. Austrian cuirassiers and hussars tried to counterattack, and French squadrons came up behind them, but the Prussians wheeled and struck them in turn. By 4 p.m. the allied cavalry was in full flight, some of it riding through its own infantry. Seydlitz rallied his squadrons instead of chasing them off the field.²⁰

The infantry collapse

Now the Prussian infantry came over the heights in echelon and swung into line, its left under Field Marshal Keith leading. The French and Imperial infantry were still in marching columns, a formation poorly suited for fighting. Artillery fire tore gaps in them, and the French attack columns pressed to within about 40 paces before Prussian volleys stopped them. In the words of the Project Seven Years War, a few salvoes were enough to rout them. As the allied infantry dissolved, Seydlitz charged again into its flank.²¹

By 4:30 the battle was over. Some French, Swiss and German units stood their ground for a while; a Swiss brigade and some Imperial troops covered the retreat, and the light troops of Saint-Germain and Loudon, posted west of the field, helped shield the flight. Darkness ended the pursuit. That evening Frederick found the castle where he meant to sleep full of wounded French officers.²²

Why the allies lost so badly

Three things went wrong for the allies at once. First, they misread what they saw: an army that vanished behind the Janus Hill looked like an army in retreat, and they hurried to cut it off instead of finding out where it had gone. Second, they marched with their cavalry far ahead of the infantry, so Seydlitz could destroy the horse before the foot came up, and the infantry then met a deployed Prussian line while still in column, unable to answer volley with volley. Third, Frederick's army could turn and form line faster than any other in Europe, and he used that speed to exploit the mistake within about an hour.²³

Counting the losses

The Prussian loss was small: 548 killed and wounded by the count of the Project Seven Years War and BritishBattles.com, 549 in EBSCO's. Allied losses are much less certain. BritishBattles.com gives 6,600 French and 3,552 Reichsarmee troops killed, wounded and captured, and EBSCO about 10,000 in all. Carlyle, working from the older German accounts, put the total at about 8,000, most of them prisoners. The Project Seven Years War, which cautions that exact figures are unknown, counts 72 guns taken; Carlyle gives 67 or 72.²⁴

After Rossbach

The beaten armies fled west, broke apart and left Saxony, and Frederick followed them only as far as he needed to be sure they would not rally. For the rest of the war the French fought mainly in western Germany, against the army of Ferdinand of Brunswick, and never again marched so far east.²⁵

Frederick did not wait. Within days he was marching east, because the Austrians had taken Breslau and were overrunning Silesia, and on 5 December, a month after Rossbach, he beat them at Leuthen.²⁶

Britain drew its own conclusions. King George II repudiated the Convention of Kloster-Zeven, under which his army in Hanover had capitulated to the French, and a new army was formed for the defense of Hanover under Ferdinand of Brunswick, lent by Frederick, with British troops serving in it.²⁷

For France the battle was a humiliation, and the beaten generals were mocked even in Paris. In Germany, by contrast, people far beyond Prussia cheered the defeat of the French invaders; EBSCO suggests that the battle gave an impetus to German national feeling. The memory lasted: after Napoleon beat Prussia at Jena in 1806, French troops pulled down the monument to Rossbach on the battlefield.²⁸

For Frederick himself, Rossbach vindicated his army and his leadership after the disaster of Kolin. But the same army could still be caught napping: the next year it was surprised at Hochkirch.²⁹