13 April in military history: Battle of Bergen, 1759

13 April 1759 · 267 years ago

Frankfurt in French hands

The French had taken Frankfurt am Main, a free city of the Holy Roman Empire, and held it in the spring of 1759. According to the Annual Register for 1759, the city gave them the course of the Main and the Rhine and linked them with the imperial and Austrian armies, so much depended on driving them out. Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick commanded the allied army whose task was to defend Hanover, the German electorate of King George II, and with it the western flank of Prussia. The Annual Register says he left about ten or twelve thousand men to guard the electorate and watch the bishopric of Münster, and led thirty thousand men against the French. Thomas Carlyle puts Ferdinand's army at rather under 30,000 and Broglie's at 35,000.¹

The French commander was Victor-François, Duke of Broglie. A map of the battle printed at The Hague in 1759, now in the Royal Collection, calls him Lieutenant-General of the King's Armies and commander of the Army of the Main, and records the day as a French victory over the allied army of Prince Ferdinand.²

Part of Ferdinand's army had just come back from operations against the army of the Empire. On 10 April Ferdinand marched from the Fulda area by Freiensteinau and Büdingen and on the 12th reached Windecken. Broglie was waiting for him at Bergen, a village between Frankfurt and Hanau. The London Gazette called it a very strong post that the allies had to take before they could reach the French line. According to the Annual Register, Broglie made the village the right of his line and covered his center and flanks so well that an attack could only be made there.³

The assault on Bergen

The allied army came up opposite the French at about nine in the morning, and the grenadiers of the advance guard attacked Bergen between nine and ten. They met a heavy fire that the defenders had prepared for them. The Hereditary Prince of Brunswick took part in the attack; Bernhard von Poten, in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, names him as Charles William Ferdinand and says he led the advance guard.⁴

Prince Johann Casimir of Isenburg-Birstein, whom Poten describes as a lieutenant general in the service of Hesse-Kassel, brought up battalions to support the attack, the three leading battalions of the left column he commanded according to Poten. He was killed. Poten writes that a musket ball struck him in the chest as soon as he came under fire and that he died on the spot. The Annual Register counts three attacks in about two hours, each one beaten back. The attackers could not clear the French from the village and fell back in some disorder; the Gazette says they rallied when the Hessian horse came up in support, while Poten writes that Isenburg's battalions were swept away by the Hereditary Prince's retreating troops and only the Hessian and Hanoverian cavalry saved them from complete defeat.⁵

Accounts of the order of the attacks differ. Carlyle has Isenburg leading the first assault and the Hereditary Prince coming in on the flank, while Poten argues that the course of the fight disproves the story that Isenburg had asked Ferdinand for the honor of attacking first.⁶

Cannon until nightfall

According to the Annual Register, Ferdinand saw that the French still held firm and that his own troops were falling into some disorder, and he began to think of a retreat while his losses were still small; but the day was not yet half over, and a retreat in the face of a victorious enemy was dangerous. He moved his troops as if to fall on the village again and on the French left at the same time, and kept up a furious cannonade, while the French stayed in their positions and answered it. Carlyle tells the afternoon differently: the battle lay quiet, Ferdinand maneuvered in sight of the French to draw them out, made a languid attempt on their wings toward evening, and went on cannonading until deep in the night. Carlyle also writes that Broglie had strictly forbidden his men to leave their ground, and that one or two French regiments that went after the allies against orders were nearly cut up.⁷

The Gazette's report from Ferdinand's headquarters put it in one line: "The rest of the Day passed in a Cannonade on both Sides, without any Ground being gained on either." Ferdinand withdrew to Windecken; according to the Annual Register and Carlyle he went after nightfall, with little or no pursuit. The Gazette adds that before leaving he gave orders to bury the dead and carry off the wounded.⁸

Good Friday in Frankfurt

The battle was fought on Good Friday, as both Goethe and the town of Bad Vilbel, which remembers the day as "Bloody Good Friday", record. Johann Wolfgang Goethe was then a child in Frankfurt, and a French officer, the king's lieutenant, was quartered in his father's house; Goethe remembered seeing Broglie in those days, "always cheerful". He and the other children were forbidden to leave the house: "The battle began: I ascended to the garret, where indeed I was prevented seeing the country round, but could very well hear the thunder of cannon and the general discharge of musketry."⁹

After some hours, Goethe wrote, wagons of wounded men passed the house on their way to the convent of St. Mary, which had been turned into a hospital, and the townspeople handed them beer, wine, bread and money. When wounded and captured Germans appeared among them, "the pity knew no limits". According to the town of Bad Vilbel, the guns were said to have been heard as far away as Friedberg, Hanau and Gelnhausen, 30 kilometers away as the crow flies.¹⁰

Counting the cost

The Gazette's report, dated at Windecken on 14 April, said the allied loss was not exactly known but was supposed not to exceed 1,000 men. Five guns had been left behind in the village. The same report listed Isenburg among the dead and two generals, named as Gilsoe and Count Schulembourg, among the wounded.¹¹

Later figures are higher. The Annual Register put the allied loss at "about two thousand in every way" and wrote that the French loss "was by no means less considerable". Carlyle gives Ferdinand 2,500 killed and wounded and says the French counted their own loss at about 1,900. The town of Bad Vilbel's heritage text gives other figures again: 22,000 allied soldiers against 30,000 on the French side, and about 6,000 dead.¹²

From Bergen to Minden

The French kept Frankfurt and the advantages it gave them, and they had time to bring up reinforcements. The Annual Register wrote that "the progress of the French arms was very rapid after the battle of Bergen", and Ferdinand fell back. In E. Graf zur Lippe's article in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, Ferdinand himself called the battle a "coup manqué", a failed stroke, and the superior numbers of Marshal Contades forced him to withdraw far from Frankfurt. According to Carlyle, Broglie was made a prince of the Holy Roman Empire and a marshal of France.¹³

Ferdinand's answer came at Minden on 1 August 1759, where he defeated the French. In Walther Mediger's article in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, that victory turned back an invasion that directly threatened Hanover.¹⁴