25 July in military history: Land battle of Aboukir, 1799

25 July 1799 · 227 years ago

The Ottoman counterstroke

The French had occupied Egypt, an Ottoman province, since 1798. In the spring of 1799 Bonaparte failed to take Acre in Syria and in June he was back in Cairo.¹

In mid-July an Ottoman army came by sea and landed in Aboukir Bay, east of Alexandria, backed by the British naval officer Sidney Smith. It stormed the redoubt and the fort of Aboukir, and then dug in on the peninsula instead of advancing inland. Its commander was Mustafa Pasha; Bonaparte and Berthier, his chief of staff, both put the force that landed at about 15,000 men.²

Two lines, two attacks

Bonaparte gathered his troops and attacked on the morning of 25 July, with Murat commanding the advance guard. His cavalry broke through between the wings of the first Ottoman line and cut them off, and the men ran into the sea, where they drowned trying to reach their boats.³

The second line held a fortified village and a redoubt in the center, flanked by gunboats. General Fugière, attacking the Ottoman right, was badly wounded. Lannes's battalions then stormed the redoubt, while Murat's cavalry got between the Ottomans and the fort and cut off their retreat. The rout was complete, and once more the fugitives were driven into the sea. Bonaparte credited the victory above all to Murat, who was wounded.⁴

A pasha prisoner

Mustafa Pasha was taken prisoner. Bonaparte wrote the next morning that he was wounded in the hand, and the accounts collected by the French official historian La Jonquière, which differ on how he was taken, mostly also describe a wound to his hand. In Cairo the chronicler al-Jabarti heard that the French had beaten the troops landed at Aboukir and captured Mustafa Pasha.⁵

Counting the drowned

Nobody counted the Ottoman dead exactly, and the figures differ widely. Bonaparte wrote of 10,000 to 12,000 drowned on 26 July and of 8,000 the next day; Berthier has two thousand left on the field and ten thousand men throwing themselves into the sea. The historian Darrell Dykstra estimates that perhaps 2,000 were killed and twice as many drowned.⁶

For the French, Bonaparte reported 100 killed and 500 wounded, and Berthier 150 killed and 750 wounded.⁷

The rest of the Ottoman army held out in the fort of Aboukir under bombardment until it surrendered about a week later.⁸

A victory and a departure

Pauline Lefebvre, writing for the Fondation Napoléon, judges that the victory went some way to making up for the defeat of the French fleet in Aboukir Bay in 1798. Dykstra judges that it disrupted but did not end Ottoman and British opposition to the French in Egypt.⁹

A few weeks later, on the night of 22 August 1799, Bonaparte secretly sailed for France, leaving most of his army behind under General Kléber. In 1801 a British army under Abercromby landed in Egypt, as told in our story of the battle of Abukir, 1801.¹⁰

Also on 25 July: Lundy's Lane, 1814

On the evening of 25 July 1814 the American army of Major General Jacob Brown, which had beaten a British force at Chippawa, attacked the troops of Lieutenant General Gordon Drummond at Lundy's Lane, almost within sight of Niagara Falls. Once reinforced, the British had about 2,800 men.¹¹

The fighting swayed back and forth around the British guns on the hill until about midnight, when the Americans withdrew and left the British holding the field. The British general Riall was wounded and captured, and Brown was wounded. Both commanders claimed the victory in their reports. Each side lost more than 850 men, and it was one of the bloodiest battles of the war. The Americans fell back, and their offensive in Upper Canada was over.¹²