On 3 July 1863, the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, some 12,000 to 12,500 Confederates under James Longstreet's command attacked the Union center on Cemetery Ridge in Pickett's Charge and were thrown back with heavy losses. Lee began his retreat the next day. On 3 July 1866 Prussia defeated Austria at Königgrätz.
Battle of Wyoming, 1778: the Wyoming Valley massacre
3 July 1778 · 248 years ago
In Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley, Patriot militia were attacked by Loyalist rangers and Iroquois warriors during the American Revolutionary War. The Patriots were almost wiped out, many killed while fleeing, which is why the clash is also remembered as the Wyoming Massacre.
Read the full story of Battle of Wyoming, 1778: the Wyoming Valley massacre ›Battle of Königgrätz
3 July 1866 · 160 years ago
Pickett's Charge
On 3 July 1863, the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, Robert E. Lee made his last attack on the Union center on Cemetery Ridge. At about 1 p.m. the Confederate guns opened a bombardment, and the artillery of both sides dueled for about two hours. Then, under James Longstreet's overall command, Pickett's division and the troops of Pettigrew and Trimble moved out: some 12,000 men by the National Park Service's count, approximately 12,500 by the American Battlefield Trust's, crossing open fields toward the Union line. The first day of the battle is told on our page for 1 July.1
Lee wrote in his report that his artillery had nearly exhausted its ammunition in the long cannonade and could not support the infantry, and the Trust also notes that the Confederate guns were running low. The right of the column broke into the Union line and took some of its guns, but it was driven back. One of Pickett's brigade commanders, Lewis Armistead, was mortally wounded.2
The Park Service puts Lee's loss at over 5,000 men in one hour, the Trust at 6,555 casualties in less than an hour. The next day, 4 July, Lee began his retreat to Virginia. Our article on the Battle of Gettysburg covers all three days.3
Königgrätz, 1866: “Catastrophe unavoidable”
In 1866 Moltke sent three Prussian armies into Bohemia on separate routes, meaning them to unite only for battle. The Prussian infantry carried the breech-loading needle gun, the Austrians muzzle-loaders. Austrian losses in the first encounters were heavy, and Benedek fell back towards the fortress of Königgrätz on the Elbe.4
According to the Austrian official history, at half past eleven on the morning of 1 July Benedek telegraphed Emperor Francis Joseph, without anyone around him knowing: "Bitte Euere Majestät dringend, um jeden Preis den Frieden zu schliessen; Katastrophe für Armee unvermeidlich" ("I urgently beg Your Majesty to make peace at any price; catastrophe for the army unavoidable"; our translation). The emperor replied at ten past two: "Einen Frieden zu schliessen unmöglich" ("To make peace impossible"; our translation), and asked whether a battle had taken place. Helmut Schmeller also writes that Benedek asked the emperor to make peace at once and that Francis Joseph refused.5
Orders at midnight
On 2 July reconnaissance told Prince Frederick Charles, commanding the Prussian First Army, that the Austrians stood in strength on the little river Bistritz, and he prepared to attack. King William I commanded the Prussian armies in person, with Moltke as chief of the general staff. His chief of staff, Voigts-Rhetz, took the news to the King at Gitschin, who ordered the Crown Prince to advance with his whole force. An order signed by Moltke told the Crown Prince, commanding the Second Army, that he "will at once make the necessary arrangements to advance with your whole force to the support of the Ist Army against the right flank of the expected advance of the enemy, and will attack as early as possible". It went out at midnight, one copy with the King’s aide-de-camp Count Finkenstein, and the Crown Prince writes in his diary that Finkenstein and Blumenthal, the Crown Prince’s chief of staff, woke him with it.6
Benedek’s Army of the North, with the Saxon corps, stood behind the Bistritz with the Elbe and the fortress at its back. The Prussian General Staff history estimates its fighting strength at 206,000 and gives the Prussian armies 220,984 men by their official returns, of whom only the 123,918 of the First Army and the Army of the Elbe were engaged at the start; Robert Epstein gives the same two totals. The Austrian official history gives Benedek’s army, Saxons included, 174,902 infantry, 23,798 cavalry and 16,328 artillerymen; taking 220,982 Prussians from the Prussian work, it concludes that the Prussians would have been superior by only 6,000 combatants. Gregory Ference gives 240,000 Austrians and Saxons against 245,000 Prussians.7
Held on the Bistritz
The First Army began to advance at about four in the morning in drizzling rain, which lasted until late afternoon according to Henry Hozier, who reported the campaign in letters to The Times. The Austrian history says the sky stayed overcast all day, that it rained and that thick fog filled the low ground. By its account Benedek reached the height between Chlum and Lipa at about half past eight and stayed there, with short breaks, through the battle; his own orders of 2 July had named the heights of Chlum as his post in a general action.8
Dennis Showalter writes that the First Army pinned itself down in an abortive frontal attack against entrenchments supported by artillery, while the Army of the Elbe made slow progress against the Austrian left. Hozier describes Fransecky’s 7th Division, in the woods on the Prussian left, as cut to pieces, and the Crown Prince’s diary records Fransecky begging for artillery. As the generals looked to the left for the Second Army, the King, Hozier writes, "gazed stedfastly through his glass, looking in vain through the misty air".9
“He is coming!”
Hozier writes that the Crown Prince had promised to be on the field at two o’clock and was there with two corps at half past twelve, his artillery engaging the batteries on the Austrian right. In the Crown Prince’s diary, his troops march through pouring rain on obliterated paths, and Blumenthal, hearing the guns, tells him: "This is the decisive battle". The Prussian General Staff history has General von Hiller’s 1st Guard Division in possession of Chlum by a quarter to three, and Hozier, who calls the village the key of Benedek’s position, has the Guard seize it then. The Austrian history has the Guard break in between two and half past two. Both Hozier and the Austrian history write that Benedek could not believe the report, rode toward Chlum and was met by fire that struck his staff.10
Later in the day the men of the 27th Infantry Regiment told the Crown Prince, in Frances Welby’s 1902 translation of his diary: "We all knew that you would come to-day; we had a hard stand in the wood at Sadowa, till all at once we heard, He is coming! He is coming! Then everything went well again, but it was high time that you did come".11
Retreat or rout?
Hozier writes that Benedek sent reserves to retake Chlum. Showalter writes of suicidally sacrificial counterattacks that enabled the battered remnants of the army to withdraw across the Elbe. Accounts of the retreat differ. Hozier writes that the Austrians kept their formation and never let the retreat become a rout, and Ference credits a skillful retreat covered by artillery. The Prussian General Staff history describes, out of the pursuers’ sight, a "spectacle of wildest flight and utter rout" before Königgrätz, whose gates the fortress kept closed until 11 at night. The same history adds that the field first gave the impression of an orderly retreat and that the Saxons kept their order.12
Counting the cost
The Prussian General Staff history puts Prussian losses at 359 officers and 8,794 men, and those of the Austrian and Saxon army at 44,200 officers and men, of whom 19,800 were prisoners; 160 Austrian guns and one Saxon gun were taken. The Austrian official history counts 1,313 officers and 41,499 men lost by the imperial army, 330 officers and 5,328 men of them killed, and 187 guns; it gives the Saxons 55 officers and 1,446 men and the Prussians 360 officers and 8,812 men. Hozier reported an Austrian loss of almost 40,000 men and a Prussian loss of under ten thousand; Ference gives about 43,000 Austrians, around half of them captured, about 1,500 Saxons and about 9,000 Prussians.13
Riding over the battlefield that day, the Crown Prince wrote: "War is an appalling thing".14
A name and a new Germany
The Crown Prince writes that when he met the King on the field at sunset, the King accepted his proposal to name the battle after Königgrätz. Hozier also called it the victory of Sadowa, after the village on the Bistritz, and Ference places the battle near Sadowa and Königgrätz, today Sadová and Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic.15
Ference writes that the battle determined the outcome of the war, and Showalter that it convinced Austria to request an armistice on 22 July. According to Schmeller, Austria agreed in the Armistice of Nikolsburg on 26 July to give up its role in German affairs and accept a North German Confederation under Prussia, terms confirmed by the Treaty of Prague on 23 August. Showalter writes that Bismarck brokered this compromise while sparing Austria humiliation. The Czech foreign ministry calls the battle the largest military clash ever fought in the Czech lands and links Prussia’s victory in the war of 1866 both to the unification of Germany under Prussia in 1871 and to the creation of Austria-Hungary in 1867.16
