3 November in military history: Battle of Torgau, 1760

3 November 1760 · 265 years ago

A camp too strong to attack head on

The Seven Years' War, which began in 1756, was fought largely over Silesia, which Frederick had seized from Austria in the 1740s and Austria hoped to win back. At the end of October 1760 Field Marshal Leopold von Daun's Austrian army took up a strong position on the heights west of Torgau, on the Elbe in Saxony, ground that Prussian troops had held and fortified themselves in 1759. Frederick resolved to attack it.¹

Ponds and marshy ground covered the southern approaches, so Frederick split his army. He led three columns on a long march through the Dommitzsch forest to fall on the Austrians from the north, while General Hans Joachim von Zieten was to attack the heights from the south.² › Battle of Torgau, 1760

Ten grenadier battalions against massed guns

The march went wrong: the cavalry column fell far behind in the forest. Daun learned where the Prussians were heading and turned his army to face north, with his artillery massed against them. At about 2 p.m., hearing cannon fire from the south and believing that Zieten was already engaged, the king attacked at once with ten battalions of grenadiers, the best of his infantry, before the rest of his army had come up.³

The Austrian artillery tore the attack apart. The grenadiers lost most of their men, and by about 3 p.m. their remnants fell back in disorder. Further attacks of infantry and cavalry followed into the dusk, and none of them took the heights.⁴

Both commanders hit

During these attacks Frederick himself was hit on the chest by a spent canister ball, which left only a heavy bruise. At nightfall he handed the rallying of his battered infantry to General Hülsen and rode back to the village of Elsnig for the night.⁵

Daun was out of the fight too. Wounded in the leg, he stayed in command until the Prussian attacks from the north had been beaten off, then went into Torgau to have the wound dressed and handed command to General O'Donnell.⁶

Zieten at dusk

Zieten had spent the afternoon in a long-range artillery duel with the Austrian corps of General Lacy. Frederick had given him his orders privately, by word of mouth. Carlyle, who could not say how far Zieten was to blame for the delay, notes that the king thought it considerable.⁷

Toward evening, pressed by his generals, among them Saldern and Lieutenant Colonel Wichard von Möllendorf, Zieten attacked the village of Süptitz, which went up in flames. By its light the Prussians saw that the Austrians had left the earthworks above two ponds unguarded, and Saldern's brigade, with Möllendorf, crossed the dam between the ponds and gained the heights. From the north General Hülsen brought up two fresh battalions and the men he had rallied and fell on the Austrian flank, riding on a cannon because his horses had been shot. The storming of the Süptitz heights late in the evening decided the battle.⁸

Around 9 p.m. the Prussians held the field. In the night the Austrian army crossed the Elbe at Torgau and fell back toward Dresden. Later anecdote books had the king wandering among the soldiers' fires before dawn and meeting Zieten in the woods with embraces; Carlyle called that story “evidently mythical, though dramatic”.⁹

The cost, and the road to peace

The losses were heavy on both sides. The Prussian General Staff history and Tempelhof, as quoted by Carlyle, put the Prussian loss at 13,000 to 14,000 men, several thousand of them prisoners. The Austrians admitted about 11,000; the Prussians took 7,000 to 8,000 prisoners, 45 guns and 29 flags, and Tempelhof put the whole Austrian loss at more than 20,000.¹⁰

The Austrian army was not destroyed: Daun kept Dresden, and Frederick held the rest of Saxony for the winter. The war ended with the Peace of Hubertusburg between Prussia, Austria and Saxony, signed on 15 February 1763, which left Silesia with Prussia.¹¹