Battle of Raszyn
Sacile - Teugn-Hausen - Vistula campaign - Raszyn - Abensberg - Landshut - Eggmühl - Regensburg - Neumarkt - Ebelsberg - Piave - Aspern - Sankt Michael - Stralsund - Bergisel - Raab / Győr - Graz - Wagram - Korneuburg - Stockerau - Gefrees - Hollabrunn - Schöngrabern - Znojmo - Walcheren
The Battle of Raszyn took place on April 19, 1809 between an Austrian army and the army of the Duchy of Warsaw during the Fifth Coalition War . It was the only meeting of the main opposing forces in the Austrian campaign against the duchy . The battle was not a decisive battle, but the Austrians achieved their goal of conquering the Polish capital, Warsaw .
prehistory
In March 1809 the 7th Corps of the Austrian Army was set up near Cracow under the command of Archduke Ferdinand Karl . It comprised over 31,000 men with 7,300 horses and 94 guns. His task was to occupy the Duchy of Warsaw. Depending on the development of the situation on the main theater of war and the behavior of Russia and Prussia, it should serve as a political bargaining chip.
Believing that the Polish army was at Sochaczew , Ferdinand moved his corps to Odrzywol, 12 kilometers south of the Pilica river, at the beginning of April . On the afternoon of April 14th, an Austrian officer handed over the declaration of war to Polish Uhlans on the stone bridge over the Pilica in Nowe Miasto . At 7 a.m. on April 15, 1809, Ferdinand marched into the duchy without encountering any resistance.
The duchy was not prepared for an invasion. The bulk of his army was on the orders of Napoleon against the anti-French popular uprising in Spain . In the duchy itself and in Danzig there were no more than 12,000 men, almost without exception without combat experience. The commander in chief was Prince Poniatowski . Since the end of March he had gathered all available troops in Warsaw.
While Ferdinand was pushing light Polish equestrian associations in front of him, he circulated a thousand times a proclamation calling on the duchy to apostate from Napoleon. It was unsuccessful - in contrast to a call by Poniatowski for a popular riot . On April 16, Poniatowski took up a position near Raszyn , two hours' walk south of Warsaw, to await the attack by the Austrians. A Saxon corps of 2,200 men with 14 guns would not let him down and stayed with him. It was not marched home as ordered by King Friedrich August .
Poniatowski's position
Poniatowski had 12,500 to just under 14,000 men and about 30 guns. The center of his position, initially occupied by five Polish and three Saxon battalions, was the village of Raszyn, through which the post road to Warsaw ran from south to north. To the south of it was a bridge that crossed the Utrata Stream. Its banks were partially flooded like a swamp as a result of the spring melt. The villages of Michalowice to the west and Jaworow to the east of Raszyn, also with bridges over the Utrata , occupied Poniatowski with two battalions and four to six guns each. Behind Raszyn he positioned a regiment of hunters on horseback , on the terrain accessible for horses in front of Michałowice three cavalry regiments and one in the apron of Falenty . This village to the south of Raszyn, protected on the southern edge by an alder forest, was raised east of the road and could be reached from Raszyn on a dam over the Utrata, but otherwise completely surrounded by damp terrain with sodden paths.
When it became clear to Poniatowski that the battle was imminent, he had Falenty evacuated on the morning of April 19 and occupied by three of his five Polish battalions with six guns and expanded for defense. This is where the Austrians' approach should be stopped first.
course
Ferdinand had made slow progress, especially since he had marched towards Sochaczew in the first few days. On the 17th he turned east on Tarczyn near Biala . On the evening of the 18th, Poniatowski's observation force withdrew from there north to Raszyn. Ferdinand followed her on April 19 along the Poststrasse to Warsaw with his bulk , four infantry and four cavalry regiments with 16 guns.
Around 1 p.m., the chief of the advance guard to the east of the road, Lieutenant General Johann Friedrich von Mohr , about two kilometers south-east of Falenty, next to a lonely inn in a lowland, saw a Polish Uhlan regiment who had sat up and remained calm . Ferdinand, who had been informed by him, turned from the road to the east and ordered his cavalry to advance in advance of the attack. Thereupon the Polish regiment trotted off in the face of the superior force in the direction of Falenty and disappeared into the alder forest. Ferdinand regrouped his troops and at 3 p.m. he sent the Mohrs infantry regiment towards the Falenty forest, while his four infantry regiments with four squadrons of hussars marched northeast towards Jaworow with the goal of Warsaw. The battle for Raszyn was on.
While the battle for Falenty began, a detachment left behind by Ferdinand as flank protection of around 500-600 horsemen and six-gun infantry under Feldmarschallleutnant Karl August Freiherr von Schauroth had gone west across the Poststrasse, where it was with the numerically superior Polish cavalry collided under Rosniecki. Schauroth managed to deceive Rosniecki about his strength, so that he withdrew to Michailowice. He had averted the danger of Ferdinand being caught in the left flank and from behind in front of Falenty.
After about an hour of fighting, the defenders of the grove and then those of Falenty were about to turn to escape when Poniatowski galloped over the dam from Raszyn to Falenty amid a swarm of staff officers at the head of a cavalry. In doing so, he not only made his soldiers turn back, but gave them so much vigor that they threw the Austrians out of the village again. Then there was a pause in action.
In the meantime, Schauroth's infantry, supported by the cavalry regiments drawn in from the center, had spread so far to the east that two companies could push against Falenty, i.e. in the rear of the Polish position. The Austrian artillery concentrated its fire on the place, in the late afternoon a new attack began, this time also from the west, and after hard fighting, the Falenty's crew fell back over the dam on Raszyn. In their pursuit, the Austrians suffered heavy losses from the Saxon artillery, which shot at the dam from Raszyn, but were able to establish themselves on the southern outskirts. The conquest of Raszyn itself failed several times due to the dogged resistance of the Polish and Saxon battalions.
In the hours since the first attack on Falenty, the Austrian bulk had arrived at Jaworow and, in the growing darkness, tried desperately to cross the marshy watercourse, the bridge of which had been dismantled.
A battalion had been branched off against Raszyn, where after nightfall the battle subsided. Around 9 p.m., the warring parties withdrew from the place on fire, most recently the Saxons. In the next hour, Poniatowski held a council of war in the open, in which General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski , who had meanwhile arrived, took part. The army had about 400 to 500 dead and over 800 wounded. The Saxon commander Dyherrn declared that he could no longer oppose his order to return and announced his departure. Poniatowski only had about 10,000 men. After Raszyn was evacuated, the Utrata line threatened by Schauroth could no longer be held and Ferdinand's twice as strong unspent bulk stood on his left wing in front of Jaworow, whose transition over the Utrata with the sun behind him was imminent in a few hours. Poniatowski was in danger of being cut off from Warsaw. It was decided to withdraw to Warsaw. Poniatowski's army arrived in Warsaw between one and two o'clock in the night.
Armistice and surrender of Warsaw
That night Ferdinand wrote a letter to Poniatowski in which he asked him to negotiate about the surrender of Warsaw and offered him an armistice for this purpose . His task was to occupy Warsaw, not to destroy it. The losses, about as great as the Poniatowskis, had mainly hit only one regiment of his army and were therefore relatively minor. Around 2/3 of his troops were not used in the battle, so they were still completely intact. Poniatowski had lost one in ten men, he only one in twenty. The balance of power had thus shifted in his favor. He was able to negotiate from a strong position and by sparing the city and temporarily neutralizing Poniatowski's army, he was more likely to fulfill his political mandate than by starting an extermination campaign.
Poniatowski accepted and on the afternoon of April 20th the generals met at the Jerusalem turnpike outside Warsaw. The agreement was concluded at a second meeting on the 21st. It contained Poniatowski's obligation to order the handover of Warsaw to Ferdinand and to cross the Vistula without a fight . In return, Ferdinand gave him two days to do so and undertook not to pursue Poniatowski across the Vistula.
For two full days, Poniatowski had all weapons, ammunition and other war supplies, all coffers, archives and government personnel carried over the Vistula Bridge to Praga with thousands of horses and wagons , accompanied by insults and curses from the Warsaw people who had been disarmed by him. They thought that he would have to Ferdinand sold . Poniatowski withdrew over the bow into the fortresses Modlin and Serock . After Ferdinand wrote a letter on April 22, offering Warsaw and the Duchy as a prize for an alliance with Austria to King Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia , he moved into the hostile, silent city on April 23.
consequences
Ferdinand had conquered the capital, but not the duchy. Just a few days after entering Warsaw, the only Austrian troops operating on the right side of the Vistula were defeated at Grochow when they wanted to conquer Praga and had to retreat to the left bank. When Poniatowski penetrated the Austrian western Galicia to the right of the Vistula in the following weeks , his popularity as a liberator in Poland increased enormously. Later, Russian and Polish troops occupied Galicia , during which Ferdinand's conquest of the duchy failed. When his campaign ended in mid-July as a result of the Znojmo armistice , Ferdinand had to give up first Warsaw and then Krakow and was on the retreat to Moravia . On October 14, Austria surrendered after three months of negotiations in the Treaty of Schönbrunn .
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Joseph a. Count Raczynski (ed. And transl.): Poland is not lost yet. From the diaries of Athanasius Raczynski . 1788 to 1818 , Berlin 1984, p. 47.
- ↑ Alois Veltzé: War images from Poland, Styria and Hungary 1809. Vienna undated (1909), (= Emil von Woinowitch, kuk General der Infanterie, director of the kuk war archives, and kuk Captain Alois Veltzé (ed.): The year of war 1809 in individual representations , Volume 11), p. 26.
literature
- Alois Veltzé: War images from Poland, Styria and Hungary 1809. Vienna undated (1909), (= Emil von Woinowitch, kuk General der Infanterie, director of the kuk war archives, and kuk captain Alois Veltzé [Ed.]: The year of war 1809 in individual representations , Volume 11)
- Claudia Reichl-Ham: "We come to truly free you". The Austrian campaign against the Duchy of Warsaw 1809. In: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum Wien (Hrsg.): From mercenary armies to UN troops. Armies and wars in Austria and Poland from the 17th to the 20th century. Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-902551-22-1 .
