The principal wars of Europe during the latter half of the 19th Century occurred duringthe second Napoleonic era -- the reign of Napoleon III, sometime known as Napoleon the Little in contrast with his famous uncle.
Napoleon The Little in action at Solverino, 1859.
Technologically the reign of Napoleon III is roughly that of the War Between the States, or, as it is sometimes called, the Second War For Independence (I back a lot of losers). It witnessed the introduction and perfection of the Minie rifle - a French development of a neglected English invention. Examples include the famous Enfield .58 which sparked the Indian Mutiny and served the Confederacy, horse and foot, quite well, as did the superb Austrian Lorenz - popular with the troopers of Nathan Bedford Forrest until somewhere along the line he lost a wagon with the Austrian pattern bullet molds.
Almost simultaneously came the breech loading Dreyse zundnagelgewehr, or needle gun, whose success inspired the Chassepot, Snider, and modified Lorenz (quickly supplanted by the Werdl) with the force of terror. Machineguns made their abortive debut and artillery passed substantially from muzzle loading smoothbore to breechloading rifle (as had the shoulder arm) in a few short years.
Napoleon the Little's reign is the continental heart of what is sometimes termed the "rifle and saber" period. It is the first part of the era I once addressed (in the old Armchair General) as an Age of Colorful Militarism in which the industrial revolution made possible mass production of uniforms and weapons - but it had not quite dawned to most nations that the mass of new uniforms should not be brightly colored. As a result, the wars of Napoleon the Little's reign were, in the words of one enthusiast, "the last of the European classics". Brilliantly clad armies marched in massed battalions topped with gleaming bayonets amidst the powder smoke (smokeless powder didn't come in until the 1890 , s) and squadrons as dandified as those of Frederick the Great and Napoleon (the German cavalry regulations of 1872 borrowed heavily on those of 1757) charged to the trumpet's call (though often with dismal effects).
When Napoleon came to power in the wake of the revolutions of 1849 the Minie and Dreyse had not been widely introduced and most foot soldiers were using equipment which would not have been out of place (except for the percussion cap) at Waterloo. But for wargaming purposes, the general appearance of the armies was taking a form that would last in some cases until 1914. The tunic, at first double breasted in most cases, came into replace the spencer in the late 1840's. Purists will balk at the shift to a slightly smaller pickelhaube with collar fully colored on the part of the Prussians between 1866 and 1870, and the shift from a double to a single breasted tunic for the Austro-Hungarian army between 1859 and 1866.
Experts may be quickto point outthat in 1859 most French line infantry had green epaulettes (red for grenadiers, yellow for voltigeurs) while all wore red in 1870 (no more elites in the line). Even so, a Frenchman in blue-gray capote with red kepi and dark red trousers is most obviously a Frenchman, the fellow in white coat with blue trousers and black stovepipe shako is obviously Austrian, and the sinister chap in spiked helmet (knob for artillery) and Prussian blue tunic trimmed red can hardly be anything except a Prussian. An 1870 wargamer in 15mm or 25mm scale may therefore, by adding an Austro-Hungarian army, be able to game two entirely different wars - not just the playoffs in 1870-71 but the preliminaries in 1859 and 1866 as well.
Of course, I warned Paul Koch (or was it Roger Welles) not to do it because the Austrians were real losers, so he didn't. But I got intrigued and did it anyway. I resolved to give them a fighting chance by painting up Sardinian (or Piedmontese) army, which, as G.B. McClellan observed at the time, looked very like the U.S. Army.
This was an era in which the rifle was taking control of the battlefield. The role of artillery was fluctuating, and cavalry was becoming a distinctly underprivileged minority. It lends itself well to grand tactical treatment because of its large numbers and massed formations. My own game, like Paul Koch's "Nach Paris" uses a base of 3 figures frontage to the battalion and even so it would take hundreds of figures to fight the battles of Solferinn, Koeniggraetz,or Mars LaTour. But smaller scales havetheir place. I am working on something along the lines of 80 to 1 (3 figure company) for corps level engagements, and systems like the Adventure game's Compleat Brigadier rules or any smaller scale ACW rules can be adopted for skirmishes and limited engagements in such places as Mexico and North Africa.
Because of the changing technology each war of the period has its own flavor which can be carefully represented or partially put in abeyance for fictitious scenarios.
The Crimean War was evolutionary. Much as McClellan admired the Russian Army it was rather clumsy and relied on smoothbore percussion muskets for the line, the Brunswick rifle, an inferior descendant of those used by Napoleonic rifle formations, for rifle troops. Some British formations (the4th Division) still used, at the start, what was essentially a Brown Bess with a percussion lock; others used the Minie rifle. McClellan observed that the French line infantry used muskets, while the elites (Guards, Chasseur a Pied, possibly Zouaves) used the Minie rifle. Among the Sardinians, the Bersaglieri, who were more heavily represented in the Crimea than other elements, carried a strange rifle with a climbing pick on the stock and a device for screwing into any handy tree for a rest. Of the line troops, 20 per company carried that weapon, the rest a musket. Although somewhat improved over uncle Napoleon's weaponry in mobility and manufacture, the guns continued to be smoothbores in everyone's artillery. The lethal technology that devastated the Light Brigade was essentially Napoleonic.
In 1859 the Austrians were fully equipped with the Lorenz - a minor improvement on the Minie which now equipped the French and their Piedmontese allies - but the French surprised them with rifled artillery, basically a rebored Napoleon 12 pdr, 8 pdr, and a new 4 pdr horse gun (Systeme 1858). These new weapons were in short supply. Not all batteries were ready to go to war and the Austrians had at least twice as many tubes on the field as the Allies. But by aggressive use of rifled artillery, skirmishers, and the bayonet, the French prevailed.
Not slow to learn (whatever some folks say about them), the Austrians re-organized. Musketry was apparently overrated, so marksmanship training was de-emphasized for the line troops. The jagers could still shoot, but the ability ar)d inclination to used the improved podewils bullet had actually declined among the line troops between 1859 and 1866. The lackluster Austrian artillery of 1859 had been completely re-equipped with the 1863 model rifled cannons of 8 and 4 lbs. Arrangements to keep batteries in action suppled from the rear were worked out so that the Austrian guns would fire early and often.
For reasons best known to themselves the Austrians also took breastplates away from their cuirassiers (who hadn't attended the 1859 War at all) but preserved their integrity by keeping them free of shoulder arms and mounted on heavy horses.
Alas, none of these precautions worked. The Prussians cheated. As far back as 1849 they had introduced a breech loading rifle, the Dreysezundnagelgewehr. Of course, they didn't immediately go overboard. When McClellan was overseas to look in on the Crimean War and other items of interest he toured Europe and found that the Prussian Guard (4 foot regiments) and 1 battalion in 3 of the line had the needle gun - which he claimed could shoot 7 times a minute and was fired at ranges up to 1,000 yards (it was only sighted to 600). The rest had smoothbore percussion muskets, except for the jagers of the line, who had the Tige rifle, a precurser of the Minie. But by 1866, in spite of a lapse in which a new percussion rifled musket had been ordered, then relegated to the second line landwehr, the entire infantry had been reequipped with the Dreyse.
There were a lot of problems with the Dreyse. It was over 60 caliber and kicked like a mule, which would have discouraged prolonged rapid fire even if officers had not. Its ballistics were inferior to those of the Lorenz, therefore firing at ranges over 300 yards was discouraged except for marksmen at mass targets. But it is variously rated at 5 to 7 rounds per minute verses 2 to 3 for good troops with a rifled musket. One German study gave the Lorenz 1.5 rounds per minute against 4-5 for the Dreyse, or a ratio of 1 to 3. That tracks with W. Simon's weighted timing of musketry at a Civil War re-enactment, but is less than good troops could achieve with a flintlock and the percussion system is easier to load.
While Prussians tended to outshoot Austrian infantry 3 to 1 in terms of results, the same margin did not hold against the Hanoverians at Langensalza who lacked the Austrian penchant for relying primarily on the bayonet. In fact the Prussians were careful with their ammunition. Hotly engaged Prussian troops at Koeniggraetz reported averaging 1 round per man per minute, and it has been estimated that Prussians fired 50 rounds per hit as compared to 740 for British in the Crimea. The latter, of course, were doing a lot of potting around in seige warfare. But, by giving Prussians a 2 to 1 advantage they are able to stop most charges and win firefights on a given frontage and, if hard pressed, they can lie down and keep on firing.
The Prussian artillery in 1866, actually more numerous than the Austrian, was still fooling around. Fifty-four of 154 batteries were still using a rather archaic smooth bore 12 pdr. The new Krupp guns were marvels of contemporary technology but their habit of occasionally blowing up in the gunner's faces dampened crew morale and efficiency. Each corps had 14 to 16 batteries of which 8 were divided between the two divisions. The remainder were reserve artillery usually left as much as a day's march in the rear with the corps trains, thus not available in an encounter battle. The procedures for moving ammunition up to the line were not well developed, so batteries in action usually shot up what they had and quit for the day. if these things are taken into account you will find yourself with a realistic struggle of bayonet and cannon against devastating close range rifle fire.
Of course it is the playoffs that have attracted what little attention this unjustly neglected era normally receives. In 1870 the French and Prussian winners of the 1859 and 1866 preliminaries met for the championship. To most people 1870 is more interesting because the tactical advantages were less obvious than had been the case in 1866. That assessment, while true up to a point, is in some respects unfair. The Austrians, after all, had more of their regular army left after the Seven Weeks War than the French did seven weeks into the Franco-Prussian War.
While Napoleon III had actually ruled longer than his famous uncle and had a record which was fairly successful if not unblemished (Mexico was an embarrassment) his relative success may have cost him. The Austrians may have been helped by their habit of defeat. A peculiar Austrian strategic approach sometimes called the sausage school involved marking successive semi-circular defensive positions on the map of the theater of operations - Koeniggraetz was such a position. A war could be fought by successive retreats and stands - a poor imitation of Johnston before Atlanta. Not great but at least the emperor of Austria didn't end up a POW.
It is pretty well accepted among players of the period that Prussian artillery and French musketry were superior to their opposite numbers. Once again the respective nations had followed the usually sound principal "if it's not broken, don't fix it". Or, as critics would have it, they vigorously prepared for the last war. The Prussians had noticed something less than satisfactory about their artillery in the 1866 affair. They tinkered with their rifled breechloaders, retired the venerable 12 pdr smoothbores (almost identical technically to Napoleon's Guard Foot artillery at Waterloo) and worked out a tactical doctrine in which the artillery went forward and the ammunition followed.
At Hohenlohe's insistence the reserve artillery was renamed corps artillery to discourage people from leaving it "in reserve". The French were happy with their artillery - after all it had performed well enough at Solferino - but they rushed a battalion machine gun into service, the Montingny mitrailleuse or canon a balles, and around the same time issued the Chassepot rifle. The latter had ballistically doubled the range of the Dreyse. Instead of imposing strict fire discipline to preserve ammunition with the new breechloader (always difficult in the French Army) they adopted a smaller cartridge and bullet - a mere 44 caliber to give them less kick, greater range, and more rounds per man.
Don't give the Chassepot double the Dreyse's range in your rules. The rifle is only a part of the equation. if few marksmen were effective against any but the largest targets with the Dreyse at 400 to 500 yds., hardly anyone was much of a marksman at the Chassepot's ballistic limits. The mitrailleuse would have made a fair battalion gun, but itwas heavy, and with the Chassepot in use, not essential, so it joined the artillery park and became a third battery in the divisional artillery, accomplishing little.
Cavalry in this era is a fascinating topic in itself. By and large the Austrian cavalry, while unimaginatively used (except for Edelshiem's division), accomplished a bit more than the Prussian in 1866. But for those who think that saber charges could no longer succeed, we have LtC. Breclow leading the 5th Prussian Cuirassiers to capture 18 guns at Tobischau with a loss of 10 men - and to show that it was no accident he came back as a general to lead the 7th (Madgburg) Cuirassiers and 16th (Altmark) Uhlans through a French Corps gun line at Vionville before the French cavalry ran him off. Let's not forget the Chasseurs d'Afrique at Balaklava or Solferino, the Sardinian cavalry at Montebello, the 6th Virginia at Cedarville, Sheridan's cavalry in the valley or the Austrians at Koeniggraetz or Custozza - it still sometimes worked, but don't count on it.
Opportunities for tactical and strategic gaming abound in this period. It offers a change of pace not only by comparison with more common periods of play, but internally from war to war. While not as well served as many other periods by manufacturers the needs of gamers are pretty well met in 15mm as well as 25mm. Paul Koch and I got going by fooling around with old boxes of left over Airfix supplemented by Stone Mountain, Thomas, Scruby, and Die Kaiserzeit - which latter firm specializes in the 2nd German Empire (1871-1918). Airfix is no longer in business, but the ACW molds are in use as well as those of Stone Mountain and Thomas and will make up into the line, light infantry, cavalry, and artillery of many nations.
The Airfix Union infantry, in fact, is wearing an imitation of the French 1860 tunic and kepi. Confederates make dandy Bersaglieri or Austrian jager. The Thomas zouave makes a better turco or zouave of France than ACW soldier. Scruby and Die Kaiserzeit actually make the real stuff. For the 15mm fancier Mike's Models and Peter Laing (available through Soldier World) cover the period very well.
As for rules, I'm working on my own and Paul has his, but these things are a matter of taste, and for practical purposes you can adapt any good ACW set that strikes your fancy. if you like the period, but are tired of blue and gray and would like a few cuirassiers, hussars (don't tell me about the 3rd New Jersey) lancers (the 6th Pa. never got the hang of those things) and a little variety in the line of battle, try the triumphs and disasters of Napoleon the Little, his allies and rivals on the continent.
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