The new book 1815: The Waterloo Campaign – The German Victory by Peter Hofschröer challenges the traditional version of events at the battle of Waterloo. The author reveals the pivotal role German soldiers played in the battle and throughout the campaign, and argues that Britain should accept that Waterloo was more a German victory than a British one.
In a similar fashion to his earlier book 1815: The Waterloo Campaign – Wellington, his German Allies and the Battles of Ligny and Quatre Bras, Hofschröer draws on previously unpublished accounts and gives not only the Prussian perspective of their march to Waterloo and decisive attack on Napoleon's flank, but also details of the actions fought by some of the 25,000 Germans in Wellington's 'British' army – more than a third of the Duke's force and the largest single contingent.
In addition to demonstrating that the Germans did most of the fighting, marching and dying in 1815, Hofschröer also questions Wellington's versions of the events – taken at face value by too many historians – and suggests that the duke attempted to manipulate the historical record to disguise his own errors of judgement. Drawing on unpublished documents from Wellington's own papers, Hofschröer reveals the Duke's attempts to play down the role of his allies and exaggerate his own contribution to victory. Rooted firmly in documented historical fact, these allegations seriously undermine the accepted verison of events and force us to reconsider the achievements of Britain's most brilliant military hero.
Peter Hofschröer's 1815: The Waterloo Campaign – Wellington, his German Allies and the Battles of Ligny and Quatre Bras was published last year to critical acclaim and heated debate. The new book 1815: The Waterloo Campaign – The German Victory is a definitive work, a revolutionary text on one of Europe's greatest confrontations, and destined to be the subject also of heated debate.
Greenhill are producing an A3 special announcement to mark the publication of the new book which contains twenty-one of the reviews which attracted so much attention to its predecessor. The same amount of interest is expected for the new volume.
Peter Hofschröer writes about his two volumes on the Waterloo Campaign:
Some years ago, it seems like an eternity – was there life before Waterloo? – I agreed with Lionel Leventhal that there was a gap in the rather full market of Waterloo books. We agreed to start a project in which I would write a monograph on the subject based on German sources. I thought this was going to be a relatively straight-forward matter. My personal library already contained the Prussian and German General Staff histories of senior officers. I gave my publisher what I thought at that time was a realistic deadline.
I was aware of the controversy that went on between British and German historians a century ago. The accusations made of Wellington's alleged deception of Blücher I initially considered to be flavoured by the politics of late-nineteenth century nationalism. I was later to learn how wrong I was. During the course of checking various documents in the British Library, I had reason to go through Sir Hudson Lowe's papers. Lowe had, for a time, been Wellington's quartermaster-general in the Netherlands, but the Duke had him replaced before the war started. In Lowe's papers, I found documents that indicated he was not satisfied with the version of events given by Wellington. This find prompted further investigation and I can now state with a considerable degree of certainty that Wellington went to extraordinary lengths to attempt to manipulate the record of Waterloo in his favour.
There is significant documentary evidence to indicate that he had certain documents removed from the record, added others, suppressed the publication of material not favourable to him, pressured historians to write his version of the events as opposed to what they had established as fact, organised a smear campaign against one particular historian and conducted a campaign of disinformation to undermine the credibility of published accounts. In short, the British public has been presented with a distorted picture of these dramatic events and one which my work has gone some way to correcting.
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