This being the winter issue of our NOVAG Newsletter, I thought an article on a winter battle would not be amiss.

Charles XII took the throne of Sweden in 1697 at the age of fifteen. His neighbors were greedy, and conspired to take his kingdom from him. King Frederick of Denmark combined with Augustus, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, and Peter the Great of Russia. With lands and peoples infinitely more numerous, it looked like a sure thing. Frederick and his Danes invaded Schleswig, Augustus’s Saxons and Poles laid siege to Riga in Latvia, and Peter the Great led 80,000 men into Estonia to take Narva in October of 1700.

“They [the Russians] were not soldiers in the sense of the Swedes, who still retained what Gustavus had willed them, and though Peter was gradually seeking to teach them discipline, they were an ill-fed, ill-armed, and half-organized rabble, of whom the larger part had only arrows and clubs, and in lieu of soldierly instinct had but the dogged, persistent obedience for which the Russian has always been famous.” [1]

Ten weeks after the Russians had arrived, they had made little progress other than to protect themselves by three miles of fortified lines of circumvallation. Czar Peter’s store-bought western style army was commanded by a German, General Kreuz, and leavened with Germans to raise its fighting level. Their lines were entrenched from river to river, with flanking outworks, a deep ditch and a thick abatis of sharpened wooden stakes pointed outward to impede an attacking enemy. Peter, who started the Russian love of artillery, had purchased a vast number of cannon from the West. The Russians had devastated the regions around them, so an advancing enemy would have neither food nor shelter. There they waited, 80,000 men in their entrenchments. Czar Peter, who heard of the Swedish advance, left thearmy at Narva to bring up another Russian Army of 40,000 reinforcements.

Charles XII crossed the Baltic Sea with a fleet of 200 ships, landing 20,000 men in the Gulf of Riga. Leaving his baggage wagons of supplies and most of his artillery with the rest of his army, Charles XII dashed ahead with his 4,000 cavalry and 4,000 infantry traveling light. Not waiting the rest of his army, Charles XII threw his tiny force of 8,000 men directly at the middle of the Russian fortified lines in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. (Fortunately for Charles XII, the wind was blowing the snow so that it was blinding the Russians.)

The two Swedish infantry columns of 4,000 exhausted hungry men were directed to assault 80,000 entrenched Russians. The Swedish cavalry were to follow after the infantry had breached the Russian fortifications. The only advantages the heavily outnumbered Swedes had were skill, discipline, and leadership. And yet, ever since the Athenians had defeated the Persians at Marathon, the armies of the West had used just those things to overcome the hordes of the East.

The Swedes had only a few light guns to support their assault. Instead of an artillery barrage to clear a way for them, they loaded their muskets and fixed bayonets. Generals Welling and Rhenskjold led the assaulting infantry columns. Fifteen minutes later, and Russian lines had been breached. Charles XII then led the cavalry forward to cut down the masses of the enemy. The Russian center under General Trubetskoi was exterminated. General Sheremetev led the Russian feudal cavalry of the left into a wild flight across the river, but the ice broke. The Russian right, under General Golovin, dashed toward the bridge over the Narva River, but it collapsed under the press of fugitives. At dawn, the survivors surrendered. Against 18,000 Russian dead, the Swedes had lost 1,400 wounded and 600 dead. Besides hordes of Russian prisoners, the Swedes captured 177 new bronze cannon, mortars and howitzers. The Swedes relieved them of their weapons and their senior officers and then, as an ultimate insult, left the rank-and-file free to go back home.” [2]

The Swedish victory was complete. When Peter arrived with his reinforcement of 40,000 new troops, he decided not to continue the siege of Narva against Charles XII. Charles turned aside from these incompetent Russians to deal with Augustus’s Poles and Saxons. What Charles failed to realize was that if Czar Peter had an army of 80,000 men—and could quickly reinforce it with another 40,000 men—then once these peasants could be made into soldiers, Charles was in trouble. It was not in Poland, but in the vast depths of Russia with its massive reserves of manpower that Charles XII would be defeated.

Tactically, there is also much to learn. A more numerous army that sits in a static defense and awaits its piecemeal destruction, as the Russians did, is doomed. Numbers only count if they engage the enemy.

Since Peter the Great, Russia has had an ongoing love affair with using masses of artillery. Peter re­placed the 177 guns lost at Narva with 268 new cannon the fol­lowing spring. Later, at Peter’s victory over Charles XII at Poltava, the Swedish infantry advanced into a line of 120 Russian cannon.

Fifty years later, Freder­ick the Great of Prussia la­mented the vast number of Rus­sian cannon, as did Na­poleon Bonaparte of France a half century later still. And in the 19th century, when Queen Victoria issued the Victoria Cross to her troops, the medals were manufactured from the bronze of melted Russian cannon the British had cap­tured in the Crimean War. In the 20th cen­tury it was massed Russian artillery that helped drive the Ger­mans from Russia in World War II. During the Cold War the Rus­sians planned to use massed artillery to de­feat the Americans at Fulda Gap in Germany in the greatest bat­tle never fought. Russia al­ways used masses of cannon to compensate for the poor quality of her individual sol­diers.

Footnotes

[1] Gustavus Adolphus, Theodore Ayrault Dodge, 1895, p. 834.
[2] Russia’s Military Way to the West, Christopher Duffy, 1981, p. 17.