Lutzen and Bautzen: Napoleon's Spring Campaign of 1813

by George F. Nafziger

Excellent condition, no damage to intact dust jacket

Genres: History, Nonfiction

394 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first of Nafziger's mighty trilogy on the 1813 campaigns in Germany is a testament to years of archival research in foreign depositories spent uncovering the details of how Napoleonic armies were organized and fought. That said, this book is almost overfilled with detail. Many sections read like running orders of battle (separate from the 80 pages of orders of battle that make up the book's appendices), occasionally broken with accounts of minor platoon-level actions being waged between these armies of tens of thousands. At many parts of the narrative I struggled to grasp the bigger picture.

In the chapters focusing on the titular battles, the reader is inundated with the organization of each and every brigade that appears, but the narrative is choppy. Though primary sources were used in compiling the structural information on the armies, accounts of the officers and men fighting in these actions are seldom quoted or cited. Likewise, with the habit of slipping into details of smaller-unit actions, it can be difficult throughout the coverage of the campaign and the two battle to grasp the bigger picture. Instead of a clear description and analysis of the action, the reader is just inundated with seemingly endless unit designations (sometimes going down to the company and platoon level).

This problem is made worse by the fact that all the maps are crammed together in the middle of the book, and that keys to identify the units on each individual map are compiled in another section (and sometimes to do match watch actually appears on the maps themselves) - at one point, I had to use two bookmarks and constantly flip back and forth from the text of a chapter to the maps and then to the key to understand what was going on.

The level of research and attention to detail (especially regarding the armies' organization) is incredible, but, ultimately, the forest gets lost for the trees, and the larger narrative of the spring of 1813 is appears rather muddled.

[Joseph Ficklen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thoroughly detailed account of Napoleon's attempts to reconstruct his army ruined by the invasion of Russia and to fend off a growing list of enemy nations. It discusses how Eugene held the Russians at bay along the Elbe, how the defection of Prussian general Yorck eventually brought Prussia into the war, how Cossack raids into Germany set the whole region in arms against Napoleon, and how the French Emperor scrapped together an army of conscripts, perilously short of cavalry, and successfully drove the Prussians and Russians out of Saxony in two battles. The information in the book is absolutely indispensable, as Napoleon's campaigns from 1813-1814 are not well documented in English. However, Nafziger goes into pedantic detail about the tactical maneuvers of every battle, and fails to give context to the movements of the armies, or easily digestible summaries of the battles. The maps are also poor, but this does improve in the next volume. This book is excellent for avid military history readers and wargamers, but may not be suited for a casual reader.