Criticising the Duke of Luxembourg

Tuesday 20 May 2014

There's an interesting thing I came across, John Lynn's partial criticism of the Duke of Luxembourg. He states that Luxembourg defeated Waldeck at Fleurus in July of 1690, in a brilliant envelopment battle that all but destroyed the Dutch and certainly swept them off the field like a tornado.

This was doubly advantageous because the leader of the Dutch, William III of Orange, a competent and daring commander himself who boldly attacked Luxembourg at Saint-Denis in 1678 and defeated him to relieve the siege of Mons, was not present. King Billy, as he was by then known, was in Ireland to secure his control of the British Isles.

John Lynn states that Fleurus was a victory "Napoleonic" in conception and result. The Dutch were annihilated, and Lynn suggests that Luxembourg could have pursued the beaten Dutch and eliminated them from the war in Napoleonic fashion before King Billy could return to shore up the defences.

But there's a very good reason for the indecisive character of pre-Napoleonic warfare, which Lynn of course admits. Which is essentially the logistical factor. Armies moved too slow, their supplies were dependent upon cumberous wagons and bad roads. Luxembourg, if he had pursued the Dutch, would not have caught them in time to compel their capitulation. Withdrawing along the Dyle they could have thrown a garrison into Louvain, which Luxembourg would have no choice but to take, and if he took that the Dutch could throw a garrison in Antwerp, or at Breda.

By the time the French reduced these fortresses William of Orange would have had plenty of time to reach the Netherlands with powerful reinforcements and the French may well have engaged in a battle disadvantageous to themselves. Especially if it were a repeat of Saint-Denis, with the French besieging Louvain or Breda when the Dutch erupted into their flanks.

What allowed Napoleon to decisively win campaigns was a culmination of two factors. One the logistics were much better in his time, supplies were organised, and living off the land became an art he was particulary adept at. This contributed to the second factor, the large increase in armies.

The advantage the French possessed in this was that they, in the times of Napoleon, had the numbers to both besiege a fortress and pursue a beaten enemy. Napoleon also could not leave unguarded enemy fortresses in his line of advance, but he had the fortune of possessing the numbers to guard them while he continued with his main body. Luxembourg had not that advantage in 1690. The French under Luxembourg were not numerous enough to both blockade a fortress, and there were plenty Waldeck could have chosen to garrison, and pursue the defeated Dutch.

Since Luxembourg could not blockade a fort while continuing his advance, he thus could not advance beyond it. He'd have to halt his pursuit until it were taken. Which meant that even if he attempted to pursue Waldeck that pursuit would immediately stop at the first fortress it ran into. Though the fortress would probably fall, that was of little consequence to Dutch strategy as it would have served its purpose, to buy time for the Dutch to reconstitute their army and retake the field in good order. Thus, as was often the case in the Low Countries (see the Spanish campaigns there), a tactical success in defeating an enemy in the field or capturing a fortress usually was barren of strategic results.

Clausewitz writing after the Wars of Napoleon identified the primary strategic priority of an aggressive war to be to bring the enemy to action and destroy him, pursuing him relentlessly so that he cannot reform and thus cause his army to disintegrate from lack of cohesion or compel his total capitulation. This was the method employed by Napoleon, and by the Prussians in 1870. It was not an option for armies before Napoleon's time. Even Frederick the Great, who won impressive battles, could not hope to pursue the Austrians, much less the French or the Russians, to their conclusive elimination.

Which is why early modern wars seem boring in retrospect. Whereas if Napoleon or Moltke won a single battle, that could lay vast areas open to foreign occupation and result in dramatic losses of territory, single battles before Napoleon, even if sometimes approaching the scale of Austerlitz or Jena, often resulted in hardly any change at all.

Luxembourg's victory over the Dutch at Fleurus, from a purely tactical standpoint, was devastating, but it did not give France the Spanish Netherlands, it did not even allow the French to enter Dutch territory. What it did achieve is allowing the French to retain all of their fortresses in Belgium for that year, and to shore up other fronts.

Because really in that period one could only hope for very limited gains, and these could only be secured by retention of strong places. Reversing Clausewitz, because his methods were impossible at the time, the armies of pre-Napoleonic times were concerned with acquiring territory in the form of seizing fortresses, and field armies had the two-fold purpose of capturing the enemy's and defending their own. Decisive destruction of the enemy army was never a goal and could not be achieved anyway.

A good example of this is the Great Condé's attempt to pursue the Bavarians under Franz von Mercy after the Battle of Freiburg in 1644.

In this engagement the French sought to dislodge the Bavarians from the mountainous highground behind the fortress, and at last succeeded by occupying the valleys behind them leading through the Black Forest.

Fearing being trapped, Mercy abandoned the fortress of Freiburg, leaving all his artillery and wagons with the garrison there, and ran through the narrow paths of the Black Forest hoping to escape to Wirtemberg.

Condé desperately wished to pursue, and sent cavalry to follow the retreating Bavarians. But this proved ineffective as the Bavarians with their pikes and muskets were able to parry the French cavalry and given the French reliance on wagons and artillery, their main body moved too slowly to catch them.

The fighting around Freiburg and the pursuit lasted for a total of three days, after which Condé abandoned the pursuit and returned to invest Freiburg having concluded that catching the Bavarians was impossible and that leaving Freiburg in his rear was too dangerous.

Pictured is Prince Louis de Condé at Rocroi.

- Kaiser

Antwerp, a danger to WW1 Britain?

Antwerp in the hands of a major continental power was dangerous for Britain, but I thought it would be interesting to examine the factors limiting its utility in the First World War, and how that war could have gone differently.

The main fleet base of the German High Seas Fleet was at Wilhelmshaven on the Jade Bight. This was closer to Antwerp than the British Grand Fleet under Sir John Jellicoe based at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, and closer even than Sir David Beatty's Battlecruiser Squadron based at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth.

Yet the German High Seas Fleet could not enter the Scheldt estuary, most fortunately for Britain, as if it had it would have been far closer to the mouth of the Thames and the most vulnerable part of the English coast than the British were themselves. At least if they were still at Scapa and Rosyth.

This would have caused some problems for the British. Jellicoe was adamant that the modern dreadnoughts remain at Scapa, and for a time he thought even that was too close and retired to Lough Swilly on the north coast of Ireland. This was because these relatively remote anchorages were believed to be too distant and too dangerous for German U-Boats, while obviously being beyond the reach of aircraft.

If the German fleet gained the Scheldt, Jellicoe would have no choice but to dock the fleet at Chatham or at Portsmouth, as Scapa and Lough Swilly were simply too far away to allow the British to impede a landing by the Germans at Antwerp. This would have placed Jellicoe in a position of risk that he'd rather avoid.

Additionally German possession of Antwerp would allow them to gather a great deal of transport shipping in a sheltered inlet that the British could not strike. This was exactly why the Scheldt was so dangerous in the times of Philip II and Napoleon, and why the British have ever been opposed to a strong continental naval power being established there.

Yet even though the British would be unable to intercept the German fleet in time to prevent it from reaching Antwerp, the Germans were nonetheless unable to use the harbour. Why would this be? Incidentally, it was for the same reason the British had difficulty reinforcing it in the early weeks of WWI.

The problem goes back very far, to the origins of the present political configuration of the Low Countries. Antwerp initially declared for the Prince of Orange in the early years of the Dutch Revolt, as had the whole of Brabant. But it was regained by the Spaniards under the Duke of Parma in 1584.

Despite this victory, the Spanish were unable to use the port due to Dutch control of the island of Walcheren. The Duke of Alba had intended to retake this island, but was distracted by the intervention of the Nassau brothers, and of the French under Gaspard de Coligny, who wished to weaken Spain. Alba was never to get the chance. And Parma after him was unable to make good due to his own perpetual distractions.

With the destruction of Spanish naval power in the north following Maarten Tromp's fantastic victory at the Downs over Antonio de Oquendo in 1639, regaining Walcheren was out of the question.

When the Spanish Netherlands passed to the Austrians, it was even more out of the question. The Austrians had no sea power to speak of, and the Dutch Army garrisoned their forts because the Austrians had precious few troops there.

Charles VI and Joseph II attempted to get use out of Antwerp and the latter even started a war over it, but to no avail. When Belgium was finally created in 1830, it seemed the problem was over as the Dutch allowed use of the Scheldt to Belgian commerce and everybody was happy.

But the problem only seemed over because Belgium had no navy. When war broke out in 1914, Belgium appealed to Britain and France for help. The British Army had already committed itself to France, but Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty was quick to grasp the importance of Antwerp, a position that could threaten German communications from behind and for which reason Schlieffen had outlined a plan to seize it with all haste.

Churchill was able to send over the Royal Naval Division, the regiments of the Royal Marines, and some French Marines. But these could not enter the Scheldt. The Netherlands protested that the mouth of the Scheldt was Dutch territorial water and that international law obliged them to open fire on any warships attempting to pass Flushing.

Unwilling to compel a Dutch declaration of war upon the United Kingdom, Churchill instead sent the men to Ostend and Nieuport. They then went to Bruges, then Ghent, and finally to the forts of Antwerp to reinforce the Belgian Army that had retreated behind its defences.

The arrival of the British caused the Germans to redouble their efforts to encircle Antwerp entirely, and after they crossed to the left bank of the Scheldt, Churchill withdrew his contingent, which retired back up the Scheldt to Termonde, continuing it to Ghent, where it's joined by the Lys, and from there down the canal linking Ghent with Bruges, and Bruges with Nieuport and Ostend. The British then retreated south to the line of the Yser formed by Nieuport and Dixmude, the canal linking the Yser with Ypres, and continuing on to connect Ypres with the Lys.

It was here that the British would face the Germans in their most terrible and famous battles; Ypres and Passchendaele between the Yser and the Lys. But this is moving beyond the scope of our work.

The point is that the British were unable to directly enter the Scheldt to reach Antwerp, nor could they directly evacuate Antwerp from that direction, as one might presume from glancing at the map. They were required by Dutch neutrality to cross Flanders from and to the ports of Ostend and Nieuport.

Appreciating this fact we realise that's precisely why the Germans could not bring their fleet into the Scheldt estuary and why they did not bother assembling invasion craft at Antwerp. For neither would be able to pass Flushing without being fired upon by the Dutch, just as the Dutch government had informed Churchill earlier would be done to the British if they tried it.

Whatever one might think of Dutch military capabilities, there were powerful forts defending the Scheldt on both sides and the distance was exceptionally narrow. Additionally the western Scheldt was controlled by Terneuse after passing east of Flushing, and the Dutch controlled that too, almost to the very entrance of Antwerp. There could be no reaching Antwerp against the resistance of the Dutch. Germany would have to invade Holland, or else secure her alliance. Neither of which Germany attempted.

During the Second World War Germany overcame this problem by subjugating the Netherlands along with Belgium. But then it was too late, the Germans had no fleet. Though the British could not stop the Germans from collecting invasion craft in the Scheldt, they had no need to fear it. Unable to escort them with battleships, the British could easily stop the Germans with light units that were based all over the south and east coasts of England under Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay. As Admiral Erich Raeder was so fond of telling Hitler, even a single British destroyer getting in amongst the landing craft would be a massacre, and there was nothing stopping the destroyers from doing that.

If the High Seas Fleet still existed the German battleships could have shielded the German transports and have blasted any destroyers or cruisers trying to attack them. But since the Germans had no battleships, and their destroyers and cruisers were hopelessly outnumbered, the British did not need to keep battleships in the Channel or at the mouth of the Thames where they'd be vulnerable to submarines and dive-bombers. And so Ramsey with the Channel Fleet was enough to defend England even without Admirals Sir Charles Forbes and Sir John Tovey with the Home Fleet.

So if we were consider, for a moment, that Schlieffen's plan as originally written was adhered to in 1914, and the Netherlands invaded, Germany could have moved its fleet into the Scheldt at Antwerp. This would force Jellicoe and Beatty to the Thames and the Medway, where, perhaps, their battleships and battlecruisers would have been the prey of submarines and aeroplanes within easy striking distance of German bases, all the more so if the Dutch coast was in German hands.

This could have been very serious for the English position. Fortunately, the Germans apparently never thought of it, or thought it not worthwhile. And so the German main fleet remained at distant Wilhelmshaven which allowed the Royal Navy to keep its capital ships far to the north out of the reach of submarines and aircraft on the remote northeast coast of Scotland.

England's southern bases offered other problems in addition. Light units; destroyers, cruisers, frigates, and corvettes, were maintained at Harwich on the east coast to cover the mouth of the Thames. The problem with Harwich was that it was not deep enough for battleships and battlecruisers.

Therefore, in order to protect the east coast and the mouth of the Thames, the fleet would have to dock at Chatham in the Medway. This was a proper fleet base with sufficient depth for a main battlefleet. Unfortunately the mouth of the Medway was too small. It could not hold the entire fleet, and what it could hold would be tightly crammed within. This would make evasion of aircraft and submarine-launched torpedoes difficult, as the ships ran the risk of collision.

Due to this fact, and Chatham's confined space, the Grand Fleet would have to be divided between Chatham and Portsmouth.

Portsmouth, like Chatham, was relatively cramped, and therefore vulnerable to submarine and aircraft attack. But additionally the separation of the main units of the fleet between the two would allow the concentrated German fleet at Antwerp to get between them. This would have enabled Germany to land on the east coast of England, at the very mouth of the Thames.

The other base at Plymouth in the West Country was ideally suited to control the entrance to the Channel from the Atlantic, but the Germans would not be coming from that direction. It was too far away to be of any use in protecting the Thames, and is therefore of no further consequence to the present work.

Constricted conditions in the southern bases is why Jellicoe much preferred keeping the fleet at Scapa. That anchorage is enormous, one of the largest anchorages in the world. The fleet could be sprawled out making it impossible for submarines, should they get into the harbour, to hit multiple ships with one salvo, and making it much easier for ships to evade if the submarine was sighted, for every ship would be able to move some distance in any direction without risking collision.

This, together with the swift currents in the channels between the Orkneys that were deadly to underwater vessels, made Scapa infinitely more secure against submarines than Chatham or Portsmouth. This was further advantageous on account of the distance from German airbases, for aircraft in those days could not reach Scapa from the continent, and even if they did, the widely scattered ships throughout the bay would make difficult targets.

At Scapa the British main battle fleet with all of its most precious and powerful battleships was untouchable. The Germans could not harm it unless their own main fleet came out to fight. This would not be the case at Chatham or Portsmouth. Both were in range of German aircraft and submarines, who could enter the harbours much more safely than Scapa, and whose targets would be much more vulnerable. Unable to take wide evasive manuevres the ships would have to choose taking the full brunt of the torpedo to their hulls, or else chance ramming their neighbours. In such conditions two developments might easily have occurred.

1. Either the Grand Fleet would determine to remain in the south, where it could be chipped away by successive harbour raids until the margin of British superiority was so narrow that the Germans could emerge from the Scheldt and successfully challenge it.

2. The Grand Fleet would decide that remaining at Chatham and Portsmouth was tantamount to a slow death by German raids, and therefore resolve to return to the safety of Scapa.

If either one happened the south and east coasts of England would be entirely naked to German amphibious assault. The British armies in France would likely have to be evacuated to meet the possibility of German invasion.

Even if this were not attempted, the British would perforce abandon the French to face the Germans alone on the Western Front, which may well have resulted in a German decisive victory over France.

Then it would be England alone against a victorious Germany with a fleet in the Scheldt poised for invasion, that the British fleet would either be too weak or too far away to prevent.

Such may have been the course of WWI had Schlieffen's original intention to invade the Netherlands been adopted. Schlieffen had not proposed it on grounds of a naval war, he cared not for the Scheldt or the mouth of the Thames. He had advocated it on solely military grounds, and solely on those grounds, with considerable justification, it was rejected. But what neither Schlieffen nor his successors saw was the advantage to Germany to be gained from controlling the Scheldt estuary, which could only be done by coercing or occupying Holland.

- Kaiser

The last Spanish Habsburg and the decline of their lineage

To write about Carlos II of Spain, the last Spanish Habsburg could be easy.

"He was a lunatic, he was born from a lunatic, and he belonged to a family of lunatics."

Seriously, his mother and father were niece and uncle.

He was descended from his great great great grandparents Juana la loca (Joanna the Mad) and Philip the Handsome through three of their children.

Whereas someone whose ascendants were all unrelated to their spouses would have 32 great great great grandparents, Carlos only had 14.

But that would be to easy, and it would not make Carlos II justice, nor his ancestors, for to truly understand Carlos II, one must understand not only the Spanish Habsburgs, but Spain itself.

I shall try my best to do just that.

In old maps (as the one below), Spain stands at the extremity of Europe, and separated by the Pyrenees from the rest of the continent.

Over a long period of time, stretching many centuries, the Iberians had wandered their own path of Christianity.

Uniquely, Spain and Portugal had experienced centuries of Islamic occupation, not raids across the borders, but constant contact with a vibrant and active Muslim culture.

Córdoba, capital of the Iberian caliphate (Al-Andalus), and Sevilla were at one time larger than any of the Christian cities of Europe, and although the Islamic occupation had been slowly whittled down during the centuries-long Catholic reconquista, the frontiers, both social and political, had come to stay, and to be absorbed.

There were many Muslims who adopted Christianity (known as Mudejares, which comes from the Arabic word "Mudajjan", meaning, "one who remains behind"), and a number of Christians, including members of the royal family, were rumoured to have Moorish - or Jewish - blood in their veins.

In practice, if not in theory, these three cultures, the Moors, the Jews and the Christian Iberians had mixed and interpenetrated.

The aim of the reconquista, accomplished by Ferdinand II of Aragon/V of Castile and his wife, Isabella I of Castile (these two united the kingdoms of Aragon, Castile and Léon to create the Kingdom of Spain), was to capture all Spanish land for Christianity.

After capturing Granada in 1492, their first act was to purge their kingdoms of all non-Christian, alien elements.

On 30 March 1492, they decreed that all Jews must either leave or convert.

Up to 150,000 Jews left, many fled to the Italian states, or the Ottoman Empire, where their wealth and industrial skills were welcomed.

This concern for purity, "One nation, one faith", was not new to Spanish society.

In 1449, the town council of Toledo decreed that no one of Jewish ancestry could ever hold public office in the city.

Only those of "pure and untainted blood" (limpieza de sangre) could be full citizens.

Pure blood became a Spanish obsession.

All the nations of Western Europe had regarded the Jews as little better than animals, and the Catholic church had proclaimed them collectively the murderers of Jesus Christ.

What separated European Jews from Spanish Jews was that in Europe, they were considered TAKERS of Christian blood, but in Spain they were seen as GIVERS of corrupt blood, through sex and the birth of "tainted" children.

Due to the degree of Jewish integration in Spanish society, they could use the power of sex to convince Catholics to "contanimate" themselves.

This was the Spanish terror, the fear of the enemy in their midst, outwardly Christian, but nevertheless carriers of bad blood.

The same also rang true of the Moors, "New Christians" as they were.

The Spanish Habsburg rulers Karl V(as Holy Roman Emperor)/Carlos I and Felipe II banned the book "Libro Verde" because it claimed that the Trastámara ancestors of Carlos and Felipe had doubly corrupted blood, that they had married Moors and consorted with Jews.

Every Moor and every Jew was a suspect, even Moorish midwives and wet nurses were not seen kindly, as they represented another way to corrupt Christian blood.

Felipe II's decision to relocate the Granadan Moors meant that sources of possible contagion was spread through all Christian communities.

The only weapon against such a mortal danger was the Holy Inquisition, which waged a ceaseless war against the forces of heresy undermining Christianity.

It has been calculated that around 35,000 cases of religious abnormality came before the Inquisition during Felipe's reign.

The Spanish became self-proclaimed experts on racial distinction as a consequence of this obsession with pure blood.

Sancho Panza, in "Don Quijote" by Miguel de Cervantes, boasted that he was "free from any admixture of Jew or Moor", and therefor he was the inferior of no man.

It was in this Spain, under Felipe II and his successors, the male children of the Habsburgs were brought up.

Maximilian II (Holy Roman Emperor) and all his four sons grew to maturity at the Spanish court, while the daughters of Felipe II and his son, Felipe III, journeyed north from Spain to marry their Austrian cousins.

The impact of this Spanish fixation with blood and race influenced the Habsburgs deeply.

The marriage patterns of the Habsburgs in the century and a half of the Madrid-Wien axis is unique in Western European history.

Their marriages followed a simple rule: to marry "in", conserving the blood, was good, to marry "out", could lead to disaster.

Felipe IV, the father of Carlos II, married the daughter of his cousin, Emperor Ferdinand III, in 1649.

Carlos II, whose life had been expected to end abruptly ever since his birth survived for 35 years.

He was most likely not able to reproduce, due to the incestuous nature of his Habsburg ancestors and left no heirs, so his death sparked the War of the Spanish Succession, with both the French king and the Austrian emperor vying for control over Spain.

French ambassadors to the court of Spain stressed the physical decay and mental ineptitude of Carlos II, while Habsburg diplomats were more inclined to stress the vital signs.

Carlos was not quite the imbecile potrayed in most histories.

He did not lack shrewdness and a will of his own.

When he came of age in 1675 he refused to sign a document that would have prolonged the regency of his mother.

Simply put, he was capable of understanding and signing decrees, following arguments and making political judgements.

He had trouble walking and was almost illiterate, but he also possessed many traits recognized in his ancestors.

He was as stubborn as his namesake, Karl V/Carlos I, and as pious as his cousin Leopold I (Holy Roman Emperor).

He was delighted to be painted kneeling before the monstrance (vessel used in Roman Catholic, Old Catholic and Anglican churches to display the consecrated Eucharistic host), but still possessed the iron discipline of a Spanish king.

During a 14 hour ceremony, he only left his place once, to answer natures call.

However, he did suffer, amongst many other things, he had a bad metabolism.

The English ambassador to Madrid, James Stanhope, reported about Carlos that "His constitution is very weak and broken much beyond his age" and that "They cut his hair off in his sickness, which the decay of nature had almost done before".

Furthermore, "He has a ravenous stomach, and swallows all he eats whole, for his nether jaw stands so much out, that his two rows of teeth cannot meet".

Yet within days Carlos could be completely recovered, a pattern that repeated  itself year after year.

By October 1700, Carlos was plainly in a terminal decline.

On 8 October, his doctor reported that he was almost dead, but once again, Carlos rallied, making an almost miraculous recovery.

On 29 October, his doctors covered his trunk with the entrails of freshly killed animals, hoping to restore his vital energy.

By this point, he could no longer speak.

Finally, on 1 November, Carlos II, last of the Spanish Habsburgs, called "el Hechizado", the Insane, or the Bewitched, passed away.

His ancestors obsession with purity of blood ultimately led to the undoing of Carlos, who suffered his entire life from mental handicaps, infertility and an inability to chew his own food.

Pictured is an old map of Spain, and Carlos II, with the trademark Habsburg chin clearly shown.- Tobbe