Trachenberg Plan

The Trachenberg Plan was a campaign strategy created by the Allies in the 1813 German Campaign during the War of the Sixth Coalition, and named for the conference held at the palace of Trachenberg.[1] The plan advocated avoiding direct engagement with French emperor, Napoleon I, which had resulted from fear of the emperor's now legendary prowess in battle. Consequently, the Allies planned to engage and defeat Napoleon's marshals and generals separately, and thus weaken his army while they built up an overwhelming force even he could not defeat. It was decided upon after a series of defeats and near disasters at the hands of Napoleon at Lützen, Bautzen and Dresden. The plan was successful, and at the Battle of Leipzig, where the Allies had a considerable numerical advantage, Napoleon was soundly defeated and driven out of Germany, back to the Rhine. The plan was an amalgam of two prior works: the Trachenberg Protocol and the Reichenbach Plan,[2] authored by the Austrian chief of staff of the Sixth Coalition, Joseph Radetzky von Radetz and Crown Prince of Sweden Charles John (formerly Napoleon's marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte) whose experience with the tactics and methods of the Grande Armée, as well as personal insight on Napoleon, proved invaluable.[3] The combined, modified version of the two prior plans became known as the Trachenberg Plan.[4]

Former Marshal of the Empire Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, later Crown Prince Charles John of Sweden, co-author of the Trachenberg Plan

Notes
  1. Leggiere, Michael (2015). pp. 51–52
  2. Leggiere, Michael (2015). pp. 52–60
  3. Barton, Dunbar Plunkett (1930) pp. 283–284
  4. Leggiere, Michael (2015). p. 62

References
  • Barton, Sir Dunbar Plunket (1930). The Amazing Career of Bernadotte 1763–1844, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
  • Chandler, David G (1966). The Campaigns of Napoleon Volume II, Macmillan Company, New York.
  • Las Cases, Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonné (1890). Memoirs of the Life, Exile, and Conversations of the Emperor Napoleon, Volume III, Worthington Company, New York.
  • Leggiere, Michael V (2015). Napoleon and the Struggle for Germany: The Franco-Prussian War of 1813 Volume II, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
  • Leggiere, Michael V (2014). Blücher: Scourge of Napoleon, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
  • Palmer, Alan (1990). Bernadotte: Napoleon's Marshal, Sweden's King, John Murray, London.
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