'Father of Modern Warfare' - Battle of Breitenfeld, 1631 - Gustavus Adolphus' masterpiece

It is late afternoon on the 17th September, 1631,  and from his command center on the Galgenberg ridge, north of the village of Breitenfeld,  Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, senses the arrival of his moment to execute an advance. His bold and audacious commander Gottfried Heinrich Graff zu Pappenheim has been launching  cavalry sorties on their enemy’s right wing for more than two hours, and Tilly can see  that the attacks are finally making a mark on the Swedish line, drawing central  units wide to conduct counter measures. It appears to Tilly that these maneuvers have  left the Saxon army opposite his own right flank separated from their more formidable Swedish  allies, and with one great push against them, the battlefield will belong to him.

. . More than ten years of war in the Holy Roman Empire has seen almost invariable  Catholic victory, and with this advance, Tilly will add one more great triumph to history.

His officers bawl commands to their multinational force of Germans, Spanish, Walloons, Italians,  Croats, and Hungarians, and the drummers of the Imperial army build to a crescendo. The tercios descend from the hill… Their ranks are 40 to 50 deep, and the  smallest units are made up of no fewer than 1,000 men. These packed Imperial formations  are supported by regiments of cuirassier cavalry.

On the opposite side, the mobile Swedish artillery  of King Gustavus Adolphus shows the effectiveness for which he has already become famed across  the continent, firing on the advance with rapid order and even more deadly accuracy. The guns rip holes in the huge imperial tercios - blasting through their tightly packed  ranks and opening them like a leaking sponge. To the consternation of the Swedes and the alarm  of the Saxons, Tilly’s forces do not stop their march; they do not even waver when a score of  men are exploded by one ball and then the same number a moment later by a second.

The drums rattle ever louder. The Elector John Georg and Gustavus  Adolphus watch the rear ranks of Tilly’s army march over the body parts of their  former comrades toward the Saxon line… The glinting pikes and smoldering  muskets remain raised in precision… The field fills with dust  and the smoke of the guns, obscuring the advance somewhat from the  Swedes and hiding the fate of their allies. What is curious to them is that the cleaved  Imperial troops make no sound themselves.

The field is oddly devoid of the  wails of the injured and dying, even as yet another Swedish cannonball rends a  gaping hollow in one of General Gallas’s tercios. Instead, there is the sound of  chanting, of prayers, of Tilly’s name. The smoke and dust of the battlefield  mingles with the sharp, pungent odor of blood and visceral gore.

The smell creates a terrible incense that brings to mind for the  Protestants the hated Catholic mass. This is a sacrifice brought to vivid life  - a black ritual - the giving of life so that those who come after will reign forever… The pall descends just Tilly’s tercios and his cavalry under Furstenberg on the far right  are about to make contact with the Saxons. Swedish generals frantically rush to  carry out their monarch’s orders.

Field Marshal Count Gustav Horn orders the  front line cavalry protecting his left wing to march wide on the left and then brings his  reserve dragoons and cuirassiers forward. With infantry marching between the mounted  units to make a consolidated line, the shroud of battlefield fog lifts like a blanket and  reveals an utterly transformed theater of war. The Saxons have left the field -  retreating in panic towards the Loberbach stream which the Protestants  crossed earlier with so much difficulty.

Not only that, but the Saxons have failed  to spike their guns, with the result that the Imperials are able to turn fire on their  fleeing backs and the improvised Swedish line. Worst of all for the King of Sweden, now hard  pressed under the artillery of two armies, the escape of the Saxons has destroyed the numerical  superiority that he enjoyed at the outset of the battle and which was almost a prerequisite of  his facing the tactical brilliance of Tilly. To the Imperial forces, the hitherto invincible  Swedes are now outnumbered, outgunned, and very quickly they will be outmaneuvered, for  Tilly has made certain that his cavalry are only to break the Saxon line and then immediately  regroup for the envelopment of the Swedes.

Rubbing his gloved hands together in satisfaction,  on this day he will triumph over a King. The guns roar once more and the smoke  descends on the Protestant cause… The northern stretches of what are today eastern  Germany and western Poland are rent with screams, terror, and fire at the outset  of the 1631 campaign season. After negotiating a treaty of alliance with  Richelieu’s France in the town of Barwalde during the winter, King Gustavus Adolphus  moves out the next month toward Mecklenburg, with the Count of Tilly wasting no time in  moving from Frankfurt-on-the-Oder to meet him.

The Swedish king avoids the Imperial  force and instead moves toward Demmin, occupying it; while at the same  time, Tilly captures Neubrandenburg, putting its garrison of mixed Swedes  and Scottish soldiers to the sword, along with ransacking the wealthy town of  anything that could be put to use by his forces. After this, Tilly moves on and puts  the town of Magdeburg under siege. Determined to answer this action, but  still unwilling to face Tilly in the open, Adolphus instead moves his forces in an unexpected  direction, south, where he eventually puts his army into position around Tilly’s former  headquarters at Frankfurt-on-the-Oder.

On word reaching him of this development at  Magdeburg, Tilly moves with a section of his army to try and lift the siege, but the city falls  to the Swedes before he can complete the march. The Swedes give Frankfurt the same treatment as  was given to the Protestants at Neubrandenburg, and when Tilly arrives back at Magdeburg  with tens of thousands of reinforcements, the violent aftermath of its fall  surpasses all of the previous incidents. Magedeburg is burned and its inhabitants  massacred for days until Tilly gives the order that his forces are to cease their devastation.

From a population of 25,000 prior to the siege, perhaps as many as 20,000 of the  city’s inhabitants are put to death. While Tilly is reinforced with armies  from Italy and southern Germany, Gustavus Adolphus is forced to take defensive  measures along the Elbe and Havel, before settling on Werben as the center where he will mass his  offensive forces and march to engage Tilly. Honor dictates now that Adolphus confront Tilly;  he is, after all, operating in Germany as the defender of Protestantism, and his reputation  will suffer if Magdeburg goes unanswered.

At the same time, the horrendousness of  the Magdeburg massacre has handed Adophus and the Protestant cause a propaganda  victory, for there is little incentive now for Protestants to surrender or trust  in the security of the Imperial forces. The Swedes also shift much of the  responsibility for the disaster onto the Elector of Saxony, whom they said  could have saved the city had he wished. Saxony and its elector, John Georg I, has  thus far remained aloof from the fighting, but its geographical position means that it  will soon need to make a decision on whether to join the Swedes or the Imperials,  lest the decision be made for it.

As early as June, Tilly is operating  within the Electorate to induce John Georg to come onto the Emperor’s side,  and he places Leipzig under siege. Its inhabitants and the rest of Saxony  quake at the thought of their city falling prey to the same fate as Magedeburg. The Elector’s situation is complicated by the fact that while he is a Protestant, he also does  not wish to see other Protestant German states like Brandenburg grow in power from the war.

While he is making his decision to join Tilly or Adolphus, Count Gottfried zu Pappenheim, who  has been left with a force at Magdeburg by Tilly, decides unilaterally at the start of July to make  an attempt on the Swedish lines along the Elbe. The Swedish army throws him  back without difficulty and then resumes the consolidation of forces at Werben. In an effort to shore up his commander’s position, Tilly marches back north - his army replenished by  the looting of Saxony, and he and Pappenheim link up for another march on Werben in early August.

On a misty morning, Tilly attempts an assault on the walls of the fortress, but a change  in the weather reveals the advance and he calls off the attack with some losses. For the next two successive days, Tilly arrays his army in battle formation before Werben,  but Gustavus Adolphus refuses to meet him. Faced with the realities of feeding tens of  thousands of men, Tilly withdraws once more into Saxony and renews the campaign of pillage.

With his army supplied by looted Saxon goods, the Elector under pressure by the siege of  Leipzig, as well as the arrival of another army under General Egon Furstenberg-Heiligenberg,  Tilly is in a dominant but not decisive position. He has very resolutely placed the onus on  Gustavus Adolphus and Elector John Georg to act, and in the second week of September, with  Leipzig nearing the end of its tether, Saxony joins the Swedish alliance. Leipzig falls three days later, on the 14th, but by that time, the Swedish army is already marching  from Werben with the monarch at its head.

Their combined forces likely exceeding  35,000 men, possibly even as high as 40,000, the allied Protestant army is assured in  its capability to face Tilly’s experienced but numerically smaller force. With his own allied contingents, Tilly’s army likely exceeds 30,000, but he is  banking on his men’s confidence following ten years of unbroken victory, coupled with the  latest triumphs in the capture of the major strongholds in Leipzig and Magedeburg before  it, to overcome the deficit in an open battle. The day after Leipzeig’s fall, the 15th  September, John Georg and Gustavus Adolphus formally join forces at Duben, Wittenburg.

At Leipzig, Tilly plays the waiting game, as there are another 15,000 soldiers moving north  to reinforce him under the command of Johann, Count Aldringen, and with that, he is convinced  that victory will fall for their side. He differs with his senior commanders in  this approach, and they are keen - to the point of insubordination - to engage with  the Protestant army as soon as possible. Pappenheim, again, leads a semi-sanctioned  sortie north, riding at the head of a force of 2,000 cavalrymen to reconnoiter the Swedish-Saxon  forces, but with his characteristic negligence of chain of command, he engages the Swedish  advance units and then holds his ground instead of withdrawing back to the main force.

His dispatches to Tilly paint his situation as very precarious, and unwilling to  lose thousands of his best cavalry, Tilly is compelled to order an advance. Breaking the rule of war to fight only on ground of your own choosing, Tilly  moves five miles north and reinforces Pappenheim in the area of Breitenfeld village. The Protestant forces are about ten miles north, but the Swedish king gives the order to march the  next day, and by the morning of the 17th, the two immense armies are just three miles apart.

While Tilly’s army moves into formation north of Breitenfeld village, the Swedish and Saxon  armies are coming south and crossing the Loberbach river toward the village of Podelwitz. Aware that the Protestant forces will be struggling to traverse the barrier, as well  as the marsh ground that surrounds its banks, Tilly sends Imperial cavalry to harass  and possibly even halt the enemy advance, but unsupported by infantry, these flying columns  are seen off by concentrated musket fire. The Protestant army continues through and  around Podelwitz village and eventually the Saxon units on the far left wing are  brushing the outskirts of Gobschelwitz.

Tilly, meanwhile, has used the time  given by the river crossing and the cavalry harassment to deploy on a wide  ridge overlooking the plain below. His army is organized in a single line -  with the artillery placed in the front and most of the cavalry on the wings. A third  cavalry unit is placed behind the center.

The tercios’ ranks are very close knit and  vary between units of 1,000 and 1,500 men, mixed with muskets and pikemen. The larger units are likely 50 men across, with 30 ranks in depth. Across the field, the Saxons are organized in a similarly traditional fashion to the  multinational Catholic army, but the Swedes to their right are using a wholly novel formation.

By this bright September morning in 1631, Gustavus Adolphus has reigned as King and commander in  chief of Sweden for more than twenty years. His military doctrine and the lessons of  his early wars against Russia, Denmark, and Poland have been absorbed and harmonized  into its ranks and its command structure. The meritocratic officer corps and his obsession  with training and drill render inconsequential the fact that this “Swedish” army is in fact mostly  composed of German and Scottish auxiliaries.

It moves as a cohesive whole, and its  tactics and formation are geared in every respect to the goals of maneuverability  and concentrated, overwhelming firepower. The philosophy and focus on initiative at the  operational level in the Swedish army would be as familiar to a Roman centurion of the 2nd  century as to a member of the Prussian General Staff under Moltke in the 19th. This difference in approaches at Breitenfeld would have been readily apparent  as Pappenheim, the contrary and insubordinate throwback to a former age, took his place  in command of the Imperial left wing.

The Swedish army is deployed into two main  lines rather than a single broad force, and each of these lines has reserve forces  to their rear, giving their commanders options as well as strength in depth. While the Swedes also place the greater number of their artillery in a central  battery, it is policy for companies and regiments to deploy their own field pieces,  and the second line of mixed infantry and cavalry are equipped with further heavy weapons. Firearms and artillery in the Swedish army also have standardized calibers, allowing  for mass production, rapid supply, and a terrific rate of fire in the field, a  great advantage over the multinational gauges and weapons used by Tilly’s force.

Another difference between the forces is the smaller size of the Swedish units. Cavalry squadrons and infantry companies can be positioned on the battlefield independently,  but they are also trained to link up and form mobile regiments to attack in force. Rather than separating the infantry in the center and cavalry on the wings, the forces  are combined with deliberate gaps left in the shallow ranks so that infantry can reinforce  and shelter cavalry units and vice versa.

Looking at the two tremendous hosts, the single  largest collection of forces on a battlefield in more than a decade of war, it is apparent to both  commanders that not only would two religions and two military leaders pit their strength against  one another on this day, it would be two different military systems and doctrines, indeed two  philosophies of warfare going toe to toe. It begins, however, as most set piece  battles of the age, with an artillery duel. The impact of the Swedish military doctrine  makes itself obvious immediately.

While Tilly’s artillery consists of 27 pieces placed in  one battery, the Swedes have close to 70, while the Saxons have brought a dozen  pieces to add to the Protestant barrage. Still more damaging than the Swedes'  advantage in numbers was their rate of fire. For every one round fired at the Protestant  line, the Swedes are firing three in response.

Not only that, but Tilly’s densely packed  tercios are afflicted in greater proportion than the spaced out Swedish units. The cannonade continues for two hours, while the soldiers of all three armies are forced  to endure the ordeal of hearing their comrades screams, witnessing their sudden deaths, and  the mental torture of knowing that the merciless guns might annihilate them at any moment. Tilly is now in a quandary.

It is he who occupies the high ground, giving him the advantage  in the event of a push by the Protestant enemy. On the other hand, his army are suffering  twice as many casualties as their opponents, and neither the Swedes nor the Saxons are  showing any indication that they wish to move and begin a disadvantageous attack  on Tilly’s position on the Galgenberg. Yet again it is Pappenheim who drives the action  forward in a completely unauthorized maneuver.

He is in command of over 5,000 men, compromising  the entirety of the imperial left wing, most prominently a mixture of German with some  Spanish and Walloon cuirassier regiments. Pappenheim leads these thousands of cavalrymen in  a glorious, medieval style charge at the Swedish positions on the left, swinging around to  try and avoid the myriad and shellacking fire from their guns. This is not an easy task, given that the Swedish system is built upon using  maneuverable guns issued to each unit, allowing them to quickly realign and fire on the highly  visible mass of cavalrymen charging toward them.

Despite their numbers, Pappenheim  cannot penetrate the Swedish line, so instead he employs the caracole tactic, by  which the cuirassiers ride in an arc within pistol range of the Swedish line, discharge their  firearms and then continue riding in a sweep. After his experiences in the Polish war, Gustavus  Adolphus has already come to the conclusion that the caracole is a useless maneuver, as if the  cavalry are within pistol range of the line, then they are most certainly within range  of the Swedish musketeers and big guns. The Swedish right - where the King  is positioned and in overall command, but with General Johan Baner commanding  almost 9,000 infantrymen, deliver a resounding reply to Pappenheim in precise order  - a crippling blitz that shocks the cavalry and forces them to withdraw without further ado.

While Pappenheim regroups his units and calls forward his infantry in support of another  raid - on the other side of the battlefield, the Imperial right wing begins its own advance. Under Furstenberg and Colonel Johann Ludwig Hektor von Isolani, the multinational force of German,  Hungarian, Croat, and Italian cavalry moves toward the Saxon army with ample infantry support. Without mobile guns and the honed defensive tactics of the Swedes, some of the Saxon cavalry  units put up resistance, but they are routed from the field, killed, or simply implode under  the pressure of the titanic offensive.

On the Imperial left, Pappenheim is continuing  to keep the Swedes and their King occupied with two more frontal attacks, both of  which are repulsed by heavy fire. By now, the field is dense with the smoke  of cannon and small arms, making it harder for any one individual to discern precisely  what is happening from minute to minute. Undeterred, Pappenheim regroups again and decides  this time to alter his approach of attack.

At the same time, with the Saxon army wavering,  Tilly decides that his strategy of kettling the Protestant wings and squeezing the center before  a final bulldozing of the enemy is coming to pass, and with the momentum of the fighting behind  him, he gives the order for a general advance. Tilly’s central tercios, numbering in the region  of 20,000 men alone, begin marching forward, their target the fragile Saxon infantry and  the Swedish units under the command Count Gustav Horn that stand next to them. The Imperial front line is two miles in length and its approach has a ruinous  effect on the hard pressed Saxon infantry.

They begin to fall away, first in ones and twos,  then in groups, and finally entire units are fleeing the field. Even their king, the Elector  John Georg is powerless to halt the panic. Just two units of the Saxon army - those of Taube  and Arnim - move in good order and take cover behind the Swedish left wing, maintaining their  ranks and reorganizing to continue the fight.

The tercios steadfast movement  in their oblique march toward the enemy line is not without its toll. The Swedish guns continually tear wide swathes through their ranks, every  round taking scores of men on impact. While Pappenheim makes another arcing charge  at Gustavus Adolphus’s position on the left, the main body of Tilly’s force  reach the Saxon’s former line, take possession of their guns, and  then begin a massed about turn.

So far all is going to plan, as Furstenburg and  Von Isolani stop their cavalry from cutting down the rushing Saxons, and bring them around  to what they anticipate will be the end game as they crush the Swedish in a side attack. A fog of war has descended, with the dry, churned field kicking up clouds of dirt from the boots  of tens of thousands of Saxons and Imperials. It mingles with the already cloying penumbra of  gunpowder smoke to obscure the Swedish lines.

All is going to plan, but moving the vast tercios  under fire is akin to turning a leviathan, and the minutes begin to elapse as the barrage  continues from the near invisible Swedish lines. On the Swedish side, counter operations are  being swiftly put in place. The commander there, Horn, a decades long veteran who has studied  modern military tactics in the Netherlands, recognizes the danger when he sees  that the Saxon line is breaking.

He immediately dispatches a report to  the King and gives orders that his second line - a mini-army in itself consisting of  cavalry, infantry, and artillery - move out to the left and widen the Swedish flank. All of the elements of Gustavus Adolphus’s doctrine are in encapsulated in the move -  from the initiative shown by Horn in reacting to the developing situation on the battlefield  before him, to the presence of ample reserves and weaponry in the Swedish ranks to reform and  in effect build a new left wing for their forces. When the smoke and dust clears and the tercios  and Imperial cavalry are facing the Swedes, they are presented with an intact and well rested  front line, rather than a vulnerable flank.

The King also receives Horn’s dispatch and  personally moves to the center to begin funneling additional reserves to the threat. While Swedish cavalry rides against Furstenburg’s and disrupts his attempt to forestall Horn’s  deployment, a Colonel Caldenbach leads his regiment in a full charge at the Imperial line. It is a charge without a hope of success, but Caldenbach’s sacrifice gives the Swedes  more time to bring their reserves into the new line and present a much stronger  front for the coming offensive.

Horn converts the ditches on the north south  road that travels down to Leipzig into defensive trenches, adding to the formidable  fire and manpower at his disposal. Undaunted by this remarkable  development, Tilly and his commanders begin what they wish to be the final foray. For fully one hour, Tilly’s tercios and cavalry run into the carnage mill of the Swedish lines,  while the Swedes hold their positions heroically against the more numerous Imperials.

Grape shot and muskets splinter and shred the deep Imperial lines, creating  excruciating and deadly ripples of pain along the front of the massed units. It is the guns that make the difference, for even though Furstenburg and Tilly  have commandeered the Saxon artillery, they cannot close the infantry on the Swedish  lines with their mobile and rapid firing cannon. Bizarrely, as tens of thousands of Swedes,  Germans and continental Europeans from Hungary to Spain reel with exhaustion, death, and awful  injuries, the sound of bagpipes rings across the field as Colonel John Hepburn seeks to rally the  Scots on the Swedish lines with a lively jig.

The tide turns irrevocably some time around  four o’clock when the King orders Johann Baner to lead a counter charge against the now  exhausted and ravaged force of Pappenheim. Riding at full gallop and firing pistols in the  saddle before drawing sabers immediately after, Baner runs Pappenheim’s cavalry from the field. The infantry that are left behind form a tercio, but without mobile support, the Swedes  begin the grim task of wearing it down.

Tilly, his forces now fully committed to the  action on the Swedish left wing and injured himself, is unable to offer any reserves or assist  the now isolated remnants of Pappenheim’s force. Adolphus sees his own opportunity. Once his  right wing has regrouped and Pappenheim’s last forces have either been annihilated or fled  back toward Breitenfeld or the Galgenberg, he gives the order for them and his front  line units in the center to arc to the left and begin a flanking maneuver on Tilly.

The Swedes move out with the king riding amongst his own regiments. Units occupy Tilly’s former  command center on the Galgenberg and overpower the remainder of Pappenheim’s force there. The imperial artillery battery is next to be captured and while the Swedish and Scottish  contingents prepare to turn them on their previous owners, Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Soop links his  cavalry with that of Horn and the merged regiments charge Tilly’s reserve cavalry unit which is  forming the left of the main Imperial force.

They drive the cavalry reserve  into the midst of the main line, causing fierce disruption just as the Swedes begin  to bombard Tilly’s army with their own guns. They are now hemmed in and taking  artillery fire from two directions, and their route south to Leipzig has been  blocked by the Swedes on the Galgenberg. Nearly the entirety of Tilly’s  cavalry flees the field, and the infantry is left to attempt to hold on.

Tilly - possibly concussed - refuses to order the retreat, even though he is now heavily wounded and  even almost captured on at least one occasion. As it becomes clear that  Imperial defeat is unavoidable, Pappenheim reappears on the battlefield  and attempts to rally and marshall whatever mounted troops he can find to provide  a screen for the tercios withdrawal. It is now late evening and the light is  beginning to fail.

Many of the men on the field have been fighting or enduring  artillery bombardment for seven hours. For the Swedes, Horn and Hepburn lead  simultaneous cavalry and infantry charges with support of troops sent by the King. The tercios finally break and a rout begins, thousands of Imperial troops running toward  the Linkelwald Forest to the north east.

Pappenheim improvises a defense with two  units he has managed to cobble together as a rear guard action, but the defeat is total. Tilly is saved by his own officers and manages to leave the field, but thousands die in  the rout before the Swedes - themselves now exhausted by the hours of fighting  - halt the pursuit as the night falls. As the news of the first major Protestant  victory in over a decade of fighting is digested with amazement around Europe, what  is not in dispute is that Sweden has now officially joined the league of great powers,  and its King is not only the defender of his fellow congregants but is also a military  leader of visionary and assiduous genius.

While Tilly and Pappenheim regroup and  attempt to rebuild their broken and diminished forces - with their losses exceeding  13,000 in a single day’s fighting - the Swedes spend the winter preparing for an invasion  of the southern German states of the Empire. The Catholics forces are far from defeated, but  the future looks bright for the still young King Gustavus Adolphus and his professional  and terrifyingly proficient army. The next year will dawn full of promise of  a reign that will last for decades to come.