Preview: Napoleon’s Counterstrike
What You Will Find
• Five maps, three of which go together to create one 66” x 34” playing area for the Katzbach Campaign.
One of our playtesters remarked: “I tell ya, those three maps set up next to each other look cool as hell.”
The Löwenberg map went through 18 revisions, Goldberg 20 revisions, and Katzbach 22 revisions.
The Dresden map extends upriver to the camp of Pirna, where numerous battles took place from Frederick’s invasion of Saxony in 1756 through August 22 and 26, 1813. This map had 35 revisions.
The small Wartenburg map, at just 11” x 17”, covers the bridgehead fight between Bertrand’s IV Corps and Yorck’s I Corps on 3 October 1813. It went through 18 revisions.
• Two counter sheets with the familiar 1813 armies, present also in Napoleon at Leipzig and Four Lost Battles.
• Player Aid cards; the most important of which are the Initial Setup cards.
How to Read the Initial Setups
Players who just want to get into play of the game can overlook the supplemental information on the setups, but for the historian who wishes to understand how we arrived at the strengths and other values on the counters, this explanation is for you.
As background, read the article in Vol. V, Nr. 4 of Wargame Design Magazine (page 5) where we posted our initial work on developing the Coalition OrBat for Dresden. The article covers our attempts to reconstruct Coalition Attrition prior to the battle. We used the Struggle of Nations and Napoleon at the Crossroads games to calculate attrition, based on Schwarzenberg’s march through the Erz Gebirge. In general, any authority you consult will simply provide the starting strength of the Bohemian Army on August 15th, which leaves all the march attrition out of account. Bodart (1908) cites a total army strength of 200,000, and Michael Leggiere (2015) comes closer with his estimate 215,000. Publishing a book with that kind of detail is okay, but for a wargame it could seriously imbalance the game.
You will find the exact situation by looking at our Coalition Initial Setup card (top of page 3). These calculations are seen here for the first time. We found the initial strength of the Army of Bohemia (including the troops transferred from Silesia at the opening of the campaign), to total 211,415 men. We then calculated the march distance of each of the six columns as they made their separate marches through the mountains over a 10-day period leading up to the battle on 26–27 August. Klenau’s left flank corps suffered the highest attrition rate at 20%, while Wittgenstein’s column got off relatively unscathed at only 8%. Overall the army left behind 13.5% of its men (over 28,000) just crossing the mountains; giving Schwarzenberg a battle strength of 182,816 men. George Nafziger, in his authoritative “Napoleon at Dresden,” gets the total exactly right (181,000), although his strengths for the five separate columns are sometimes over and sometimes under the mark.
Details
For example, look at Moritz Liechtenstein’s Light Division. He starts out with 5,487 men and reaches Dresden (Net 8–26) with 4,903 men. His two brigades start with 2,740 men each, and wind up with about 2,450, losing about one strength point between them. (“Basis” is the quality of the unit used in evaluating its strength.) A 600-basis means the total strength of the unit must be divided by 600 to develop the combat strength. For reference, the calculated strength of the unit on 4 October (Net 10–4) is also shown, as is the unit’s strength at Leipzig, which for these two units is unchanged from their Dresden strength, indicating that replacements had been received to cover all combat and attrition losses during and after the battle of Dresden.
The French Army
Fortunately, Napoleon’s strength had already been worked out in OSG’s Special Study Nr. 1 published in 2007 (2nd edition 2016) on pp 54–59. For Counterstrike we reduced the number of columns, adding calculations for Victor’s II Corps on 16 August (not included in the earlier work.) For the remainder of the army we started with the manpower on 23-Aug (after attrition and combat losses—not including officers). Wherever you see a green cell with the word “Counter,” that is the strength we used to calculate the unit’s combat strength. “Combat Loss” is for engagements between 15 and 25 August. Attrition is estimated at 1% per day. For Bertrand’s IV Corps which was part of the Berlin Army, we used the unit strength on 26-Sept and then showed an estimated attrition (only about 330 men in a week without marching or fighting).
For both the French and Coalition, the next five columns show the setup location for each unit at Löwenberg, Goldberg, Katzbach, Dresden, and Wartenburg. That was a huge historical research project. In the next column we list the regimental composition of each unit (note abbreviations at the bottom). And finally, for the French, we include a “Notes” column. In several instances you will see “Loss departs from Study,” meaning that we recalculated the attrition and or combat losses instead of using the numbers in the Special Study.
What Does it all Mean?
It took a team of committed grognards months to figure all this out, working-over the strength and other values of each unit. The purpose of this massive effort was to give Counterstrike a chance of replicating the historical outcome. The accuracy of the maps and counters is vital to producing the historical situation.