Castigleone, the archetypical Napoleon Offensive Battle and Campaign.

[Redalvilgeshki]

In July 1796, with the intention of relieveing Mantua, Austrian General Count Dagobert Wurmser led an elaborate 3-pronged offensive inorder to increase the speed of moveing his large force of 50,000 men and overwelm Napoleon's 44,000, somewhat dispersed force.
Early on, the Austrians scored some early success. They captured Lonato on July 31st, but Wurmser, stubbornly intent on captureing Mantua left his right wing isolated from August 1st to August 3rd.

This was all the time the young Bonaparte needed. Leaveing merely 8,000 men to guard the far right and 12,000 around Mantua, quickly moved 24,000 men to attack Wurmser's Isolated left wing serpated from most of the army by Lake Garda.
With heavy loses he threw the Austrians out of Lonato.

Solidifiying the geographical effect Lake Garda had on seperateing Wurmsers force.

Wurmser, realizeing his error, quickly made for Lonato and met with Napoleons force around Castigleone.

A fatal mistake, he was now caught between Napoleon and Sururier's Corps on the right.
Capitalizeing on Wurmser's errors Napoleon was able togather a local numerical supriority of 27,000 Frenchmen to 21,000 Austrians.

It was a classic Napoleonic Stratagy of Mouvement sur les derrieres, pinning Wurmser's force with Masanna and Augueru, he forced Wurmser to commit more and more reserves to the front untill when Sururier's division showed up, Wurmser had no more troops to commit.

But Napoleon, who had witheld most of Augueru's force untill Sururier showed up, in what he called Augueru's finest hour, unleashed the Coup de grace.


The Austrians lost a total of 40,000 men (15,000 of which were captured), nine standards and 70 peice's of artillery.

Napoleon lost barely 6,000.


The roots of briliance shown in all of Napoleon's future campaigns could be seen at Castigleone,

I. Deafet in Detail:

Napoleon was a manuver based commander.
There was no way he could have sustained the assault on all 3 fronts by spliting his force into 3rds. He relied more on the boots of his soldiers then the muskets they were armed with.

Using manuver, he concentrated a majority of his force to the left flank and then turned to take the center and right

LATER SEEN AT:

In the Six Days Campaign, he quickly split the enemy force and defeated Blucher's corps in detail.

II. NAPOLEON'S CENTRAL STRATEGY

After throwing the enemy out of Lonato, given its position at the tip of Lake Garda, he was in between a wing and the center of the Austrian army.

As long as he was in this position, he had LOCAL numerical supriority over the enemy armies regardless of which enemy he attacked.

He created a circumstance where the supirior enemy numbers were negated significantly.

LATER SEEN AT:

In the Waterloo campaign, he attained the the Central position and fought the seperated Prussian and British armies on his terms of Local Supriority.


III. INDIRECT APPROACH