705 Battle of Warsaw (III): Surrounded on three sides

The Austrian commander Bender had a grim countenance, and the Austrians advanced at a very fast pace at the beginning, and the Austrians encountered little hindrance from Slovakia. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 infoBut as we get closer to Warsaw, the pressure on the Austrians increases. The cavalry scouts he sent out had suffered heavy losses in the past few days, and it was clear that the Germans and Poles were also sending a large number of cavalry to reconnoiter the battlefield. Bender was in disbelief at the sight of the Austrian cavalry who had fled, and in his mind, the Austrian cavalry had always been the proudest and most tenacious soldiers, but he did not expect that they were like ghosts, and many of them even lost their souls, apparently from post-war trauma.

There's only one possibility, and that's that their enemies have given them nightmares that they won't be able to dispel!

This was a problem for Bender, as the Austrians were the only Triple Coalition forces to arrive from the south, which meant that he had to fight the Germans alone at this time. The Germans had apparently set up a net for the Austrians to come by, and Bender did not want to resist the Germans, so he chose to temporarily halt his march at Valka on the Vistula River, and wait for the Russians and Prussians to arrive before launching further operations.

The Germans were not easy to deal with, this is a consensus among European armies. Bender was not the most senior in the Austrian army, and another army commander, Krefait, had been defeated in the previous war against the Germans, and this time he was not trusted by the Austrian emperor, so he was replaced by Bender. Klefait was not actually idle, the general was organizing forces in Austria to block the military attempts of Napoleon and others to threaten Austria from Bavaria.

However, although Bender did not plan to continue the march, the German army would not retreat, and Blucher ordered the German army to launch an offensive when he did not know that Bender had actually stopped. Bender could not have imagined that the Germans were so fast, and Blucher ordered a forced march of the German army, spanning hundreds of kilometers, to appear in the rear of the Austrian army, cutting off the possible trajectory of the Austrian army's retreat to the south. At the same time, the German army gathered more than 90,000 troops from six divisions and stormed the front of the Austrian army. At the same time, the Polish People's Revolutionary Army led by Kościuszko detoured to the left side of the Austrian army, and generally formed a state of encirclement on three sides of the Austrian army.

Bender was not to blame for being careless, and based on intelligence, he only judged that the main German army was still some distance away from him, and that the presence of German scout cavalry was basically just that. Moreover, he also carried out a certain defensive deployment to ensure that his position was stable and balanced.

However, the speed of the Germans surprised him a little, and the Germans moving south broke through the defense of the Austrian left flank within an hour, and continued to the south without hesitation, and finally inserted a backward one, so that the rear of the Austrian army was completely cut off. The gap in this southbound force was soon filled by the Polish People's Revolutionary Army, and Bender found himself surprisingly surprisingly surrounded.

Although the weapons and equipment of the Austrian army have been updated a lot, the command thinking of the officers and generals is still on the old side. If Bender had made such a set-up, it would have taken him at least half a week, but the Germans had encircled the Austrians in just two days, which surprised Bender.

While Bender was still terrified that he had been surrounded by the enemy, Blucher's frontal offensive arrived. Blucher, who was not particularly well stocked with ammunition, did everything he could to get his artillery at least two base shells before the battle, and then his artillerymen launched a bombardment of the Austrians.

The Austrians also used artillery to bombard each other in a hurry, but it was somewhat insignificant compared to the German firepower. Bender wisely sent out a cavalry unit in an attempt to harass Blucher's army from the flank, but the cavalry was quickly repulsed. The solid German formation, combined with machine guns, soon turned the Austrian cavalry into a pile of corpses and hasty deserters.

The war has evolved to the state it is today, and basically all the generals in Europe are learning to fight trench warfare. Bender was no exception, and although he was surprised by the speed of the Germans, Bender still had his soldiers dig trenches in the position.

Scharnhorst, who was at the front command post, said to Blucher solemnly: "Our logistical problems are now very huge, and in order to fight this volley, our soldiers are lightly armed, carrying only ammunition and supplies for two days. In particular, the troops behind enemy lines that we intercepted were actually very inadequate in terms of food and ammunition. We even had to ask the comrades of the Polish National Revolution to assist us in mobilizing the locals to collect grain and grass for us. Even worse is our ammunition, and in two days we will probably have to fight the Austrians hand-to-hand. ”

Blucher also sighed: "I always listened to the discussion of the officers of the Tang Army before, saying that modern war logistics is the first condition for determining victory or defeat, but I refuted it at the time, and now that I think about it, it is really a bit naïve." We didn't have railroads on the battlefield, we didn't have enough cars, and all the supplies were transported by horse-drawn wagons, so the pressure was enormous. But from what we have learned, the Austrians are also inexperienced in the face of modern warfare, and like us, they do not have enough logistical baggage to carry out a long-term battle with 100,000 men, not to mention that we have copied their supply lines, and they are now also short of ammunition and food and grass, and their condition will only be worse than ours. Defeating them and gaining time, we will be able to get more supplies from the Datang, and what about Prussia and Russia? Prussia has lost its old nest, and there is no question of supply at all, and now it is all dependent on the help of Russia, and the Russian guys, apparently not prepared at this time, are not enough to support them to continue attacking us. ”

Blucher was not wrong at all, Tsarist Russia did hoard a lot of weapons and supplies at the beginning for military operations to partition Poland, but now the war has expanded, the Russian army has been replenished in large quantities, coupled with the burden of Prussia, the consumption of materials is an astronomical amount, not to mention that winter is just around the corner, don't expect that in the cold winter of Eastern Europe, the Russians will be able to send grain, grass and ammunition to Poland for 200,000 people.

Blucher believed that in fact, as long as the situation could be held up and one side did not collapse, then the war dragged on, and the damage to Tsarist Russia and Austria was far greater than that of Germany. (To be continued.) )