Description
In this issue:
NAPOLEON’S MASTERPIECE
The Battle of Austerlitz, 1805. This month MHM focuses on Napoleon’s strategic brilliance and explains how he defeated the leading figures of ancien regime Europe at Austerlitz in 1805, establishing the hegemony of France. Includes:
– Background
– The commanders
– The armies
– The battle
– Battle map
– Timeline
For God and Tsar: Imperial Russia’s army from the Crimea to World War I. Graham Goodlad describes the decline of the Tsarist army in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Hawker Hurricane: Biography of a battle-winning fighter. Stephen Roberts tells the story of the other great British fighter of the Second World War.
Tudor Walls: The birth of artillery fortification in England. David Flintham analyses the anti-invasion defences of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, exploring the greatest programme of coastal fortification since the Romans.
Plus: news, reviews, museums, opinion columns, and much more!
From the Editor:
The centenary of Waterloo has reminded us what a crude slugging match the battle was. A desperate defence on one side. A succession of clumsy frontal attacks on the other. A huge butcher’s bill.
Our special feature this month focuses on a very different sort of battle, ten years before. Austerlitz, fought on 2 December 1805 in the heart of Europe, was perhaps Napoleon’s greatest masterpiece.
The basic idea was simple enough: to fix the flanks and break through in the centre. The mastery was all in the detail.
Victory depended on a minute appreciation of the ground, a precise distribution of force along six miles of front, and an elaborate deception plan designed to make the enemy do exactly as the French commander wanted.
Then, however, matters depended on the Grande Armée. But in 1805, after ten years of Revolutionary change and Napoleonic reform, this had become the finest army of its age -a superb all-arms military machine based on mass, morale, and mobility.
Also this issue, Stephen Roberts recalls the role of that other great British fighter of the Second World War, the Hawker Hurricane; Graham Goodlad analyses the decline of the Tsarist Army between Borodino and Tannenberg; and David Flintham reviews the coastal defences of Henry VIII.
Cover Date: Dec-2015, Volume 6 Issue 3