Qualla: Battle of Kunersdorf

Battle of Kunersdorf: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit unknown lithographer, Public domain. By the time the long August day was ending, Frederick II of Prussia, the king his contemporaries called the Great, had two horses shot dead under him, his coat was perforated by bullets, and a musket ball had flattened the gold snuff box in his pocket without quite reaching his ribs. Of the roughly 50,000 men he had led across the Oder the day before, perhaps 3,000 were still with him in any organized form. He sat down in a peasant's hut at Reitwein and wrote a despairing letter to his old tutor: "Our defeat is very considerable. To me remains 3,000 men from an army of 48,000. I am no more master of my troops. I will not survive the doom of my fatherland. Farewell forever." He intended, that night, to abdicate and let his nephew inherit the wreckage. He was wrong about the doom of his fatherland, as it turned out. But he was not wrong about the scale of what had just happened on the chain of low hills outside the village of Kunersdorf.

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Image: unknown lithographer | Public domain

Battle of Kunersdorf: An Enemy He Despised

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ice Boy Tell, CC BY-SA 4.0. Frederick had spent his career humiliating armies twice the size of his own. At Rossbach he had thrashed the French and the Reichsarmee in ninety minutes. At Leuthen he had broken an Austrian force twice his strength with the oblique-order maneuver that became a textbook entry. B...

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Image: Ice Boy Tell | CC BY-SA 4.0

Battle of Kunersdorf: Through the Forest

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ralf Roletschek at German Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.0 de. Frederick crossed the Oder by pontoon bridge in the night and, at four in the morning of 12 August 1759, sent his army marching in a wide arc through the Reppen Forest, intending to come around the Russian rear and use his oblique attack from the southeast. He had not scouted the...

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Image: Ralf Roletschek at German Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 2.0 de

Battle of Kunersdorf: The King Will Not Stop

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ralf Lotys (Sicherlich), CC BY 2.5. Here Frederick should have stopped. His brother Henry, a clear-sighted tactician, told him so. The men were dehydrated, they had not eaten a hot meal in days, and the position they had taken on the Mühlberg was easily defensible. The Russians could not stay where they were foreve...

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Image: Ralf Lotys (Sicherlich) | CC BY 2.5

Battle of Kunersdorf: The Cossack Charge

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J.F.Krethlow, ~1780–?1880 See Georg Kaspar Nagler, Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon oder Nachrichten von dem Leben..." Fleischmann, 1839 171, Public domain. By late afternoon Saltykov knew the Prussian attack was finished. He fed his fresh Austrian reserves into the line and ordered his Cossacks and Kalmyks forward. The Prussian cavalry, sent in piecemeal across boggy ground, was scattered. The infantry began to throw down their weap...

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Image: J.F.Krethlow, ~1780–?1880 See Georg Kaspar Nagler, Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon oder Nachrichten von dem Leben..." Fleischmann, 1839 171 | Public domain

Battle of Kunersdorf: The Salvation That Did Not Come

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Siegmund l'Allemand, Public domain. Berlin lay only eighty kilometers away, undefended. If Saltykov and Laudon had marched on it the next morning, the war would have been over. They did not. The two commanders disliked each other, did not trust each other's translators, and could not agree on what to do next. Withi...

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Image: Siegmund l'Allemand | Public domain