Seven Years' War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Seven Years' War, fought from 1756 to 1763, was a global conflict that Winston Churchill would later call the "First World War." Its major campaigns spanned five continents. Great Britain and Prussia stood on one side. France and Austria stood on the other. Around them gathered Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Russia, Saxony, and a crowd of minor states from the Holy Roman Empire. The first shots, though, did not echo across a European parade ground. They were fired in a forest clearing in North America, where a young colonial officer named George Washington ambushed a small French force at Jumonville Glen on the 28th of May 1754. Ten men died, including the French commander Joseph Coulon de Jumonville. How did a skirmish in the Ohio wilderness pull in the great powers of Europe? What turned old enemies into allies overnight? And why did one Prussian king, fighting on so many fronts at once, come within a hair of losing everything before fortune turned?

• 2. The Diplomatic Revolution

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  In 1748, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ended the War of the Austrian Succession, but none of the signatories were happy with it. Empress Maria Theresa of Austria signed only to buy time to rebuild her forces and forge new alliances. In that earlier war, the Prussian King Frederick II had seized the prosperous province of Silesia from Austria. Maria Theresa wanted it back. For decades the alliances had been predictable. France's traditional enemies were Great Britain and Austria, while France supported Prussia against the Austrians. Then the whole system collapsed. France aligned with Austria, and Great Britain aligned with Prussia. This realignment of 1756 became known as the Diplomatic Revolution. The maneuvering ran in secret. King Louis XV of France conducted his own private diplomacy, the Secret du Roi, a network of agents pursuing aims often at odds with France's stated policy. On the 16th of January 1756, Britain and Prussia signed the Convention of Westminster, promising to aid one another. The carefully coded words proved no less catalytic for the other powers. Empress Elizabeth of Russia was outraged at British duplicity. France was enraged and terrified by the sudden betrayal of its only ally, Prussia. On the 1st of May 1756, France and Austria signed the First Treaty of Versailles, each pledging 24,000 troops to defend the other. Both treaties were ostensibly defensive, yet the actions of both coalitions made the war virtually inevitable.

• 3. Two Theories Of War

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  France approached its wars the same way for much of the eighteenth century. It would let colonies defend themselves, or send only limited numbers of troops and inexperienced soldiers, expecting that fights for the colonies would most likely be lost anyway. Geography and the superiority of the British navy made it hard for the French to supply distant colonies. So France based its strategy overwhelmingly on the army in Europe, hoping to win close to home. The plan was to fight to the end, then trade European conquests in treaty talks to win back lost overseas possessions. This approach did not serve France well, because the colonies were lost and the European war brought few counterbalancing successes. Britain played the opposite hand. It avoided large commitments of troops on the continent and instead allied with continental powers whose interests ran against France. By subsidizing those allies, Britain turned London's enormous financial power into military advantage. Its principal partner was the most brilliant general of the day, Frederick the Great of Prussia, who received substantial subsidies. The war cost Prussia 139 million thalers. Of that sum, 58.3 million, or 42 percent, came from Prussian taxes and savings, and 27 million, or 19 percent, came from British subsidies. The rest came from currency debasement or the pillage of other northern German states, especially Saxony. William Pitt the Elder, who entered the cabinet in 1756, gave this strategy its boldest form. He committed Britain to seizing the entire French Empire, with its main weapon the Royal Navy, which could control the seas and carry as many invasion troops as needed.

• 4. The Cabinet War

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  Eighteenth-century European armies were built around massed infantry carrying smoothbore flintlock muskets and bayonets. Cavalrymen carried sabres and pistols or carbines. Light cavalry handled reconnaissance and screening, while heavy cavalry waited as reserves for shock attacks. Smoothbore artillery gave fire support and led in siege warfare. Strategy centred on control of key fortifications that commanded the surrounding roads and regions, so lengthy sieges were common and decisive field battles relatively rare. The Seven Years' War was fought as what was called a cabinet war. Disciplined regular armies were equipped and supplied by the state to fight on behalf of the sovereign's interests. Occupied territories were taxed and extorted for funds, but large-scale atrocities against civilians were rare compared with the previous century. Logistics decided many campaigns. Armies had grown too large to feed themselves by foraging alone, so supplies were stored in centralised magazines and moved by baggage trains that were highly vulnerable to enemy raids. Armies could rarely fight through winter, so they settled into winter quarters in the cold season and resumed campaigning in spring. This rhythm of magazines and seasons would shape the war's most stubborn problem, especially for the Russians, whose supply lines repeatedly failed them.

• 5. Frederick's Gamble

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  On the 29th of August 1756, Frederick II led Prussian troops across the border into Saxony, a small German state in league with Austria. He meant it as a bold pre-emption of an anticipated Austro-French invasion of Silesia. He had three goals. First, seize Saxony and turn its army and treasury to Prussia's use. Second, advance into Bohemia and winter at Austria's expense. Third, invade Moravia, seize the fortress at Olmütz, and march on Vienna to force an end to the war. At the Battle of Lobositz on the 1st of October 1756, Frederick stumbled into one of the embarrassments of his career. He badly underestimated a reformed Austrian army under General Maximilian Ulysses Browne, found himself outmanoeuvred, and at one point ordered his own troops to fire on retreating Prussian cavalry. Frederick actually fled the field, leaving Field Marshal Keith in command. Because the Prussians technically held the ground, he claimed Lobositz as a victory in a masterful coverup. The attack on neutral Saxony caused outrage across Europe and strengthened the anti-Prussian coalition. The fighting of 1757 swung wildly. At the bloody Battle of Prague on the 6th of May 1757, the Prussians forced the Austrians back into the city's fortifications, then laid siege. But at the Battle of Kolín, Austrian commander Leopold von Daun handed Frederick his first defeat and forced him to abandon Bohemia. Then, in the space of weeks, Frederick reversed everything. At the Battle of Rossbach on the 5th of November 1757, the only battle between the French and Prussians of the entire war, he lost about 548 men killed while Soubise's Franco-Reichsarmee lost about 10,000. At the Battle of Leuthen on the 5th of December 1757, he routed a vastly superior Austrian force. Frederick always called Leuthen his greatest victory.

• 6. The Russian Vise

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  In the words of the American historian Daniel Marston, the Battle of Gross-Jägersdorf on the 30th of August 1757 left the Prussians with "a newfound respect for the fighting capabilities of the Russians that was reinforced in the later battles of Zorndorf and Kunersdorf." The Russians were a genuine new threat, yet they were hobbled by their own weakness. They lacked a quartermaster's department able to keep armies supplied across the primitive mud roads of eastern Europe. Russian armies tended to break off operations after a major battle, even when undefeated, because resupply would be a long time coming. At the Battle of Zorndorf on the 25th of August 1758, a Prussian army of 35,000 under Frederick fought a Russian army of 43,000 under Count William Fermor. The Prussians lost 12,800 men and the Russians 18,000. Marston described it as a draw, with both sides too exhausted to risk another fight. Then came the worst day of Frederick's military career. At the Battle of Kunersdorf in 1759, he lost half his army, a defeat that drove him to the brink of abdication and thoughts of suicide. Yet disagreements with the Austrians over logistics sent the Russians withdrawing east again, which let Frederick re-group his shattered forces. The Russian supply problem had a long history. It had crippled their gains in the Russian-Ottoman War of 1735 to 1739, when battle victories produced only modest results. That weakness finally lifted at the end of 1761, when the Russians under Zakhar Chernyshev and Pyotr Rumyantsev stormed Kolberg in Pomerania. The loss cost Prussia its last port on the Baltic. Now the Russians could supply their armies by sea, faster and safer than over land, threatening to swing the balance decisively against Frederick.

• 7. The Miracle Of The House Of Brandenburg

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  By the start of the 1761 campaign, Prussia had just 100,000 available troops, many of them new recruits, and its situation seemed desperate. By the end of that year, the Prussian armies had dwindled to 60,000 men, Berlin itself was about to come under siege, and Britain threatened to withdraw its subsidies unless Frederick offered concessions. Then on the 5th of January 1762 the Russian Empress Elizabeth died. Her pro-Prussian successor, Peter III, at once ended the Russian occupation of East Prussia and Pomerania, mediated Frederick's truce with Sweden, and placed a corps of his own troops under Frederick's command. Frederick could now muster 120,000 men and turn them against Austria. He drove the Austrians from much of Silesia after recapturing Schweidnitz, while his brother Henry won the Battle of Freiberg on the 29th of October 1762. Spectacle marked the war as much as battle. Between the 10th and the 17th of October 1757, the Hungarian general Count András Hadik executed what may be the most famous hussar action in history. He swung a force of 5,000, mostly hussars, around Frederick's marching armies and occupied part of Berlin for one night. The city was spared for a ransom of 200,000 thalers, and Hadik slipped away before a larger Prussian force could free it. He was later promoted to marshal. By 1763 the central European war was a stalemate between two exhausted powers. Both Maria Theresa and Frederick had reached the limits of their resources. She had pawned her jewels in 1758 and urged her public to bring silver to the mint. He had melted church silver, ransacked his palaces, and debased his coinage by mixing it with copper. The settlement came at the Treaty of Hubertusburg in 1763, where Glatz was returned to Prussia in exchange for the Prussian evacuation of Saxony.

• 8. An Empire Changes Hands

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  On the 13th of September 1759, General James Wolfe led 5,000 troops up a goat path to the Plains of Abraham, one mile west of Quebec City. The Marquis de Montcalm attacked immediately rather than wait to coordinate with Louis Antoine de Bougainville's regiments to the west. Many French soldiers fired before they were within range. Wolfe had ordered his men to load their Brown Bess muskets with two bullets and hold their fire until the French came within 40 paces. When the volley came it was devastating, and nearly every bullet found its mark. Wolfe was mortally wounded in the chest, so command fell to James Murray, who would become lieutenant governor of Quebec. Montcalm was also severely wounded and died the following day. The fall of Quebec was part of a sequence the British called an Annus Mirabilis, when all their campaigns against New France succeeded in 1759. The French staged a counteroffensive in the spring of 1760, with initial success at the Battle of Sainte-Foy, but British naval superiority kept Quebec supplied while the French went without. The French retreated to Montreal and surrendered on the 8th of September 1760, essentially ending the French Empire in North America. The final North American battle came in 1762, when French forces took St. John's in Newfoundland but were defeated at the Battle of Signal Hill and surrendered to Lieutenant Colonel William Amherst. The war reached far beyond Canada. In India, British forces under Robert Clive recaptured Calcutta from the Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah and ousted him at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Sir Eyre Coote defeated the Comte de Lally at the Battle of Wandiwash in 1760, and Pondicherry, the French capital in India, fell in 1761. In the West Indies, the Royal Navy took Guadeloupe in 1759 and Martinique in 1762, along with Havana in Cuba and Manila in the Philippines. Under the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Havana and Manila were returned, but France lost its possessions in North America and Britain established its commercial dominance in India. That memory lingered long after the guns fell silent, in the ballads, images, and novels the war inspired, among them Longfellow's Evangeline, Benjamin West's The Death of General Wolfe, and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans.