Napoleon’s 1812 march lost hundreds of thousands in six months
Napoleon’s French invasion of Russia—also the Russian campaign, Second Polish War, or Russia’s Patriotic War of eighteen twelve—aimed to force the Tsar back into the continental blockade of Britain. In under six months the enterprise became one of military history’s most devastating failures.
On twenty-four June eighteen twelve the Grande Armée’s first wave crossed the Neman from the Duchy of Warsaw. Nearly half a million men forced-marched through western Russia (today’s Belarus) to smash Barclay de Tolly and Bagration’s roughly one hundred eighty to two hundred twenty thousand Russians. After Smolensk, Alexander I named Mikhail Kutuzov commander; he kept the strategy of trading space while saving the army. At Borodino, about one hundred ten kilometres from Moscow, the armies bled each other before Kutuzov withdrew and Moscow burned.
Retreat in early November met snow, frost, starving horses, missing winter kit, and peasant and Cossack guerrilla strikes. More than half the soldiers died of hunger, exhaustion, typhus, and climate. At Krasnoi, scarce cavalry and artillery forced Napoleon to throw the Old Guard against Miloradovich blocking the road; Davout broke through while Eugène and Ney detoured.
Exact tallies blur without meticulous rolls, but estimates put the entering force above four hundred fifty thousand men, over one hundred fifty thousand horses, about twenty-five thousand wagons, and nearly fourteen hundred guns. Survivors shrank toward one hundred twenty thousand excluding early deserters—a loss near three hundred eighty thousand dead, missing, or captive. The campaign that meant to cow Russia instead hollowed the imperial war machine.
The road to war ran through a broken alliance. After beating Russia at Friedland in 1807, Napoleon and Alexander I signed the Treaty of Tilsit on the Neman, which drew Russia into the anti-British Continental System. The embargo squeezed Russian commerce so hard that the Tsar abandoned it on 31 December 1810. Other irritants piled up: Western Galicia was handed to the Duchy of Warsaw in 1809, and Napoleon, after floating marriage to Alexander's youngest sister Anna Pavlovna, wed the Austrian emperor's daughter Marie Louise instead. Russia used the lull to build fortresses at places such as Dinaburg and Bobruysk and to reform its army, then in April 1812 demanded that French troops quit Prussia and the Duchy of Warsaw.
Source: French invasion of Russia
