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by watwut
1907 days ago
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Napoleon army lived off land (as historical armies often did). It means that everything soldiers eat was stolen from people living there. In those times, it meant starvation for locals - marching army eats basically everything there is to eat. It obviously also involved a lot of violence against them. Not that Russian generals would care about people that they diaplaced. But emptying those places of supplies was not just preventing capture in abstract. It was meaningfully weakening ennemy army, the same way shooting at them does. Logistics makes it breaks wars in general. In a way, it is interesting that these realities are mostly lost from contemporary stories about wars. We like to paint heroic fights in past, but don't like to show where the food soldiers eat comes from. When we do talk about it, we use euphemisms like "living off the land" as if they were hunting and collecting berries. |
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Absolutely agreed. My original reply wasn't meant to paint Russian generals as stupid for setting their cities/towns on fire. In fact, I believe that if it wasn't for that, then Napoleon would have been way more successful in his invasion, as he was pretty much stomping the Russian military up until it got to point of capturing major cities.
In fact, Mikhail Kutuzov[0] (Russian Empire commander-in-chief at the time who was responsible for coming up with the plan to burn down Russian cities rather than giving them to Napoleon) is remembered as an exceptional military commander and a hero to this day. He let Napoleon occupy burned down Moscow, so that Napoleon army could be starved and then driven out using guerilla warfare.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Kutuzov