“It was impossible to do anything except fight.”

By Douglas Brown

IN A previous article, we explored seven of the best-known escapes of British armies from history — famous battles or campaigns, from Agincourt to Dunkirk, in which troops from the British Isles found themselves cornered, surrounded or outnumbered, yet somehow managed to defy the odds and survive to fight another day. 

Here, we’ll examine seven more cases when redcoats were caught wrong-footed but fought it out and through discipline and stubbornness turned the direst situations into stunning victories.

Consider these:

Oudenaarde

“Such marching is impossible.”[1]

The War of Spanish Succession saw Britain and a Grand Alliance fighting to prevent Louis XIV’s France and Spain from dominating Europe.

In the spring of 1708, the French Duke of Vendome with 100,000 men was facing Britain’s Duke of Marlborough with 90,000 in the Low Countries. Vendome struck first with a surprise march that cut Marlborough off from the sea and his lines of communication back to the British Isles. 

Marlborough, although temporarily off balance, rallied when his friend Prince Eugen of Savoy arrived. Together, they set the Allied army in rapid motion. Covering 30 miles in 36 hours, the vanguard reached the Scheldt at Oudenaarde and laid down pontoon bridges. All day on June 30, Marlborough funneled his troops, marching hard to reach the battlefield, across the bridge and into the fight as the French struggled to mount a decisive response. 

The battle devolved into a close-range musketry duel between British and Allied troops against the elite of the French army. Marlborough audaciously shifted troops from his left to his right under Vendome’s nose and then brought up the Dutch to turn the French right as Eugen turned the French left with the British infantry. The French disengaged under cover of darkness, leaving 5,500 casualties and 9,000 prisoners against 3,000 Allied casualties.

“If we had been so happy as to have had two more hours of daylight,” Marlborough wrote, “I believe we should have made an end of this war.”[2]

Minden

“I never thought to see a single line of Infantry break through three lines of Cavalry […] and tumble them to ruin.”[3]

The Seven Years War began badly for Great Britain. Beginning as early as 1754, French forces and their Indian allies were wreaking havoc on the North American frontier. Closer to home, the loss of the Mediterranean island of Minorca in 1756 and a defeat at the hands of the French at Hastenbeck in 1757 painted a picture of a war being lost. In fact, things seemed so bleak, for a time London even made preparations to defend England itself from a French invasion. But 1759, dubbed the “Year of Miracles,” saw things turn around.

On Aug. 1 of that year, a small British contingent found itself part of an allied army under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick defending Hanover and their ally Prussia’s western flank. Everything was going against them. The French had repulsed Ferdinand’s offensive and seized the important fortress of Minden, near what’s now the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Ferdinand planned to leave part of his army outside Minden to lure the French out, then attack them in the flank with his main army as they emerged from their fortifications. Unfortunately for the prince, his pickets’ negligence allowed the French to form up before the allies had deployed.

A desperate Ferdinand flung in the only troops he had ready: two British infantry brigades and two Hanoverian battalions. As these units rushed forward, the redcoats came under enfilading artillery fire, including grape shot. The British artillery deployed and silenced the French, but immediately the French cavalry charged the advancing infantry. The redcoats decimated the first charge with a volley at 30 yards, then repulsed a second charge. France’s elite horsemen came on for a third attack but were soon caught in an Allied crossfire. French and Saxon infantry then attacked the redcoats’ right flank, which wheeled about to exchange musketry with them. The British wavered but then rallied and, supported by artillery, forced the enemy back.

“Such was the unshaken firmness of those troops that nothing could stop them,” noted one officer present.[4] 

By now the entire French army was in retreat. They’d suffered 7,000 casualties before withdrawing. The Allies had lost 2,800 — half of them British — but the threat to Hanover was gone.

Sillery

“A poor pitiful handful of half Starved, Scorbutic Skeletons.”[5]

In September of “the Year of Miracles,” the British under James Wolfe took Quebec from the French. By April 1760, it remained to be seen if they could keep it.

Although Wolfe was killed at his moment of victory, his successor, James Murray, spent a desperate Canadian winter short on fuel, fresh supplies and proper quarters. Hundreds had succumbed or fallen ill in the months that followed, and with the arrival of spring in 1760, a sizeable French army made its way along the St. Lawrence River from Montreal to retake the city.

Lacking faith in Quebec’s defences, Murray marched his army out from behind the city walls on April 28 to meet the French on defensible high ground four miles west of the city at Sainte-Foy near Sillery Woods. Amazingly, many of his soldiers volunteered to leave the hospital to join, and the starving British hauled their artillery train by hand out to the position.

Seeing the French approaching through the nearby Sillery Woods, Murray decided to attack before they deployed, opting to leave the high ground to fight in mud and slush below.

“We immediately gave them battle, and fought as long as our ammunition lasted,” Sergeant James Thompson of the 78th Fraser Highlanders later recalled.[6]

As seesaw battles raged on both flanks, the British centre and the artillery traded fire for three hours with the French at the tree line, the Canadian militia sniping them mercilessly. Finally, the artillery’s ammunition gave out as the slush stopped the flow of supplies, and both flanks caved in. The British, having lost a third of their army, withdrew back to the city.

It was a tactical defeat, true, but a strategic victory. The French had suffered almost equally heavily, especially among officers, and proved unable to press the siege home and retake Quebec. When the Royal Navy arrived with the spring melt, the French retired back to Montreal, where they would surrender to a three-pronged British offensive. Canada became a British possession.

Albuera

“The day was mine, but they did not know it and would not run.”[7]

The Peninsular War saw Britain, Spain and Portugal fighting to evict Napoleon’s troops from the Iberian Peninsula, which the French emperor had invaded in an act of sheer aggression.

The bloodiest battle of that war occurred on May 16, 1811, at a village in Spain called Albuera. There, France’s Marshal Soult attempted to relieve the strategic French-held fortress city of Badajoz, besieged by Marshal Beresford and an Anglo-allied army.

Soult began by feinting an attack towards Albuera and then swinging around two divisions to flank the British right. A stalwart stand by Spanish infantry held the French divisions long enough for John Colborne’s brigade to arrive and charge their flank. Then disaster struck.

A sudden downpour soaked the British (and their powder), temporarily hampering their musketry just as two regiments of Polish lancers charged the redcoats’ flank. Colborne’s brigade was all but annihilated in minutes. Next, two French divisions, 8,000 strong, advanced to press the attack. As the formations jumbled together into one deep mass, 3,600 redcoats in two brigades stepped forward to stop them. At between 20 to 60 paces, the two forces exchanged volleys for an hour, the British also having to contend with 24 French cannons firing grapeshot. As casualties piled up, the redcoats steadily closed ranks, but kept firing, taking cartridges from the piles of dead and wounded.

“Die hard, 57th, die hard!” one wounded colonel reportedly shouted to his men.[8]

As Beresford prepared to retreat, his own 4th Division defied orders and advanced in the face of French cavalry and fresh enemy reserves. After another lethal musketry duel ended with the 4th advancing, the French infantry broke and ran, ending one of the hardest fought battles in history.

“Fifteen hundred unwounded men, the remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood triumphant on the fatal hill,” Sir William Napier recalled. [9]

Maya

“They were not men, they were devils.”[10]

By the summer of 1813, the Peninsular army had driven the French almost completely from Spain. On July 25, Marshal Soult launched General d’Erlon’s corps through the Pass of Maya in the Pyrenees to relieve the French garrison at Pamplona.

As the French surprised the British and began to drive them back, the 400 men in the 92nd Gordon Highlanders’ right wing deployed into line against an entire French division.

The Gordons held out for 20 minutes and inflicted 1,000 casualties before withdrawing with only half of their original number. [11]

As the bloodied French attacked the second British line, reinforcements arrived and flanked them. Incredibly, as the decimated and exhausted 92nd heard its piper, “without either asking or obtaining permission, not only charged, but led the charge,”[12] which swept the French back a mile.

Quatre Bras  

“Napoleon has humbugged me!”[13]

On June 15, 1815, Napoleon, in a bid to reclaim his throne after exile on Elba, launched his 125,000-man Armée du Nord  into what is now Belgium against the Prussian and Anglo-Allied armies.

The Duke of Wellington, commanding the Anglo-Allied force gathering to crush Bonaparte, was caught off guard by the invasion, which threatened to drive a wedge between his army and the Prussians approaching from the east under Field Marshal von Blücher. 

As the Iron Duke moved his troops from Brussels to link up with the Prussians on June 16, a French force led by Marshal Ney caught his unprepared army at the crossroads of Quatre Bras. After a valiant stand by the Dutch-Belgians in the face of French attacks, the British infantry arrived and charged.

Throughout the day, Wellington fed in his exhausted men as they came up into a seesaw battle with the French. Against their combined-arms opponents, the stubborn British infantry were essentially alone, “unsupported by any artillery or cavalry,” but they “braved every attempt to penetrate their squares.”[14]

At one point the 42nd Highlanders formed square in the midst of a French lancer attack, while the 44th, with no time to form square, turned its rear rank about to counter their envelopment. Other battalions were not so lucky as the French cavalry hovered over the field looking for vulnerable targets.

Finally, the Allies gathered enough troops to counterattack and force the French back. The Prussians having been defeated that same day a few miles away at Ligny, on June 17, Wellington began a withdrawal to some high ground south of Brussels at a place called Waterloo.

Rorke’s Drift

“It was impossible to do anything except fight.” [15]

In 1879, the British plan to unify and develop South Africa led to a war with the Zulu nation. On Jan. 22, an army of 20,000 Zulus wiped out 1,300 invading British troops at Isandlwana.

Eager for a share of the glory, the Zulu reserve set out to destroy the small British force at the nearby mission station of Rorke’s Drift. The British, commanded by lieutenants John Chard and Gonville Bromhead, barricaded the perimeter around the buildings and braced, 150-strong, for an onslaught of 3,000 Zulus.

The Zulus launched a series of ferocious attacks, undeterred by the blazing firepower of the British Martini-Henry rifles.

“Had the Zulus taken the bayonet as freely as they took the bullets,” Fred Hitch noted, “we could not have stood more than fifteen minutes.”[16]

The British, during a stubborn defense, were forced from their outer barricade back into an interior position, leaving the hospital, now ablaze, isolated and exposed. The patients and their comrades had to literally cut their way out and run a gauntlet of Zulus to the new position.

The combination of British bullets and bayonets ultimately outlasted the Zulu attacks, which fizzled out overnight. The British garrison was rewarded with 11 Victoria Crosses, the most for any engagement in the history of the empire.

Douglas Brown is a Texas-based writer who specializes in military history and historical fiction. His novel The Honorable Spy was released by Cheetah Publishing in July of 2022. Buy it on Amazon HERE. Follow him on Twitter @DougBrownAuthor or Instagram at douglasbrownauthor, or like his Facebook page, “Douglas Brown – Author.”

SOURCES:

[1] Marshal Vendome at Oudenaarde on hearing of Marlborough’s approach, as quoted in James Falkner, Great and Glorious Days: Marlborough’s Battles 1704-09 (Stroud, U.K.: Spellmount, 2007), 142.

[2] Letter to the Duchess of Marlborough, July 16, 1708, in William Coxe, Memoirs of the Duke of Marlborough, with His Original Correspondence, revised edition, volume II (London: William Clowes and Sons, Limited, 1886, Google Book), 267.

[3] Quote attributed to Marshal Contades following the battle, as quoted in Sir Lees Knowles, Minden and the Seven Years’ War- Primary Source Edition (Facsimile by Nabu Public Domain Reprints, originally published London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co, Ltd., 1914), 24.

[4] Anonymous account, quoted in Stuart Reid, The Battle of Minden 1759: The Impossible Victory of the Seven Years War (Barnsley, U.K.: Frontline Books, 2016), 168.

[5] James Miller, quoted in Ian M. McCulloch, “From April Battles and Murray Generals, Good Lord Deliver Me! The Battle of Sillery, 28 April 1760,” in Donald Graves, editor, More Fighting for Canada: Five Battles 1760-1944 (Toronto: Robin Brass Studio, 2004), 29.

[6] A Bard of Wolfe’s Army: James Thompson, Gentleman Volunteer, 1733-1830, edited Earl John Chapman and Ian MacPherson McCulloch (Montreal: Robin Brass Studio Inc, 2010), 199.

[7] Quote attributed to Marshal Soult after the battle, in Ian Fletcher, Bloody Albuera: The 1811 Campaign in the Peninsula (Ramsbury, U.K.: The Crowood Press Ltd, 2000), 96.

[8] Colonel Inglis, quoted in Ian Fletcher, Bloody Albuera: The 1811 Campaign in the Peninsula (Ramsbury, U.K.: The Crowood Press Ltd, 2000), 93.

[9] History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France, from the Year 1807 to the Year 1814, 4th edition, volume II (Facsimile by the British Library, originally published Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1842), 332.

[10] General d’Erlon to a captured British colonel after Maya, quoted in James Archibald Hope, Campaigns with Hill & Wellington: The Reminiscences of an Officer of the 92nd– the Gordon Highlanders- in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, 1809-1816 (Leonaur, 2010), 180.

[11] James Archibald Hope, Campaigns with Hill & Wellington: The Reminiscences of an Officer of the 92nd– the Gordon Highlanders- in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, 1809-1816 (Leonaur, 2010), 176.

[12] Gordon’s historian, quoted in Stuart Reid, Highlander: Fearless Celtic Warriors (London: Publishing News, Ltd, 2000), 114.

[13] Quote attributed to the Duke of Wellington before Quatre Bras.

[14] James Archibald Hope, Campaigns with Hill & Wellington: The Reminiscences of an Officer of the 92nd– the Gordon Highlanders- in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, 1809-1816 (Leonaur, 2010), 228.

[15] Henry Hook, 1905, Royal Magazine, February, rorkesdriftvc.com, http://www.rorkesdriftvc.com/vc/hook_account.htm (accessed November 13, 2020); also quoted in Ian Knight, Rorke’s Drift 1879: ‘Pinned like Rats in a Hole’ (London: Osprey, 1996).

[16] Quoted in Ian Knight, Rorke’s Drift 1879: ‘Pinned like Rats in a Hole’ (London: Osprey, 1996), 40.