As his troops testified, ‘The emperor has discovered a new way of waging war he makes use of our legs instead of our bayonets.’Ĭhandler explains the importance of the organisational structure developed by Napoleon, based on the self-sufficient corps d’armée, composed of infantry, cavalry, and artillery.
Rapid movement, with troops living off the land rather than being encumbered by slow-moving supply convoys, was another hallmark of his campaigning.
Careful advance planning was a vital ingredient of Napoleon’s success, with provision for alternative courses of action in the event of unexpected developments.
From Prussia’s Frederick the Great he learned the overriding importance of striking the enemy’s army as hard and directly as possible. In the book’s most sustained analytical passage, a 70-page chapter entitled ‘Napoleon’s art of war’, Chandler clearly explains what made him such a successful general. Amongst his key skills as a commander were a personal charisma that inspired and moulded others to his will, an outstanding mental capacity, and immense powers of work. He was not an original theorist but a superb practitioner, who applied the lessons he learned from others with extraordinary effectiveness. Chandler establishes the characteristics that brought Napoleon an incredible run of success – losing just six of the 34 major battles that he fought between 17 – as well as identifying the sources of his eventual defeat.Ĭhandler sees Napoleon as a gifted improviser whose operations were nonetheless underpinned by certain consistent principles. Its subtitle, ‘The mind and method of history’s greatest soldier’, sums up the author’s view of his subject. Remarkably, The Campaigns of Napoleon was David Chandler’s first major publication rather than the culmination of a lifetime of research. He was also an authority on John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, whom he regarded as the greatest-ever British general. Chandler’s main area of expertise was the Napoleonic era – in addition to The Campaigns of Napoleon, he wrote a short biography of the emperor and specialist studies of the battles of Austerlitz, Jena, and Waterloo. He was head of the Department of War Studies at Sandhurst from 1980 to 1994, where his brilliance as a communicator enthused a generation of trainee officers. David Chandler served briefly in the British Army before dedicating himself to writing and teaching military history.
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