π On This Day in Military History
3 events across history
Frederick's last major offensive battle β and his bloodiest victory. Attacking Field Marshal Daun's entrenched Austrian army on the heights of Torgau, Frederick split his force in a double envelopment. The first Prussian column was repulsed with devastating losses; Frederick himself was briefly knocked unconscious by a spent bullet. General Ziethen's cavalry and infantry arrived at dusk and broke the Austrian right. The Austrians withdrew, leaving the field to Prussia β and 40,000 dead and wounded between both sides.
Torgau demonstrated both Prussian resilience and the war's accelerating attrition. Frederick won the field but could not exploit the victory β his army was bleeding out. Prussia had entered the war with one of the finest armies in Europe; by 1760 it was being rebuilt with boys and older men conscripted from conquered Saxony. Frederick knew the war could not be sustained much longer. The salvation he needed came from St. Petersburg, not the battlefield.
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An Egyptian army of some 10,000 men under the British officer Hicks Pasha marched into the waterless Kordofan scrub to crush the Mahdi. Led astray by treacherous guides, exhausted and parched, it was ambushed in the forest of Shaykan and annihilated almost to the last man; Hicks and nearly his entire force were killed.
The destruction of the Hicks expedition was a catastrophe that shattered Egyptian power in the Sudan and convinced the British government the country could not be held β leading directly to the decision to evacuate, and to Gordon's fatal mission.
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The Siege of Adrianople lasted from early November 1912 until March 26, 1913 β over four months. Adrianople (modern Edirne) was the third city of the Ottoman Empire and a place of enormous symbolic importance, having been the empire's capital before the conquest of Constantinople. Its garrison of roughly 60,000 men under the resolute ΕΓΌkrΓΌ Pasha held out through the winter against Bulgarian and Serbian forces. The Bulgarians used aircraft for aerial reconnaissance and even conducted some of the first bombing raids in military history during the siege. When the fortress finally fell on March 26, 1913, after artillery had reduced its outer works, ΕΓΌkrΓΌ Pasha surrendered with the remnants of his garrison.
The fall of Adrianople was the emotional and symbolic capstone of the First Balkan War. The city had been the gateway to Ottoman Europe for centuries; its loss was understood throughout the Muslim world as a catastrophic humiliation. It also demonstrated that modern siege artillery could reduce even major fortresses relatively quickly, a lesson European general staffs noted carefully.
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