The Battle of Rossbach took place on 5 November 1757 during the Third Silesian War. Frederick the Great defeated an Allied army composed of French forces augmented by a contingent of the Reichsarmee of the Holy Roman Empire. The battle marked a turning point in the Seven Years’ War, not only for its stunning Prussian victory, but because France refused to send troops against Prussia again.
About Battle of Rossbach in brief
The Battle of Rossbach took place on 5 November 1757 during the Third Silesian War. Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, defeated an Allied army composed of French forces augmented by a contingent of the Reichsarmee of the Holy Roman Empire. The French and Imperial army included almost 42,000 men, opposing a considerably smaller Prussian force of 22,000. Despite overwhelming odds, Frederick employed rapid movement, a flanking maneuver and oblique order to achieve complete surprise. The battle marked a turning point in the Seven Years’ War, not only for its stunning Prussian victory, but because France refused to send troops against Prussia again and Britain, noting Prussia’s military success, increased its financial support for Frederick. After the battle, Frederick immediately left Rossbach and marched for 13 days to the outskirts of Breslau. There he met the Austrian army at the Battle of Leuthen; he employed similar tactics to again defeat an army considerably larger than his own. In the summer of 1757, Prussia was threatened on two fronts, under the Russians under Field Marshal Stepan Fyodor Apraks. The Russians then used Memel as a base to invade East Prussia and defeated a smaller force in the fiercely contested Battle of Gross-Jägersorf on 30 August 1757. However, shortly afterward, the Russians were unable to take the capital of Königsberg, the Prussian capital, and retreated. By the end of the year, Prussian forces were able to take Königstein and the city of Memel, as well as a number of other towns in the East German province of Silesia and the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel.
The Prussian army was able to win the war on all three fronts, but the Russians used up their supplies at Memel after five days of artillery bombardment, and soon afterward retreated to a more secure base in the east of the country. In 1758, the Russian army successfully stormed Memel with 75,000 troops, but Prussia had one of the strongest fortresses in the world. By 1759, Russians had taken the city and were on their way to the Iberian Peninsula, where they defeated Prussia in a fiercely contested battle for control of Pomerania and Iberia. The war ended in October 1759 with the fall of the Russian fortress of Memels. The Battle of the Bulge in 1760 was the last major battle of the war, with Prussia taking control of most of the East Germans’ possessions in the region. The War of the Austrian Succession began in 1748 and ended in 1759. The 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle concluded the earlier war in which Prussia. and Austria were a part; its influence among the European powers was little better than a truce. Empress Maria Theresa of Austria had signed the treaty to gain time to rebuild her military forces and forge new alliances; she was intent upon regaining ascendancy in the HolyRoman Empire.
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This page is based on the article Battle of Rossbach published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
