The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (45 page)

WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION

Death toll:
500,000
¹

Rank:
70

Type:
hegemonial war

Broad dividing line:
everyone against Austria

Time frame:
1740–48

Location:
central Europe

Major state participants:
France, Prussia vs. Austria, Britain

Minor state participants:
Bavaria, Saxony-Poland

Who usually gets the most blame:
Frederick the Great

Another damn:
European balance-of-power war fought with muskets

T
HE HAPSBURG EMPEROR CHARLES VI OF AUSTRIA NEVER PRODUCED A SON,
and unfortunately, each of his territories had its own peculiar inheritance laws for dealing with this. Some lands had no problem passing ownership to, say, a daughter or brother-in-law. Others forbade titles to pass anywhere close to a woman; they preferred to pass inheritance through uncles or cousins. The emperor, however, wanted everything to go to his eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, so he put a lot of effort into convincing all of the European powers to sign an agreement (the Pragmatic Sanction) saying that they would go along and not make a fuss. It wasn’t supposed to be a problem.

However, the new young king of Prussia, Frederick II (soon to be Frederick the Great), was looking for an excuse to go conquering gloriously across Europe. After Emperor Charles died, Frederick scrounged u
p a medieval agreement between dead princes that gave the Austrian province of Silesia to Prussia before they would allow it to go to any female.

No one else in Europe found this convincing, and they dismissed his invasion of Silesia (now in western Poland) as foolish adventurism, doomed to fail against the greatest power in central Europe. In the first clash at Mollwitz, the Austrians easily chased off the Prussian cavalry, Frederick among them, and then turned against the isolated Prussian infantry; however, the Prussians’ discipline and training surprised everyone when their infantry stood firm and slaughtered the attacking cavalry. Then a Prussian counterattack overwhelmed the Austrian infantry as well. Maria Theresa was forced to accept the loss of Silesia.

The conquest of Silesia boosted the Prussian population by a million easily, as assimilated German Protestants settled in fertile farmland along a navigable river. Frederick withdrew from the war to enjoy his new territory; however, with Austria knocked down, France realized that now was the perfect opportunity to administer kicks to the ribs, face, and groin of its fallen enemy, so the French declared war. Bavaria and Saxony—itching to break Austrian hegemony in Germany—joined in as well. Meanwhile, Britain was already fighting France on the high seas and beyond, and the British were dynastically linked to the German state of Hanover, so they subsidized the Austrians.

War boiled over all of the usual battlegrounds and pathways in central Europe, but each of the allies had different war aims, so they never quite coordinated their strategy. In the end, the Austrians managed to hold off the circling scavengers and to keep their losses down to only Silesia.

SINO-DZUNGAR WAR

Death toll:
600,000
¹

Rank:
67

Type:
conquest

Broad dividing line:
China vs. Dzungars

Time frame:
1755–57

Location:
central Asia

Who usually gets the most blame:
Qianlong

S
OMEWHERE OUT IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, A LONG TIME AGO, THE
Chinese wiped out a tribe few people have heard of. Most of history is like this.

The Dzungars were a species of Mongol. The nomadic horsemen of the central Asian steppe whom we’ve seen so far—such as Huns and Mongols—had been a continuous threat to civilization. Only a few chapters ago, horsemen such as the Manchus and Tatars were terrorizing China and Russia. Now guns had turned the tide against these nomads, and their independence was being squeezed by advancing civilization.

The soldiers on the leading edge of civilization who pushed into the steppe were themselves usually only a few generations removed from the steppes—Turks, Cossacks, and, in the case of China, the Manchus (see “Collapse of the Ming Dynasty”). Emperor Qianlong brought the Qing empire of China to its widest extent by conquering all around the periphery of China, notably into the western desert in Xinjiang and the land of the Dzungars.

People and Places You’ve Never Heard Of

Until he died in 1745, Galdan Tsereng, khan of Dzungaria, had maintained tight control over all of the component tribes in his empire. His son and successor, however, was cruel and degenerate, so the Dzungar nobility blinded and imprisoned him. He was followed by a monkish weakling who let several tribes drift into independence before he was killed in a coup. While the new khan, Dawaji, was consolidating control, several losers in the power struggle took refuge in Chinese territory and asked for help. Emperor Qianlong was happy to oblige.

A Chinese army took the Dzungar capital at Kuldja and put
Galdan Tsereng’s fugitive son-in-law, Amursana, in charge. After a chase across the desert, the former khan Dawaji was captured by the Chinese, but they tucked him away in a comfortable retirement rather than killing him.

Because the Chinese did not want a strong Dzungar state on their border, they recognized the autonomy of individual tribes rather than restoring the unified Dzungar empire, but Amursana had been hoping to inherit his father-in-law’s grand empire, so he rose in rebellion.

Qianlong felt person
ally betrayed by this disloyalty so he insisted on wiping the Dzungars from the face of the earth. The details of this ethnic cleansing are pretty standard: anyone who didn’t get out of the way was killed; anyone who did get out of the way starved.
²

SEVEN YEARS WAR

Death toll:
1.5 million
¹

Rank:
40

Type:
hegemonial war

Broad dividing line:
everyone against Prussia

Time frame:
1756–63

Location:
Europe, the oceans, the colonies

Major state participants:
Austria, France, Russia vs. Prussia, Britain

Minor state participants:
Sweden, Saxony

Who usually gets the most blame:
Frederick the Great

Another damn:
European balance-of-power war fought with muskets

Junkers

Scattered in pieces all across the northern European plain, the Kingdom of Prussia lacked natural boundaries. There was Prussia itself on the eastern Baltic, Brandenburg around Berlin, Pomerania on the central Baltic coast, and a few pinpricks like Kleve and Ravensberg over by the Netherlands. Countries like these tended to get trampled by armies passing through on their way to attack the countries that mattered. Only by building up a world-class army could such a country convince marauding generals to respect their neutrality and go the long way around.

Frederick the Great’s father, Frederick William, had achieved this through personal frugality. Instead of building magnificent palaces, he financed an army. Instead of servants, he had soldiers. The rest of Europe consider this to be a personal eccentricity rather than a national policy, and joked about it instead of worrying.

The single-minded fanaticism with which the Prussians built their army paid off by producing soldiers who were superior to whomever they fought. The Prussians didn’t waver or delay. Their drill and discipline allowed them to fire five shots for every two fired by the Austrian infantry.

Prussian armies of this era continued to evolve away from the mercenary bands of the previous century. They were becoming true national armies filled by beating the drum from village to village and luring bored farm boys into signing up. Each unit was permanently billeted in a district from which they gathered new recruits. Three-fourths of the Prussian army was actually Prussian.

This manpower certainly was not the best that Prussia had to offer. Armies were usually the dregs of society. Useful people like craftsmen, shopkeepers, and artisans were too important to the national economy to be recruited. Instead, armies were assembled out of expendable people—criminals, landless peasants, teenagers, vagrants, drunkards. Since the Prussian aristocracy—the Junkers—had nothing better to do, they were made the officers.

The shiftless rabble that filled the ranks could be controlled only by the most brutal discipline. Heavy whipping was the standard punishment for almost any offense, unless it was serious enough to require something worse. The Prussian army had standing orders to not make it too easy to desert—no camping near woods, no night marches, no unsupervised foraging. Cavalry patrolled the edges of the army, mostly to keep the Prussians in, rather than to keep the enemy out.
²

War Begins

After losing Silesia in her first war against the Prussian juggernaut (see “War of the Austrian Succession”), Queen Maria Theresa of Austria spent the following peace wooing away all of Frederick’s allies. It proved to be remarkably easy since none of the other great powers wanted a dynamic new player like Prussia to replace a comfortably declining old power like Austria. Maria Theresa’s major success in this diplomatic revolution was befriending France, Austria’s mortal enemy for over a hundred years. Empress Elizabeth of Russia also signed on to the anti-Frederick team.

When it became obvious that the new alliance was gearing up to attack as soon as warm weather arrived in the spring of 1757, Frederick launched a preemptive attack in August 1756 against what he assumed would be their jumping-off spot, the independent Duchy of Saxony. Unfortunately, Saxony had not officially joined the coalition against Prussia, so Frederick had just invaded a neutral nation without warning or provocation. This made it a lot easier for the rest of Europe to declare war on him.

This new lineup brought all of the Catholics together, so Frederick tried to persuade England and other northern European countries to join him in Protestant solidarity, which everyone spotted as a cynical ploy. According to one Englishman of the time, Frederick “cried out
religion
as folks do
fire
when they want assistance.” In any case, it didn’t matter to England which side they were on, as long as France was on the other.
³

The 4.5 million people of Prussia now faced 70 million enemies.
⁴
But cash, not population, was the deciding factor for how large an army a country could put in the field. Frederick began the Seven Years War with a war chest of 11 million thalers, and once the war got going, the British subsidized him with 4 million yearly, plus occupied Saxony could be squeezed for another 5 or 10 million each year as well.

Frederick the Great became known for the oblique order of battle. He withheld one wing of his army, threatening but disengaged from the enemy. Then he loaded up the other flank and threw it against the smaller enemy wing that faced it. This overwhelmed the enemy wing and forced a progressive collapse of the enemy line as each piece was attacked in turn from both the front and the side. At each point of contact, the Prussians would have a local superiority of numbers, knocking aside the enemy line bit by bit. Other countries tried to emulate Frederick’s tactics, but they wouldn’t work without soldiers as disciplined as the Prussians or a mind as sharp as Frederick’s.

The Seven Years War was a reckless, hyperactive affair that zigzagged around central Europe, blasting apart armies whenever they caught up with each other. Frederick’s ability to attack in every direction and fend off practically the whole of Europe for seven years has always amazed military historians, and his tactics have been eagerly studied and analyzed. He won important battles against astounding odds and miraculously recovered from his occasional defeats; however, the final twist that gave the victory to Frederick was a matter of luck rather than skill.

In January 1762, as the Russians were closing in on the Prussian capital at Berlin, Empress Elizabeth of Russia suddenly died, leaving the throne to her young son, Peter III, who had admired Frederick ever since Peter was a little boy playing with toy soldiers. Peter III pulled Russia’s troops out of the war zone and signed a treaty in May, preparing to intervene on Frederick’s side; however, Tsar Peter was soon overthrown and assassinated by his wife, Catherine (the Great), who withdrew Russia completely from both sides of the war.

By this time, the armies were in no shape to launch another major offensive. Manpower was down to burnt-out veterans and green recruits. In the autumn of 1762, the French were driven back over the Rhine, which finally convinced everybody that further fighting would be futile. The peace treaty was signed in February 1763 in Paris.

Worldwide War

Because the Europeans carried their fight all over the world, some writers—Winston Churchill, for instance—have argued that the Seven Years War deserved the credit for being the
real
first world war.

Two of the major colonial powers, France and England, used the European war as an excuse to fight each other elsewhere. In North America, the French won the first battles in the Appalachian wilderness that separated their settlements, but then a fresh British army captured Quebec, which put England in control of the entire American mainland. In India, the British decisively defeated the native ally of the French at the Battle of Plassey, which set them on the path to ruling the whole subcontinent.