Walcheren to Waterloo: The British Army in the Low Countries during the Napoleonic Wars 1793-1815
Andrew Limm
237 pages including notes and index
published in 2018
Back in the nineties, in order to pay my study fees, I used to work the Summers in a chips shop in Veere which was owned by the same people who owned the Campveerse Toren restaurant and hotel, which was the headquarters of the English expeditionary force to Walcheren in 1809. This has little relevance to the actual book to be discussed here, but if I cannot indulge myself in pointless anecdotes in my own booklog, where else? At the very least, this personal history is part of why this title grabbed my eye.
Alliterative as it is, Walcheren to Waterloo is a bit misleading however as Waterloo is barely discussed here, nor does the story start with that failed expedition to Walcheren. Instead, it’s a more general overview of the four different campaigns British forces fought int he Low Countries during the Napoleonic Wars. Those in order being the campaign to occupy Dunkirk in 1793 and the following retreat through the Netherlands in 1795/95, the expedition to Northern Holland in 1799, the aforementioned campaign in Walcheren and finally the failed assault on Bergen Op Zoom in 1813-1814. You’ll note that none of these campaigns were at all successful, all ending in failure and British withdrawal from the Low Countries. This may explain why, as Limm shows in his introduction, these campaigns have received relatively little attention compared to Wellington’s campaigns in Portugal and Spain, let alone Waterloo. For Limm they are a good tool to attack the idea that the British Army had transformed itself between 1798 and 1809, by providing a counterexample to the successful British campaigns of the Peninsular War. As he attempts to show, each campaign, whether it took place before, during or after this supposed transformation, suffered from the same flaws, leading to their ultimate failure. This should not happen if the British Army, smarting from its defeats in the American Revolutionary War and their early interventions in the French Revolutionary Wars, was indeed transformed by the reforms enacting by the Duke of York during this period.
As Limm goes through each campaign in order, it does become clear that the same errors were made over and over again. Each campaign was marred by opportunism, the desire for a quick win overriding any other consideration. Planning for each was abysmal and had to be done in a hurry because each campaign was decided on at the spur of the moment. Intelligence about both the country to be fought in as the enemy forces to fight was always lacking, nor seemed to be a priority for the planners. Because of bad, hurried planning and lack of reliable intelligence, the logistics for each campaign were a shamble as well. The lack of cooperation and coordination between the army and navy, something that is somewhat important for an amphibious operation, did not help here either. The execution of each campaign is not inspiring either, with the nadir being the Walcheren campaign, which saw a large part of the expeditionary force fell ill with the Walcheren flu, which ended up killing thousands. Because clear objectives were lacking due to the rushed planning, each campaign ended up spinning their wheels in search of one. While individual battles were won, strategically each was a failure.
The same pattern repeats time and again. The English manage to land with some difficulty, win their early battles and maybe reach some of the objectives before the lack of planning lets them down. Making the problem worse is the preference each commander seems to have had for over complicating his attack plans, needlessly splitting up his forces instead of concentrating them, as best shown in the campaign in North Holland. There it meant that part of the allied Anglo Russian forces had secured their objectives, but were now too far away to influence of the battles elsewhere, leading to piecemeal defeats there. Though not fatal, these defeats means that the French and Dutch forces opposing them get the space to reorganise and be reinforced, leading to a loss of momentum and ultimately a retreat when the expedition’s nominal goals can no longer be achieved.
That this happened during the early campaigns at Dunkirk and Den Helder is one thing, but that this was repeated at Walcheren and Bergen op Zoom indicates that nothing was learned from these earlier failures even when some of the same people were involved. This is one of Limm’s key points, that the Napoleonic Era British Army did not have any sort of institutional memory nor did its leaders have any desire to examine and learn from those failures. The British also had a nasty habit of blaming their allies for their own failures, as with the Russians in the North Holland campaign. The conclusion he reaches is that it took the exceptional talents and dedication of a Wellington to achieve any semblance of this, but that this was limited to him and his direct staff and commanders. Because it was Wellington driving the campaigns in Spain and at Waterloo they were successful; with any other commander this may not have been the case.
an interesting read if with a slightly misleading title. One thing I did struggle with was that Limm’s command of Dutch geography and place names is not always the greatest. Texel is not a river (it’s an island) and Den Helder is not at the mouth of it. Limm also has a habit of making the armies march in a northern or southern direction when would be more fitting to speak of a easterly or westerly one. It took some getting used to and some squinting at maps to make things clear. It would also have been appreciated if the maps had been located in their respective chapters, rather than clustered in the front of the book. Small quibbles for what was an enlightening look at a military period I knew little about.
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