The Battle of Prague - the set-up

Today (Sunday) was a relatively inactive day from a wargaming point of view, partly due to resting (which involved watching the last Tom Baker Dr Who series on Forces TV), and partly due to getting dragged into doing household chores. The latter involved pruning the neighbour's overhanging tree and, revoltingly, unblocking a drain. Manually. As in hand down said drain where we had a mini fatberg. Old Fritz never had to do this sort of thing.

After that trauma I got down to some planning. In fact it started on Saturday when I worked out the numbers of brigades of different troop types required for Twilight of the Soldier Kings. Originally I intended not to get bogged down in my accustomed manner, but it seems I can't help myself. I studied various maps on line and in books, and I made my. measurements. 

Contemporary map with my annotations of the main movements. Key locations circled in black. All places names in Czech, but it is relatively easy to figure out the German names if you have a map like the one below. Schwerin initially advances across the Golf Resort near Doci Počernice and is repulsed near the Fashion Arena Prague Outlet!

Next came a decision on how I would set-up the scenario. The two main options are either:

1. Start with the Prussians having completed their turning movement, and the Austrians having got their makeshift flank position ready; or
2. Start with the two armies eying each other across the Roketnitzer Bach before the turning movement.

1. Effectively sets up a straightforward head-to-head struggle, and loses some of the uncertainty. 2. however requires a much deeper board than I have. I could fit everything in but there wouldn't be enough depth if I decided to do a flanking move as the Prussians did. And a head on assault against the Austrian position would just lead to a slog that owed very little to the real Battle of Prague.

In the end I compromised. I would begin with the turning move partly completed. I would start with the Austrians in their original position and the Prussians entering the board, meeting engagement style as shown in the map below. This should allow both sides a bit of flexibility in their re/deployment and give chance for the command breakdowns that Twilight of the Sun Kings allows.

This map was borrowed from Duffy's 'The Wild Goose and the Eagle'.

I superimposed my scaled-down table size onto a map and adjusted the angle until I could get a good space arrangement. I was half-tempted to cut down on manouvre space on the east by including part of Prague city purely because I have a model of a real Prague building. 

As for the orders of battle, I did my customary thing of looking at all my Duffy books, plus assorted others and internet resources. A bibliography is given below. One of the key resources for working out which types of units were present is Kronoskaf. That was my starting point, and I created a table showing numbers of squadrons and battalions in the various commands. Then I converted this to TOSK brigades using ratios of approximately 4 battalions or 10 squadrons to the brigade. 

On tabulating the troop totals given by various sources, I noticed Duffy gives quite a low headcount for the Austrian cavalry. It is 4,500 lower than the Prussians, yet using the numbers of squadrons in Kronoskaf you arrive at a larger number of brigades. I calculated that the squadron sizes of the Prussians were on average 50% larger than the Austrian heavies, and twice the average Austrian hussar squadron size. So I used a different denominator for the Austrians. The Austrian infantry battalions come out lower too, but not so dramatically lower. However, all accounts refer to a grouping of 22 Austrian grenadier companies, engaged in repelling the initial Prussian infantry attacks. This equated to approximately 4 battalions (conveniently a TOSK brigade unit) so I reckoned that the total number of Austrian infantry needed to be divided by a larger number of battalions, thus reducing the average battle size. I therefore reduced the number of line battalions slightly. The overall number of units works out proportionate to the numbers of men.

	Austrians			Prussians
	Cav	Inf	Arty	Cav	Inf	Arty
Army of Fredrick the Great 1st ed.	12 heavy r 5 hussar r (12,600)	54 b 5 Grenze b (48,500)	59	116 (17,000)	66b (47,000)	82
Army of Fredrick the Great 2nd ed.	12 heavy r 5 hussar r (10,000 excl hussars?)	65 b (45,000) 5 Grenze b (2,000)	59	116 (17,000)	66b (47,000)	82
Kronoskaf	132 sq (but adds up to 124)	56 b (but adds up to 66) 5 Grenze b	61	113	66b (47,000)	82
By Force of Arms	10,400 2,100 Hussars	45,400 2,000 Croats	60	17,000	47,000	210 pieces overall

I then worked out an arrival schedule for the various Prussian columns. Unusually, they arrived in reverse order with the left wing appearing first, then the centre then the right. I broke the centre down into several formations arriving in sequence, since that's the way they appeared to arrive. The actual composition of each formation is roughly based on the Duffy maps. The Austrians were much simpler to organise since they start in the order of battle. Here are the respective army layouts. Numbers/letters refer to the second map above.

PRUSSIANS	Command	Enters	C	D	H	G	M	F	A		Enters on turn
Column 1	Ziethen, Reserve	South of U.Pczernitz			8						Dice from turn 4
Column 2	Schönaich	North of U.Poczernitz	4	4							1
Column 3	Schwerin	North of U.Poczernitz				2	4	2			1
						2		6			2
							2	2	2		3
Column 4	Bevern						6		2		6
							2		2		7
							2		2		8
							2				9
Column 5	Manstein	Hlaupetin				2			2		10
Column 5	Penavaire	Hlaupetin	4*	2							11
Total			8	6	8	6	18	10	10	66

* 1 cuirassier brigade is large

AUSTRIANS	Command	Formation	C	D	H	G	M	Gzr	A
A	Luchesi	Right Wing Cavalry	4	2
B	Königsegg	Right Wing Infantry				2	8		2
C	Kheul	Left Wing Infantry 1					8		4
D	Kheul	Left Wing Infantry 2					8		2
E	Esterhazy	Left Wing Cavalry	4	2
F	Hadik	Reserve Cavalry		2	4
G	Macquire	Reserve Infantry					4	2	2
Total			8	6	4	2	28	2	10	60

That's as far as I got. It looks like the actual game will either get delayed until next Sunday Saturday*, or I might manage to squeeze it in one evening if I get to finish work in good time.

* Update: Thanks to a message on the Grimsby Town London Supporters' WhatsApp group, I was reminded it's my Sunday that is accounted for by football not Saturday this coming weekend. Unbelievably it's the last day of the regular season. Already. It only seems a few weeks since the season kicked off in August. The laughingly named "National League" (i.e. England's fifth national division) has its last round of fixtures on Sunday this week.

It's been a hell of a season though. Attendances at Grimsby have actually gone UP by about 2,000 since relegation last season. The incredible thing is with an average attendance over 5,700, which would place them in the upper reaches of League Two and above many clubs in League One, Grimsby's attendances are only 6th highest in the National League. It’s the highest average for the Mariners since they were in the Championship in 2002-3. 'Hollywood's Wrexham' has an average approaching 9,000. Notts County, Stockport, Chesterfield and Southend lie between the two. After the first dozen games, automatic promotion looked distinctly possible. After two dozen games the playoff positions (i.e. 2nd-7th places) looked out of the question. Since then great form has led to us needing just 1 point from the last two games (now and Sunday) to confirm a play off place. In the process we've contrived to lose to part-time teams but beat Stockport who were on a 23 game unbeaten run.

Post-post Script: I'll put you out of your misery. Town won, so playoffs reached. We'll be at Notts County away for the "quarter finals", then if successful it'll be Stockport or Wrexham away. The final will be at the London Stadium on the Jubilee weekend. Bad planning by the National League. But I don't think Grimsby will be there.

One final comment. I found the reference to Lenore (see previous post) in the Wikipedia article. That in turn led me on to something called the Carne-Thompson-Uther index of folk tales. It seems the same stories or themes keep cropping up in many different cultures, so the aforenamed folklorists categorised them all. One of the types is ATU505 the Grateful Dead, which is where the band name comes from.

Bibliography

Title		Publ. date	Author
The Wild Goose and the Eagle: A Life of Marshall von Browne 1705-1757	Warwick	2019	Duffy, Christopher
The Military Life of Frederick the Great	Norwalk, CT	1992	Duffy, Christopher
The Army of Frederick the Great	Warwick	1996	Duffy, Christopher
The Army of Frederick the Great	Newton Abbot	1974	Duffy, Christopher
By Force of Arms	Chicago	2008	Duffy, Christopher
The Seven Years War in Europe, 1756-1763	Harlow	2008	Szabo, Franz
The Wars of Frederick the Great	Harlow	1996	Showalter, Dennis
Frederick the Great	London	2000	Fraser, David
Internet Resources
Kronoskaf: http://www.kronoskaf.com/syw/index.php?title=1757-05-06_-_Battle_of_Prague
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Prague_(1757)