Austrian Infantry Regiments by region

 In the time I was waiting for the Hat Austrian sets to come out I dug into any information I could find about the Austrian army, the most relevant parts of which I have stored in the Excel file that has all my plastic soldier inventory and OOB.

The geography of the Austrian Army’s units was one of these subjects.  Managing a multi-ethnic/lingual army presented certain challenges to the Habsburgs; from basic issues of communication to more complicated considerations like moral and level of interest/investment in (or in the case of their Polish subjects of Galicia in 1809, outright opposition to) the Habsburg’s interests/continued rule over them.  From what I understand, the Polish units serving in the Austrian army suffered much higher desertion and surrender/capture rates than regiments of the other Habsburg regions.  In the Polish theater these men helped swell the Duchy of Warsaw’s new army, but in the the main Hauptarmee this higher attrition rates are noticeable.

Looking at the Infantry Regiments it is interesting to see how heavily the Hapsburg army relied on their non-German and non-Hungarian populations.  Inner & Ober Austrian together account for less of the infantry regiments than less reliable Galicia, while the Bohemians & Moravians/Silesia (which I see I misspelled in the above chart) provided almost 40% of the regiments.  Meanwhile Hungary-proper provides only 7 regiments, less the the 2 other “Hungarian” regions together do.  The Hungarian nobility and their historic privileges severely limited their contribution to the Habsburg’s military.  

It was rare in 1809 for regiments from different regions to be brigaded together for obvious reason, but it happened. This included brigading Ober Austrian IR #45 de Vaux with the Hungarian IR #32 Esterhazy in the VI Korps; a rarity of “German” and “Hungarian” regiments in the same brigade.

Of further interest is the mix of Korps IRs

I Korps; 6 Bohemian & 1 Moravian 

III Korps; 5 Moravian & 2 Galician 

VI Korps; 2 Ober Austrian, 1 Slovak & 2 Transylvanian 

V Korps; 2 Galician & 2 Moravian

Biggest Austrian battalion fire line vs typical French battalion fire line

 One of the issues I have with most wargame depictions of Wagram is that they understate the size of Austrian battalions particularly how much larger they typically were than the mostly under strength French battalions.

While many Austrian units were eroded down, their larger starting size left their average battalion size much larger than that of the French Army.  I estimate that French line & light battalions averaged only around 565 men vs about 790 for the Austrian line battalions.

These numbers are slightly different in My OOB because I consolidate some under strength battalions in both armies; French rises to 612 men vs Austrian 830 men.

A full strength Austrian bat in fire line is more than half again as long as a full strength French fire line.

Since there were no full strength French battalions at Wargram, and many that were close and smaller than average, I thought I’d show a typical French fire line vs a full sized Austrian one.  Even this understates the Austrian size advantage, because I can’t have the Austrian bats too unwieldy, but at least the ratios in men still hold to the historic.

So here’s some pics (with Dr. Strange as the background);

Austrian IR #17 Reuss-Plauen, II battalion

 Here’s a look at the second battalion of this Austrian “German” (actually Bohemian) Infantry Regiment from Bellegarde’s I Korps, Division Dedovich, Brigade Hennenberg. 

It was part of the largest regiment at Wagram, which deployed a total of 3,516 men (in 3 bats for average of 1,172 men, basically a fully maned regiment).  In my scale of 12.5 the OOB of its bats are 89, 95 & 95 men each.

The regiment was in the thick of the fighting, deployed in the front line of the Korps during the French night attack on July 5th, and again in the front line between Wagram and Aderklaa on the second day.