Battle of Blenheim
Marlborough and Prince Eugene destroyed a French and Bavarian army on the Danube in August 1704, and Louis XIV's reputation for invincibility went with it. The strategic situation was that Vienna was about to fall. A French army was on the upper Danube with the Elector of Bavaria, the Hungarians were in revolt to the east, and the Grand Alliance's cause would have ended with the Austrian capital. Marlborough's answer was to move an army 400 kilometres from the Low Countries to Bavaria without telling his own Dutch allies where he was going — announcing a campaign on the Moselle, marching past it, and paying in cash for supplies laid in along the route so the troops arrived fit. The French assumed for weeks that he was going somewhere else. He joined Eugene and attacked on 13 August across a marshy stream against a force of roughly equal size holding a strong position with villages anchoring both flanks. The design was to pin both flanks — repeated bloody assaults on Blenheim village and on Lutzingen — until the enemy had fed his reserves into them, and then break the weakened centre with massed cavalry, which is exactly what happened in the late afternoon. The French centre was ridden down and driven into the Danube. Some 20,000 French and Bavarians were killed or wounded and 14,000 captured, including the commander Tallard. Marlborough wrote the news to his wife on the back of a tavern bill. Parliament gave him a palace named after the village.
- Year: 1704 CE
- Category: Military
