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Incompetence That Shaped History

Khalid Elhassan March 9, 2020 33 min

Nineteenth century Washington Metropolitan Police Force officers. Washington Metropolitan Police

37. Incompetence Turns an Orderly Retreat Into a Catastrophic Rout

Napoleon’s retreat from Leipzig, with the premature detonation of the bridge in the background. Napoleon Bonaparte Podcast

Entrusting the fate of an army to a lowly corporal turned out to be a bad decision. Around 1 PM on October 19^th, 1813, Corporal Lafontaine, temporarily in sole charge of the explosives-rigged up to blow up Leipzig’s bridge, heard distant gunfire. Discombobulated, the corporal immediately blew up the bridge – while it was jam-packed with Napoleon’s retreating men.

Most of those on the bridge were either killed by the explosion, or drowned. That was just the tip of the iceberg. The unexpected detonation caused a panic, during which thousands of French troops were killed. Tens of thousands of Napoleon’s men were still on the far side of the bridge, when they found themselves suddenly cut off from retreat, and on the same side as the enemy. Many more drowned as they tried to swim across. 30,000 of those stranded on the wrong side of the bridge were forced to surrender.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.