Siege of Badajoz (1812)

After the allied campaign in Spain had started with the Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo and the capture in earlier sieges of the frontier towns of Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo, Wellington's army moved south to Badajoz to capture this frontier town and secure the lines of communication back to Lisbon, the primary base of operations for the allied army. Badajoz was garrisoned by some 5,000 French soldiers under General Armand Philippon, the town commander, and possessed much stronger fortifications than either Almeida or Ciudad Rodrigo. With a strong curtain wall covered by numerous strongpoints and bastions, Badajoz had already faced two unsuccessful sieges and was well prepared for a third attempt, with the walls strengthened and some areas around the curtain wall flooded or mined with explosives.[7]

Siege of Badajoz

General Sir Thomas Picton storming the Castle of Badajos. March 31st 1812

With three large gaps in the curtain wall and being aware of Marshal Soult marching to the town's aid, Wellington ordered his regiments to storm the town so at 22:00 on the 6th and the troops made their way forward with scaling ladders and various tools. Three attacks would be mounted. The first men to assault the breaches were the men of the forlorn hope, who would lead the main attack by the 4th Division on two of the breaches. The third breach would be assaulted by Alten's Light Division, while diversionary attacks were to be made to the north and the east by Portuguese while British soldiers of the 5th Division and Picton's 3rd Division[12] would assault the Castle from across the river.[14]

Just as the main forlorn hope were beginning their attack, a French sentry was alerted and raised the alarm. Within seconds, the ramparts were filled with French soldiers, who poured a lethal hail of musket fire into the troops at the base of the breach. The British and Portuguese surged forward en masse and raced up to the wall, facing a murderous barrage of musket fire, complemented by grenades, stones, barrels of gunpowder with crude fuses and bales of burning hay to provide light.[14]

The furious barrage devastated the British soldiers at the wall and the breach soon began to fill with dead and wounded over whom the storming troops had to struggle. The carnage, rubble and loss of guiding engineering officers led Alten's Light Division to become confused; assaulting an outlying ravelin that led nowhere, the troops became mixed with those of the 4th Division. Despite the carnage, the British continued to surge forward in great numbers, only to be mown down by endless volleys and shrapnel from grenades and bombs. The French could see that they were holding off the assault and that the British were becoming stupefied and incapable of further exertion.[15] In just under two hours, some 2,000 men had been killed or badly wounded at the main breach, while many more men of the 3rd Division were shot down as they made their diversionary assault.

Picton's 3rd Division managed to reach the top of the castle wall – without Picton, who was wounded[5] as he climbed a ladder to try to reach the top of the wall – and found themselves secure within the castle but, as all entrances into the town were blocked, unable to come immediately to the assistance of the other divisions.[14]

Everywhere they attacked, the allied soldiers were being halted and the carnage was so immense that Wellington was about to call a halt to the assault when he heard that the soldiers had gained a foothold in the castle. He ordered that the castle gates be blown and that the 3rd Division should support the assaults on the breaches with a flank attack.[15]

The 5th Division, which had been delayed because their ladder party had become lost, now attacked the San Vicente bastion; losing 600 men, they eventually made it to the top of the curtain wall.[15] Major Lord FitzRoy Somerset, Wellington's military secretary (and the future Field Marshal the Lord Raglan), was the first to mount the breach,[16] and afterwards secured one of the gates to enable access for British reinforcements before the French could organise a fresh defence.

The town's fate was sealed with the linking up with men of the 3rd and 5th Divisions, who were also making their way into the town.[12] Once they had a foothold, the British and Portuguese soldiers had an advantage. Seeing that he could no longer hold out, General Philippon withdrew from Badajoz to the neighbouring outwork of San Cristobal; he surrendered shortly after the town had fallen.[17]

When dawn finally came on 7 April, it revealed the horror of the slaughter all around the curtain wall. Bodies were piled high and blood flowed like rivers in the ditches and trenches. Surveying the destruction and slaughter Wellington wept openly at the sight of British dead piled upon each other in the breaches[18] and bitterly cursed the British Parliament for granting him so few resources and soldiers. The assault and the earlier skirmishes had left the allies with some 4,800 casualties. Numbers differ between 4,760[4] and 4,924.[5] The elite Light Division had suffered badly, losing some 40 percent of their fighting strength.

British infantry attempt to scale the walls of Badajoz, the site of one of several bloody sieges conducted during the Peninsular War.

Siege of Badajoz

After the capture of the city, British troops became drunk on stocks of captured alcohol and began rampaging through the city. During the sack of Badajoz, numerous homes were broken into, private property was vandalized or stolen, civilians of all ages and backgrounds raped and many British officers trying to bring to order were shot by the men.[19][5] Captain Robert Blakeney wrote:

The infuriated soldiery resembled rather a pack of hell hounds vomited up from infernal regions for the extirpation of mankind than what they were but twelve short hours previously – a well-organised, brave, disciplined and obedient British Army, and burning only with impatience for what is called glory.[20]

Despite this, some historians have defended the actions of the British soldiers by arguing that the aftermath could not have been avoided considering the ferociousness of the battle. Ian Fletcher argues:

Let us not forget that hundreds of British troops were killed and maimed by the fury of the respective assaults, during which men saw their comrades and brothers slaughtered before their very eyes. Should we really condemn them for feeling some degree of bitterness, for wanting to vent their anger upon somebody? The storming of a fortress is not the same as a battle where men expect casualties to occur. But when a force was asked to storm a fortress when practicable breaches had been formed, such casualties would have been deemed unnecessary. Given the enormity of the task facing the stormers in the Peninsula, I for one begrudge them none of their feelings of anger and desire for revenge.[21]

On the other hand, Myatt writes:

Presumably one can return to the laws of war which, imprecise though they were, did at least suggest propriety of a surrender when a practicable breach had been made, to which Phillipon might very justifiably have retorted that practicable was not a recognisable description of breaches on which two of the best divisions in the British Army had failed to make any impressions, even though the extent of their effort can be measured by their losses.[22]

After fifteen to eighteen hours Wellington finally issued an order that the sack of Badajoz should cease and ordered detachments to restore order beginning at 5 a.m. the next day.[23] However, it took another 72 hours before military order was completely restored in the ranks.[24] Many British soldiers were flogged as punishment and a gallows was erected, though no one was hanged.[25]

The most detailed study of the effects of the British sacking of Badajoz is undoubtedly the one published in 1983 by Spanish historian Eladio Méndez Venegas from data collected in the Diocesan Archives of Badajoz. Research into the local archives have established that only about 300 families (between 1,200 and 1,500 people) had remained in the city. A document drawn up at the time by the priest of the Parish of Conception, which is signed ‘Bances’, presents in two folios the detailed list, per street/per parish, of the civilian dead and injured. The conclusion is that the total could be as high as 250, possibly even 280. These numbers indicated that between 20% and 30% of the Spanish civilians who were living near or within the walls of Badajoz were killed or injured during the sack of the city.[26]

In a letter to Lord Liverpool, written the following day, Wellington confided:

The storming of Badajoz affords as strong an instance of the gallantry of our troops as has ever been displayed. But I greatly hope that I shall never again be the instrument of putting them to such a test as that to which they were put last night.[27]

From an engineering view point, the requirement to undertake the assault in a hasty manner, relying upon bayonet charges, rather than scientific methods of approach, undoubtedly resulted in heavier casualties, as did the lack of a corps of trained sappers. The siege was to lead, within two weeks, to the formation of the Royal School of Military Engineering.[28]

Wellington advanced into Spain leading to the Battle of Salamanca in a continuation of the Coalition campaign of 1812.

• Badajoz bastioned enclosure

• Bodart, Gaston (1908). Militär-historisches Kriegs-Lexikon (1618-1905). Retrieved 28 May 2021.
• EB (2020). "Siege of Badajoz". Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on 24 October 2020.
• Fletcher, Ian (2001). In Hell before Daylight: The Siege and Storming of the Castle of Badajoz, March–April 1812. Spellmount Ltd. ISBN 1-873376-26-X.
• Fletcher, Ian (2005). Badajoz 1812: Wellington's bloodiest siege.
• Heathcote, T. A. (1999). The British Field Marshals 1736–1997. Staplehurst. ISBN 0-85052-696-5.
• Hibbert, Christopher (1997). Wellington: A Personal History. Perseus Books. ISBN 0738201480.
• Melón, Miguel Ángel (2012). "Badajoz (1811–1812) La resistencia en la frontera" (PDF). In Butró Prída, Gonzalo; Rújula, Pedro (eds.). Los sitios en la guerra de la Independencia: La lucha en las ciudades. Cádiz: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cádiz. ISBN 978-84-9828-393-8.
• Myatt, Frederick (1995). British Sieges of the Peninsular War. Staplehurst. ISBN 0-946771-59-6.
• Oman, Sir Charles (1914), A History of the Peninsular War: Volume V, October 1811 to August 1812, Clarendon Press
• Ortiz, Lt Col Fernando (2019). "Civilian Casualties during the Sack of Badajoz 1812". Retrieved 28 May 2021.
• Paget, Julian (1996). Wellington's Peninsular War – Battles and Battlefields. London. ISBN 0-85052-603-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Porter, Maj Gen Whitworth (1889). History of the Corps of Royal Engineers Vol I. Chatham: The Institution of Royal Engineers.
• Weller, Jac (1962). Wellington in the Peninsula 1808–1814. London: The Institution of Royal Engineers. ISBN 0-7182-0730-0.
• Wellesley, Arthur (1838). The dispatches of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, during his various campaigns in India, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, the Low Countries, and France. From 1799 to 1818. Compiled from official and authentic documents Vol 9. London: John Murray.

• Fletcher, Ian: Fortresses of the Peninsular War, Osprey Publishing.
• Fletcher, Ian: Wellington's Regiments: The Men and Their Battles, 1808–15, The History Press Ltd., ISBN 1-873376-06-5

• Media related to Battle of Badajoz at Wikimedia Commons