Featured battle : Villach 2

Part of The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

Date : 28 August 1813 - 29 August 1813

The Austrians left an inadequate force [a single battalion] to hold this vital town and river crossing. They left 80% of the town burnt down and three arches of the bridge destroyed.

The Great Waterloo Controversy.

Gareth Glover
Another classic Gareth Glover about the battle of Waterloo but this book is firmly focussed on the 52nd Foot. There is a little about the regiment prior to the battle and slightly more about them up to the end of their time in France after the fall of Paris. The 52nd became the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry notably going in gliders to hold Pegasus bridge on D-day, WW2.
The controversy referred to in the title is around the defeat of the Imperial Guard in the final stages of the battle. So many accounts present the myth that it was the foot guards alone who achieved this. Glover expertly and conclusively destroys the myth, explaining on the way how it came into existence, and replaces it with the best available evidence of what really happened. The author qualifies his reliance on first-hand accounts by the nearness in time to the event that the account was written and the proximity to the action of the various writers. A large part of the accounts are included in the text. The last two chapters and the appendices are an excellent summary of what is in effect a mass of primary data.
There are some useful maps, a nice set of photographs and an extensive bibliography.
We highly recommend this book which, as well as being a jolly good read, is also a lesson in battle history writing.

Frontline Books, 2020