Surviving Glatz only to be executed

0:00You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode, and we distribute it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and hundreds more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads like this. Even with just 10 listeners a month. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start free at RSS.com. Imagine for a second that you survive a grueling, I mean, just a completely brutal month-long military siege. Right. The kind where you are literally starving. Exactly. You are completely surrounded, cut off from the entire world. The stone walls of your fortress are literally crumbling around you under relentless heavy bombardment. Sounds terrifying. Oh, it gets worse. Because you survive all that crossfire, you survive the starvation.

1:00And then you survive years languishing in an enemy prisoner of war camp, just waiting for the geopolitical winds to shift so you can finally go home. Which takes years, usually. Right. But when the war finally ends and you make that long agonizing journey back to your own country, your ultimate doom doesn't come from the enemy. It comes from your own boss. It is the ultimate betrayal, really. It completely breaks the social contract between a commander and their sovereign. You survive the absolute worst the enemy military machine has to offer only to be executed by the very leader you spend all those years fighting for. Welcome to today's Deep Dive. Our mission today is to unpack a single incredibly dense Wikipedia article detailing a military clash from 1760. We're talking about the siege of Glatz. It's such a fascinating case study. It really is. You look at the actual mechanics of how this siege operated. Some frankly shocking casualty numbers and the really dark psychology of military leadership

2:01during this era. Yeah. To really get why this happened, we have to set the stage for you. Right. So we are stepping into the third Silesian war, which for context was a major theater of the much broader global conflict that we know as the seven years war. The big one. And the two belligerents locked in this specific struggle are the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire. And the focal point for all of this is Glatz. It's a massive fortress city in Prussian Silesia, which the source notes is modern day quits go in Poland. Okay. Let's unpack this. We are starting in the early summer of 1760 June 6th to be specific. The timeline is super critical here. Because on June 6th, the Austrian forces arrive at Glatz. They are under the command of General von Laudem. General von Laudem, right? Yeah. And they successfully execute this massive encirclement, I mean, they completely surround the fortress. Locking it down. Exactly. Cutting off all the supply lines, cutting off communication, nobody gets in, nobody gets out. And trapped inside that fortress are 3,200 Prussian troops. A sizable garrison. Yeah.

3:02And they are commanded by Colonel Bartholomell Sido. He's the guy we mentioned at the very beginning of the deep dive. The one who really bears the brunt of this incredibly tragic historical arc. Right. So General Laudem has trapped his enemy. The board is set, the siege is on, except, and this is wild, he doesn't actually fire a single shot. No, he just sits there. He just sits there. Because he has to wait for his heavy artillery to be hauled all the way from Olimok, which is miles and miles away in neighboring Moravia. Which takes forever. I mean, I have to call this out as a massive Austrian blunder. You don't show up to a major siege operation without your cannons. It seems crazy, right? It's an inexcusable failure of planning. It's like, it's like hiring a state-of-the-art demolition crew to take down a high-rise building. They show up, they put up the fencing, they block off the streets, and then they realize they forgot something. Right. The foreman looks around and realizes they left the actual wrecking ball in another state. I mean, does this suggest a massive blunder in Austrian planning?

4:06Or was this just the sluggish reality of 18th century warfare? What's fascinating here is how this delay perfectly illustrates the constraints of historical military logistics. It absolutely looks like a massive blunder to modern eyes. Oh, totally. But to really understand this, we have to strip away our modern expectations of warfare. We have to look at the sheer physical constraints of logistics in the 1700s. Right. No guzzle trust. Exactly. It wasn't a failure of planning. It was a literal battle against physics. You essentially have two entirely different elements of an army, and they are moving at two completely different speeds. Okay. Break that down for me. Your infantry and your cavalry, the men on foot, and the men on horseback, they could move remarkably fast. They could march, say, 20 miles in a day. Wow. That is fast. Yeah. So they can secure parameters and establish that massive encirclement before the Prussian Garrison had any chance to react or, you know, retreat. So they are the net. You throw the net quickly to trap the fish. That is a great way to put it. You throw the net.

5:07But the technology required to actually break a fortified stone and earth star fortress. The heavy stuff. Right. The heavy siege guns, the massive mortars, the thousands of iron cannonballs, the literal tons of black powder. That machinery moved at an absolutely glacial pace because they're super heavy. Incredibly heavy. And the 18th century was not exactly an era of paved asphalt highways. Yeah. No interstates back then. Talking about dragging thousands of pounds of cast iron and bronze over unpaved, deeply redded dirt roads, roads that turned into impassable swanx, the second it rained. Just mud everywhere. Exactly. You had to use these massive teams of oxen or draft horses. And if one axle broke on one wagon, the entire column stopped. So it's physically impossible for the wrecking ball to arrive at the same time as the demolition crew. Unless, I guess, you want the demolition crew to walk at a mile a day and give the enemy a month's warning that you're coming. Right. And you definitely don't want to do that. The synchronization simply didn't exist back then.

6:09General Lawden had to secure the location with his fast moving troops first. And then, while simply endure the weight for the slow moving heavy hitters to catch up. And that weight stretched for weeks. I mean, the source says they arrived on June 6th and the heavy guns wouldn't arrive for over a month. It is a massive test of patience over a month of just staring at a stone wall. But General Lawden doesn't just sit in his tent reading poetry while he waits. Right. Absolutely not. While he is stuck in this holding pattern, his scouts bring him some pretty critical intelligence. A smaller pressure force, commanded by someone named Fouquet, is actually marching into the broader region. And this creates a really fascinating tactical dilemma for Lawden. How so? Well, he is committed to a static siege. He's stuck there waiting. But suddenly, there is a highly mobile threat approaching his theater of operations. And Lawden's response to this borders on tactical suicide, at least from my perspective. It's definitely a bold move. Because he takes the bulk of his army, turns his back on the 3,200 armed pressions trapped

7:12inside the fortress and marches out to intercept this new approaching force. He dies. This feels like an insane gamble. Isn't it incredibly dangerous to abandon a siege you've already set up just to chase down like the side quest? What stops Colonel Dio from opening the gates of Glatz? He's pushing his 3,200 troops out and devastating the Austrian camps while Lawden is miles away. You are identifying the exact vulnerability that makes siege warfare so incredibly perilous. It just seems so exposed. It is. But Lawden isn't just gambling blindly here. The historical record emphasizes a really crucial detail. Lawden possessed a much larger force, a vastly superior force in terms of sheer numbers. Okay, so he had guys to spare. He had enough manpower to effectively bifurcate his army. He doesn't abandon the siege entirely. He leaves behind a screening force at Glatz. Okay, let's break down that term. Because to me, a screening force sounds like, you know, a few guys left behind with binoculars just to keep watch.

8:13It is far more sophisticated than that, I promise. A screening force is a highly calculated tactical deployment. Really? Oh, yeah. It is not just about observing the enemy. It is about psychological manipulation. It's area denial. The troops left behind are tasked with maintaining the illusion of a full encirclement. So they're putting on a show? A very elaborate show. They keep the campfires burning. They run constant patrols back and forth. They take occasional potshots at the walls. Their entire job is to keep those 3,200 pressions inside the fortress, utterly paranoid, convince that if they step outside the gates, they will be annihilated by a massive army that actually is no longer even there. A lethal illusion. They are projecting strength to cover the fact that the main muscle has left the building. Exactly. And that main muscle marches directly toward the approaching Prussian relief force. This all culminates in the Battle of Landishat on June 23rd. So about two and a half weeks after they first got to Glatz. Right. And General Loudon uses his superior numbers and his momentum to absolutely crush this new

9:19threat. He forces the Prussian commander, Fouquet, to surrender his entire force. Wow. It's an incredible display of dynamic command. You have this completely static, frustrating reality of the siege, where he is literally just waiting for iron tubes to arrive on cards. Yeah. Tuddling their phones. Right. But the moment a fluid opportunity presents itself, Loudon capitalizes on it. He cleans up the perimeter, eliminates a mobile threat, and secures the broader region. He essentially ensures that when his artillery finally does arrive, he can conduct the bombardment in peace. He doesn't have to constantly look over his shoulder for a Prussian rescue army. And that main event finally kicks into gear in July. Following his decisive victory at Landishat, Loudon marches his army back to Glatz. And by July 20th, the agonizing weight is finally over. The guns arrive. The heavy artillery from Moravia rolls into camp. The wrecking ball is finally on site. And at this point, the nature of the engagement shifts entirely. The siege, as they say, properly begins. And the mechanics of this are just brutal.

10:21Because you can't just park a cannon in an open field and start shooting at a fortress. No. Because the fortress has its own cannons firing back at you from an elevated position. Right. They have the high ground. So the Austrians have to dig. They start carving these extensive trench networks into the earth, literally using the dirt itself as cover. It's incredibly labor intensive. And they systematically zigzag comes around closer to the fortress walls, just to bring their heavy guns into effective range. The physical and psychological reality for the pressions trapped inside must have been suffocating. Try to conceptualize that transition for those 3,200 trapped men. I mean, for nearly six weeks, they experienced this terrifying, quiet tension. Just waiting. Right. They knew they were surrounded. They knew the enemy was out there, but there was no major combat. And then suddenly, the horizon just erupts. The heavy siege guns are unlimbered, and the systematic, deafening bombardment begins. This massive iron projectile starts shattering the masonry, destroying the defensive parapets, and literally collapsing the very walls these guys are standing on.

11:24It's the beginning of the end. And once the walls are sufficiently pulverized by this continuous artillery fire, Loden prepares for the final blow. But, and this is interesting, he avoids throwing his entire army into a massive chaotic charge against the breeches. Which is usually a meat grinder. Exactly. But, he organizes a specialized group of volunteers to storm the city first. These volunteers actually manage to slip through the newly created gaps in the rubble, navigate whatever defensive obstacles remain, and they actually manage to open the main fortress gates from the inside. It's pretty amazing. It allows the overwhelming bulk of the Austrian army to just flood right in. It is a textbook execution of an 18th century assault. It reminds me of how modern special operations work, honestly. It's less like a brute force doorkick and more like a heist movie or, you know, a surgical bypass. Right. The sneaky way in. Yeah. The artillery acts as the anesthesia, completely numbing and suppressing the fortresses central nervous system. It's cannons and defenders. No, that's a good analogy.

12:25And that suppression allows this small scalpel of volunteers to slip in quietly, the few slipping through the cracks, and sever the main lock from the inside, opening the vault for the rest of the crew to follow. The surgical metaphor is highly appropriate here because the results of this operation were remarkably clean for the attacking force. Here's where it gets really interesting because the casualties statistics are what really stop you in your tracks. They are unbelievable. When the smoke clears and the fortress officially falls on July 26th, the math is just staggering. The defending pressions, the forces who had the walls on the high ground, they suffered 700 dead or wounded, which is a huge hit. And furthermore, an incredible 2,500-pression soldiers were taken as prisoners of war. If you do the math on that, 700 casualties plus 2,500 prisoners accounts for the entire 3,200-man garrison. Completely wiped out. Colonel Dio's command was entirely wiped off the board. A total eradication. But the attacking Austrians, the army that had to actually run toward the guns in storm

13:28a fortified position, they suffered only 214 casualties. It's an incredibly low number. I really need to emphasize to you how rare that is. In siege warfare, the attacker almost always bleeds more than the defender. How does an attacking force lose only 214 men while entirely capturing a fortress of 3,200? The answer lies in the timeline we established earlier. The delay. Yes. That grueling month and a half wait for the heavy artillery for Moravia is the direct cause of the minimal Austrian casualties. Because they refused to rush the timeline. They didn't just rush in. Patients in warfare translates directly to preserved manpower. If General Lotten had allowed his commanders to grow impatient back in June like, if he had ordered his infantry to try and scale the walls with ladders before the artillery arrived, it would have been an unmitigated bloodbath. The infantry would have been marching right into a meat grinder. Absolutely. The pressions would have maintained clear fields of fire, secure cover, the high ground they would have picked them on.

14:28But by waiting. By waiting, Lotten let the guns do the bloody work. The heavy artillery systematically dismantled the physical defenses of glass. But maybe more importantly, it broke the psychological will and the defensive cohesion of the Prussian garrison. They were just worn down. Right. By the time those volunteers moved in to secure the gates, the combat effectiveness of the fortress had been fundamentally shattered by iron and gunpowder. The incredibly low casualty rate for the Austrians is a testament to the brutal mathematical efficiency of properly applied siege warfare. When you see that level of tactical precision, losing only 214 men to completely capture a heavily fortified city and eliminate an entire enemy garrison, you'd assume this victory cracked the whole war wide open. We really would. But when you zoom out to look at the macro picture of the conflict, the story takes a turn that is genuinely mind blowing on a geopolitical level. The contrast here between the tactical victor and the strategic reality is honestly arguably

15:30the most profound insight we can pull from the historical record of this campaign. Let's look at the map of 1760. Throughout that entire year, the Seven Years War was raging globally. There were massive extensive army maneuvers across the continent. Huge troop movements. Yeah. And several heavy bloody battles fought between the Prussian and Austrian forces, including that battle of landage, we discussed earlier, thousands of men fighting, bleeding and dying. But despite all of that movement, despite all that expenditure of human life and national treasury, the capture of the glass fortress was the only piece of territory taken by the Austrians and their allies that entire year. You really have to let that sink in. A full calendar year of global industrialized imperial warfare and the geopolitical borders remained almost completely frozen. It's wild. The map of Europe in December of 1760 looked virtually identical to the map in December of 1759, with the singular exception of this one fortress in Silesia. It's just an overwhelming realization.

16:30Thousands of men marching through mud, the month-long psychological terror of the siege, the 700 dead Prussians, the 214 dead Austrians, the 2500 man marched off to POW camps. And for what? The grand strategic picture just ground into a massive feudal stalemate. It reveals a defining characteristic of mid-18th century warfare. The defensive technologies, like these massive star fortresses and the entrenched positions, they were often so robust and the logistical chains were so incredibly fragile that maneuvering massive armies resulted in these grinding wars of attrition. Just a total slog. Exactly. We could win a brilliant tactical victory like Glatz, but entirely lack the logistical capability to exploit that victory and push any deeper into enemy territory. It was a remarkably bloody way to essentially maintain the status quo. A devastatingly expensive stalemate on the grand stage. But we need to contrast that macro-futility with the hyper-personal fate of the Prussian commander we introduced earlier. Oh, Colonel Dio.

17:31Right. Let's talk about Colonel Bartholomey's due, the man tasked with defending Glatz. His narrative really serves as the grim epilogue to everything we've discussed about the brutality of this era. So the fortress falls. Colonel Dio is captured. He becomes a prisoner of war. And miraculously, he actually survives. Against all odds. He survives the weeks of artillery bombardment. He survives the physical and psychological toll of captivity in an Austrian camp. And he manages to wait out the remainder of the Seven Years War. Which is an achievement in itself. Totally. The treaties are finally signed and the war ends. He is released. He makes the journey home to Prussia, expecting perhaps a quiet retirement after enduring horrors most of us can't even imagine. You think he earned it? Right. Instead, the moment he returns, he is arrested, put on trial by his unmilitary, and Frederick the Great, the King of Prussia orders him to be executed, the official crime, losing the fortress of Glatz. It is a profoundly chilling conclusion to a military career.

18:33But what does this all mean? This is where I really need your perspective, because this feels beyond brutal. It feels entirely irrational. I can see why you'd say that. Executing your own commander for losing a battle where he was hopelessly outnumbered by a mobile army, trapped in a static box, and pounded to dust by heavy artillery makes zero strategic sense. Why would Frederick the Great execute a man for failing to win a mathematically impossible battle? We connect this to the bigger picture. To understand that execution, you really have to understand the existential terror of the Prussian State during the Seven Years War. Frederick the Great wasn't punishing a simple tactical mistake. He was enforcing a doctrine of absolute institutional survival. So he's enforcing discipline through terror? Exactly. Prussia was a relatively small kingdom, and it was surrounded by massive, incredibly wealthy empires, Austria, Russia, France. Frederick was fighting a war where the math was never in his favor. He's the underdog. Always. He was constantly outnumbered and out-resourced. The only way the Prussian State could avoid being entirely wiped off the map was through

19:37maintaining an army with iron, unbreakable discipline. He's fighting gravity, so he has to outlaw falling. That is the perfect way to contextualize it. In Frederick's military machine, there was no room for nuance, there was no room for calculating the odds. A fortress commander was expected to hold their ground to the last man, regardless of how hopeless the situation appeared. Even if it meant total annihilation. Surrendering, even to save the lives of 2,500 men in the face of overwhelming Austrian artillery, was not viewed as a pragmatic military decision. It was viewed as a fundamental moral failure. It was a betrayal of the kingdom's precarious survival. So the reality of the Austrian superior numbers, the delay of the siege guns, the surgical breach, none of the actual mechanics we just spent time unpacking mattered to Frederick. The only data point he cared about was that the Prussian flag was no longer flying over glass. The execution of Colonel Duo was a theatrical display of zero tolerance policy. It was designed to send a terrifying, unmistakable message to every other officer serving in

20:39the Prussian army. Surrender is a crime punishable by death, and your only option is victory or death on the battlefield. It was the grim glue required to hold a heavily outmatched military force together under extreme duress. Think about times you faced impossible odds at work, right? A project that's doomed from the start. Yeah, we've all been there. Now imagine the penalty for that project failing wasn't just a bad performance review, but a literal firing squad. The psychological burden of that is almost incomprehensible. You are placed in command of a fortress. You know that if you fight against the Austrian heavy guns, you will almost certainly die in the rubble. Right. But you also know that if you surrender to save your men, you will eventually face a firing squad organized by your own king. It is a completely unwinnable fatal paradox. He made the pragmatic choice to surrender, and it cost him his life years later when he finally thought he was safe. It really forces us to look beyond the dry statistics of military history. We see the 214 Austrian casualties, the 700 Prussian casualties, the singular fortress

21:45changing hands. But hidden beneath those numbers are the absolute destruction of individual human lives, reputations, and the terrifying pressures placed on the people forced to navigate those impossible circumstances. It is a wild heavy journey we've taken today through this single source document. We started with an Austrian army completely stalled out in the mud, unable to move forward without their heavy guns. Waiting for the wrecking ball. Waiting for the wrecking ball. We explored the psychological warfare of a screening force and the dynamic pivot to crush a relief army, a land of shit. We broke down the surgical, terrifying mechanics of how a fortress is systematically dismantled by artillery and then breached by volunteers, the 18th century heist, and it all culminated in a tragic brutal execution of a surviving commander by keen desperate to keep his fragile empire intact. And all of that complex human drama, suffering, and tactical brilliance was expended for a single fortress in a year where absolutely nothing else of consequence changed on the geopolitical map.

22:46Which brings us to a final lingering thought for you to mull over as we wrap up. We look back at the campaign of 1760. We see that thousands of lives were permanently altered or extinguished. Hundreds of men were killed in the dirt trenches outside Glatz, a garrison of 2500 men was marched into the despair of captivity, and a commanding officer survived the entire horrific ordeal only to be executed by the very sovereign he was sworn to protect. All of this violence, all of this suffering, all of this tactical genius, over a single fortress that was literally only piece of land to change hands between these vast global empires and an entire year of non-stop warfare. So when the smoke finally clears and the dust settles, does the colossal machinery of war actually achieve tangible progress? Or is it just a devastatingly expensive tragic way to keep the map exactly the same? A heavy question. It's a heavy question, but examining those questions is the entire point of what we do here. Thank you for joining us on this deep dive. You are now officially well informed on this obscure, but deeply revealing, slice of history.

23:47We will catch you next time. You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're in a podcast, chances are you have something to say too. With rss.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start your new podcast for free today at rss.com.