The Spring 1813 Campaign-in-a-Day: Messages from the Front

 

Aides de Camp from the latest Piano Wargames Kickstarter, which ends  in less than 14 hours. 

GM Mike entered all the messages that were preserved in to a spreadsheet:

Over 100 messages that I had I typed up, took quite a while.

 

I did not get all the messages.  Unfortunately, Wittgenstein had thrown out the ones he had.

I am sure others did the same... and I noticed gaps, where i have replies but do not have the original message.

 

Still, very interesting and tells the story of the battle of what the Generals knew.

Some fog of war at its best.

  

I find it interesting if you filter on a commander like Wittgenstein, you can see when he received information; that is after a 10-15 min delay that I used to relay messages.  He found out that Blucher was under attack at  the Altenburg table around 12:01 (12:15), and that came from Yorck, not Blucher.  We kicked off at 11:30 am so it was about a half hour for Ney to get to the next table.  Same for Tormosov, about 20 min to get to his 1st table, Dresden, and then another 30 some minutes to get to Altenburg with a Transit town in between.   

 

Some commanders have no messages.  That is because they had Napoleon riding with them.

 

I numbered the messages by team.  you can see the Allies sent out twice as many messages vs the French over the 1st hour of the campaign.  (24 to 12).

The Allies messages go silent after 2:30 as either Wittgenstein was killed, or he had just assumed command of the Barclay troops and did not have time to continue to write messages.  Or he realized every Corps was locked in battle at that time.

 

I need to dig into more analysis, like compare these to the transit logs.