Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: Who took part in The Battle of Lesnaya?
The Battle of Lesnaya ( "Bitva pri Lesnoy", , ), was one of the major battles of the Great Northern War. It took place on September 28, 1708 (O.S.) / September 29, 1708 (Swedish calendar) / October 9, 1708 (N.S.) between a Russian army of between 26,500 and 29,000 men commanded by Peter I of Russia, Mikhail Mikhailovich Golitsyn, Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov, Christian Felix Bauer and Nikolai Grigorovitj von Werden and a Swedish army of about 12,500 men commanded by Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt and Berndt Otto Stackelberg, at the village of Lesnaya, located close to the border between the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia (now the village of Lyasnaya, south-east of Mogilev in Belarus). The Swedes were escorting a supply column of more than 4,500 wagons for their main army in Ukraine.
The battle was won by the combined forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the latter represented only by the forces of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland (the march of the Lithuanian army was delayed, and they reached Vienna after it had been relieved). The Viennese garrison was led by Ernst Rüdiger Graf von Starhemberg, an Austrian subject of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I. The overall command was held by the senior leader, the King of Poland, John III Sobieski, who led the relief forces.
The Battle of Vienna ( or "Kahlenberg" (Battle of the Bald Mountains); or "odsiecz wiedeńska" (The Relief of Vienna); Modern Turkish: "İkinci Viyana Kuşatması", Ottoman Turkish: "Beç Ḳalʿası Muḥāṣarası") took place at Kahlenberg Mountain near Vienna on 1683 after the imperial city had been besieged by the Ottoman Empire for two months. The battle was fought by the Habsburg Monarchy, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Holy Roman Empire, under the command of King John III Sobieski against the Ottomans and their vassal and tributary states. The battle marked the first time the Commonwealth and the Holy Roman Empire had cooperated militarily against the Ottomans, and it is often seen as a turning point in history, after which "the Ottoman Turks ceased to be a menace to the Christian world". In the ensuing war that lasted until 1699, the Ottomans lost almost all of Hungary to the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I.
In the Great Northern War he was Charles XII's right-hand man in the operative organization of the Carolean Army and drafted the battle plans for the landing at Humlebæk and for the battles of Narva, Düna and Kliszów. In the battle of Fraustadt in 1706, with his own independent army, he decisively defeated a Saxon-Russian Army under the command of Field Marshal Schulenburg. For his services, Rehnskiöld was appointed Field Marshal and the title of Count. During Charles XII's campaign against Russia, Rehnskiöld commanded the battle of Holowczyn and the siege of Veprik, where he was severely injured. After Charles XII was incapacitated by a bullet wound, Rehnskiöld replaced him as commander-in-chief of the Swedish Army during the battle of Poltava in 1709, where it suffered a decisive defeat.
The Battle of Austerlitz (2 December 1805/11 Frimaire An XIV FRC), also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors, was one of the most important and decisive engagements of the Napoleonic Wars. In what is widely regarded as the greatest victory achieved by Napoleon, the "Grande Armée" of France defeated a larger Russian and Austrian army led by Emperor Alexander I and Holy Roman Emperor Francis II. The battle occurred near the town of Austerlitz in the Austrian Empire (modern-day Slavkov u Brna in the Czech Republic). Austerlitz brought the War of the Third Coalition to a rapid end, with the Treaty of Pressburg signed by the Austrians later in the month. The battle is often cited as a tactical masterpiece, in the same league as other historic engagements like Cannae or Gaugamela.
The Battle of Ravenna, fought on 11 April 1512, by forces of the Holy League, France and Ferrara was a major battle of the War of the League of Cambrai in the Italian Wars. Although the French and the Ferrarese drove the Spanish-Papal army from the field, their victory failed to help them secure northern Italy, and they would be forced to withdraw from the region entirely by August 1512.
The battle of Warsaw was fought from August 12–25, 1920 as Red Army forces commanded by Mikhail Tukhachevsky approached the Polish capital of Warsaw and the nearby Modlin Fortress. On August 16, Polish forces commanded by Józef Piłsudski counterattacked from the south, disrupting the enemy's offensive, forcing the Russian forces into a disorganized withdrawal eastward and behind the Neman River. Estimated Russian losses were 10,000 killed, 500 missing, 30,000 wounded, and 66,000 taken prisoner, compared with Polish losses of some 4,500 killed, 10,000 missing, and 22,000 wounded.
The Battle of Ravenna in 729 was fought between the troops of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Exarchate of Ravenna and a force of Italians. This was in response to Emperor Leo III the Isaurian outlawing the veneration of holy icons, which Pope Gregory II was against. After a fierce battle, the Eastern Roman Army was overcome and thousands of Byzantines were killed.
In 1773 Pugachev's army attacked Samara and occupied it. His greatest victory came with the taking of Kazan, by which time his captured territory stretched from the Volga to the Ural mountains. Though fairly well-organized for a revolt at the time, Pugachev's main advantage early on was the lack of seriousness about Pugachev's rebellion. Catherine the Great regarded the troublesome Cossack as a joke and put a small bounty of about 500 rubles on his head. But by 1774, the threat was more seriously addressed; by November the bounty was over 28,000 rubles. The Russian general Michelson lost many men due to a lack of transportation and discipline among his troops, while Pugachev scored several important victories.
Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and the German 1st Mountain Division reached the suburbs of Lviv on September 12 and began a siege. The city's garrison was ordered to hold out at all cost since the strategic position prevented the enemy from crossing into the Romanian Bridgehead. Also, a number of Polish troops from Central Poland were trying to reach the city and organise a defence there to buy time to regroup. Thus a 10-day-long defence of the city started and later became known as yet another Battle of Lwów. On September 19 an unsuccessful Polish diversionary attack under General Władysław Langner was launched. Soviet troops (part of the forces which had invaded on September 17 under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) replaced the Germans around the city. On September 21 Langner formally surrendered to Soviet troops under Marshal Semyon Timoshenko.
The Battle of Ravenna was fought between supporters of Orestes and supporters of Julius Nepos for control of the Western Roman Empire. In prelude to the battle, Orestes had been ordered to raise a large army to confront tribal rulers in Gaul. Instead he led his force against Emperor Julius Nepos in the capital Ravenna. Nepos was defeated and deposed, but managed to flee to Dalmatia. Orestes in turn enthroned his son Romulus Augustulus as Roman emperor. He was in turn overthrown by Odoacer in September 476 following the Roman defeat at Pavia.
England and France were in the concluding stages of the Hundred Years War. The French did not wish to lose their advantage in the fight by sending knights and the English were in no position to do so. Spain was in the final stages of the Reconquista. The Holy Roman Empire, never centralized enough behind the Hohenstaufen to unite the principalities, had exhausted what could be spared at Varna. Further fighting among the German princes and the Hussite wars seriously reduced the willingness of most to perform a crusade. Poland and Hungary were key participants at Varna and the defeat there along with the Polish–Teutonic Wars kept them busy and unwilling for further commitments.
In 1812, at the height of his power, Napoleon invaded Russia with a pan-European "Grande Armée", consisting of 650,000 men (270,000 Frenchmen and many soldiers of allies or subject areas). The French forces crossed the Niemen River on 24 June 1812. Russia proclaimed a Patriotic War, and Napoleon proclaimed a Second Polish war. The Poles supplied almost 100,000 men for the invasion force, but against their expectations, Napoleon avoided any concessions to Poland, having in mind further negotiations with Russia.
The Battle of Elsenborn Ridge was the only sector of the American front lines during the Battle of the Bulge where the Germans failed to advance. The battle centered on the Elsenborn Ridge east of Elsenborn, Belgium in the Ardennes forest. West of Elsenborn Ridge, near the cities of Liège and Spa, Belgium, was a vast array of Allied supplies and the well-developed road network leading to the Meuse River and Antwerp. The Germans planned on using two key rollbahns or routes through the area to seize Antwerp and force a separate peace with the United States and Britain. Capturing Monschau and the nearby village of Höfen, and the twin villages of Rocherath-Krinkelt just east of Elsenborn Ridge, were key to the success of the German plans, and Hitler committed his best armored units and infantry troops to the area, including the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend.
The battle was fought between the Army of the Cumberland under Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans and the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Gen. Braxton Bragg, and was named for Chickamauga Creek, which meanders near the battle area in northwest Georgia (and ultimately flows into the Tennessee River about 3.5 miles (5.6 km) northeast of downtown Chattanooga).
Rehnskiöld's name was later tied to a massacre that was purported to have occurred shortly after the battle. According to testimony from a Lieutenant Joachim Matthiæ Lyth and Lieutenant-Colonel Nils Gyllenstierna, Rehnskiöld ordered the massacre of up to 500 Russian prisoners of war.
In the beginning of the Great Northern War in 1700, Karl XII proved himself a gifted military leader and won devastating victories over his enemies with relentless offensive tactics in battles such as Narva, Düna, Kliszów and Jakobstadt. In fact, the Swedish Army never lost a single major land battle until 1709. In the Dano-Swedish war of 1700 king Charles forced his adversaries to the southwest to abandon the conflict, and one year after that he launched a five-year campaign against Poland which saw the Commonwealth forced out of the conflict. Sweden saw no military failures in west or south, even though Russia had conducted some successful raids against Swedish outposts and villages on the eastern border. Charles XII's reputation as an invincible military commander would only end after he decided to launch a major campaign against Russia, known as the invasion of Russia. Once the army had reached as far as Poltava, Ukraine, Charles himself was wounded and his men were in a dreadful state, having not slept or eaten for days and lacking sufficient ammunition. Under the leadership of Field Marshal Carl Gustav Rehnskiöld the Caroleans desperately tried to overcome a heavily fortified line of defenses, but failed. The Russian army severely outnumbered the Swedish invaders, was in good condition, had a much larger artillery force and were heavily dug in behind lines of redoubts along with wooden stakes and trenches. The Battle of Poltava was a severe blow to the Carolean army. King Charles led his men to the southwest in the hopes of reaching his allies in the Ottoman Empire for support, but Swedish general Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt ordered the surviving troops to lay down their arms when the Russian forces approached. The outcome of the events surrounding the disaster at Poltava effectively meant that Sweden had no land army left on continental Europe to contest renewed Russian attempts at reconquering their lost territories.
The French invasion of Russia, known in Russia as the Patriotic War of 1812 () and in France as the Russian Campaign (), began on 24 June 1812 when Napoleon's crossed the Neman River in an attempt to engage and defeat the Russian army. Napoleon hoped to compel Tsar Alexander I of Russia to cease trading with British merchants through proxies in an effort to pressure the United Kingdom to sue for peace. The official political aim of the campaign was to liberate Poland from the threat of Russia. Napoleon named the campaign the Second Polish War to gain favor with the Poles and provide a political pretext for his actions.
Joseph Stalin, then chief political commissar of the South-western Front, was engaged at Lwów, about 320 kilometres from Warsaw. The absence of his forces at the battle has been the subject of dispute. A perception arose that his absence was due to his desire to achieve 'military glory' at Lwów. Telegrams concerning the transfer of forces were exchanged. Leon Trotsky interpreted Stalin's actions as insubordination; Richard Pipes asserts that Stalin '...almost certainly acted on Lenin's orders' in not moving the forces to Warsaw. That the commander-in-chief Sergey Kamenev allowed such insubordination, issued conflicting and confusing orders and did not act with the decisiveness of a commander-in-chief contributed greatly to the problems and defeat the Red forces suffered at this critical junction of the war.
The Polish 5th Army under General Władysław Sikorski counter-attacked on 14 August from the area of the Modlin fortress, crossing the Wkra River. It faced the combined forces of the numerically and materially superior Soviet 3rd and 15th Armies. In one day the Soviet advance toward Warsaw and Modlin had been halted and soon turned into retreat. Sikorski's 5th Army pushed the exhausted Soviet formations away from Warsaw in a lightning operation. Polish forces advanced at a speed of thirty kilometers a day, soon destroying any Soviet hopes for completing their enveloping manoeuvre in the north. By 16 August, the Polish counter-offensive had been fully joined by Marshal Piłsudski's "Reserve Army." Precisely executing his plan, the Polish force, advancing from Warsaw (Colonel Wrzaliński's group) and the south (Polish 3rd and 4 Army), found a huge gap between the Soviet fronts and exploited the weakness of the Soviet "Mozyr Group" that was supposed to protect the weak link between the Soviet fronts. The Poles continued their northward offensive with two armies following and destroying the surprised enemy. They reached the rear of Tukhachevsky's forces, the majority of which were encircled by 18 August. Only that same day did Tukhachevsky, at his Minsk headquarters 480 kilometres (300 mi) east of Warsaw, become fully aware of the proportions of the Soviet defeat and ordered the remnants of his forces to retreat and regroup. He hoped to straighten his front line, halt the Polish attack, and regain the initiative, but the orders either arrived too late or failed to arrive at all.
1914The Battle of Liège was the first battle of the war, and could be considered a moral victory for the allies, as the heavily outnumbered Belgians held out against the German Army for 12 days. From 5–16 August 1914, the Belgians successfully resisted the numerically superior Germans, and inflicted surprisingly heavy losses on their aggressors. The German Second Army, comprising 320,000 men, crossed into neutral Belgium in keeping to the Schlieffen Plan, with the ultimate goal of attacking France from the north. Liège was key strategically as it held a position at the head of a pass through the Ardennes, which made it the best possible route into the heart of Belgium itself.
At the beginning of the Hundred Years' War Edward III and Philip VI of France both assembled armies in France, but they did not engage in any decisive battle. On 23 October 1339, both armies were formed in sight of each other in the fields between La Flamengerie and Buironfosse, when a hare, caught in the field between them, started running towards the French lines. The French troops greeted the approaching hare with a lot of noise. Some troops at the rear of the French formation mistook the noise as a sign of an imminent English attack and prepared for battle. As a preparation for the battle the William II, Count of Hainaut quickly knighted 14 distinguished squires as was the common chivalric custom. However the English attack never came and, after the reason for that became clear, those knights became known as the "Knights of the Hare".
The next morning, Lewenhaupt, who during this time stayed with his rearguard, would once again find himself confronted as the Russians stepped up their efforts to harass the back of the convoy as it made its crossing over at Dolgij Moch, towards Lesnaya. Here the Russians under Mikhail Golitsyn and Alexander Menshikov attacked him on two fronts over the river of Resta. The engagement concluded in a standoff after four hours of musket and artillery exchange in which the Swedes successfully denied every attempt made by the Russians to cross the river for the convoy. Later the same day, Lewenhaupt reached the village of Lesnaya with most of his army and was within a day's march from Propoisk. By now he knew that Peter I was in the area with a fairly large amount of Russian troops. But he did not know exactly how large the Russian army was or if more units were on their way. Once he reached Propoisk he could cross the Sozh river and achieve relative safety in case he was the target of the whole Russian force.
Tsar Peter with his Russian infantry and dragoons had now pushed away the last retreating Swedes and had full control over the "southern forest edge". The Russians now strove to reach the "Lesnaya field" between the forest and the village of Lesnaya, to block the bridge over which the Swedes might obtain further reinforcements. (A company of 1,000 cavalry had already managed to get back to assist in the fight at Lesnaya.) A Swedish counter-offensive to push the Russians out of the forest was now ordered by Lewenhaupt, who had been very disappointed by Stackelberg's decision to retreat. The Swedes counter–attacked with the support of 16 artillery pieces from Lesnaya. However the Russian troops, backed by their own 30 cannons, were too strong and the Swedes had to fall back.
On October 9, the Russians gathered all their available forces to attack the Swedes in the rear as they were crossing the stream of Lesnjanka at the village of Lesnaya, to march south against Propoisk in order to reach safety by crossing the river of Sozh. Thousands of wagons made for slow progress and bottlenecks and the scattered Swedish army was by then very vulnerable to Russian attacks. Furthermore, Bauer put a small detachment of 1,000 dragoons along with a portion of irregular troops at Propoisk to further stall the Swedish advance. The Swedish vanguard of 800 men soon stumbled upon this unit which did not hesitate to open fire. The sudden engagement put a halt to the Swedish convoy with its vanguard put in slight confusion as there was uncertainty regarding the size or position of the Russians at Propoisk. Decision was made to await orders from Lewenhaupt before committing to any course of action. In the meantime, Peter I took the advantage and pressed home the assault, marching with the majority of his troops towards Lesnaya and the rest of the Swedish convoy deployed there (at least one third of the convoy still remained at Lesnaya). Unaware of these developments, the Swedes were put in–between two forces, with an enemy no longer contented with harassment, but a decisive battle.
Peter I, who overestimated the Swedish force being 16,000 men strong, had gathered numbers far superior to those of Lewenhaupt and was eager to catch his convoy while it was still out of reach of Charles' main army and safety. He planned to destroy the convoy before its crossing of the river Sozh where it would otherwise reach—as Peter thought—the protection of the main army (the Russians had misleading reports saying Charles was 25 kilometers away from Sozh and not 120 as they had previously presumed). On October 7, the Russians in the area were large enough that they posed a considerable threat to the convoy and so the two sides confronted each other for some time at the village of Belitsa. Subsequently however, Lewenhaupt ordered a cavalry attack consisting of 4,000 men on the equally numbered Russian dragoons who were facing them, the Russian horse did not desire a fight and instead started retreating, persecuted by their enemies for a good four–kilometers step. In this encounter losses amounted to more than 40 Russians killed and three to eleven captured, to four wounded Swedes, a real battle did not develop as both sides parted and the confrontation ended with the quick cavalry skirmish. The Swedes however, received intelligence from the captured Russians saying the Tsar was following Lewenhaupt with a force of about 20,000 cavalry, 12,000 infantry and four guns. Later during the day, the vanguard of the convoy reached the small village of Lesnaya and there made preparations to set camp for the rest of the army, accordingly.