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The Second Battle of Kehl occurred on 18 September 1796, when General Franz Petrasch's Austrian and Imperial troops stormed the French-held bridgehead over the Rhine river. The village of Kehl, which is now in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, was then part of Baden-Durlach. Across the river, Strasbourg, an Alsatian city, was a French Revolutionary stronghold. This battle was part of the Rhine Campaign of 1796, in the French Revolutionary War of the First Coalition. In the 1790s, the Rhine was wild, unpredictable, and difficult to cross. Its channels and tributaries created islands of trees and vegetation that were alternately submerged by floods or exposed during the dry seasons. A complex of bridges, gates, fortifications and barrage dams linked Kehl with Strasbourg. These had been constructed by the fortress architect Sébastien le Préstre de Vauban in the seventeenth century. The crossings had been contested before: in 1678 during the French-Dutch war, in 1703 during the War of the Spanish Succession, in 1733 during the War of the Polish Succession, and earlier in Battle of Kehl, when the French crossed into the German states on 23–24 June. Critical to French success would be the army's ability to cross the Rhine at will. The crossings at Hüningen, near the Swiss city of Basel, and at Kehl, offered access to most of southwestern Germany; from there, French armies could sweep north, south, or east, depending on their military goal. In late summer of 1796, the Austrian force reacquired most of the territory lost to the French earlier in the summer. On 18 September 1796, the Austrians temporarily acquired control of the ''tête-du-ponts'' (bridgeheads) joining Kehl and Strasbourg until a strong French counter-attack forced them to retreat, leaving the French in control of the bridges but the Austrians in control of the territory surrounding them. The situation remained in ''status quo'' until late October. Control of the surrounding territory there prevented the French from crossing to safety in Strasbourg, and required the French commander, Jean Victor Marie Moreau, to withdraw toward Basel. Immediately after the Battle of Schliengen (24 October 1796), while most of Moreau's army retreated south to cross the Rhine at Hüningen, Count Baillet Latour moved his Austrian force to Kehl to begin a 100-day siege. ==Background: general campaign of 1796== (詳細はFrench Revolutionary Wars in which republican France pitted itself against a fluid coalition of Prussians and Austrians and several other states of the Holy Roman Empire, the British, Sardinians, Dutch, and royalist French emigres. Although initially the republican French experienced several victories, the campaigns of 1793 through 1795 had been less successful. However, the Coalition partners had difficulty coordinating their war aims, and their own efforts also faltered. In 1794 and 1795, French victories in northern Italy salvaged French enthusiasm for the war, and forced the Coalition to withdraw further into Central Europe. At the end of the Rhine Campaign of 1795, the Habsburg Austrian Coalition and the French Republican called a truce between their forces that had been fighting in Germany.〔Theodore Ayrault Dodge, ''Warfare in the Age of Napoleon: The Revolutionary Wars Against the First Coalition in Northern Europe and the Italian Campaign, 1789–1797.'' Leonaur Ltd, 2011. pp. 286–287. See also Timothy Blanning, ''The French Revolutionary Wars,'' New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-340-56911-5, pp. 41–59.〕 This agreement lasted until 20 May 1796, when the Austrians announced that the truce would end on 31 May.〔Ramsay Weston Phipps,''The Armies of the First French Republic: Volume II The Armées du Moselle, du Rhin, de Sambre-et-Meuse, de Rhin-et-Moselle'' Pickle Partners Publishing, 2011 reprint (original publication 1923–1933), p. 278.〕 The Austrian Coalition's Army of the Lower Rhine included 90,000 troops. The 20,000-man right wing, first under Duke Ferdinand Frederick Augustus of Württemberg, then Wilhelm von Wartensleben, stood on the east bank of the Rhine behind the Sieg River, observing the French bridgehead at Düsseldorf. The garrisons of Mainz Fortress and Ehrenbreitstein Fortress included 10,000 more. The remainder of the Imperial and Coalition army, the 80,000-strong Army of the Upper Rhine, secured the west bank behind the Nahe River. Commanded by Dagobert Sigmund von Wurmser, this force anchored its right wing in Kaiserslautern on the west bank while the left wing under Anton Sztáray, Michael von Fröhlich and Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé guarded the Rhine from Mannheim to Switzerland. The original Austrian strategy was to capture Trier and to use their position on the west bank to strike at each of the French armies in turn. After news arrived in Vienna of Napoleon Bonaparte's successes, however, Wurmser was sent to Italy with 25,000 reinforcements, and the Aulic Council gave Archduke Charles command over both Austrian armies and ordered him to hold his ground.〔 On the French side, the 80,000-man Army of Sambre-et-Meuse held the west bank of the Rhine down to the Nahe and then southwest to Sankt Wendel. On the army's left flank, Jean Baptiste Kléber had 22,000 troops in an entrenched camp at Düsseldorf. The right wing of the Army of the Rhine and Moselle was positioned behind the Rhine from Hüningen northward, centered along the Queich River near Landau, and its left wing extended west toward Saarbrücken.〔 Pierre Marie Barthélemy Ferino led Moreau's right wing at Hüningen, Louis Desaix commanded the center and Laurent Gouvion Saint-Cyr directed the left wing. Ferino's wing consisted of three infantry and cavalry divisions under François Antoine Louis Bourcier and Henri François Delaborde. Desaix's command included three divisions led by Michel de Beaupuy, Antoine Guillaume Delmas and Charles Antoine Xaintrailles. Saint-Cyr's wing had two divisions commanded by Guillaume Philibert Duhesme and Alexandre Camille Taponier.〔Digby Smith, ''Napoleonic Wars Data Book'', Connecticut: Greenhill Press, 1996, p. 111.〕 The French plan called for a springtime (April-May-June) offensive during which the two armies would press against the flanks of the northern Coalition armies in the German states while a third army approached Vienna through Italy. Specifically, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan's army would push south from Düsseldorf, hopefully drawing troops and attention toward themselves, while Moreau's army massed on the east side of the Rhine by Mannheim. According to plan, Jourdan's army feinted toward Mannheim, and Charles repositioned his troops. Once this occurred, Moreau's army endured a forced march south and attacked the bridgehead at Kehl, which was guarded by 7,000 imperial troops—troops recruited that spring from the Swabian Circle polities, inexperienced and untrained—which held the bridgehead for several hours, but then retreated toward Rastatt. Moreau reinforced the bridgehead with his forward guard, and his troops poured into Baden unhindered. In the south, by Basel, Ferino's column moved quickly across the river and advanced up the Rhine along the Swiss and German shoreline toward Lake Constance, spreading into the southern end of the Black Forest. Worried that his supply lines would be overextended or his army would be flanked, Charles began a retreat to the east.〔Dodge, p.290. See also Charles, Archduke of Austria. ''Ausgewӓhlte Schriften weiland seiner Kaiserlichen Hoheit des Erzherzogs Carl von Österreich'', Vienna: Braumüller, 1893–94, v. 2, pp. 72, 153–154.〕 At this point, in July, the jealousies and competition between the French generals came into play. Moreau could have joined up with Jourdan's army in the north, but did not; he proceeded eastward, pushing Charles into Bavaria, while Jourdan pushed eastward, pushing Wartensleben's autonomous corps into the Ernestine duchies.〔Dodge, pp. 292–293.〕 On either side, the union of two armies—Wartensleben's with Charles' or Jourdan's with Moreau's—could have crushed their opposition.〔Dodge, pp. 297.〕 In August, Wartensleben's autonomous corps〔An autonomous corps, in the Austrian or Imperial armies, was an armed force under command of an experienced field commander. They usually included two divisions, but probably not more than three, and functioned with high maneuverability and independent action, hence the name "autonomous corps." Some, called the ''Frei-Corps'', or independent corps, were used as light infantry before the official formation of light infantry in the Habsburg Army in 1798. They provided the Army's skirmishing and scouting function; Frei-Corps were usually raised from the provinces. See Philip Haythornthwaite, ''Austrian Army of the Napoleonic Wars (1): Infantry.'' Osprey Publishing, 2012, p. 24. Military historians usually maintain that Napoleon solidified the use of the autonomous corps, armies that could function without a great deal of direction, scatter about the countryside, but reform again quickly for battle; this was actually a development that first emerged first in the French and Indian War in the Thirteen British Colonies and later in the American Revolutionary War, and became widely used in the European military as the size of armies grew in the 1790s and during the Napoleonic Wars. See David Gates, ''The Napoleonic Wars 1803–1815,'' New York, Random House, 2011, Chapter 6.〕 united with Charles' imperial troops and turned the tide against the French. The defeat of Jourdan's army at the battles of Amberg (24 August), Würzburg (3 September) and 2nd Altenkirchen (16–19 September) allowed Charles to move more troops to the south, and effectively removed Jourdan from the remainder of the campaign.〔J. Rickard,(''Battle of Emmendingen'' ), History of war.org. 17 February 2009, Accessed 18 November 2014.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Second Battle of Kehl (1796)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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