Battle of Ulm

The battle of Ulm in October 1805 broke the Austrian opening move of the War of the Third Coalition without a pitched battle. Mack von Leiberich invaded Bavaria with seventy-two thousand men expecting Russian support that had not yet arrived, while the Grande Armée marched east from Boulogne in a great wheel around the Black Forest. Napoleon's corps converged on the Danube behind Mack's rear, crossed the river, and by 16th October had the Austrian army encircled inside Ulm. After failed breakouts Mack capitulated on 20th October with some twenty-five thousand men, eighteen generals and sixty-five guns; about ten thousand had been killed or wounded and twenty thousand slipped away. French losses in the encirclement were under two thousand. Vienna lay open, and the method — rapid marches, envelopment, the isolation of an enemy before he could concentrate — became the model of Napoleonic strategy. The capitulation came on the very day Nelson swept the combined fleets at Trafalgar, though news of the two events travelled by different roads.