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War sucks. Plenty of guys get roped into it against their will and are often willing to throw up their hands in surrender if it means they’re not gonna die. It doesn’t make them cowards. Because dying also sucks. Anyway, plenty of times in military history large groups have surrendered to much smaller forces. I’m not sure I blame them.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: October 30, 1806--
It was called the War of the Fourth Coalition. Taking place between 1806 and 1807, it was part of the larger Napoleonic Wars that raged across Europe for a dozen years in the early 19th century. The fourth coalition was made up of Britain, Russia, Prussia, Saxony, and Sweden. And they lost. An eagerness to surrender as represented by Prussian General von Romberg played a role in the coalition’s defeat.
So Napoleon was a cock. It wasn’t “short man syndrome.” He wasn’t actually short. He was just another asshole wanting to make his “mark” on the world by throwing countless unwilling bodies at other unwilling bodies in a churning morass of blood and shit and pain and death so he could say “I conquered that shit.” Asshole.
Stettin, now called Szczecin, is a port city on the Baltic Sea in what is now Poland. Von Romberg was in charge of its defense during the war, and he had a lotta dudes and a lotta guns. By the numbers, it was 5,300 soldiers and 281 guns. Not musket guns. Big-ass blow you to French bits cannons. But here is the thing. Napoleon had already kicked some Prussian and Saxon ass a couple of weeks earlier at the battle of Jena-Auerstadt; it was a catastrophic defeat, and the Prussians were demoralized. AKA fuck this war and fuck fighting.
So one of Napoleon’s generals named Antoine Lasalle showed up to attack Stettin with not 281 guns, but two guns, and not 5,300 soldiers, but 800. So what does Lasalle do? He arrives at Stettin and says to General von Romberg listen up motherfucker. We got a shit ton of bloodthirsty dudes here and you better give up or we’re gonna waste the entire city. Continues below …
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And von Romberg believed that he wasn’t facing 800 men, but 30,000. So rather than saying essen scheiße, or whatever, he said yeah okay we give up on October 30, 1806. His subordinate officers made no argument with his decision. They too were all fuck yeah let’s surrender.
When the truth of the situation came to light the surrender was described as “shameful.” Not only did the Prussians vastly outnumber the attacking force, but they were in a heavily fortified position and well supplied. They could have survived a protracted siege. But von Romberg wasn’t in the mood and quit without a fight. As a result, in 1809 he was convicted of the crime of being a wimp, I guess, and sentenced to life in prison. But he was already an old fuck and died at the age of 80 before his sentence began.
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