The East Coast Theatre of Operations, 1810-1813
The British Military General Service Medal had 21 Peninsular War battle or campaign clasps when it was issued in 1847.1 None were for service on the east coast of Spain. It is curious that British service in this theatre of operations was overlooked, or not considered suitably meritorious for recognition by the British establishment. It is also interesting that British and German (King’s German Legion) eyewitness accounts and primary sources, so abundant from participants in Wellington’s main army in Portugal, central Spain and southern France, are very rare from the pens of veterans of the east coast. It is, perhaps, a combination of these two points which have led so many British histories of the war (too many to mention individually) to give cursory consideration to events on the Levante and at worst to ignore them altogether. It is most fortunate, therefore, that the British commander was not so myopic. The operational theatre’s proximity to the coast, the naval supremacy enjoyed by the Royal Navy and the inevitable link between these two factors make it a truly joint campaign. Ignoring the east coast was not an option for any of the protagonists. To the Spanish, the east coast was a matter of national survival. The ports of Tarragona, Valencia, Alicante and Cartagena sustained the nation, fed the people and kept the military machine. To the French, failure to gain early control of the east coast was cited by Napoleon as one of the principal reasons for the defeat of the Grande Armée and the loss of the war. To the British, the east coast was a necessary and cost-effective distraction but, by 1812, it had become an integral component to Wellington’s plans and, in the end, it held the key to the successful invasion of France.
Wellington was neither daunted nor constrained by the geography of the Iberian Peninsula. Lieutenant General Sir John Moore’s opinion, which was considered gospel in 1808 and reflected across his army, was that Portugal was undefendable against a large army in possession of Spain. Wellington, however, looked beyond the 1,200-kilometre land border. He was aware that there were only five entry/exit points; two in the north and three in the east. He therefore concentrated his defence on those facing east; primarily at the two most important routes protected by the large border fortresses at Almeida-Ciudad Rodrigo and Elvas-Badajoz. However, as he only had a relatively small army, he accepted Moore’s point that effective defence directly upon the Portuguese border was improbable. He therefore built the Lines of Torres Vedras, defending Lisbon (and his positions of embarkation) while creating a wilderness to their front. Equally visionary, when the French attention turned to the east coast and the capture and closure of the Mediterranean ports, was his understanding that he had to actively incorporate that part of the Iberian theatre in his theatre-wide campaign planning. The landing of a British led expeditionary corps to coincide with his 1812 campaign was one of many diversionary operations executed across Spain. In 1813 he planned a two-pronged attack on the French; the main effort under his command across central Spain and a second axis, north along the east coast, under the command of Lieutenant General Sir John Murray. If Wellington’s campaign unfolded inexorably that of Murray stuttered and misfired.
So much for the land, what of the sea? The Iberian Peninsula has a coastline in excess of 3,300 kilometres which presented both opportunity and risk. Yet the battle which did more than any other to shape the outcome of the Peninsular War was, in fact, fought nearly three years prior to the start of the war itself. The naval engagement off the Cape of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 instigated the knockout blow to the French and Spanish fleets, which had been systematically hounded in the preceding two years by the Royal Navy. Britain’s navy emerged triumphant and Britannia truly ruled the waves. Wellington was more than aware of the importance of naval support to the land campaign and he masterfully exploited that advantage. Following Trafalgar, those French and Spanish ships which had managed to survive the battle had escaped to Cádiz, Spain’s primary naval base. The task of blockading the port fell to the Mediterranean Fleet and was tying-up at least 10 ships of the line.2 Once Spain became an ally at the start of the Peninsular War, the commander of the Mediterranean Fleet judged that his task at Cádiz was complete and he was able to turn his attention back to the Mediterranean and the French fleet at Toulon. Alliance with Spain also provided an anchorage and watering stop at Port Mahon, cutting the distance and time to blockade Toulon by two-thirds.3
British strategy towards the Mediterranean had vacillated at the start of the 19th Century and the commencement of the Iberian war allowed the Portland ministry to redefine that strategy and consolidate in the central Mediterranean. The island of Sicily had remained the lynchpin to that strategy; it provided a centrally situated naval base and an entrepôt for British trade.4 However, maintaining a presence there came at a cost: a not inconsiderable subsidy and the deployment of 10,000 British troops. Many in the Tory government, and some in the Whig opposition, felt that this army could be better used for operations in Italy and indeed that the army, which had just landed in Portugal, should be transferred to the region to realize and exploit that possibility. Within two years Perceval’s government had reversed that strategy and Lieutenant General John Stuart, the British military commander in Sicily, was ordered to send some of his men to Portugal. However, when plans of a French invasion of Sicily emerged in September 1810 this brought a swift end to that proposal and instigated a general review of the British government’s policy in the region. Lord William Bentinck was despatched as the instrument of delivering this new policy of conciliation to both the Sicilian monarchy and its government while encouraging wider Italian revolt against the French. The initial strategy stumbled to a form of conclusion, which exposed deep divisions within Sicilian society, while the aspiration of an Italian nation-wide revolt, petered out. The British government then restated the suggestion that troops in the region should be sent to the east coast of Spain. Thus Spain and Sicily were, at this juncture, interlinked and dependent on Britain for their survival; yet, in both cases, the body politic were unable to come to terms with this actuality.5
Bentinck wanted the expedition to eastern Spain to be no more than a temporary diversion but both the British government and Wellington saw things differently. The Anglo-Sicilian force, once landed in August 1812, remained in Spain until the end of the war and played an increasingly important role. There can be no doubt that, militarily, it was a disappointment but, rather like the numerous Spanish armies and Portuguese formations that existed throughout the war, its sheer existence caused the French considerable problems. The arrival of the Anglo-Sicilian force halted Suchet’s advance and prevented the capture of the port of Alicante and possibly also that of Cartagena. The Royal Navy’s command of the sea and their capability and capacity were vital to this force. The navy not only transported the force to the east coast of Spain in mid-1812, but they also carried the siege train from Lisbon at much the same time, transferred reinforcements from Sicily later that year and Spanish troops from Galicia and Andalusia in May 1813. Ultimately, however, it was the continued support from the Mediterranean Fleet, in the form of ships and a considerable number of on-station naval transports, which was to be the thorn in the side of Marshal Louis-Gabriel Suchet’s army. Coastal mobility provided the allies unhindered opportunities for counterstroke operations to the rear of Suchet’s front line.
If the war on the east coast was truly joint, it was undoubtedly one of the best examples of combined, or coalition, warfare of the entire war. Suchet’s French army comprised French, Italians, Piedmontese, Neapolitans and Poles while that of the allies included British, Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, Italians, Sicilians and Calabrese. The French coalitions were well established, enjoying what we would call today a lead nation status, while those of the allies were more ad hoc in nature. Although the battles were not great allied successes the fact that they took place at all owes great credit to many of the commanders at the tactical level. Credit too must be given to the Spanish guerrillas, or at least their more organized elements. Much has been written about Javier Mina, Francisco Espoz y Mina, Antonio Jauregui, José Joaquín Durán and Francisco Longa in Navarre and Julián Sánchez in Leon but the contribution of Augstín Nebot in the Valencia region appears equally significant: ‘he had established a liberated area centred on the isolated mountain town of Vistabella de Maestrazgo complete with tax collectors, arms depots, magazines, hospitals, clothing workshops and town councils.’6
By design the French operations on the east coast were carried out largely in isolation from the rest of the French army in the peninsula and, furthermore, they were not subject to Joseph Bonaparte’s command and control from Madrid. It could also be argued that the prevailing regional autonomy in Spain led the Spanish to conduct military operations on the east coast in a similarly independent nature. In 1812 with the arrival of the Anglo-Sicilian force this isolated approach was reversed and from then on, until the end of the war, the allied effort was conducted in unison with both Wellington’s Anglo-Portuguese army and the (four) Spanish armies. Of course this was largely due to factors of time and space. The timing of the movement of Wellington’s main army and British involvement on the east coast was carefully choreographed to coincide with the second factor, that of space or geography; in other words, the movement east of Wellington’s main army to the point where the activities and strategy of the two forces in the centre and east of Spain were correlated. It is a point which is often overlooked in histories of the war.
The War... was fought over many fronts in Europe and the wider world. The main focus of interest, in the English speaking world at least, has been the campaigns of the Duke of ... These campaigns ... have been widely written about. With four great battlefield victories under a British commander featuring British troops, and with lots of material available in English it is not surprising that this should be the case. Yet this focus on this front detracts from the often interesting and important events of this war on other fronts. ... The lack of ... success in this theatre, compared to ... efforts is an obvious reason why this is so. The lack of information about this interesting theatre of war is another factor.7
This account does not, in fact, relate to the Napoleonic Wars, the Peninsular War and the east coast of Spain or the Duke of Wellington. It refers to The Wars of Spanish Succession 1701–1714, the First Peninsular War 1702–1712 and the Duke of Marlborough. ‘History does not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme’ wrote Mark Twain and it is with no little irony that many of the battles fought by Marlborough’s ‘other army’ were on the east coast of Spain. Yet they too involved British troops and their contribution, while it was less glorious, was no less important to the outcome of that war and in shaping Britain’s position in Europe.
The East Coast Theatre of Operations, 1810-1813