Cannons LOST in Napoeonic battles ?????

[Gunner24]

Hello all, does anyone have good information about how many cannons were lost in Nap battles, it is easy to find estimates for numbers of men lost, but there is hardly ever any mention of how many cannons were lost - any help would be appreciated.

[GunnerJim]

The only place I have ever found numbers like that was in the Official Records on France, Germany (Prussia) and England.  I haven't been able to get my hands on any such records for Austria although a friend of mine says he has seen such records for Austria.  F.L. Petre talks about guns captured after Wagram but nothing about guns destroyed in battle.  I think the reason is that getting cannon during this era wasn't that big of a deal.  Many guns were available, look at how quickly Napoleon reconstituted his artillery after Russia and after Leipzig.  The quality of the guns and gunners obviously decreased and there proved a more restrictive use of guns with regiments, but guns were still available.  I have found battle losses of actual guns were more like 10%.  But losses of gunners was higher as the years progressed.  That seems more critical to me than actual guns lost. 

[Gunner24]

Thanks for the comment, that makes a lot of sense. 

I had always thought of cannons as being highly valuable and "rare"....but as you say, they were 1,000s of them so maybe not like I used to think.

I have only today worked out the artillery crew numbers from the HW OOB result, taking the start number of INF and CAV away from the total start strength leaves arty crew numbers.......roughly 20-25 per gun.




 

[DominiqueT]

Don't forget that a gun only lasted some 200 shots at that time.

After that, it became very quickly dangerous  to use ! (risk of explosion)