Talk:Battle of Fehrbellin

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Casualties and losses[edit]

edit: the swedes lost around 4000 men, dead/wounded/prisoners and deserters.. while brandenburg-prussia had ~500 dead/wounded — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.187.110.185 (talk) 09:40, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I strongly doubt that. There are no Swedish sources for anything in the article for starters. The Swedish figures still stand at losses of 500-600 men. There's no record of any significant Prussian pursuit that would cause additional casualties, aside from the generel attrition of any army on the move. (Never mind that the major Swedish objective was successful, that of joining their dispersed forces, which was what the Brandenburgers tried to but failed to prevent). There is other weirdness as well. There has never been a Swedish "Dalwig" cavalry regiment, much less a guards regiment. (It might even be something from a German adolescent novel that has crept in?) It consequently was never near annihilated at Fehrbellin.

The significance of the battle is the massive propaganda benefit it provided. THAT is hugely significant, and historically wonderfully interesting. As things stand in this ariticle however, some kind of misguided objective of trying to make what was essentially a skirmish, where the Swedes even managed to pull off their main objective, is being papered over with invention to make it something it wasn't — either in scope of fighting or losses, as if that was more important than the use the political use the fight was put to. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.236.237.92 (talk) 15:27, 17 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry to say, there has never been a "Dalwig regiment" in the Swedish army. It's apocryphal. You can search the War Archive in Stockholm until the cows come home for one. Your precesses of vetting sources are working against accuracy in this instance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.64.251.6 (talk) 08:23, 15 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

So what about Henrik von Delwig's German infantry regiment, suffered heavy casualties in the German campaign (1,295 men in 1673 and only 120 men remaining after the campaign). Surely the text refeers to this man. Imonoz (talk) 10:38, 15 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

OK, yes, a recruited German regiment then, commanded by Henrik von Delwig (Baltic nobleman) — not GUARDS then. Nobody quite knows it seems. It suffered IN THE CAMPAIGN, which led to Delwig's disgrace. There's no actual information about what, if anything, he did at Fehrbellin. Except it is on record HE was promoted somewhat later than the battle. The connection between Delwig's regiment and Fehrbellin is spurious. Effectively it was a recruited German regiment, deployed in peacetime to the Scanian province, and commanded by von Delwig since 1661. We know its muster strength in early 1673 from records, and the same records then subsequently show that the regiment had melted away to almost nothing by mid-1675. But whether this was due to general mishandling of his regiment by Dalwig, of awful carnage meeted out to it by the Brandenburgers at Fehrbelling, well... Even its presence at the battle seems spurious.

However, had Dalwig been in the thick of it at Fehrbellin, and promoted — presumably as a consequence of his input — then it's very curious that he THEN was disgraced and had to resign because of it. That's very unusual for commanders, even if their regiment suffer for it. Given what we know about the sorry state of the Swedish armies in 1675 — it had found itself forced to join a war of French choice unprepared, due to its alliance obligations — Dalwig's regiment clearly wasn't the only rubbish regiment that suffered in the campaign. BUT, what seems to have happened already in the 19th., patriotic German historians seized on the tribulations of Dalwig's regiment, assuming the link between the collapse of its manpower and Fehrbellin, as "proof" that Fehrbellin wasn't just a technical, propagandistically important Brandenburgian victory — which it was and is what makes it actually interesting — but as part of trying to prove that the Brandenbrugers REALLY put the hurt on the Swedes in a more traditional military sense. But that really is at best circumstantial. For lack of actual proof of it (since that wasn't how the battle went down), they latched on to Delwig's career-ending disgrace over what most likely was simply mismanaging his regiment in the campaign. Nothing really indicates it was the Brandenburgers' doing. That's rather a piece of Brandenburgian/German propaganda.

Fehrbellin is a FANTASTIC story of wartime propaganda on the part of the Brandenburgers, the whole campaign is — mythologiezed up the wazoo, already at the time, but with a follow-up in the 19th c.

I know this battle is more known because of the proparganda that followed it rather than the battle-result itself. I would like to ask, what would you like to do/change with the article in its present state? Imonoz (talk) 16:50, 30 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]