Battle of Teugen-Hausen

The Battle of Teugen-Hausen or the Battle of Thann was an engagement that occurred during the War of the Fifth Coalition, part of the Napoleonic Wars. The battle was fought on 19 April 1809 between the French III Corps led by Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout and the Austrian III Armeekorps commanded by Prince Friedrich Franz Xaver of Hohenzollern-Hechingen. The French won a hard-fought victory over their opponents when the Austrians withdrew that evening. The site of the battle is a wooded height approximately halfway between the villages of Teugn and Hausen in Lower Bavaria, part of modern-day Germany.

Also on 19 April, clashes occurred at Arnhofen near Abensberg, Dünzling, Regensburg, and Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm. Together with the Battle of Teugen-Hausen, the fighting marked the first day of a four-day campaign which culminated in the French victory at the Battle of Eckmühl.

Austria's invasion of the Kingdom of Bavaria caught Emperor Napoleon I of France's Franco-German army by surprise. Though the advance of Archduke Charles' Austrian army was slow, mistakes by Napoleon's subordinate Marshal Louis-Alexandre Berthier placed Davout's corps in great peril. As Davout withdrew southwest from Regensburg on the south bank of the Danube, Charles tried to intercept the French with three powerful attacking columns.

The first Austrian column missed the French altogether, while Davout's cavalry held off the second column. The third column crashed head-on into one of Davout's infantry divisions in a meeting engagement. Generals of both armies led their troops with courage and skill as the troops fought over two ridges. French reinforcements finally pushed the Austrians off the southern ridge late in the afternoon and Charles ordered a retreat that night. This opened a clear path for Davout to join the main body of the French army on 20 April.

On 8 February 1809, the Austrian Empire determined to make war on Napoleon. Led by Foreign Minister Johann Philipp Stadion, Count von Warthausen, the diplomat Klemens von Metternich, and Empress Maria Ludovika, the war party pointed to the 1808 French disaster at the Battle of Bailén in Spain. However, Archduke Charles, Duke of Teschen, wished to put off the war in order to fully mobilize and find allies.^[6]

Archduke Charles, appointed generalissimo after the debacle of the War of the Third Coalition in 1805, had tried for three years to improve the Austrian army.^[7] Historian David G. Chandler wrote, "Charles was the very best man available to Austria" to lead her army.^[8] He expanded the number of regular soldiers to 340,000 and created a large body of 240,000 Landwehr troops. He upgraded the artillery corps, adopted the corps organization, and revised the infantry drillbook, incorporating more French-style tactical evolutions. Serious deficiencies remained, however, in Austrian staffwork, in the Landwehr organization, and among the non-German nationalities. At the start, only 15,000 of the best Landwehr formations were added to the field army while the rest were relegated to garrison duty or the reserves.^[9] The Habsburgs did not wish to arm the population for fear of an insurrection and therefore the Landwehr was never fully utilized. In Hungary, the nobles and people were cool toward the war and contributed as little as possible.^[10]