Battle of Mollwitz 1741 – Post of Honour Review

The Post of Honour rules are by Keith Flint who is also the author of the  Honours of War rules published by Osprey.  Both sets of rules are for the Seven Years War – 1756-63.    The rules are supported by an excellent honoursofwar.com  http://honoursofwar.com/  forum which contains modifications for fighting the War of Spanish Succession (WSS), War of Austrian Succession (WAS) and others around that period sometimes called the lace wars.

 As I game this period in 6mm, I use the standard polemos basing of one 60mm x 30mm base per foot battalion/ cavalry regiment rather than several smaller bases. 

 For my first use of POH  I chose the WAS  battle of Mollwitz in the WAS.  Far better men than I have provided detailed analysis of the battle, so I’ll just point you towards,  Obscure Battles http://honoursofwar.com/, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mollwitz  and British Battles https://www.britishbattles.com/frederick-the-great-wars/the-battle-of-mollwitz/ (not that any British troops were present).

I fought the battle solo, due to lockdown and found the rules easy to read and remember.  Having previously used the HoW rules  was an advantage as the command and control and / manoeuvre rules are similar. 

The turn sequence  starts with alternative movement phases but then has simultaneous firing and melee phases.  On the whole, this worked fine.  I’d suggest that firing is calculated in groups of units for both sides rather than all of one side and then all of the other, by which I mean Austrian battalion "A" shooting at Prussian Battalion "B" and then the reverse, rather than all of the Austrians then all of the Prussians.    This helps when you are trying to remember whether a battalion was weakened before this round of firing or during it.

Units can take a number of hits before they are weakened and take penalties in their firing and melee.  After further hits units are destroyed.  The rallying rules are very important.  Having reserves who can march forward past the 1^st line to “shelter” them and allow them to rally, is key to success.

In retrospect Mollwitz may not have been the idea battle to test the rules as I halved all movement distances in order to simulate the 2’ deep snow on the ground that April. (Mollwitz is in modern day Poland and it was a cold year.)  The half speed movement increased the effectiveness of firing as troops could only approach to charge range slowly.  This was awkward for cavalry who were unable to change from outside of musket range and had to take twice as much fire when charging infantry.

 Overall, I felt the battle has a period feel to it and the result was a near perfect  recreation of the actual battle.

The Battle

The left flank of the battle field has two small river and three small villages.  In the actual battle everything was under 2’ of snow.

The empty battlefield

Some of the buildings

The Prussian forces were squashed on the plain with small cavalry forces on each flank.  Two gun batteries were situated before the battle lines.  One feature I like about the PoH rules is the pre-battle bombardment phase.

Prussian Deployment

The battle started with the Austrian right wing  moving on the flank of the Prussian line.  In retrospect with the slower movement they would have been better off just going straight ahead at the Prussians as they had both a numerical and quality advantage.

Flanking Austrians

The Austrian left and Prussian right wings clashed in a mass cavalry brawl.  The Prussian Carabiniers were lead by the king himself. (As per the actual battle.)  True to the real battle the Austrian cavalry whipped the Prussians and Frederick had to retire to the infantry.

In the actual battle the two Prussian grenadier battalions formed square.  The PoH rules seemed to lack this ability.  

A four way cavalry fight. (Quite easy to calculate)

The two battle lines slowly closed on one another while the Prussian grenadiers on the right flank  held off the Austrian cavalry.

 The Austrians were at a disadvantage firing using the old volley fire system and wooden ramrods and the Prussian infantry blow chunks out of the Austrian battle line.    The Austrian 2^nd line had been drawn off to protect their right flank which prevented the Austrians rallying as easily as the Prussians.  

The Infantry advantage lay with the Prussians in both quality and quantity. 

The Austrian battle line broke, just as they did in 1741 and the battle was lost.  The Austrian cavalry had won both wings but were unable to swing the battle in the favour of Austria.

I fond the Post of Honour rules gave a reasonably quick battle; a nice period feel and gave a historically accurate result.  (To be fair I’d have been very worried if the Prussians had lost.  They had over 50% superiority in infantry who were better equipped and trained than the Austrians.