The Battle of the Katzbach was fought between the First French Empire and a Russo-Prussian army in Silesia on 26 August 1813 during the War of the Sixth Coalition.
As the seven-week armistice between France and the Sixth Coalition neared its 17 August expiry, Gebhard von Blucher ordered his Army of Silesia to advance on 13 August, breaching the truce and clashing with the French in a series of running fights. The unity of the Prussian armies ultimately fell apart due to a lack of coordination between Blucher and August von Gneisenau, and French resistance grew in intensity. Blucher ultimately came face-to-face with Napoleon's army at the Bober river on 20 August, but he retreated after Napoleon himself arrived on the battlefield. Napoleon pursued Blucher and inflicted 8,000 losses on him from 21 to 23 August, while the French suffered similar casualties. Landwehr militiamen deserted en masse in entire battalions, and Blucher contemplated firing Gneisenau for his lack of coordination. On 23 August, Napoleon led his main army to face Karl Philip Schwarzenberg's Austrian army in Bohemia while sending Etienne Jacques MacDonald with 100,000 troops to drive Blucher east of the Katzbach before protecting the flank of the French armies in Saxony and near Berlin.
On 25 August, Blucher and MacDonald sought each other out and engaged near Liegnitz (Legnica, Poland). MacDonald's army crossed the swollen Katzbach river and attacked the Prussians, but the French columns found themselves too far apart to support one another. As the Prussians' muskets were too wet for fighting, the battle was decided with bayonets. Prussian cavalry routed the French II Cavalry Corps, 8th Division, and 2nd Brigade with a heavy counterattack, and hundreds of retreating French soldiers drowned in the Katzbach and the Neisse. The French defeats at Katzbach, the Battle of Kulm, and the Battle of Dennewitz dissuaded Austria from abandoning the coalition.