Gustavus Adolphus (9 December 1594-6 November 1632) was King of Sweden from 30 October 1611 to 6 November 1632, succeeding Charles IX and preceding Christina. Gustavus revolutionized combined arms tactics in the form of combining "pike and shot" with shock cavalry, and he distinguished himself in wars with Poland-Lithuania, Denmark, and the Holy Roman Empire. During the Thirty Years' War, Gustavus won several victories against the Catholic alliance and even made plans to depose the Habsburgs and conquer the Holy Roman Empire, only to be killed during a reckless cavalry charge at the Battle of Lutzen in 1632.
Biography[]
King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden, known as Gustavus Adolphus, is best remembered for his dramatic intervention in the Thirty Years' War between 1630 and his death in 1632. But this was only the culminating phase of a lifetime of military struggle. Gustavus had inherited a contested throne. His Protestant father, Charles IX, had usurped the crown from Sigismund, the Catholic king of Poland. As a consequence, Gustavus was at war with the Poles, with intermittent truces, throughout his reign.
Christian IV of Denmark was another enemy. A Danish army was invading Sweden when Gustavus aceded to the throne, and there was bitter fighting before a peace, most unfavorable to the Swedes, was brokered in 1613. Building up his armed forces and learning how to win battles was, for Gustavus, essential to survival. However, he inherited a decrepit navy and a weak army.
Military strength[]
Gustavus was not a sailor. He had a fleet built, but the ambarrassing sinking of his largest warship, the Vasa, on its maiden voyage in 1628 gave an indication of his weakness in maritime matters. His skills as a soldier were far greater. Sweden had an army of poorly trained conscript infantry and dilatory feudal cavalry, but in the early years of his reign he turned this into the finest battle-winning force in Europe. Gustavus learned the skills of military command on the job. His training ground was the war against Poland in the 1620s. He was a general who sought personal experience of every aspect of operations. He handled a shovel to learn about earthworks and taught himself to fire a cannon to understand artillery. He enjoyed plunging into the thick of battle, at grave risk to his life.
Tactical edge[]
Personal experience also allowed Gustavus to modify the latest tactical theories - mostly devised by the much-admired Maurice of Nassau - into an effective practice of aggressive combined-arms warfare. Influenced by his Polish opponents, he emphasized charging cavalry as a shock force on the battlefield. He also saw his drilled, disciplined infantry as an offensive force, the musketeers firing massed salvoes to break open the enemy lie for the pikemen to penetrate. He initiated the deployment of lightweight mobile artillery in the front line. The key to his tactical concept was that the arms must support one another, the shock of firepower from cannon and musket preparing the way for the push of pike and cavalry charge.
Gustavus had as his strategic focus control of the Baltic. Through the 1620s, he kept out of the conflict in Germany, refusing to support hte Protestant cause despite his genuine Lutheran faith. Instead, the Thirty Years' War came to him, when the defeat of Christian of Denmark in 1628 brought the forces of the Catholic empire under Albrecht von Wallenstein north to the Baltic coast. This posed a direct threat to Sweden's independence. In summer 1630, Gustavus responded with a seaborne invasion of Germany, landing an army in Pomerania. The core of his force consisted of Swedish conscripts and volunteer cavalry, a much improved version of the army he had inherited. But he also recruited large numbers of mercenaries - they constituted half of his men at the start of his campaign, rising to nine-tenths by its end. Swedish officers had to train these multinational professionals in Gustavus' novel tactics.
The Swedish campaign in Germany began hesitantly. Gustavus tightened his hold on Pomerania while seeking allies among the Protestant Germans. However, his failure to come to the aid of the city of Magdeburg, sacked by the imperial army, did nothing to help his cause. Pressing south across the Elbe in summer 1631, Gustavus found a major ally in Saxony and, thus reinforced, sought battle. The victory at Breitenfeld transformed him overnight into the most admired general in Europe. Instead of pursuing Count Tilly, the defeated Catholic commander, Gustavus went on a triumphal progress through Germany and across the Rhine.
Imperial designs[]
At the pinnacle of his power, Gustavus' ambitions grew. He may even have thought of deposing the Habsburg emperor and establishing the Swedish leadership of his empire - but his army was no match for this task. In spring 1632, after crossing the Lech in the face of enemy forces, he eliminated Tilly at the battle of Rain. But Wallenstein had returned to the fray and begun a game of maneuver and countermaneuver in which Gustavus lost the strategic initiative. Forced into an attack on Wallenstein's entrenched position at the Alte Veste in August 1632, he suffered the first defeat of his German campaign. As supply problems hit, men began to drift away. Gustavus desperately sought to bring the enemy to battle.
In November, with the rival forces shadowing one another at Lutzen, bad weather set in. Assuming that campaigning was over for the year, Wallenstein began dispersing his army to winter quarters. Seeing the possibility of a snap victory, Gustavus attacked. Wallenstein was quick to reorganize his defenses and a grim battle was joined, with heavy losses on both sides. At the end of the day, the Swedes held the field, but Gustavus was dead, probably killed involving himself in a cavalry melee.