Saturday 12 April 2008

The maps for Goldberg


The next battle will be the battle of Goldberg (August 22, 1813). This combat was the prelude to the battle of Katzbach (fought August, 24) and involved to the V and XI French Corps under Lauriston and Macdonald respectively, and the left wing and center of the Bluecher Army of Silesia, under Langeron and Yorck respectively. Bluecher was still under the false impression that Napoleon himself was at his front (in fact he was hurrying back towards Dresden) so, in accordance with the Plan of Trachtenberg, he retired to east.
The battle will be fought using true Napoleon's Battles (not my 'divisional' or 'one-half' versions). The map will be extracted from the same source that the Kalisz map, i.e. the magnificient
3rd Military Mapping Survey of Austria-Hungary (1:200,000). The Goldberg zone lies in the junction of sheets 33.51 and 34.51 aronud the 51º 10' latitude.
This information was completed with the derived from Google Maps. However, the Goldberg area lies today in Poland but until 1945 it was in Germany territory, so the names of the places in the contemporary narratives and maps are in German language, but these same places appear now in Polish in Google Maps or Google Earth.
A Google search produced the Polish translation of Goldberg, Zlotoryja, but the rest of the places were more harder to find.
A request to
Napoleon Series Forum produced the correct answer by Oliver Schmidt: Topografia, a Polish web site containing the German-Polish equivalence of many geographical places from which I can to trace the contemporary names of the old german map.

So watch this space for the new battle.

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