Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher

Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher was a Prussian field marshal and one of Napoleon’s most determined opponents. His army’s arrival at Waterloo in 1815 was decisive in the final defeat of Napoleon’s forces.

Blücher had fought France repeatedly during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and became famous for aggressive leadership and determination after defeat. In the Waterloo campaign his army was beaten by Napoleon at Ligny on 16 June 1815 but remained coherent and marched to support Wellington two days later. The arrival of Prussian forces on the French flank was a decisive factor in the Allied victory at Waterloo.

Michael Ridpath’s Operation Berlin makes Blücher the object of historical research in 1930, as Archie Laverick’s work on the Prussian general draws him into a murder investigation in an increasingly unstable Germany. Simon Scarrow’s The Fields of Death brings Blücher into the Napoleonic story at its decisive end: his Prussian army’s arrival at Waterloo turns Wellington’s endurance into coalition victory. Griff Hosker’s Waterloo uses the same final campaign within Robbie Matthews’s military career. Earlier books such as British Light Dragoon and Bloody Badajoz trace the wider wars that made the eventual Anglo-Prussian partnership necessary, placing Blücher’s later intervention within the long process by which Napoleon’s opponents learned to sustain coalition warfare rather than fight him separately.