Did you know that in 1795 a French Hussar Regiment capture a Dutch fleet?
In the autumn 1794, during the War of the First Coalition of the French Revolutionary Wars, the French Army beginn a campaign for the conquest of the Nederlands and, on January 19th 1795, they entered Amsterdam to stay there over winter. The general commanding this campaign, Jean-Charles Pichegru, was well informed and he found out that a Dutch fleet was anchored at Den Helder, at the tip of the North Holland peninsula in the Zuiderzee bay, approximately eighty kilometers north from Amsterdam.
Pichegru ordered General of Brigade Jan Willem de Winter, who had been serving with the French since 1787 and would later command the Dutch fleet in the Battle of Camperdown, to lead a squadron of the 8th Hussar, assisted by the 15th Line Infantry Regiment, to capture the Duch fleet in the Zuiderzee bay, wich was freezed due to the exceptional cold of that winter.
On the night of January 23rd 1795 they arrived at Den Helder. The Dutch fleet was there as expected, trapped by ice. The Hussars, each one carring an infantryman on his horse, covered the horses' hooves with fabric to avoid awakening the Dutch sailors, and began a careful approach. Then Lieutenant-Colonel Louis Joseph Lahure launched the assault and the Hussars, supported by the fire of the infantrymans, rushed to board the ships, that being locked inclined downwards they could not use cannons to counter the attack. In the aftermat the French captured 14 warships, 850 guns, and several merchant ships, as well as the Dutch admiral and the vessels' crews, suffering no casualties.
However, while the traditional narrative of French cavalry storming and capturing the ships at Den Helder is primarily based on French sources, the Dutch historian Johannes Cornelis de Jonge claimed on the basis of documentary sources that the Dutch fleet had already received orders on 21 January to offer no resistance. Instead, some French hussars merely crossed the ice for a meeting with the fully awake Dutch officers to negotiate a handover with the captain (not admiral) Reyntjes . De Jonge also argued that the account of a capture on the ice is likely based on an 1819 publication by the Swiss general Antoine-Henri Jomini, who was later copied by a large number of French historians.
Whatever the actual course of events is, this is one of the few times in recorded military history wherein cavalry captured a fleet (another example is the José Antonio Páez's 1818 cavalry attack across the alligator-ridden Apure River, seizing fourteen enemy boat, during the Venezuelan War of Independence).
Article edited by Wikipedia.
