The Devil's Arithmetic: How Napoleon's Grand Army Died by Spreadsheet Podcast By cover art

The Devil's Arithmetic: How Napoleon's Grand Army Died by Spreadsheet

The Devil's Arithmetic: How Napoleon's Grand Army Died by Spreadsheet

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What if the greatest killer of Napoleon’s soldiers wasn’t a Cossack saber or a British musket ball, but a ledger? As the Emperor assembled his colossal invasion force for Russia in 1812, he believed he had mastered the logistics of conquest. Yet, beneath the glittering surface of the Grande Armée lay a fatal miscalculation, one written not in strategy, but in supply tables and forage estimates. This episode dissects the bureaucratic hubris that doomed the campaign before a single shot was fired. We follow the quartermasters and administrators tasked with an impossible feat: moving 600,000 men and 200,000 horses across a thousand miles of barren terrain. We examine the catastrophic reliance on speed over supply, the flawed assumption that Russia would feed its own destroyer, and the grim reality of a supply chain that stretched to the breaking point and then vanished. Listeners will understand how Napoleon’s very model of operational genius contained the seeds of its own destruction. This is a story of how paper promises of grain and fodder translated into mass starvation, how horses died by the tens of thousands, and how an army began to disintegrate from hunger and exposure long before it ever reached the battlefield of Borodino. The most dangerous enemy often comes from within your own headquarters. #Napoleon #Logistics #GrandeArmee #RussianCampaign #MilitaryHistory #SupplyChain #1812 Hosted by Ibnul Jaif Farabi. Produced by Light Knot Studios (lightknotstudios.com).
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