Oebastien Lc Prestre de Vauban established the importance of the engineer on the battlefield and became the master of his time in conducting offensive siege warfare and in preparing defensive fortifications. His contributions in combat engineering, weapons development, and the use of artillery gained him a promotion to marshal of France and respect around the world for his innovations.
Born in 16.33 at Saint-Leger de Fauchercst in Burgundy, Vauban joined the army of Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Conde during the revolt of 1651. The young Vauban quickly distinguished himself in the design of field fortifications in the Argonne but fell captive to the Regular French Army after only two years of service with the rebels. Vauban’s captors recognized his talents and offered him a pardon and a commission to join their ranks. A year later, Vauban, despite being twice wounded, engineered the siege of Stenay, which captured one of Conde’s major bases. When Stenay fell on May 3, 1655, Vauban’s reward included a promotion to “king’s engineer.”
For the next twenty years Vauban established and executed French siege and antisiege doctrine. His skills were much valued because at the time sieges were the most common form of warfare. During Vauban’s early years in the military, he served and studied under the leading French engineer Chevalier de Clerville. Soon, however, student exceeded master, and for his performance in improving frontier fortifications during the War of Devolution in 1667-68, Vauban was elevated to the directorship of all royal engineers.
Following the War of Devolution, Vauban focused on improving the security of the French borders. He built more than thirty new fortresses and upgraded the existing three thousand. Not only did he address land defenses, he also built the defenses around the naval bases at Brest, Dunkirk, Le Havre, Rochefort, and Toulon in conjunction with the growth of the French navy.
Vauban designed these land and coastal bases to be mutually supportive and added logistic points within the forts to act as supply bases to support military forces on the march outside the fortifications. Unlike the former European model of single-point defenses, Vauban devised a system of defense-in-depth, using multilayers, or “bands,” of fortifications. He also added corner towers to the forts to reinforce each defensive layer and also to provide a point for command and control. Semi-detached outposts for early warning and for channeling an attacking army into the strength of the main defenses rounded out die Vauban-designed fortification.
The great French engineer also provided innovations in offensive siege operations. He devised a widely adopted attack plan against enemy fortifications that included an advancing system oi trenches supported heavily by artillery lire. This adoption o( protective trenches and fire support rather than bloody attacks by amassed infantry in the open endeared him to the loot soldiers. Vauban’s military innovations extended beyond building and opposing field fortifications.
Until his time, infantrymen mounted bayonets on their muskets by “plugging” them into the barrel, making firing the weapons impossible. As a result, most of the armies of the period did not issue bayonets to their musketeers; rather, they mixed pikemen into their infantry ranks. The pikemen were armed with bayonets mounted on spear poles. Vauban invented the socket bayonet, which mounted outside the barrel and did not interfere with firing the weapon. Now each infantryman could fight both as a musketeer and a pikeman.
During the Dutch War, Vauban’s siege techniques proved successful at Maastricht in 1673, Valenciennes in 1677, and Ypres in 1678. During times when sieges often took six months or more to achieve victory, the offensives Vauban directed proved successful in two to three weeks.
With the outbreak of the War of the League of Augsburg, Vauban again took to the field to besiege enemy strongpoints. In short batdes he defeated the defenses at Mons in 1691, Namur in 1692, and Ath in 1697. At Ath, Vauban instituted firing artillery at a low trajectory in order to rico-chet the nonexplosive cannonballs into the inner walls of the fortification.
Vauban, sixty-nine, retired from active service in 1702 because of advancing age and ill health. In recognition of his achievements, he was elevated to the rank of marsnal of France on January 14, 1702. He continued to advise the French military and to write about his ideas of military engineering, as well as studies of navigation, forestry, and farming, until his death on March 30, 1707 at age seventy-four.
Throughout his life, Vauban wrote detailed letters to his king about the importance and techniques of building and breaching fortifications. These reproduced letters influenced French and European engineer operations for the next century. Vauban’s writings and successful implementation of his theories in combat earned personal respect for him and professional recognition of the combat engineer as an integral part of any army’s organization. His contemporaries on this list are FernAndez Gonzalo de Cordoba 1806, who introduced firearms to the battlefield, and Jean Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauvai and Lennart Torstensson for their innovations in artillery.