The Siege of Badajoz, 1812. Total Carnage, Absolute Gore. Napoleon's Spanish Divisions Decimated by Wellington.

 When the guns fell silent and the blood-soaked ruins of Badahose lay under British control, the last obstacle between Wellington and Spain was gone. The fortress had been the key, the final lock on the door that led into Napoleon’s empire. Now, the British held that key, and there would be no turning back. The invasion of Spain had begun: not as a probing raid, not as a cautious advance, but as a declaration of war against the French occupation itself. The road to Madrid lay open, and with it, the future of the entire Peninsular War.

Badajoz. March 17 - April 6, 1812.
British Forces: 51,000 Infantry, 52 Siege Guns.
French Forces: 4,700 Infantry, 140 Guns.

Additional Reading and Episode Research:

• Lawrence, James. The Iron Duke.
• Myatt, Frederick. British Sieges of the Peninsular War.
• Glover, Michael. Wellington's Peninsular Victories.

Transcript

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of History's Greatest Battles. Season 2, where we explore History's Greatest Sieges. If you know anybody that enjoys this genre of history, please share the podcast with them, and leave a review. Stay tuned after the episode to descend into the killing fields of the comments section.In the spring of 1812, war consumed the Iberian Peninsula. For years, Napoleon’s empire had fought to strangle the last pockets of resistance in Spain and Portugal, determined to break British influence in the region. France had already taken Madrid, installed a puppet king, and burned its way through the countryside, crushing Spanish guerrillas and routing ill-prepared armies. But the British had not left. Under General Arthur Wellesley, Viscount Wellington, they had fought a relentless defensive war, holding Portugal against repeated invasions and bleeding the French at every turn. Now, the time for defense had passed. The British were going on the offensive.

Victory in Portugal had been secured, but the path into Spain was still barred by two fortresses, one in the north, one in the south. Both had to fall before an invasion could begin. The northern stronghold had already been taken, but the one to the south remained in French hands. It was larger, stronger, better defended, and held by a garrison that had no intention of surrendering. Wellington knew that if he could not break through, the war in Spain would stall, the French grip would tighten, and the British army would never take Madrid. The men under his command would be forced to hold the line indefinitely, waiting for an enemy that would always return.

What happened next altered the course of history. It determined the fate of Spain, shaped the strategy of the Napoleonic Wars, and set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the destruction of Napoleon’s empire. The battle that followed was brutal, unrelenting, and one of the bloodiest engagements of the entire Peninsular War. The consequences extended far beyond the battlefield, beyond Iberia itself. The victory here shattered French control of the western theater, opened the road to Madrid, and put Wellington on a path that would end, years later, on the field of Waterloo.

 Welcome to History's Greatest Battles, Season Two, Episode 33: The Siege of Badajoz. From the 17th of March to the 6th of April, 1812.

British Forces: 51,000 Soldiers and 52 Guns.

French Forces: four thousand 700 Soldiers and 140 Guns.

When the guns fell silent and the blood-soaked ruins of Badajoz lay under British control, the last obstacle between Wellington and Spain was gone. The fortress had been the key, the final lock on the door that led into Napoleon’s empire. Now, the British held that key, and there would be no turning back. The invasion of Spain had begun: not as a probing raid, not as a cautious advance, but as a declaration of war against the French occupation itself. The road to Madrid lay open, and with it, the future of the entire Peninsular War.

In 1808, Napoleon tightened his grip on Spain, planting his brother Joseph on the throne like a puppet king. But the empire’s ambitions didn’t stop at the Pyrenees. Portugal was next. The British saw it coming and answered in the only way they knew how, by putting boots on the ground, steel in hand, and daring the French to try them.

For three unrelenting years, General Sir Arthur Wellesley, Viscount Wellington, shattered every French attempt to crush Portugal. Every march, every battle, every maneuver, it all led to this moment. No longer content to play defense, he prepared to take the fight into Spain itself.

Only two doors led into Spain, and Wellington needed them both. In the north, Ciudad Rodrigo, a fortress built to withstand the centuries. In the south, Badajoz, an even greater prize. Without them, his invasion was suicide. The French would only need to snap shut behind him, and the British campaign would die before it began.

Both fortresses were built for war, their walls thick with history and lined with guns. Ciudad Rodrigo stood behind General Auguste Marmont, a commander hardened in the Emperor’s fires. Badajoz belonged to Marshal Nicolas Soult, Napoleon’s relentless warhound. These men weren’t just holding the keys to Spain, they were ready to kill for them.

As Wellington tested the defenses of Ciudad Rodrigo, pushing and prodding for weakness, he sent General William Beresford south with a single mission, break the French siege at Badajoz and keep Portugal in the fight.

But Beresford was too late. The city had already fallen, the tricolor waving above its walls. He had no choice but to attack. No proper engineers, no siege artillery, just grit and musket fire against stone and cannon. The result was predictable, failure.

Wellington, a master of logistics, had miscalculated. The supplies weren’t there, and without them, no amount of courage could bring Badajoz to its knees. The French held firm.

Then, in a twist of fate, Napoleon himself gave Wellington the opening he needed. The Emperor’s gaze had shifted eastward, his mind consumed by the thought of breaking Russia. And so, the order went out, men were needed for the coming storm. Troops were pulled from Spain.

Marmont’s force, once 45,000 strong, was cut to the bone. Soult, the hammer of Badajoz, was ordered south to crush resistance at Cádiz. With every French battalion that marched away, Wellington’s odds improved.

The moment had come. Wellington struck first at Ciudad Rodrigo, taking it with ruthless precision. Parliament rewarded him with an earldom, but his mind was already elsewhere. Badajoz was next.

Napoleon, convinced that Wellington lacked the strength for another push, sealed Marmont in the north. No reinforcements would be sent. Soult would fight alone.

And so, when Wellington’s army arrived at Badajoz in mid-March, there was no French army on the horizon, only the city, its walls, and the men prepared to defend them to the death.

As they closed in, the British forces swelled. At Elvas, just twelve miles from Badajoz, they joined with a siege train, the weapons they needed to crack the fortress open.

On March 17th, Wellington and his officers surveyed Badajoz. The sight was grim.

To the north, the Guadiana River cut a path through the land, a 300-yard-wide barrier with a single crossing, a bridge locked down by the Tête du Pont, a fortress in its own right.

Watching from the heights beyond the river, Fort Christoval stood in defiance, guarding the approaches like a silent sentinel of war.

To the east, another obstacle, the Rivillas River, a natural shield against any who dared approach.

At the heart of it all, the castle of Badajoz loomed over the land where the two rivers met. Below it, the city spread out in all directions, but nothing within those streets mattered, only the walls. Twenty-three feet high, lined with eight towering bastions, each with a field of fire covering the next. An unbroken line of death for any man who tried to break through.

Then came the first real obstacle. A deep ditch, cut into the earth like a scar. And beyond that, the counterscarp, a sheer, 25-foot cliff of stone and earth, rising from the depths to make any direct assault a nightmare. To the east, the Lunette St. Roque jutted forward, extending its reach across the Rivillas like a dagger in the enemy’s ribs.

South of the city, two more strongholds stood in defiance. Fort Picurina, perched alone on the high ground, and Fort Pardaleras, anchored to the southern defenses, its guns ready to meet any foolish enough to approach.

But walls and guns were only part of the equation. The real threat was the man commanding them. General Armand Philippon, hard, seasoned, and unyielding. Even the British knew his name, and they knew what it meant. He would not break.

When Ciudad Rodrigo fell, Philippon didn’t waste a second. He ordered another ditch carved into the earth, deeper than the first, ready to be flooded so that any soldier who reached it would have a choice, drown or die.

He wasn’t done. He dammed the Rivillas, turning open ground into a quagmire, a wasteland of sucking mud and water that would drag attackers to their deaths before they even reached the walls.

The French had what they needed, food, ammunition, and discipline. For Wellington, this was a nightmare siege, a trial by fire that few armies in history could endure.

Wellington had numbers, 51,000 men, 52 heavy guns. But he lacked the craftsmen of war. The men who could tunnel beneath walls, bring them down from within, and turn strongholds into rubble. He would have to do this the hard way.

Even Wellington knew the grim reality. "The truth is," he admitted, "that, equipped as we are, the British army are not capable of carrying on a regular siege" (Patten, Iron Duke's Sad Victory, p. 52). But war doesn’t wait for ideal conditions. If he couldn’t take Badajoz by science, he would take it by blood.

Wellington turned to the one man who could still make this work, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Richard Fletcher, his chief engineer. The plan was brutal and simple. Hit Picurina first.

The west had seemed promising, no fortifications, no obvious defenses. But it was a lie. Beneath the ground, mines waited to rip men apart. That approach was suicide.

Beresford had tried taking Fort Christoval the year before, hoping to gain the high ground. It hadn’t worked. Fletcher scouted the ground and dismissed the idea outright.

The southeast wall was the key. If a breach could be made, the city could be taken. But first, Fort Picurina had to fall.

The night of March 17th, the storm came, wind and rain lashing the earth. In the darkness, British troops wrenched open the ground, carving a trench to set their guns for the coming barrage.

By dawn, their work was done. A trench, 600 yards long, cut across the front. Behind it, another stretched 1,300 yards, snaking through the mud, linking the men who would soon fire the first shots.

They barely had time to reinforce their positions before Philippon struck. At noon, the French stormed out of the city, cutting down 150 British troops and stealing 500 picks and shovels in the process. A message, loud and clear, Badajoz would not fall without a fight.

The men went back to work, their hands blistered, their backs bent. Rain hammered the earth, filling the trenches with water, but there was no stopping now.

By March 24th, the skies cleared, and the guns roared to life. The bombardment of Fort Picurina had begun.

That night, Wellington gave the order, Picurina was to be taken. The assault was swift and merciless. Bayonets flashed in the darkness. Blood soaked the earth. Of the 230 French defenders, only 32 made it back to the main walls alive.

Victory came at a price. Two out of every three British attackers fell, but Picurina was theirs. When Philippon counterattacked, he was thrown back, his men unable to retake the smoldering ruin.

With Picurina in British hands, the siege tightened. A second trench line was carved into the earth, bringing Wellington’s army closer to the city walls.

Four hundred yards, no longer a distant target, but close enough to see the scars on the stone. The British guns went to work, hammering the bastions of Trinidad and Santa Maria, tearing at their defenses one brutal shot at a time.

Philippon saw it coming. He knew where the hammer would fall, and he prepared accordingly.

Inside the city, his men worked like demons, carving new trenches to fight from once the walls inevitably gave way.

At night, under the cover of shadows, they went further, planting explosives, setting traps, covering the ditches with spikes meant to maim and kill in the chaos of battle.

At the breach site, they left a gift for the British, a row of chevaux-de-frise, brutal wooden frames bristling with steel blades, waiting to rip apart any man who charged blindly forward.

Every morning, they were concealed. Every night, they were placed again. The British, focused on the walls, had no idea what horrors awaited them beyond.

Then, on April 4th, news arrived. Soult was coming. Sixty miles away, marching fast. If Wellington didn’t take the city soon, he would be the one trapped between walls and an enemy army.

He dispatched troops to slow Soult’s advance, but it was a desperate measure. The city had to fall. If he couldn’t break through now, there would be no time to rebuild, no way to prepare for the storm that was coming.

But just as Wellington prepared to strike, the full scale of Philippon’s defenses became clear.

A new plan was needed. The breach would have to be somewhere unexpected, somewhere Philippon’s men hadn’t yet fortified.

The target was set. The stretch of wall between the crumbling Trinidad and Santa Maria bastions. That was where Badajoz would be broken.

When the wall fell, the real assault would begin. Diversions would slam into Fort Pardaleras, Saint Vincente, and even the northern bridge. The French would have nowhere to focus.

San Roque would be hit, silencing its deadly enfilading fire. Meanwhile, another force would cross the Rivillas, scaling the castle walls with ladders taller than a man’s home.

April 6th. The wall cracked open under relentless fire. The assault was set for 7:30 that evening.

But delays cost them dearly. The British hesitated, and Philippon moved fast. Two hundred and fifty men, pulled from the castle, rushed to the breach, waiting with loaded muskets.

The attack finally came at 9:30. The French were waiting.

The first wave, the "forlorn hope", volunteers who knew they were walking to their deaths, moved in silence, carrying ladders for the assault. Then, at San Roque, the fight erupted.

The British poured forward, closing on the breach. Then, the earth shattered. The French ignited powder kegs hidden in the trenches, blasting men apart in an eruption of fire and stone.

A thousand men were torn from the ground, hurled backward in a storm of flesh and blood.

Smoke filled the air, blinding the second wave as they stumbled forward, straight into the cunette, into the spikes, into the steel-tipped barricades meant to carve them to pieces.

The dead and dying clogged the trenches, a rising tide of torn flesh and shattered bone. The next wave had no choice but to climb over them, stumbling into the firestorm. The French atop the walls took their time, every musket shot found its mark.

Forty charges. Forty desperate attempts to break the wall. Each one shattered. Each one driven back with ruthless precision. The French defenses held.

The main attack was failing. It was now up to the diversions, side battles that had never been meant to win the city, now forced to carry the weight of the entire assault.

The attack on the castle was a disaster. French fire cut men down before they even reached the walls. Then, General Sir Thomas Picton did the unthinkable, he committed his last reserves. The ladders went up again. This time, against all odds, they reached the top.

The first men over the walls fought like demons, clawing for space, killing anything in their path. A French counterattack slammed into them, but it was too late, the castle was in British hands.

Philippon had made his move. He had taken men from the San Vincente bastion to retake the castle, and in doing so, he had left a weakness. An hour later, General Sir James Leith’s 5th Division found it. They stormed the bastion, overwhelmed the defenses, and forced their way into the city.

The walls were breached. The British were inside.

The entire battlefield shifted. With enemy troops now within the city, Philippon had no choice, he abandoned the defenses at the breach and fell back.

His army was broken. A few hundred men, all that remained of the defenders, retreated across the Guadiana and locked themselves inside Fort Christoval.

By morning, the fight was over. Fort Christoval surrendered. Badajoz belonged to Wellington.

Philippon had fought to the last. The butcher’s bill was high, 1,500 Frenchmen lay dead, another 3,200 wounded or captured.

But they had taken their pound of flesh. The British paid for this city with 4,000 dead and wounded. The Portuguese lost another 1,000 at the Tête de Pont.

The ground before the breach was a charnel house. In just a hundred yards of space, 3,500 British soldiers lay where they had fallen, dead, dying, broken.

A British surgeon saw it firsthand: "There lay the burned and blackened corpses of those who had perished by the explosions, mixed with those that were torn to pieces by round-shot or grape, and killed by musketry, stiffening in the gore, body piled upon body, involved and intertwined into one hideous mass of carnage. The smell of burning flesh was yet shockingly strong and disgusting" (Glover, Wellington's Peninsular Victories, p. 52).

Even Wellington, cold, disciplined, a man who had seen war in all its horror, couldn’t stomach it. He turned away, his face wet with tears.

Perhaps that moment of grief dulled his edge, because what followed was an atrocity beyond reason. For three days, the victors became animals.

A British officer put it simply: "The infuriated soldiery resembled rather a pack of hell hounds vomited up from the infernal regions for the extirpation of mankind" (Patten, Iron Duke's Sad Victory, p. 56).

When Wellington finally tried to stop the madness, they turned on him. His own men. The conquerors of Badajoz had become nothing more than butchers.

In the end, there was only one language they understood. A gallows was built in the town square. The killing stopped.

And then the war rolled forward. Soult arrived with 25,000 men, only to find Wellington waiting for him with 31,000.

Soult saw the writing on the wall. He turned his army and marched away, Spain was burning, and he had other fires to put out.

Portugal would never again tremble beneath the shadow of a French bayonet. No invader would march its roads, no foreign tyrant would claim its throne. But the price had been paid in full, paid in the lives of men who would never return home, in the screams of the wounded left to rot in the gutters of Badajoz, in the silent grief of mothers who would never see their sons again. The blood of this battle had sunk deep into the earth, and it would never be washed away.

Yet war does not pause for mourning. There was no time to weep, no time to count the dead. The frontier was broken, the door to Spain blown open. And so Wellington marched, not as a conqueror, not as a hero, but as a man who understood that the killing had only just begun.

Badajoz had fallen. But war? War was just getting started.

 Hope you enjoyed that episode. Let's not ascend into the killing fields of the comment section on the siege of Malta. Listener Howard TRO 3, 3 0 3 commented all things considered, it's probably a miracle. The Islamic empires were defeated as often as they were her.

You know, Howard, I see where you're coming from and I agree with you on the Islamic empires, whether the Ottomans, the Mom, Lukes, or the Moores.  Were military powerhouses. They were disciplined. They were technologically advanced and masters of logistics. They were an undeniable force in world history. The fact that they were halted or even beaten at key moments does seem incredible at first glance.

But war it seems isn't just about strength. It's about endurance  strategy sometimes sheer desperation. The Crusaders at Antioch. The Spaniards at Las Nas, dea, the Hungarians at Belgrade, the Knights of Malta, they weren't supposed to win. They were outgunned, outnumbered, often on the brink of annihilation.

But terrain, supply lines, leadership and raw stubbornness have a way of turning the tide. So was it a miracle? Perhaps, but I'd argue it was something else. Men who refused to kneel. Empires stretched too thin and moments where history could have gone either way, and that's what makes it fascinating 

on the siege of Carthage listener James Bone, amigo 2 4 3 6, wrote, I'm glad you didn't add the fake story of salting the fields around the city.  Mr. James Bon Amigo, a fellow connoisseur of historical accuracy. I salute you. The whole Rome salted the field's tale as one of those myths that refuses to die, much like a Carthaginian war elephant charging through the broken Roman line.

No ancient source mentions it. In honestly, Rome didn't need to waste salt when they had already burned the city to the ground and enslaved its people.  But hey, the idea of Rome literally seasoning its enemies for extra humiliation. That's the kind of Roman violence that keeps the legend alive.

Keep the sharp takes coming. History's always better with a good debate.  Thanks for listening. See you guys tomorrow.