Talk:Battle of Borodino

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Ummmm, why are we always quoting one author, namely Smith? On losses. Why don't we quote some russian authors and sources. their estimate is rather different. Also, on sizes of armies, I think the article underestimates both. I corrected casualties according to the russian source that I added to references. 74.98.216.68 00:42, 29 August 2007 (UTC)Pavel Golikov, 28 August 2007.[reply]

I edited losses part by inserting for both sides estimates, for french - 28000-50000, and for russians 35000-58000.

expansion of the article

I'd like to expand this article however given the heat of the discussions I don't want to put my head in another meat grinder. I've finished expanding the Battle of Waterloo article and you would have to assume that I must have murdered small children in bed to get such reactions. I propose to put units where they were and keep as much opinion out of it as possible. Some of the heat I will confess that I just do not understand. I am an American so I might be missing some of the context. The battle is of interest as it was the set piece large battle of the entire campaign. However if this article is expanded it will hit the 32k limit pretty fast. I'd like to hear from those interested before I start on this. However if you have an axe to grind just opt out. I don't intend to be backed up to a wall for putting a unit where it was and outlining the outcome of the event as it actually happened. Tirronan 20:38, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Gettysburg

"Even the lowest casualty figures are high enough to make the Battle of Borodino the bloodiest single-day battle in human history, surpassing the Battle of Cannae (approx. 65,000, 2nd Punic War). Though other battles may have ended with a higher number of casualties (Gettysburg, the Somme, Battle of the Bulge), none seems to have surpassed Borodino in only a single day (not even the first day of the Somme offensive)."

The above sentence from the article seems curious to me. Firstly the mention of Cannae's casualties for which only sketchy and hugely unreliable ancient sources exist seems dubious at best. Secondly, and of greater importance, the sentence about other battles ending with higher numbers of casualties oddly includes Gettysburg for which total casualties for all three days were comparable to those of the Russian army alone at Borodino. Wikipedia states 46,286 casualties were sustained between the two armies at Gettysburg. Bruce Catton in The Civil War states that Gettysburg cost "the two armies close to 50,000 casualties" and in The Civil War Day by Day EB Long cites 23,049 casualties for the Union and 20,451 for the Confederacy (the latter is stated to be the official figure). Even if we round these figures up to 50,000 they still fall well and truly short of the lowest estimate cited here for the single day of Borodino. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 211.27.181.7 (talk) 14:11, 21 February 2007 (UTC).[reply]

Estimating Army Sizes

This section has citation requests, that will likely never be fulfilled and thus has NPOV issues. It also is confusing given the different numbers it lists, and does not add anything to the article. The size of armies in the battle box from Riehn is verified by the numbers given by Smith. Finally this sentence, "Still others (such as Richard Riehn) question Kutozov's judgement at deploying Russian troops." I don't understand at all, what does it mean? what other troops would Kutozov have deployed? I think the whole section needs to be cleaned up.--Bryson^{Talk}^{Edits} 19:14, 14 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I replaced the old section with Opposing forces section, which simply gives the strength of forces present, and notes forces not committed to battle. --Bryson^{Talk}^{Edits} 19:30, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think we missed the point

Despite all the fussing about who won Borodino, and it was the French, and who lost the campaign, again it was the French, This article is about the Battle of Borodino which consists of exactly 1 long paragraph and is a seriously deficent article because of it. All this wasted time and energy while the article suffered for want of attention to its main focus, to bring into bright detail what happened when by whom. As for the outcome I'm for a French tactical victory, French stragtic defeat, its pretty incontestable. Now can we get to actually improving this article to something that we can be proud of? Tirronan 23:19, 9 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Created archive page and inserted archive box

I've moved the old arugments to the archive page I have created and they can be viewed there if you care to see 131 kb of 2 people bashing each other. I will begin to expand this article tonight, the involved parties are welcome to join in this if they can park the fighting outside of the edits. This is too important an article to have suffered from the lack of attention it deserved while you two had temper tantrums and scared off anyone, including me, from wanting to work on it. Frankly if you two can't behave better go find something else to do. Tirronan 23:38, 9 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]