Prussian Landwehr Flags.

[Churchill]

Hi everyone,

I brought some Prussian Landwehr Flags yesterday from Fighting 15's while at Claymore, but unfortunatly the flags don't say which regiment there for.These are for my 15mm Prussians that I'm doing for my Waterloo Project.
I've checked the fighting 15's website, the warflag website and the mont saint jean website with little success.
Can anyone help either with another website or book name.
The main Landwehr Regiments I'm looking for are those with Bulow's IV corps.
2nd & 3rd Neumark, 1st & 2nd Pomeranie and the 1st, 2nd, 3rd & 4th Silesie.

Any help would be grateful.

Ray.

[obriendavid]

Ray, officially the Landwehr weren't supposed to have flags but made their own anyway so there is no official style for any particular regiments so you should be able to use these for any unit but I'm sure Martin can chime in and confrim or deny this.
Check out his site he might have more info there.
http://befreiungskriege.wordpress.com/

Cheers
Dave

[obriendavid]

http://www.napolun.com/mirror/napoleoni ... anlandwehr

Ray, you might also find this site interesting.
Cheers
Dave

[Churchill]

Thank you for your help Dave, very interesting indeed.As you say if no futher information comes forward I may just stick these flag's on any Landwehr regiment.

Kind Regards......Ray.

[msk]

Ray e-mailed me this question as well as posting it here. So I thought it would be helpful to reproduce the e-mail I've sent to Ray for others to share:

Officially, the Prussian regulations didn't permit the landwehr to carry flags until June 1814 and the subsequent issue of official flags didn't begin until 15 June 1815 - too late for Waterloo!

However, there are a lot of contemporary accounts of unofficial flags and I know of one surviving flag in the German Hisrtory Museum in Berlin. It is on this material that the makers of flags for wargamers base their conjectural products. I've checked the information Grahame Black of GMB has provided me about the flags in his range and the following might help you identify suitable ones to assign to each of your units:

a). There is evidence that Silesian landwehr units carried flags bearing their state crest (a black eagle on a yellow shield) on a blue background. Some accounts describe the eagle as being on a red-and-white checkered shield but this may be a specific area within Silesia.

b). The conjecture is then that other districts also incorporated their crests within their flags - that implies flags bearing a red griffin for Pommerania and ones bearign a red eagle for Brandenburg (which was composed of the Kurmark and the Neumark regions).

c). There are also accounts of more generic landwehr flags. Typically they were variants on a theme often bearing the white landwehr cross on a black background with a slogan like "Mitt Gott fur Konig und Vaterland".

I can't think of any books to recommend that cover this topic well - so I think you can get away with a fair amount of conjecture of your own. I'd like to be there when somebody tells you you've put the wrong flagh with the wrong unit. I'd enjoy asking them them to provide historical evidence to back their claim!


If anybody comes across reliable primary sources, I'd be interested to know.

[Churchill]

Hi Mike(msk),

Thank you very much for your help and reply on here for other forum members.That's given me a rough idea of what flag's were issued to what Landwehr regiments of various districts of Pussia.It also tells me that flag's may not have been issued at all, even by the time of Waterloo.

Kind Regards.........Ray(Churchill).