Crimean War

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CRIMEAN WAR

The Crimean War (1853–1856) concluded a period of forty years in which Russian expansion and Ottoman Turkish weakness had created a major problem for the European state system. If the Ottoman Empire collapsed, who should profit, and how could the balance of power be preserved if Russia, Britain, France or Austria were to acquire more resources than their rivals? Hitherto Anglo-Russian consensus on the need to preserve Turkey had staved off the threat of a major war, although Turkey had surrendered Greece and part of the Balkans. Only when Bonapartist France interfered in 1851 did the system fail.

While the spark for war came from a dispute among France, and Russia, and Turkey over the Christian shrines in Palestine, the cause was Russian ambition to control the Dardanelles and Bosphorus, to exclude the strategic threat of British sea power, and ensure the free passage of Russian exports. Britain joined France in diplomatic attempts to avert war, but by the time Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855) realized Britain was serious he was too deeply committed to back down. The war began in October 1853, when Turkey declared war on Russia and attacked across the Danube. On 30 November a Turkish flotilla heading for the Circassian coast was annihilated at Sinope by a Russian fleet. Britain persuaded France to adopt a global strategy based on command of the sea, for campaigns in the Baltic, the Black Sea, the White Sea, and the Pacific. Britain and France declared war respectively on 27 and 28 March 1854. They planned an amphibious attack on Sevastopol, after the destruction of a Russian battle squadron at Reval (Tallinn) in the Baltic.

A fifty-thousand-man joint expeditionary force was sent to secure European Turkey, led by Field Marshal Lord Raglan (1788–1855), who had been for many years the Duke of Wellington's (Arthur Wellesley, 1769–1852) Military Secretary, and Marshal Armand-Jacques Saint Arnaud (1798–1854), one of the leading architects of Napoleon III's (r. 1852–1871) coup d'etat. The two armies had rifled small arms, but still used Napoleonic tactics. British long-service regulars were well trained for combat, but ill prepared for the harsh realities of campaigning. The French combined volunteers hardened in the Algerian war with conscript units that proved fragile in battle. The Russian army, the largest in Europe, had no rifles, and did not trouble recruits with aiming. None of the belligerents had a modern administration.

The Baltic campaign of 1854 began with the discovery that Reval was empty, but produced the first major Allied success, the capture of the fortified Aland Islands in August. The British also imposed an effective economic blockade that crippled Russian finances.

In the Black Sea neutral Austria demanded that Russia evacuate the Danubian Principalities (modern Romania) or face war. Russia complied, leaving the allied army at Varna on the Bulgarian coast with no role. The British Government decided to attack

Sevastopol, expecting a grand raid of no more than a month to seize the city, destroy the Russian Black Sea fleet, and demolish the naval base. The French agreed. In mid-September 1854 the Allies landed in the Crimea almost sixty thousand strong. They marched south toward Sevastopol, encountering the Russian army under Prince Menshikov (1787–1869) well dug in on the banks of the River Alma on 20 September. The French used a coastal path to turn the Russian flank while the British drove through the Russian center. The Russians retreated in disorder, unable to withstand British infantry firepower. After a delay caused by Saint Arnaud's terminal illness the Allies marched round Sevastopol harbor to begin a conventional siege from the south, based on the ports of Balaklava and Kamiesch Bay. An attempt to storm the city failed on 17 October, allowing Menshikov to stage a flank attack on Balaklava on 25 October.

After holding off the Russians with slender resources a misunderstanding led the British Light Cavalry Brigade, some 650 troopers, to charge a strong position, which they cleared, and then drove off several times their number of Russian horsemen. Usually portrayed as a disaster, the charge was highly effective, with casualties no heavier than those incurred at the Alma. It broke the morale of the Russians, who would never again face British cavalry. However, British political agitation calling for domestic political reform used the Charge as a metaphor for aristocratic mismanagement and created the myth of disaster.

The other great myth of the war had the same purpose. Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) was lionized as the "Lady with the Lamp" who nursed sick and wounded troops. In reality Nightingale was a hospital manager, the nursing was done by male orderlies. The "nurses" cooked and cleaned. Nightingale's status reflected the fact that she was the only noteworthy middle-class figure in the conflict. The new universal heroism was reflected in the Victoria Cross, a conspicuous gallantry award for all ranks.

On 5 November another Russian attack, on the Inkermann Heights, came close to driving the Allies into the sea. The massive Russian attack columns became separated in the fog, allowing small British units to hold them off until reinforcements and two siege guns arrived to turn the tide of battle. Nine days later a hurricane demolished the Allied camp, and they had to prepare for a winter in trenches before Sevastopol. The Allies survived, despite appalling hardships, because they had uncontested command of the sea, steam shipping to bring in supplies and reinforcements, and ultimately a railway to mechanize the siege.

Over the winter Britain and France reconsidered their strategy. The Grand Raid on Sevastopol had failed, and they had been drawn into a prolonged battle of attrition around the city between three armies, all well dug in and well supplied with heavy (largely naval) artillery. The French, with far larger military resources, gradually took control. Napoleon III favored assembling a large field army to pursue and destroy the Russian army, but his local commanders preferred the steady attrition of local trench attacks. The British still employed a maritime strategy, sending a joint expedition to seize the Straits of Kertch and take control of the Sea of Azov in May 1855. When Marshal Canrobert (1809–1895) had to withdraw his troops from the operation under orders from Paris he resigned the high command, exchanging positions with one of his divisional generals. Marshal Pélissier (1794–1864) carried out the Azov operation, enabling British steam gunboats to cut the Russian logistics link with the River Don, crippling the field army, and limiting supplies to Sevastopol. Raglan and Pélissier stepped up their attacks, and despite the occasional failure, and Raglan's death on 28 June, the vital Malakhov bastion fell to French troops on 9 September. The Russians abandoned Sevastopol, burning the last remnants of their fleet.

This success had come at a heavy cost, but it produced little strategic or political impact. Tsar Nicholas I had died in early 1855, but Alexander II (r. 1855–1881) was not going to make peace because a small dockyard town had been taken. Russia was bankrupt and with its economy in ruins it needed peace. France was weary of war now that it had harvested a full measure of la gloire by taking Sevastopol, so Napoleon III sought peace. Neutral Austria had been bankrupted by the costs of keeping its army mobilized.

Franco-Austrian diplomatic maneuvers limited Russian humiliation and tried to keep the British out of the peace process. The British, aware of the drift of events in Paris, quickly shifted their Baltic strategy to a full-scale assault on Cronstadt, the fortress protecting St. Petersburg. By late 1855 the British were building a massive armada for this operation, and ensured the Russians knew they were ready to use it.

Over the winter of 1855–1856 the diplomats patched up a peace, but Britain kept up its naval mobilization to ensure that both its enemy and its ally recognized British claims. The Peace of Paris was signed in March, but on 23 April 1856 the British celebrated their victory by showing in a demonstration bombardment of Southsea Castle what their Baltic fleet would have done to Cronstadt. This form of coercive diplomacy served Britain well—it did not fight another major war until 1914.

The Crimean War was at once the last preindustrial war and the first modern conflict. It occurred in a period of rapid transformation in the conduct of war at all levels. British strategic thinking, developed from the Napoleonic era, combined economic warfare, global power projection, intelligence-gathering, and new technology into a winning combination. However, while the war moved by steam, military logistics were still working to the rhythm of the oxcart. The small peacetime army simply did not have the capability to mobilize fresh troops. Under pressure from the powerful news media, administrative

reform was inevitable. That said, the British were the first to employ mass-produced rifles; build tactical railways; and employ rifled cannon, inter-continental cable communications, and photography. The French pioneered armored warships, the Russians submarine mines. Although the political aims were limited, the Crimea was a global conflict between the two leading powers of the era, Russia and Britain, with France anxious to improve its status. The war preserved Ottoman Turkey for another half-century, while Russia was forced to reconstruct the very foundations of the state before modernizing its military institutions wholesale. However, the main beneficiary was Prussia. Freed from Russian dominance Berlin had created a unified Germany by 1870, over the wreckage of Louis-Napoleon's Imperial France. It was not the least of the ironies of this war was that while it preserved the balance of power in eastern Europe it created ideal conditions for an altogether more dangerous altercation in the west.