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Crimean War

LANGUAGE:   English/French/Russian/Turkish

TIME:  1854-1856

LOCATION:  Principally in the Crimea (Russian peninsula on the north shore of the Black Sea)

CATEGORY: Military

DISCIPLINE: Military

ASSOCIATION:  Britain, France, Ottoman Turks, Russia

SHORT DESCRIPTION:

War waged against Russia by Britain, France and Turkey

DESCRIPTION:

The main cause of the Crimean War was a desire by the western allies to block Russian territorial ambitions in Turkey. Turkey was part of the Muslim Ottoman empire which was in decline and was famously referred to by Tsar Nicholas I of Russia as “the Sick Man of Europe”. For over fifty years, Russia had been taking advantage of this decline to annex a number of Turkish provinces.

In 1853, when the Tsar demanded that Turkish Christians in provinces within the Ottoman Empire be placed under the protection of Russia, alarm bells went off in Britain and France. Britain was concerned to protect her interests in India and so she wanted a strong Turkey as a barrier to Russian expansion in Asia.

In France, Napoleon III* had only just re-established his rule after revolution in France and was keen to win military glory and distract the French from domestic upheavals. France was also annoyed at the idea that the Russian Orthodox church should have control of Roman Catholics in the Turkish province of Palestine. The British ambassador in Palestine advised the Turks to refuse the Russian demand and Britain thus became a direct participant in the Russo-Turkish quarrel.

In July 1853 Russia occupied the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (now Romania) north of the Danube on the Turkish border. An Anglo-French naval force was sent to the Dardanelles.

In October 1853, Turkey declared war on Russia. In November, the Russian navy destroyed a Turkish squadron at the battle of Sinope in the Black Sea during which explosive shells were used for the first time in naval history (by the Russians).

The Crimean War was also the first to feature Special Correspondents such as William Howard Russell who reported from the front for “The Times” newspaper in London. Press censorship in Paris and Russia prevented similar articles there, although the Russian novelist Tolstoy*, who fought in the Crimea, succeeded in having some of his letters published and later used his experiences of battle in his famous novel, “War and Peace”.

In January 1854 the Anglo-French naval force entered the Black Sea to protect Turkish shipping. Napoleon III sent an ultimatum to the Russians ordering them to withdraw from the Danubian principalities. The Tsar refused and in March 1854 France and Britain declared war on Russia. Until September, the war was waged between Russia and Turkey on the Danube and in Asia Minor. The Turks drove the Russians out of the Danubian provinces but the momentum in the west was too great to stop the participation of France and Britain.

In a bid to take the pressure of the Turkish army, it was agreed to mount a joint expedition to take the Russian fortress of Sebastopol in the Crimean peninsula on the north shore of the Black Sea. In September 1854, allied forces landed in the Crimean peninsula. The allies were victorious at the battle of Alma on 20 September where the British saw most of the action. During a counter attack by the Russians on the British base of Balaklava in October, the Light Brigade* made their suicidal charge through North Valley, an episode immortalized by the British poet Tennyson*. On 5 November, the allies won another victory at Inkerman. An incident during this battle stimulated WG Armstrong* to begin developing the Armstrong gun.

In January 1855, troops from Sardinia-Piedmont joined the allied forces who were now besieging Sebastopol. The Sardinian foreign minister, Cavour*, realised that participation in the war would give Sardinia a place at the peace conference (Austria, occupying part of Italy, would not be present). The soldiers were living in trenches and the British forces in particular suffered terribly from the severe winter weather and the lack of supplies, many of which had been lost at sea during storms.

The arrival of Nightingale* and her band of nurses in the Crimea resulted in some improvement in their care, and Nightingale’s work during the war inspired Dunant*, who later founded the Red Cross. As well as better medical treatment, the troops were issued with clothing and tobacco, and they also received a Christian tract written by Kingsley*, the British clergyman who believed that war was a regenerating influence.

In August, the French and Sardinians defeated the Russians at the battle of the Chernaya river and the following month the French captured the Malakov redoubt. The long drawn out siege (which began at the end of November 1854) was now entering its last stages and one Crimean observer, Oliphant*, recorded the surreal experience of attending dinner parties in full evening dress where the chief entertainment was watching the bombardment of Sebastopol. Wealthy visitors from Britain visited the Crimea on tours advertised by shipping companies, and groups of tourists gathered to socialize at an hotel run by Mary Seacole.

American military observers, led by Major Richard Delafield, also visited the Crimea and on their return to America they used the evidence they had gathered for the reform of the US army. Only one US officer, McClellan*, noticed that the new Minie rifles used by the British and French infantrymen at Inkerman made old black-powder muskets obsolete. Other US observers were influenced by the findings of a study of the Crimean War undertaken by Jomini* who did not think that the new weapons would alter military tactics.

An electric telegraph line was laid which connected British and French headquarters to the outside world.

The loss of much of the British fleet in a hurricane during the war led to the first international weather-forecasting conference, organized by the American Maury*

On 8 September 1855 the bizarre stalemate ended when the Russians surrendered Sebastopol. Some individuals, like Schliemann*, later to become a famous archeologist, had made a fortune from the war, but for governments it had been costly.

In 1856 Britain was forced to take out a loan negotiated by LN Rothschild* in order to meet the costs. The Treaty of Paris, signed by Russia, the allied powers and neutral Austria, was signed in March 1856. The Turks were given a guarantee of non-interference by foreign powers and Christian subjects in the Ottoman Empire were guaranteed equality under the law.

Two prominent British radicals, John Bright* and Cobden*, argued against humiliating the Russians, who were forced to surrender southern Bessarabia to Moldavia, and the Black Sea was declared a neutral zone. The British statesman Gladstone* disapproved of making the Black Sea neutral. Fifteen years later this clause was rescinded.

EXTRA CONNECTIONS: Smithsonian Magazine credits cold with setting off facial hair popularity

ONELINER: The Crimean War, fought between the Western Allies and Russia

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Royle, Trevor, Crimea, The Great Crimean War, London, Little, Brown and Company, 1999

Kerr, Paul, et al, The Crimean War, Boxtree, London, 1997

Emily Mullin  Smithsonian Magazine May 10, 2016

Wikipedia:

The **Crimean War**, also known in Russian historiography as the Eastern War of 1853–1856 (October 1853 – February 1856), was a conflict in which Russia lost to an alliance of France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia. The immediate cause involved the rights of Christian minorities in the Holy Land, which was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The French promoted the rights of Catholics, while Russia promoted those of the Orthodox Christians. The longer-term causes involved the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and the unwillingness of Britain and France to allow Russia to gain territory and power at Ottoman expense. Russia lost the war and the Ottomans gained a twenty-year respite from Russian pressure. The Christians were granted a degree of official equality and the Orthodox gained control of the Christian churches in dispute.[8]:415

The Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia in October 1853 and suffered a major defeat that gave Russia control of the Black Sea. The Russian threat to the Ottoman Empire required control of the Black Sea, and the key was the Russian naval base at Sevastopol, on the Crimean peninsula. The allies realized that, if they captured Sevastopol, they would control the Black Sea and win the war. France and Britain entered in March 1854. During most of the fighting in the Black Sea, a large French army and a smaller British army fought to capture Sevastopol. Death from disease was very high on both sides. After Sevastopol fell, the neutrals started aligning with the allies. Isolated and facing a bleak prospect if the war continued, Russia made peace in March 1856. The original superficial religious issues had already been resolved. The main results of the war were that the Black Sea was neutralised—Russia would not have any warships there—and the two states of Wallachia and Moldavia became largely independent.

The war was largely fought in and near Crimea, with smaller campaigns in eastern Anatolia, Caucasus, the Baltic Sea, the Pacific Ocean and the White Sea. This war is also known as the "Eastern War" (Russian: Восточная война, Vostochnaya Voina).

The war had a permanent impact. Through nationalist movements incited by the war, the present-day states of Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, and regions such as Crimea and the Caucasus all changed in small or large ways due to this conflict.[9][10] It also helped set the backbone of several geopolitical conflicts between the Western world and Russia and other Eastern world powers, which will include the 20th century Cold War.[10]

The Crimean War was one of the first conflicts to use modern technologies such as explosive naval shells, railways and telegraphs.[11](Preface) The war was one of the first to be documented extensively in written reports and photographs. As the legend of the "Charge of the Light Brigade" demonstrates, the war quickly became an iconic symbol of logistical, medical and tactical failures and mismanagement. The reaction in Britain was a demand for professionalization, most famously achieved by Florence Nightingale, who gained worldwide attention for pioneering modern nursing while treating the wounded.

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