Crimean War - Buildup to war, The Crimean War begins, Characteristics of the war, Major events of the war

(1854–6) A war fought in the Crimean peninsula by Britain, France, Turkey, Piedmont, and Austria against Russia, whose origins lay in Russian successes against the Turks in the Black Sea area, and the British and French desire to prevent further westward expansion by the Russians, which threatened the Mediterranean and overland routes to India. Major battles were fought in 1854 at the R Alma (20 Sep), Balaclava (25 Oct), and Inkerman (5 Nov). The fall of the Russian fortress at Sebastopol (Sep 1855) led to peace negotiations, finally agreed at the Treaty of Paris (Mar 1856). Russia ceded S Bessarabia to neighbouring Moldavia. The war was an ineptly run, costly conflict. The commanders on both sides wasted their troops' lives, as in the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Battle of Balaclava, (1854) in which many British troops died. Medical care was primitive, but the war was notable for the nursing achievements of Florence Nightingale at Scutari. The pioneer war reports of the Irishman W H Russell in The Times, the first journalist in history to write as a war correspondent, using the newly invented telegraph, made people in Britain increasingly critical of the war. Most significantly, it ended the 40-year post-Napoleonic coalition of Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, who together had tried to maintain peace in Europe.

Crimean War
Date 1854-56 Location Crimean Peninsula, Balkans, Black Sea, Baltic Sea, Pacific Ocean Result Victory of the anti-Russian coalition
Combatants
France United Kingdom Ottoman Empire Kingdom of Sardinia	Russian Empire
Casualties
90,000 French 35,000 Turkish 17,500 British 2,050 Sardinian killed, wounded and died of disease	130,000 killed, wounded and died of disease

Crimean War
Sinop – Petropavlovsk – Alma – Sevastopol - Balaclava – Inkerman – Eupatoria – Taganrog – Chernaya River – Kars – Malakhoff

The Crimean War lasted from 1854 until 1 April 1856 and was fought between Imperial Russia on one side and an alliance of France, the United Kingdom, the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire on the other.

The war is generally seen as the first modern conflict and "introduced technical changes which affected the future course of warfare."

Buildup to war

Conflict over the Holy Land

The immediate root causes of the Crimean War can be traced back to the 1851 coup d'état in France which brought Louis Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, to power as dictator.

Quickly, the Russians made counter-claims to this newest change in "authority" in the Holy Land.

Due to his stunning diplomatic success in Istanbul, Napoleon III's support in France grew tremendously. Angry over losing the diplomatic war to France in the Porte, the Russian tsar had his 4th and 5th Army Corps mobilized and deployed along the Danube River and had Count Karl Nesselrode, his foreign minister, begin a diplomatic war to regain Russian prestige with the Ottomans.

Further, Nesselrode implied to Seymour that Russia would not hesitate to use its military to backup and enforce its diplomacy. Nesselrode believed war to already be inevitable if France did not back down. On January 2, 1853, in a letter to the Russian ambassador in London, Nesselrode further confided that Russia would 'face the whole world alone and without allies,' and also noted that war with Britain was likely as well.

The diplomatic front

As conflict loomed over the question of the Holy Places, Nicholas I and Nesselrode began a diplomatic offensive which they hoped would prevent either Britain or France from interferring in any conflict between Russia and the Ottomans, as well as to prevent them from allying together. Further, the Tsar was sure that neither Prussia nor Austria would enter the conflict, firstly because the question of German unification was in stalemate and secondly because the Tsar had kept the two countries from going to war in 1850

In January 1853, Nicholas began courting Britain through Seymour. He further expanded on the belief that the Ottoman Empire was the "sick man of Europe" and that Russia and Britain should act in concert to parcel out the Ottoman lands when that Empire fell.

The Tsar next dispatched a diplomat, Prince Menshikov, on a special mission to the Porte.

The British embassy at Istanbul at the time was being run by Hugh Rose, chargé d'affaires for the British.

First hostilities

At the same time, however, the British government of Prime Minister Aberdeen sent Lord Stratford. Benjamin Disraeli blamed Aberdeen and Stratford's actions for making war inevitable, thus starting the process by which Aberdeen would be forced to resign for his role in starting the war.

When the Tsar sent his troops into Moldavia and Wallachia (the "Danubian Principalities"), Great Britain, seeking to maintain the security of the Ottoman Empire, sent a fleet to the Dardanelles, where it was joined by another fleet sent by France.

Great Britain and France set aside the idea of continuing negotiations, but Austria and Prussia did not believe that the rejection of the proposed amendments justified the abandonment of the diplomatic process. The Sultan proceeded to war, his armies attacking the Russian army near the Danube. In 1853, after Russia ignored an Anglo-French ultimatum to withdraw from the Danubian principalities, Great Britain and France declared war.

Peace attempts

Nicholas presumed that in return for the support rendered during the Revolutions of 1848, Austria would side with him, or at the very least remain neutral. and, though it did not immediately declare war on Russia, it refused to guarantee its neutrality. When, in the summer of 1854, Austria made another demand for the withdrawal of troops, Russia feared that Austria would enter the war.

Though the original grounds for war were lost when Russia withdrew its troops from the Danubian Principalities, Great Britain and France failed to cease hostilities. Determined to address the Eastern Question by putting an end to the Russian threat to the Ottoman Empire, the allies proposed several conditions for the cessation of hostilities, including:

a demand that Russia was to give up its protectorate over the Danubian Principalities it was to abandon any claim granting it the right to interfere in Ottoman affairs on the behalf of the Orthodox Christians;

When the Tsar refused to comply with the Four Points, the Crimean War commenced.

The Crimean War begins

The siege of Sevastopol

The following month, though the immediate cause of war was withdrawn, allied troops landed in the Crimea and besieged the city of Sevastopol, home of the Tsar's Black Sea fleet and the associated threat of potential Russian penetration into the Mediterranean.

The Russians had to scuttle their ships and used the naval cannons as additional artillery, and the ships' crews as marines.

In the same year, the Russians besieged and occupied the Turkish fortress of Kars.

Azov Campaign and the siege of Taganrog

In spring 1855, the allied British-French commanders decided to send an expedition corps into the Azov Sea to undermine Russian communications and supplies to besieged Sevastopol. On May 12, 1855 British-French war ships entered the Kerch Strait and destroyed the coast battery of the Kamishevaya Bay. On May 21, 1855 the gunboats and armed steamers attacked the seaport of Taganrog, the most important hub in terms of its proximity to Rostov on Don and due to vast resources of food, especially bread, wheat, barley and rye that were amassed in the city after the breakout of Crimean War that put an end to its exportation.

The Governor of Taganrog, Yegor Tolstoy and lieutenant-general Ivan Krasnov refused the ultimatum, responding that Russians never surrender their cities.

In July 1855, the allied squadron tried to go past Taganrog to Rostov on Don, entering the Don River through the Mius River.

Baltic theatre

The Baltic was a forgotten theatre of the war. At the same time British and French commanders Sir Charles Napier and Parseval-Deschènes, although they led the largest fleet assembled since the Napoleonic wars, considered Russian coastal fortifications, especially the Kronstadt fortress, too well defended to engage and limited their actions to blockade of Russian trade and small raids on less protected parts of the Finnish coast.

Russia was dependent on imports for both the domestic economy and the supply of her military forces and the blockade seriously undermined the Russian economy.

The burning of tar warehouses and ships in Oulu and Raahe led to international criticism, and in Britain, a Mr Gibson demanded in the House of Commons that the First Lord of the Admiralty explain a system which carried on a great war by plundering and destroying the property of defenceless villagers. By autumn, the Allies' fleet left the Baltic for the White Sea, where they shelled Kola and the Solovki.

In 1855, the Western Allied Baltic Fleet tried to destroy heavily defended Russian dockyards at Sveaborg outside Helsinki. A massive new fleet of more than 350 gunboats and mortar vessels was prepared, but before the attack was launched, the war ended.

Part of the Russian resistance was credited to the deployment of newly created blockade mines. Modern naval mining is said to date from the Crimean War: "Torpedo mines, if I may use this name given by Fulton to self-acting mines underwater, were among the novelties attempted by the Russians in their defenses about Cronstadt and Sebastopol", as one American officer put it in 1860 .

Final phase and the peace

Peace negotiations began in 1856 under Nicholas I's successor, Alexander II. In addition, warships of all nations were perpetually excluded from the Black Sea, once the home to the Russian fleet (which, however, had been destroyed in the course of the war).

The Treaty of Paris stood until 1871, when France was crushed by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871.

The Crimean War caused a mass exodus of Crimean Tatars towards the Ottoman lands, resulting in massive depopulation in the peninsula.

Having abandoned its alliance with Russia, Austria was diplomatically isolated following the war. This led to its defeat in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War and loss of influence in most German-speaking lands. Soon after, Austria would ally with Prussia as it became the new state of Germany, creating the conditions that would lead to World War I.

Characteristics of the war

The war became infamously known for military and logistical incompetence, epitomised by the Charge of the Light Brigade which was immortalised in Tennyson's poem. The scandalous treatment of wounded soldiers in the desperate winter that followed was reported by war correspondents for newspapers, prompting the work of Florence Nightingale and introducing modern nursing methods.

Amongst the new techniques used to treat wounded soldiers, a primitive form of ambulances were used for the first time during this conflict.

The Crimean War also introduced the first tactical use of railways and other modern inventions such as the telegraph. The Crimean War is also credited by many as being the first modern war, employing trenches and blind artillery fire (gunners often relied on spotters rather than actually being on the battlefield).

The Crimean War occasioned the introduction of hand rolled "paper cigars" — cigarettes — to French and British troops, who copied their Turkish comrades in using old newspaper for rolling when their cigar-leaf rolling tobacco ran out or dried and crumbled.

It has been suggested that the Russian defeat in the Crimean War may have been a factor in the emancipation of Russian serfs by the Czar, Alexander II, in 1861.

The British army abolished Sale of commissions as a direct result of the disaster at the Battle of Balaclava, which saw the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade.

Major events of the war

Some action also took place on the Russian Pacific coast, Asia Minor, the Baltic and White Seas The roots of the war's causes lay in the existing rivalry between the British and the Russians in other areas such as Afghanistan (The Great Game). Siege of Kars, June to 28 November 1855 It was the first war where the electric telegraph started to have a significant effect, with the first 'live' war reporting to The Times by William Howard Russell, and British generals' reduced independence of action from London due to such rapid communications. Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole came to prominence for their contributions in the field of nursing during the war.

Prominent military commanders

Russian commanders Mikhail Dmitriyevich Gorchakov Ivan Feodorovich Paskevich Pavel Stepanovich Nakhimov Eduard Ivanovich Totleben Aleksandr Sergeyevich Menshikov British commanders Earl of Cardigan Lord Raglan Sir Edmund Lyons (later 1st Lord Lyons) French commanders Jacques Leroy de Saint Arnaud François Certain Canrobert Ottoman commanders Abdulkerim Nadir Pasha Omar Pasha

Berwick-upon-Tweed

There is a rather charming but apocryphal story, recently repeated on the BBC comedy programme, QI, that goes that when the UK joined the war, Great Britain, Ireland, Berwick-upon-Tweed and all British Dominions declared war. When the war ended, Berwick was accidentally left out of the text of the peace treaty. (see Berwick-upon-Tweed for more.)

Crimean War in fiction

Leo Tolstoy wrote a few short sketches on the Siege of Sevastopol, collected in The Sebastopol Sketches. Because of this work, Tolstoy has been called the world's first war correspondent. In the Thursday Next series of novels by Jasper Fforde, which are set in an alternative reality, the Crimean war lasts 132 years from 1853 to 1985, and creates sour relations between Imperial Russia and England. Beryl Bainbridge's novel Master Georgie is set in the Crimean War. George MacDonald Fraser's novel Flashman at the Charge (1986) is also set in the Crimean War. The song Abdul Abulbul Amir by Irish music hall performer Percy French was inspired by the Crimean War and reduces it to two fighters, The Turk Abdul and the Russian soldier Ivan Skavinsky Skivar, who duel over a triviality and both die, accomplishing nothing. "Luck", by Mark Twain, mentions the Crimean War in connection with a celebrated war hero. "The Great Stink" by Clare Clark, debut novel published 2006, tells the story of a traumatized veteran of the Crimean War and contains a number of references and flashbacks to this conflict. The irish music song "The Kerry Recruit" deals with the experiences of a young man from Kerry who fights in the war. The song The Trooper by english metal band Iron Maiden is about the Crimean war.

Additional works

Hamley, The War in the Crimea, (London, 1891) Kinglake, The Invasion of the Crimea, (nine volumes, London, 1863-87) Russell, The War in the Crimea, 1854-56, (London, 1855-56) Marx, The Eastern Question, 1853-56, (translated by E.