Carnage in the Crimean War culminated in the Siege of Sebastopol

This edited article about Sebastopol originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 760 published on 7th August 1976.

The Siege of Sebastopol by Richard Hook

The Crimean War had now been going on for eight months. The Russians had lost the Battle of Inkerman, but they still continued to hold Sebastopol, which the Allied Commanders had confidently assumed would fall before the winter had set in. But Sebastopol had not fallen, and now the winter had come upon them, bringing with it biting winds, rains and snow. Given the minimum support in the way of clothing and food, the British troops could have sat out the winter without too much discomfort. As it was, the inefficiency of everyone concerned in running the war had left them stranded on the heights above Sebastopol, with no new clothes to replace their tattered rags, and very little in the way of provisions.

Thanks to the war correspondents, this sorry state of affairs was well enough known in Britain for the magazine Punch to carry a cartoon which showed a half-naked guardsman telling a comrade the good news that they were about to receive a Crimean medal. “Very good,” replied the other. “Maybe one of these days we’ll have a coat to stick it on.”

Cartoons such as these and the blistering reports from William Howard Russell of The Times, made it all too clear that someone had blundered badly. Much of the blame was eventually put on the shoulders of Lord Raglan, the Commander-in-Chief who had conducted most of the war from a snug farmhouse behind the lines, but in fact the real culprits were the members of his General Staff, who seemed incapable of organising anything. Earlier in the year, for an instance, ample stores and provisions had been landed at Balaclava, but through lack of storage space, the food had been allowed to rot in the open. Even worse, innumerable bales of warm clothing and trusses of hay had not been sent forward for the use of the troops, but had been used instead to provide additional landing stages at Balaclava. This appalling situation had been made doubly bad by a great gale which had sent to the bottom of the Black Sea the Prince, a large steamer laden with boots, clothing and medicine.

In order to understand why the Allies had committed themselves to the siege of Sebastopol in the first place, it is important to know something of its strategic importance. The reasons were obvious enough. It guarded a vast harbour in which the Russian fleet nestled in perfect safety, and it was, moreover, a dockyard and a huge arsenal filled with great guns. It was therefore argued that its capture would weaken the Russian army to such an extent that it would probably bring about the end of the war.

Unfortunately, due to the inefficiency of those in command, the enormity of the task had been completely underestimated. To begin with, the Russians had built earth works and defences around Sebastopol at a speed unanticipated by the Allies. Coupled with this, the weather conditions were such as to make it impossible to bring up ammunition in sufficient quantities to maintain a steady bombardment of the fortress. As the south side of Sebastopol was virtually impregnable because it would mean having to make a suicidal attack across a vast stretch of land swept by heavy fire, the Allies were committed to a policy of trying to bombard the garrison with insufficient guns for the task. Faced with this situation, the Allies could only wait for better weather, while disease, Russian bullets and shells, took their daily toll of human life.

The morale of the British troops began to weaken and desertions became frequent, which was hardly surprising in an underfed army walking around with its tattered uniforms stuffed with straw and hay to keep out the cold. Walking scarecrows to a man, and covered with vermin because they had never washed or taken off their uniforms for months, they spent their time trying to dig trenches in the unyielding earth, forever at the mercy of a sniper’s bullet. Their resentment was fanned, inevitably, by the sight of their French Allies going about their affairs in clean and warm uniforms.

The spring came at last, and the morale of the troops immediately lifted. But it was not until the beginning of June, 1855, that any decisive action was taken to break the stalemate. Despite the enormous problems involved, the weather conditions had now made it possible for them to bring up some 500 guns which poured from their mouths a steady avalanche of metal upon the Russian positions. A determined assault by the French and British followed, which in the end achieved nothing. Another great assault was launched on June 18th, the fortieth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. This attack was a disaster. The French assault dwindled away to nothing, and the British attack was repulsed with heavy loss of life.

Assault after assault was launched in the following weeks right up to September 8th, when the French, attacking in great numbers, captured the Malakoff Tower, considered one of the key positions in the fortifications. The British also launched an attack, but this failed because only a meagre force was used, although the British positions were swarming with troops lined up for battle.

But the French attack had marked the beginning of the end of the siege, a fact which left a bitter taste in the mouths of the British, who had hoped to share in the glory of a final victory as a reward for their months of suffering. They had their revenge, however, in another way. The Russians, with their resources now almost at an end, began to retreat over a bridge of boats which had been constructed weeks beforehand. The British batteries overlooking the bridge ranged in on them with terrible effect, sweeping whole sections of men and horses into the air with each cannonade. Behind the fleeing Russians, great clouds of black smoke erupted into the air as the French troops blew up the forts one after the other, until the city was little more than a smouldering ruin.

The siege of Sebastopol was over and so to all intents and purposes was the war. Defending Sebastopol had cost the Russians 102,670 men dead, wounded and missing, and this staggering loss had completely exhausted even Russia’s vast resources. Peace negotiations followed, resulting in the Treaty of Paris in the February of 1856, which brought to an end one of the most badly mismanaged military campaigns in the history of the British Empire.