Battle of Eupatoria, 1855: Omer Pasha holds the Crimean port

From first light until mid-morning the guns hammered a sandy little town of windmills and minarets on the shore of the Black Sea. Russian batteries crept closer, columns formed behind the walls of a graveyard, and an Egyptian general fell among the windmills. When the smoke cleared, the Russians were marching away, and the Ottoman army, so often dismissed by its allies, had won its own battle in the Crimea.²

Who won the Battle of Eupatoria and why?

The Ottoman army of Omer Pasha won, helped by a small French detachment and by allied warships in the bay. The Russian columns reached the ditch but found it full of water and their ladders too short, while fire from the works and the steamers cut down their officers. Khrulev judged the town too costly to take and withdrew.³

Background: a port on the Russian flank

The Crimean War grew out of a quarrel between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. In July 1853 Russian troops crossed the Pruth and occupied the Danubian Principalities; in October the Ottomans went to war, and on 30 November a Russian squadron destroyed a Turkish one at anchor in Sinop. In 1854 Britain and France declared war on Russia.⁴ › Battle of Sinop, 1853

In September 1854 the allied fleet anchored off Eupatoria, a town on a low spit of land on the west coast of the Crimea, and the town was occupied without a fight. The armies landed to the south, won at the Alma and settled down to besiege Sevastopol.⁵ › Battle of the Alma, 1854

Eupatoria was left with a small garrison. After the Battle of Inkerman the allies ringed it with a continuous earthen rampart and a broad, deep ditch, and their commanders, looking for a diversion, had the Ottoman army of the Danube brought over to it. Through the winter Turkish battalions arrived. Russian commanders watched with growing unease: an army at Eupatoria threatened the road north to Perekop, the Russian army's link with the mainland.⁶

The siege of Sevastopol had already drawn two great Russian attempts to break the allied hold on the peninsula, at Balaklava in October and at Inkerman in November 1854. Both failed. Tsar Nicholas I pressed for a new offensive, yet he doubted that Eupatoria could be held even if it were taken, under the guns of the allied fleet, and said so to his commander in the Crimea, Prince Alexander Menshikov.⁷ › Battle of Balaclava, 1854

Armies and commanders

The defenders. Omer Pasha, the Ottoman commander-in-chief, came to Eupatoria on 9 February 1855 with the rest of his army, troops who had fought the Russians on the Danube. Its strength is put at about 20,000 by Slade, at about 21,600 landed with Omer besides the older garrison by Bogdanovich, and at about 23,000 by Hamley. Among them were Egyptian troops under Selim Pasha. A small French force included sailors from the ship of the line Henri IV, stranded off the town.⁸

The defenses were still unfinished. When the Russians scouted them, the works mounted only 34 guns, most of them naval; Hamley gives the same figure of 34 heavy guns. Egyptian troops held a work in front of the windmills, and French sailors and marines helped to serve the guns. Omer Pasha's report names the British warships Curaçoa, Furious and Valorous and the gunboat Viper, the French steamer Véloce and an Ottoman steamer in the bay; Todleben places the Véloce off one flank of the town and the Valorous, the Viper and a Turkish vessel off the other.⁹

The attackers. Menshikov gave the task to Lieutenant General Stepan Khrulev: 22 battalions, 24 squadrons and 5 sotnias of Cossacks, about 19,000 men, with 108 guns, by Bogdanovich's count. Hamley, citing Todleben, likewise gives 19,000 infantry with strong cavalry and numerous artillery. Among them were the Azov Infantry Regiment, lancer and dragoon regiments and a battalion of Greek volunteers.¹⁰

The defenders thought they faced far more. Omer Pasha, judging partly from prisoners, reported 36 battalions, 6 cavalry regiments, 400 Cossacks and 80 guns in position; Colonel John Simmons, the British liaison officer at his headquarters, wrote that afternoon that there could not be fewer than 40,000 men of all arms. Slade, a British admiral in Ottoman service, later put the Russians at 30,000 infantry, 3,000 cavalry and fifty guns.¹¹

The commanders' decisions

Menshikov sent two generals to look at the town. Baron Wrangel, who commanded the Russian troops watching Eupatoria, reported it strongly fortified and would not answer for the success of an assault. In Todleben's fuller account he warned that the infantry would need ladders and fascines, and that the approaches were swept by the crossfire of the warships.¹²

Khrulev, his artillery commander, saw it differently. In his judgment, formed after riding close to the town, parts of the earthworks were unfinished and so low that they did not even hide the foundations of the houses, and he reported that the town could be taken. Faced with the two opposing reports, Menshikov gave Khrulev the command. Mikhail Gorchakov had described him to Menshikov as a brave man without much in his head, but very bold and enterprising, who would do whatever was asked of him once it was explained.¹³

A first plan, drawn up by a general staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel Batezatul, was reworked by Khrulev. Because the ground in front of the town lay open to the flanking fire of the steamers, the main effort would fall where the naval guns reached least, with attacks on both flanks to draw the defenders' attention. Khrulev also decided to open fire at close range from the start, rather than lose time moving guns during the action.¹⁴

Omer Pasha was warned in time. When the Russians appeared before the town on the 16th he put the garrison on alert and kept it behind the works. Slade later judged that waiting behind redoubts and barricades to be attacked was Omer's favorite way of war.¹⁵

The battle in phases

The night of 16 February. After dark the Russians dug an emplacement for each gun a few hundred yards from the town wall, with rifle pits between them, while the infantry waited behind in three lines. By dawn 76 guns stood ready, 250 sazhens (about 530 m) from the works by Todleben's account, 600 to 800 yards by Hamley's. The defenders did not interfere.¹⁶

The cannonade. The first shot came at daybreak, about five o'clock by Todleben's account and six by Khrulev's report, and a general cannonade followed. The Russians saw that the warships covered the Ottoman left, so they made their main effort against the center and the right. Their fire was heavy and accurate: it silenced a number of Ottoman guns and blew up five ammunition chests or magazines, and Simmons reported one battery with every gun struck and most of its horses killed.¹⁷

The assault. On the Russian left, a battalion of Greek volunteers and dismounted Cossacks worked forward from the direction of Lake Sasik, using the walls of a cemetery and quarry pits for cover, until they were about a hundred paces from the works. Toward ten o'clock the Russian batteries moved closer still and opened with canister, and two battalions of the Azov Regiment under Major General Ogarev went in with the Greeks beside them. Musketry, canister from the works and the fire of the steamers cut down many of their officers. The columns reached the edge of the ditch, found it full of water, and saw that their ladders, two sazhens long, were too short. Allied eyewitnesses describe a column coming out of the graveyard to within twenty yards of the ditch before it broke.¹⁸

Turning point: the ditch and the guns

At the ditch the attack lost its momentum. Khrulev concluded that the town was held in great strength and that taking it would cost enormous losses, and he ordered a retreat. Turkish cavalry, three squadrons in the Russian accounts, came out after the retreating left column; the two Azov battalions covering it formed squares, and the horsemen, after firing at musket range, turned back into the town. Bazancourt instead has a Turkish battalion and 300 horsemen hurrying the Russian retreat, while Omer Pasha himself wrote that the enemy's superiority in cavalry and guns kept him from harassing it.¹⁹

Both Russian accounts describe the retreat as carried out in exemplary order, the lines kept as straight as on a parade ground. The allied reports put the Russian withdrawal at about ten o'clock; the Russian accounts say the firing stopped by eleven.²⁰

The defenders' best-known loss came near the redoubt by the windmills. Selim Pasha, the Egyptian general of division, was killed there. The Daily News correspondent wrote that he fell leading a bayonet charge of Egyptians against the broken column; Bazancourt, the French historian, that he was shot while standing on the parapet watching the Russians begin to give way. The Egyptian colonel Rustem Bey and Colonel Ali Bey were mortally wounded. Slade wrote that Selim's death was believed to have contributed to the later inaction of the army at Eupatoria.²¹

Aftermath and the count of the dead

The figures differ even between reports from the same side. Omer Pasha gave his losses as 87 killed and 277 wounded in the London translation of his letter, 377 wounded in the French version printed by Bazancourt; Simmons counted 97 Turks killed and 277 wounded, with 4 French killed and 9 wounded, 387 combatants in all, and 13 townspeople killed. Hamley gives the garrison's loss as the same 387, Slade as 103 killed and 298 wounded. Todleben, adding the townspeople to the allies' own figures, reaches 401.²²

On the Russian side Omer Pasha reported 453 dead buried by the town authorities and 300 artillery horses lost, and wrote that Khrulev's own report admitted 500 killed and wounded. That report, as Tarle quotes it, lists 114 killed and 583 wounded or contused. Todleben gives 168 killed, 583 wounded and 18 missing, 769 in all, and Bogdanovich 768; Hamley also gives 769 killed and wounded. Slade wrote that the Russians left 420 men and 300 artillery horses on the field.²³

The failure had consequences far beyond the town. Menshikov was removed from command in the Crimea and replaced by Prince Mikhail Gorchakov. Tsar Nicholas I died in St Petersburg on 2 March 1855, less than two weeks after the battle. Hamley wrote that it was generally believed the blow, all the harder because it came from the despised Turks, was fatal to him; Slade, that the repulse embittered the tsar's last hours.²⁴

Eupatoria stayed in allied hands. After the fall of Sevastopol in September 1855, allied cavalry under the French general d'Allonville operated from the town, but these sorties brought no decisive result. Slade judged that the army at Eupatoria was of service only negatively, by keeping a Russian infantry division and two cavalry divisions watching it.²⁵ › Siege of Sevastopol, 1854

Legacy and memory

Eupatoria was the Ottoman army's battle in the Crimea. Bazancourt saw in it the same stubborn defense the Ottomans had shown at Silistria on the Danube. Russian commanders played it down: Menshikov's report and Khrulev's both called the action a reconnaissance. The Soviet historian Yevgeny Tarle later argued that a shortage of powder also hobbled the Russian guns, citing a regimental doctor who learned after the battle that some batteries had been down to their last charge.²⁶ › Battle of Kinburn, 1855