Siege of Sevastopol, 1854: the first bombardment and an eleven-month siege

The Crimean War was meant to be decided at Sevastopol, the base of Russia's Black Sea Fleet. On 17 October 1854 the Allies tried to break the fortress with guns alone. They failed, and what followed was a siege of trenches, winter and costly assaults that lasted until September 1855.²

Background: a war over the Ottoman Empire

The war grew out of Russia's quarrel with the Ottoman Empire. The National Army Museum dates its start to Russia's invasion of the Ottoman Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, and writes that Britain and France wanted to prop up the Ottoman Empire and resist Russian expansion. The Ottomans declared war on Russia in 1853. After the Russian Black Sea Fleet destroyed a Turkish squadron at Sinope that November, the British and French fleets entered the Black Sea, and in 1854 Britain and France joined the war.³

Sevastopol, the fleet's base, became the target. The British government, the National Army Museum notes, was pushed by public opinion at home to strike there, and the French agreed. On 14 September 1854 the Allies landed on Kalamita Bay, on the west coast of the Crimea, about thirty miles north of the city: by the museum's count about 30,000 French, 26,000 British and 4,500 Ottoman troops. On 20 September they beat Prince Menshikov's army on the Alma.⁴ › Battle of the Alma, 1854

Instead of attacking from the north, across the wide harbor, the Allies marched around the city and settled on the plateau to the south, with the British at Balaklava and the French at Kamiesch as their supply ports. That, the National Army Museum notes, gave the Russians time to strengthen the city's fortifications. The Russians had already sunk a line of warships across the harbor mouth to keep the Allied fleets out, a measure that Russell, the correspondent of The Times, credits to Admiral Kornilov.⁵

Armies and commanders

The Allies were led by Lord Raglan for the British and, after Marshal Saint-Arnaud fell fatally ill, by General Canrobert for the French. EBSCO puts the Allied army at about 60,000 men and judges that the Allies outnumbered the defenders by about three or four to one.⁶

Prince Menshikov commanded the Russian forces, but he took most of his field army out of the city to the northeast, so as not to be bottled up. The defense of Sevastopol itself fell to the navy and the engineers. Admirals Kornilov and Nakhimov led and inspired the garrison, and Lieutenant Colonel Eduard Totleben, Menshikov's chief engineer, covered the open south side with earthworks, trenches and batteries built around the clock.⁷

The siege in phases

17 October 1854: the first bombardment

The bombardment opened at 6:30 in the morning on 17 October by Totleben's account, which was 5 October in the Julian calendar then used in Russia; Raglan put it at about a quarter before seven. At about half past nine, Totleben writes, a Russian shell blew up a magazine in one of the French batteries on Mount Rodolph, and a second explosion followed half an hour later; Raglan dates the explosion to about ten o'clock, Russell to 8:40. The French fire died away and stopped altogether at about half past ten. The British did better. Raglan reported an extensive explosion behind a strong Russian redoubt in front of the British lines, and Totleben describes how British fire wrecked the guns of the Third Bastion, where at about three in the afternoon the magazine in its salient blew up and killed more than a hundred men. Admiral Kornilov, who had ridden out to the Malakhov hill, was struck by a cannonball and died two hours later in the naval hospital.⁸

The bombardment had been meant to prepare an assault, and the besiegers' troops stood ready for it. In Totleben's judgment the Allies should have stormed the Third Bastion at once, while its guns were silent; no assault came.⁹

The fleets fared no better. British and French wooden ships of the line spent the afternoon firing at the harbor forts, took considerable damage and did little in return; the naval historian H. W. Wilson treats the day as proof of what shore guns could do to wooden ships. The Russian earthworks, the National Army Museum notes, stood up well to the bombardment. EBSCO sums up the attempt as two days of shelling without success.¹⁰

Balaklava, Inkerman and the winter

The Russians then struck at the Allied flank: at the British base of Balaklava on 25 October, the day of the Charge of the Light Brigade, and at Inkerman on 5 November, a confused battle fought in thick fog. Neither broke the siege lines; EBSCO calls the result at Inkerman indecisive.¹¹ › Battle of Balaclava, 1854

Then winter came. On 14 November a great storm swept the Crimea and tore down the tents of the camps before Sevastopol. Several British ships were wrecked, among them the steamship Prince, and the National Army Museum counts 30 vessels damaged with their cargoes of medical supplies, food and clothing. The troops in the trenches ran short of rations, winter clothing, tents and fuel, and by February 1855, the museum writes, sickness had reduced the British force to 12,000 effective men.¹²

The suffering did not stay hidden. William Howard Russell's reports in The Times told the British public what was happening, and the National Army Museum writes that the outcry brought down Lord Aberdeen's government. The museum credits a sanitary commission sent out in 1855, working alongside Florence Nightingale's nurses, with halving the death rate in the hospital at Scutari within weeks.¹³ › Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War

The siege settled into a war of trenches, and EBSCO notes that the harsh winter reduced the fighting to exchanges of artillery fire. A soldier's letter quoted by the National Army Museum describes the other enemy: rain pouring down on the tents and cholera among men exposed in the trenches day and night with nothing but their greatcoats.¹⁴

1855: the Mamelon and the failed assault

In the spring of 1855, the National Army Museum writes, the Allies resumed their preparations to take Sevastopol, and after a long bombardment and the capture of some outworks an assault was ordered for 18 June. The British, many of them newly arrived and inexperienced, attacked the Redan across 250 yards of open ground and lost over 1,500 men before falling back; EBSCO describes the mid-June assaults as costly on both sides. Raglan died of cholera on the evening of 28 June, and a last Russian attempt to break the siege from outside failed on the Chernaya on 16 August, both by Totleben's account.¹⁵

Turning point: the Malakhov, 8 September 1855

The final bombardment opened on 5 September. On the 8th, by Totleben's account, the Allied fire stopped suddenly at noon and the French at once rushed from their forward trenches on the Malakhov. The Russians counterattacked for hours, but the French held. The British assault on the Redan failed for the second time.¹⁶

The fall of the Malakhov decided the siege. That night the Russian garrison crossed the harbor to the north side by the floating bridge, and during the crossing, Totleben writes, the Russians sank what remained of the Black Sea Fleet and blew up their works; EBSCO notes that they destroyed vast amounts of military supplies and equipment. The Allies took the city but did not pursue them.¹⁷

Aftermath

No single, agreed total exists for the losses of the whole siege, and this article does not invent one. Disease took a heavy toll on both sides: the National Army Museum describes the French army being decimated by disease in the second winter, while the British, who had suffered in the first, were by then well clothed, housed and equipped.¹⁸

The fall of Sevastopol ended the war in practice. In October 1855 the Allies took the Russian base of Kinburn, where French armored floating batteries went into action. When Austria threatened to join the Allies, Russia accepted peace terms, and the Treaty of Paris of March 1856 neutralized the Black Sea.¹⁹ › Battle of Kinburn, 1855

Legacy and memory

Among the defenders was a young officer, Leo Tolstoy, who, EBSCO notes, served inside Sevastopol for many months. He wrote three sketches of the siege, Sevastopol in December, Sevastopol in May and Sevastopol in August, set in December 1854, May 1855 and August 1855.²⁰

Both sides drew lessons. EBSCO sees in the waves of infantry thrown against prepared positions a warning that would be repeated in World War I, and in Russia's defeat on its own territory the start of a long effort to modernize its army and economy under the new tsar. The peace also cost Russia its place as the leading power on the Black Sea.²¹