The British were compelled to divert some of their forces to go on defense. British Infantrymen Hold ‘Thin Red Line’Įarly on, the Russians tried to break through British lines and capture an allied base at Balaklava, a harbor that was crucial to supplying the allied operation. Instead, the fighting ended up dragging on for nearly a year. The Allies then headed to Sevastopol for what they expected to be a three-month siege. More than 5,700 Russian soldiers were killed, while the British and French lost 962 men, according to the Lancashire Infantry Museum. A few days later, the allies took on the Russians at the battle of the Alma, which ended just three hours later with the Czar’s forces being routed. The plan was to march south and capture Savastopol, a heavily-fortified port city that served as the main naval base for Russia’s Black Sea fleet. In mid-September 1854, the allies landed 30,000 French soldiers, 26,000 British troops and 4,500 Turks at Eupatoria, a town on the Crimean peninsula.
With the combined might of their navies and armies-including a 60,000-man force protecting Istanbul, the Turkish capital-they expected to make short work of the Czar’s military. The two countries entered the war on Turkey’s side in late March 1854.
Meanwhile, the French, who still remembered Napoleon I’s defeat by the Russians, saw a chance to take revenge. Russia’s aggressiveness also made the British nervous about maintaining their trade with Turkey and access to India. That horrible slaughter helped inflame western European public opinion against the Russians. A month after the war began, Russian gunships pounded an antiquated Turkish naval force at ships at the Black Sea port of Sinop, setting their wooden hulls on fire with incendiary shells and killing nearly 2,000 Ottoman sailors and officers, according to Candan Badem’s 2010 book The Ottoman Crimean War. Though the Turks won some initial victories, the fight was lopsided in Russia’s favor. In response, in October 1853, Turkey declared War on Russia and counterattack Russian forces. Wilson has written.Īfter the sultan refused his request, Nicholas-who viewed Turkey as the “sick man” of Europe-decided to occupy the Turkish-controlled principalities of Moldavia and Walachia (territory that today is part of the nation of Romania). After violence in Bethlehem in which Orthodox monks were killed, Nicholas sent an emissary to the Turkish sultan, Abdulmecid I, and demanded not only equal access to religious sites but that the sultan recognize Nicholas as protector of Orthodox Christians throughout the Ottoman empire, as British journalist and author A.N. The spark that set off the war was religious tension between Catholics and the Orthodox believers, including Russians, over access to Jerusalem and other places under Turkish rule that were considered sacred by both Christian sects. It’s also the conflict in which Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, first became famous, for her efforts to help wounded British soldiers who were dying of cholera and typhoid in squalid hospital wards. The event is commonly remembered today as the setting for Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which glowingly depicts the bravery of a British cavalry unit that suffered horrific casualties when it made an ill-advised attack on a heavily-defended enemy position. The British and French, in turn, saw Nicholas’ power grab as a danger to their trade routes, and were determined to stop him. The war, which claimed an estimated 650,000 lives, pitted Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia against Russia, whose ruler, Czar Nicholas I, was attempting to expand his influence over the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean at the expense of the declining Ottoman Empire. The Crimean War (1853-1856) was a brutal conflict that took its name from the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea.
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