Battle of Malakoff
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| Crimean War |
|---|
| Sinop – Petropavlovsk – Alma – Sevastopol – Balaclava – Inkerman – Eupatoria – Taganrog – Chernaya River – Kars – Malakhoff – Kinburn |
The Battle of Malakoff, during the Crimean War, was fought between the French and Russian armies on September 7, 1855 as a part of the Siege of Sevastopol. It resulted in an allied French victory under General MacMahon and in the killing of all major Russian admirals: Pavel Nakhimov, Vladimir Istomin, and Vladimir Kornilov. The French zouave Eugène Libaut installed the French flag on the top of the Russian Redoubt.
This allied victory brought about the capture of Sevastopol, after one of the most memorable sieges of the 19th century, winning the Crimean War for the Western Allies (United Kingdom, France, the Ottoman Empire (to some extent), and Piedmont-Sardinia).
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[edit] Defensive preparations
The harbour of Sevastopol, formed by the estuary of the Chernaya, was protected against attack by sea not only by the Russian war-vessels, afloat and sunken, but also by heavy granite forts on the south side and by the works. For the town itself and the Karabelnaya suburb the trace of the works had been laid down for years. The Malakoff, a great tower of stone, covered the suburb, flanked on either side by the Redan and the Little Redan. The town was covered by a line of works marked by the Flagstaff and central bastions, and separated from the Redan by the inner harbour.
Lieut.-Col. Eduard Totleben, the Russian chief engineer, had very early begun work on these sites, and daily re-creating, rearming and improving the fortifications, finally connected them by a continuous enceinte. Yet Sevastopol was not, early in October 1854, the towering fortress it afterwards became, and Todleben himself maintained that, had the allies immediately assaulted, they would have succeeded in taking the place. There were, however, many reasons against so decided a course, and it was not until 17 October that the first attack took place.
[edit] Battle
All that day a tremendous artillery duel raged. The French siege corps lost heavily and its guns were overpowered. The fleet engaged the harbour batteries close inshore, and suffered a loss of 500 men, besides severe damage to the ships. On the other hand the British siege batteries silenced the Malakoff and its annexes, and, if failure had not occurred at the other points of attack, an assault might have succeeded. As it was, by daybreak, Todleben's engineers had repaired and improved the damaged works.
For months the siege of Sevastopol continued. During July the Russians lost on an average 250 men a day, and at last it was decided that Gorchakov and the field army must make another attack at the Chernaya, the first since Inkerman. On 16 August the corps of General Pavel Petrovich Liprandi and General Read furiously attacked the 37,000 French and Sardinian troops on the heights above Traktir Bridge. The assailants came on with the greatest determination, but the result was never for one moment doubtful. At the end of the day, the Russians drew off baffled, leaving 260 officers and 8000 men on the field; the allies only lost 1700.
With this defeat vanished the last chance of saving Sevastopol. On the same August 16, the bombardment once more reduced the Malakoff and its dependencies to impotence, and it was with absolute confidence in the result that Plissier planned the final assault. On 8 September 1855 at noon, the whole of Bosquets corps suddenly swarmed up to the Malakoff. The fighting was of the most desperate kind: every casemate, every traverse, was taken and retaken time after time, but the French maintained the prize, and though the British attack on the Redan once more failed, the Russians crowded in that work became at once the helpless target of the siege guns.
Even on the far left, opposite Flagstaff and Central bastions, there was severe hand-to-hand fighting, and throughout the day the bombardment mowed down the Russian masses along the whole line. The fall of the Malakoff was the end of the siege. All night the Russians were filing over the bridges to the north side, and on 9 September the victors took possession of the empty and burning prize. The losses in the last assault had been very heavy: to the allies over 10,000 men, to the Russians 13,000; no less than nineteen generals had fallen on that day. But the crisis was surmounted: with the capture of Sevastopol the war loses its absorbing interest. No serious operations were undertaken against Gorchakov, who with the field army and the remnant of the garrison held the heights at Mackenzies Farm, but Kinburn was attacked by sea, and from the naval point of view, the attack is interesting as being the first instance of the employment of ironclads. An armistice was agreed upon on 26 February and the definitive peace of Paris was signed on 30 March 1856.
[edit] Aftermath
The strategically decisive importance of the siege of Sevastopol lies beneath the surface: why did the fall of a place, at first almost unfortified, bring the master of the Russian empire to his knees. At first sight Russia would seem to be almost invulnerable to a sea power, and no first success, however crushing, could have humbled Nicholas I. Indeed the capture of Sevastopol in October 1854 would have been far from the most decisive action of the war, but once the tsar had decided to defend to the last this arsenal, the necessity for which he was in the best position to appreciate, the factor of unlimited resources operated in the allies favor.
The sea brought to the invaders whatever they needed, whilst the desert tracks of southern Russia were marked at every step with the corpses of men and horses who had fallen on the way to Sevastopol. The hasty nature, too, of the fortifications, which, daily crushed by the fire of a thousand guns, had to be re-created every night, made huge and therefore unprotected working parties necessary, and the losses were correspondingly heavy. The double cause of loss completely exhausted even Russia's resources, and, when large bodies of militia appeared in line of battle at Traktir Bridge, it was obvious that the end was at hand. The short stories of Leo Tolstoy, who was present at the siege, give a graphic picture of the war from the Russian point of view; the miseries of the desert march, the still greater miseries of life in the casemates, and the almost daily ordeal of manning the lines under shell-fire to meet an assault that might or might not come; and no student of the siege can leave it without feeling the profoundest respect for the courage, discipline and stubborn loyalty of the defenders.
[edit] Memory
In France, the battle was officially commemorated in a rare way: apart from the Battle of Magenta (in the Italian Campaign), it was the only of Emperor Napoléon III Bonaparte's exploits to lead to the awarding of a victory title (both of ducal rank), but this distinction was bestowed upon marshal Pélissier. A suburb of Paris was also named after this battle. Currently, Malakhov Kurgan where it was fought contains the Eternal Fire, commemorating the Siege of Sevastopol (1942) and a branch of Franz Roubaud's great panorama representing the battle of 1855.
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
