Cry for Me, Crimea

The Crimea, an island crossroads located between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, was once the site of the ugliest and most casualty-ridden war in early modern European history.

Prior to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Europe had seen its fair share of wars, but nothing on the scale of what it saw in the Crimea from 1853 to 1856. The Crimean War was a watershed moment insofar as it marked the last time that traditional military tactics were employed in European warfare and the first time that modern science and technology were used to augment the European war machine. Warfare, and the technology behind it, made a dramatic evolutionary leap forward following the events in the Crimea. This essay seeks to explore how and why.

The Balance of Power

From the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo, Belgium in 1815 to the early 1850s, the polities of Europe had maintained a shaky but resilient balance of power. This geopolitical homeostasis fell apart in 1853, however, when the Russians decided to pick a fight with the flagging Ottoman Empire.

On the surface, the premise for Russian aggression against the Ottoman Turks seemed legitimate: the Ottomans were pervasively anti-Christian, and the tsar saw his role as protector of Eastern Orthodoxy as paramount, especially as it related to Eastern Orthodox Christians residing in Muslim-controlled Turkey.

In reality, though, the Russians were merely seeking greater access to the Mediterranean. This meant taking control of the two waterways leading there - the Bosporus Straits and the Strait of the Dardanelles - both of which connected to the Aegean Sea, leading to the Mediterranean. Both straits were well within Ottoman territory, and the precursor to taking both was to first take the Crimea (also in Ottoman hands.) Thus began the war.

Tipping the Scales

From the onset, the Russians had very little trouble routing the Ottoman Turks. They decisively crushed the Turkish fleet at the Battle of Sinop in 1854, but this victory was all but assured given the ailing state of the Ottoman Empire.

With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire eminent, the British and French soon entered the fray. Fearing the potential implications for the balance of power in Europe should the Russians expand into Anatolia (Asian Minor), both empires declared war on Russia in March 1854. The Russian Empire did not fare nearly so well against a combined Franco-Britannic force as it had against the Turks, and the war grew progressively protracted and bloodier.

Military Mismanagement

The Crimean War was marred by chronic military mismanagement and one of the highest death tolls in early modern European history. Perhaps two of the most striking examples of this were the siege of Sevastopol and the massacre at Balaklava.

In the case of Sevastopol, the Russians were so overwhelmed by the Franco-Britannic assault on their naval base that after just one year they were forced to abandon it, sinking their own ships and blowing up their fortifications. As for Balaklava, the Russian massacre of British ground forces there was so utterly complete that it lives on in infamy through the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson in The Charge of the Light Brigade.

When it was all said and done the Russian Empire sued for peace, which it won in 1856 at the expense of neutralizing the Black Sea and promising to steer clear of Turkish religiopolitical affairs in the future.

Warfare Evolves

The Crimean War was - from both a humanitarian and a historic standpoint - an absolute travesty; it bore the highest casualty rate of any conflict in Europe from 1815 to 1914.

The sheer magnitude of losses suffered during the course of the war - made all the more palpable thanks to the implementation of photography on the battlefield and real-time telegraph communiqués from the war front - can be viewed as the catalyst for several major political and military changes thereafter.

In terms of the European political spectrum, the balance of power more or less returned to status quo following the events in the Crimea. The utter mismanagement of Russian military forces throughout the war - to say nothing of the political embarrassment Russia suffered to end the war - may have in fact led to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the advent of Bolshevism.

In terms of warfare, the staggering human and infrastructural cost of the Crimean War triggered a war technologies revolution. Having witnessed the benefits science can bring to the battlefield during the course of the war - rifled muskets, railway transport of troops and munitions, iron-clad warships, etc. - and the detriment of being on the receiving end of such advances, war technologies absolutely boomed between 1856 and 1914.

By the time of World War I the European powers-that-be were ready to prosecute a war of true technological killing innovation. The idea became to maximize killing potential while at the same time limiting human investment. As such, 1914 saw the implementation of science and technology on a truly cataclysmic scale: armored tanks, battleships, war planes, submarines, chemical weapons, flamethrowers, machine guns, et al.

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Sources

Antill, P. Battle of Balaclava. http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_balaclava.html20 June 2001.

Crimean War: 1853-1856, The. Civil War Reenactors. http://www.cwreenactors.com/~crimean/criwar.htm 1996-2008.

Rempel, G. The Crimean War. Western New England College. http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/russia/lectures/19crimeanwar.html Accessed 16 February 2009.

Siege of Sevastopol. National Maritime Museum. http://www.nmm.ac.uk/explore/collections/by-type/archive-and-library/item-of-the-month/previous/the-siege-of-sevastopol-1854 2008.

Sinop. The History of [the] Russian Navy. http://www.neva.ru/EXPO96/book/chap8-2.html Accessed 16 February 2009.

World War I Weapons - New Technology. RevisionNotes.Co.Uk. http://www.revision-notes.co.uk/revision/927.html 2001-2003.