The Crimean War полностью

The allied commanders had no idea of this weakness and disorder on the Russian side. Raglan had wanted to press on as fast as possible to Sevastopol, as the allies had agreed in their war plans, but now the French were not ready, having left their kitbags on the other side of the Alma before they had scaled the heights, and needed time to collect them. Unlike the British, they did not have sufficient cavalry to give chase to the Russians, so were less inclined to rush ahead. Once the initiative was lost, the allied commanders began to hesitate about what they should do next. Tatar spies had misinformed them that the Star Fort was impregnable, that Menshikov intended to defend it with all his might, and that the city was almost undefended on its southern side. This encouraged the allied commanders to abandon their initial plan to attack the city quickly from the north, and instead march right round the city to the southern side, a plan of action strongly urged by Sir John Burgoyne, the chief engineering officer.^ab

The change of plan was also driven by the Russians’ bold decision to blow up their own fleet. Recognizing that they could not match the allied ships in speed or gunpower, the commanders of the Black Sea Fleet sank five sailing ships and two frigates in the mouth of the harbour to block the entrance and so prevent allied ships from supporting an attack from the north. The designated vessels were towed into place, their flags were taken down, and there were religious services to commit them to the sea. Then, at midnight on 22 September, the ships were destroyed. One frigate, The Three Saints, would not go down. The next morning it was shelled at close range by a gunboat for two hours until it sank. The noise was heard by the allied armies, which at that time were on the Kacha, prompting Saint-Arnaud to pronounce in amazement, once it was discovered what the noise was from, ‘What a parody of Moscow 1812.’³⁵

With the harbour blocked and no possibility of back-up from their ships, the allied commanders decided that it was too dangerous to attack Sevastopol from the north, so they now committed themselves to attack the city from the southern side, where their ships could use the harbours of Balaklava (for the British) and Kamiesh (for the French) to support their armies. The change of plan was a fatal error of judgement – and not just because the city’s defences were in fact stronger on the southern side. Moving south of Sevastopol made it harder for the allied armies to block the Russian supply route from the mainland, which had been a crucial element of the strategic plan. If the city had been taken quickly, this would not have been a major problem; but once the allied commanders had ruled out a coup de main, they fell into the trap of conventional military thinking about how to besiege a town, ideas going back to the seventeenth century that involved the slow and methodical process of digging trenches towards the town’s defences so that it could be bombarded by artillery before an assault by troops. The French favoured the idea of a longer siege, and they brought the British round to their traditional way of thinking. It seemed less risky than a quick storming. Burgoyne, the chief engineer, who had been in favour of a quick attack, changed his mind on the absurd grounds that it would cost 500 lives to seize Sevastopol in a lightning strike, losses that were ‘utterly unjustifiable’ in his opinion, even though the allies had already suffered 3,600 casualties at the Alma (and were to lose tens of thousands in the siege).³⁶