The Crimean War at Sea

The Naval Campaigns Against Russia 1854-56

Peter Duckers

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781848842670
• eBook ISBN: 9781844687121
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XIX

Too often historical writing on the Russian War of 1854-56 focuses narrowly on the land campaign fought in the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea. The wider war waged at sea by the British and French navies against the Russians is ignored. The allied navies aimed to strike at Russian interests anywhere in the world where naval force could be brought to bear, and as a result campaigns were waged in the Baltic, the Black Sea, the White Sea, on the Russian Pacific coast and in the Sea of Azoff. Yet it is the land campaign in the Crimea that shapes our understanding of events. In this graphic and original study, Peter Duckers seeks to set the record straight. He shows how these neglected naval campaigns were remarkably successful, in contrast to the wretched failures that beset the British army on land. Allied warships ranged across Russian waters sinking shipping, disrupting trade, raiding ports, bombarding fortresses, destroying vast quantities of stores and shelling coastal towns. The scale and intensity of the naval operations embarked upon during the war are astonishing, and little appreciated, and this new book offers the first overall survey of them.

Chapter 1

The Battle Fleets

The war of 1854–6 brought into action the three largest warship fleets in the world at that time: the British, the French and the Russian. Although it is traditional in terms of naval history to regard the period after 1815 as one of continued British naval domination, with the newly industrialising country controlling a powerful warship fleet which made her invincible at sea, the story is actually not that simple. Unsurprisingly, as great military powers both Russia and France maintained battle fleets of considerable size and strength and the Ottoman Empire naturally aspired to a significant naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea. The Italian state of Piedmont-Sardinia, which entered the war for political and opportunist reasons under Count Cavour in January 1855, also made a small naval contribution.1

The period 1854–6 which saw these great powers putting their fleets into action was one of transition in terms of naval warfare, with scientific and technological development in many fields, borne on the back of industrialisation. Whilst the old ‘wooden wall’ sailing ships that would have been familiar generations earlier were still very much in evidence, new types of warship had appeared over the past thirty years. In particular, the use of steam as a form of propulsion2 was coming to the forefront of naval design and the experience of the naval campaigns in the Russian War was to establish firmly the dominance of steam over wind power in all the leading navies of the world. After 1856, sail may not have been dead but its day was clearly drawing to a close. The main forms of steam propulsion adopted by the navies of the great powers were sidepaddle wheels and propeller or ‘screw’ drives. Both developed almost side by side in the 1830s and 1840s and ships equipped with either type were used to great effect during the war, but it was the steam ‘screw’ warship that established its supremacy. Technological and industrial advances also aided the development of new types of powerful weaponry, from the small to the largescale – from the highly regarded Minié rifle to new types of artillery. Not the least of these was the invention and adoption of the explosive shell, destined, it was said, to put an end to wooden warships.3 Experiments were also going on at this time with the use of iron in the actual construction of warships4 and with the possibility of armour-plating wooden ships. Neither had come to any useable stage of development by 1854,5 though the French employment of three armoured ‘floating batteries’ in the Black Sea in 1855 (see below, p. 136ff.) again showed that a new era in warship design was approaching.

Of the combatant navies of 1854–6, that of the Ottoman Empire was the weakest. The Ottoman navy had of course been a formidable fighting force in earlier times, dominating the eastern Mediterranean. A great reform of the fleet, begun in 1770 after defeat at the hands of the Russians, bore some fruit in the construction of more modern naval dockyards, training schools and new, lighter ships, their principal naval bases being Constantinople, Sinope (on their northern Black Sea coast) and Rhodes in the eastern Mediterranean. Much of their organisation was modelled on the fleets of France and Sweden and the process of reform and improvement continued well into the nineteenth century. But the Turks were not highly regarded for their gunnery training nor the quality of their naval weaponry and although they maintained a fleet of over forty warships by the 1820s, they began to suffer from financial neglect, lack of modernisation and occasionally from actual battle damage; a significant part of their navy was destroyed by a combined British, French, Russian and Austrian fleet at Navarino in 1827, the last major battle to be fought by sailing ships alone.

The Ottoman navy had last seen significant action (quite creditably) during the Eastern Crisis of 1839–40 as part of the allied naval force operating off Syria. On the heels of further modernisation, by 1853 Sultan Adbul Medjid II commanded an impressive-looking fleet of 4 powerful 3-deck sailing ships, 10 sailing frigates, 36 smaller sailing vessels and gunboats, 6 new steam frigates and 12 smaller steam warships. In all, the Ottoman fleet comprised around 70 vessels with about 34,000 men and 4,000 marines, the Sultan’s best ships and crews being those derived from Egypt, then still a Turkish province. However, there were those who believed that the Turkish navy had ‘hardly recovered materially or morally from the overwhelming defeat it had sustained at Navarino. New ships had been built and seamen conscripted but the force was ill-organised and the majority of officers had no great energy or experience’.6 Turkey was not a naval force to be ignored, but her entry into a naval war with Russia in 1853 was not a happy experience, starting with a major defeat at the hands of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet at Sinope in November (see below, p. 44). In truth, after Sinope the allied naval command showed little interest in the Turkish fleet and, apart from helping to wage Turkey’s own war to the east of the Black Sea7 her ships were largely relegated to transport and escort duties, though a few played a small part in operations like the bombardments of Sebastopol and actions in defence of Eupatoria, which became an important Turkish base in the Crimea.

The Imperial Russian navy was also very much in transition. Since the days of its radical moderniser, Peter the Great 8 the Russian Empire had sought not only the defence of its shores and maritime trade but a prestige force that would put Russia amongst the principal naval powers of Europe.9 By the early nineteenth century, the administrative centre of the Imperial Russian Navy was the magnificent Admiralty Building in St Petersburg, built between 1806 and 1823. The Russian navy then consisted of about 40 battleships, 15 frigates, 24 corvettes and brigs and 16 other vessels, with combined complements of around 91,000 ‘people’. But the main strength of the Imperial Russian Navy by 1854 lay in its two major fleets – the Black Sea Fleet based at Sebastopol and the larger Baltic Fleet at Cronstadt, with elements at Sveaborg and Reval. Since the island-fortress of Cronstadt was vital to the defence of the capital St Petersburg the Imperial Russian government always regarded the Baltic Fleet as its principal naval arm. And needless to say, the mere existence of both fleets, even though their natural areas of operation would largely be limited to the Baltic and the Black Sea, could be used as a valuable lever in any diplomatic dispute with Britain or other European powers. There is no doubt that because of the proximity of the Baltic Fleet to British waters and the potential danger to her eastern Mediterranean trade routes posed by the Black Sea Fleet, Britain regarded the Russian navy as a threat of some magnitude and was quite ready to neutralise Russian sea power; the war of 1854–6 gave her exactly that opportunity.

Emperor Nicholas I 10 initially took a personal interest in his navy but found it under strength and in poor condition, with many warships (especially in the Baltic) simply not fit for war service. He initiated radical reforms under Admiral Prince Menshikov in the 1830s, so that both the Baltic and Black Sea Fleets were greatly expanded – causing considerable alarm in British naval circles at the time. However, neglect and lack of use diminished their real strength and further reforms under Prince Constantine after 1850 were not completed by 1854 and had little effect. Much of the Russian navy’s organisation and drill was modelled on British methods but despite the fleet’s intended prestige value, by 1854 the Imperial navy was again starved of funds, the victim of corruption and inefficient administration, badly manned and poorly equipped. The fleets were crewed largely by conscripts, their gunnery in particular was regarded as poor and their guns of less range and power than those employed by the British or French fleets.

In an attempt to keep up to date with modern naval developments, Russia began to experiment with the use of auxiliary steam power. In 1826, they built their first armed steamboat the Izhora, mounting eight guns and in 1836 constructed the first paddle-steam-frigate of the Russian navy the 1,300-ton Bogatyr. This process continued into the 1850s with the construction, for example, of the paddle-steamers Vladimir and the smaller 4-gun Odessa, Krym and Khersones, all of which were based at Sebastopol in the Black Sea. Others destined for the Baltic, to be serviced by a new steam depot at Cronstadt, were the 10-gun Olaf and the Diana. Since Russia did not develop much of a supporting industry, most of her steam ships and their machinery were actually built abroad, often produced by British companies and yards.11 In terms of modern screw vessels they were weakly equipped; by 1855 they had the converted Vyborg, the Orel and the aged Retvizan, a Swedish vessel of 1789 largely rebuilt in the winter of 1855. A few new screw vessels were under construction in 1854–5, including the 46-gun frigate Maria but most were completed too late to be employed during the war, so that to any real extent, Russia had no significant screw warship fleet and comparatively few steamers by the time of the war with Britain and France. Effectively, she continued to rely on the old wooden sailing warship at a time when both Britain and France were developing and using radically new types of vessel. Not until the 1860s did the Russian fleet significantly replace its sailing warships with steamers.

Nevertheless, the Russian fleet certainly could not be underestimated; in 1854 it comprised about 60 sailing ‘ships-of-the-line’, each mounting something between 70 and 120 guns, with over 100 sailing frigates and smaller ships and perhaps 40 paddle-steamers. Their whole fleet mounted 9,000 guns and was manned by over 40,000 sailors. At the outset of the war Russia divided its fleet into 5 ‘divisions’. Each would notionally comprise about 20 ships of varying size and firepower, with 2 divisions based at Sebastopol and 3 in the Baltic – 2 at Cronstadt itself and 1 divided between Reval and Sveaborg, guarding the approaches to Cronstadt. Smaller squadrons were based in the White Sea (at Archangel), in the Pacific (the Okhotsk flotilla) and at Kertch, guarding the approaches to the Sea of Azoff. Effectively handled, the Russian navy would have been a dangerous enemy, as the Turks discovered at Sinope in November 1853. In the event, it was never tested against the fleets of Britain and France.

Whatever fears the British had about the potential threat posed by the Russian fleets, it was the increasingly powerful French navy that gave Britain most concern and against whom British developments and strategic planning were largely directed. The French royal navy of the Ancien Régime had of course been a formidable weapon but was more or less ruined by the French Revolution and had to be rebuilt by Napoleon I into a world-class fighting force. But after Trafalgar in 1805 and in the wake of Anglo-French naval engagements around the world, Britain contained the threat posed by France’s renewed naval power and reigned supreme at sea. This was the fact of the situation in 1815 when the long French wars ended and during the years of the restored monarchy little was done to develop or expand the French navy. Only the accession of Louis Napoleon as President in 1848 and then as the Emperor Napoleon III in 1852 brought about a radical change. Napoleon sought to expand and strengthen the French fleet for many reasons – to defend France’s two vulnerable coastlines along the English Channel and in the Mediterranean, to protect France’s growing overseas and imperial commerce and not least as a pure matter of personal and national prestige. Napoleon III wanted to recreate a ‘Great Power’ battle fleet and as far as the British Admiralty was concerned, there was only one possible goal for French ambitions – a naval confrontation with Britain. After 1850 there was something of a naval arms race between Britain and France, very often with the French making the running12 and by 1854 the French had indeed produced a powerful battle fleet with 290 sailing warships, the largest mounting between 80 and 120 guns, and 117 steamers of various types and sizes, mounting between them over 13,000 guns.

Ultimately, however, for all her design flair and determined effort France lacked the industrial development and capacity to produce a modern warship fleet that would really challenge British maritime supremacy – their production of iron, machinery and weapons, for example, could not match that of Britain in either quantity or quality 13.policy in 1839–40 It is nevertheless true that throughout the Russian War, when Britain and France acted as naval allies – and with great cordiality between their naval forces – both were developing their navies with an eye to the other and to possible Anglo-French conflict in the future. Following the humiliation of French foreign policy in 1839–40 14 and growing antagonism with Britain, British naval strategy in the 1840s was concerned to counter a possible French challenge and developed detailed plans for attacks on French naval bases, especially Cherbourg, with its first-class deepwater harbour and dockyards, which was considered to be potentially the most dangerous threat to Britain. British ships built for deployment in Russian seas and for use against Russian fortifications, whether at Sebastopol, Sveaborg, Cronstadt or Kinburn, could equally be used against Cherbourg or other French bases; experimenting with new types of warship and armaments and creating large battle fleets in 1854–5 was not solely related to the needs of the current war with Russia.

Britain’s Royal Navy was the largest of the combatant fleets in 1854. As an island, with an extensive maritime trade and a growing overseas empire, Britain simply had to maintain a naval preponderance in the face of her potential European enemies, especially France and Russia. There were still many ships in service in 1850 that would have been familiar to Nelson and his men – the old ‘wooden walls’ or sailing line-of-battle ships that dominated the seas by 1815, though these were increasingly larger and more powerfully armed than those known to Nelson. Edward Seymour commented that ‘Admiral Benbow [d. 1702] might have taken command of a sailing line-of-battle ship in 1853 and only remarked that it was larger and the guns heavier than he had been used to’.15 But it is unsound to think of the British navy as simply an old-fashioned force, sticking to its traditional styles and resting on its hard-earned laurels.16 Although Britain continued to build wooden sailing warships, they were not simply copies of older types; newer types were greatly improved – larger, stronger and better armed. New ships like the 121-gun 3-decker Royal Albert launched in 1854 – the largest warship of its day – were immense floating fortresses and represented the most powerful weapons available at that time and the greatest development of the wooden-hulled sailing ship. There were many others in the Royal Navy. Britain did indeed ‘downsize’ its fleet and naval manpower after 1815, largely on the grounds of expense17 but even though the era after 1815 was one without a major European war, there were plenty of opportunities for naval intervention. British squadrons played their part in the Portuguese and Spanish crises of the 1820s and 1830s, in the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s, in the great Eastern Crisis of 1839–40 and in China and South America. And this is not to mention anti-slaving, surveying, mapping and hydrographical work carried out by British naval vessels around the world.

The period 1815–54 was also one of great technological and industrial progress in Britain. The Admiralty, often considered to be a conservative force reluctant to contemplate or impose radical change, was in fact at the forefront in the testing and development of new technologies. It was a case of establishing the effectiveness of new systems rather than adopting them without thought and whilst steam power and iron construction developed rapidly from the 1820s in the merchant service, the Admiralty was more circumspect. The use of steam, new machinery and improved weaponry were all gradually adopted by and absorbed into Admiralty planning, so that the British battle fleet of 1854 was one very much in transition – the old and familiar ranged alongside the most up-to-date designs. The most important new development after 1820 was the adoption of steam power. Using engines controlled by steam power allowed finer control of the steering and manoeuvring of the vessel than did reliance on the vagaries of the wind, enabling steam ships to get closer to the shore, or to control their passage through harbours or narrow channels. In 1853, The Times commented:

When the nature of this modern agent [steam] is considered, and its adaptability for the purposes of naval warfare, the contrast which it illustrates becomes still more formidable. For giving certainty and rapidity to the movements of a fleet, and for all the attendant advantages which are thus secured, the steam-engine far exceeds the standard by which its capabilities are measured . . . [we have] the sublime idea fully realized of man controlling the sea and subjecting the winds by a mechanical power developed by the patient observation of natural forces and the happy application of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Maps and Plans
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on names and illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Battle Fleets, 1854
• Chapter 2:The Baltic Campaign, 1854
• Chapter 3: Opening Moves in the Black Sea, Summer 1854
• Chapter 4: ‘The Invasion of the Crimea’: the Navy Ashore
• Chapter 5: Operations in the White Sea, 1854–5
• Chapter 6: Operations in the Pacific, 1854–5
• Chapter 7: The Campaign in the Baltic, 1855
• Chapter 8: Scouring the Sea of Azoff, Summer 1855
• Chapter 9: Black Sea, 1855 and the Attack on Fort Kinburn
• Conclusion
• Chronology
• Appendix1
• Appendix2
• Appendix3
• Appendix4
• Appendix5
• Appendix6
• Appendix7
• Appendix8
• Appendix9
• Appendix10
• Appendix11
• Appendix12
• Appendix13
• Appendix14
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index