A QUESTION TO THE HOUSE
Why did we attack the Redan? It was a matter of policy! Lieutenant A.M. Earle, 57th Foot. From a letter to his father on 10 September 1855.
On 14 March 1856, Colonel Fitzstephen French rose to address the House of Commons. He asked whether any inquiry was to take place into the failure of the attack on the Great Redan by Her Majesty's troops in the Crimea on 8 September 1855. In the colonel’s view, the arrangements before the assault had been ‘notoriously and inexcusably defective’, British soldiers had been killed needlessly, and reserves had not been used to support the attack. In short, French argued, there had been unforgivable mistakes, and he demanded to know the reason why.
During his steady but emphatic speech, French suggested why he thought the assaults on the Redan had been hopelessly mismanaged. British trenches had not been pushed far enough towards the Russian defences, he said, and there had been no holding area where a large attack force could have been mustered before the assault. He reminded the House that an earlier attack on the Redan on 18 June 1855 had also resulted in a massacre and he applauded the competence of Britain’s allies (the French) whose attacks on similar objectives were clearly coordinated despite heavy losses.
With trenches carried up to the defences of Sebastopol and a place d'armes sufficient to hold 30,000 men, French troops had succeeded in taking the Malakoff Tower while British forces had failed at the Redan on two occasions. Had General Simpson taken the same precautions as Marshal Pelissier, said Colonel French, the result would surely have been a success in both cases. Too few men had made the attacks on the Redan, he added vehemently, and out of the storming parties under General Simpson’s command, he had been reliably informed that only 5000 men had actually taken part in the final assault on the 8th September.
After a brief pause for breath Colonel French revealed the even worse revelation that this force was not in fact used and that only half the storming party had vacated the British trenches. He also had evidence that the few troops who eventually made good their entrance into the Redan were left unsupported. For more than an hour and a half, they struggled as best they could against fearful odds. And he also pointed out that General Simpson was three-quarters of a mile away from the action, separated by a deep ravine, from which it was impossible for him to communicate with his commanders. Add to this the fact that only two officers had been left in command of the operation, without any definite orders, and the disaster, in his view, was totally unforgivable.
With shaking hand, Colonel French concluded his statement by saying that, ‘he would have preferred that an officer of the line had demanded an inquiry into the battles of the Redan, but as this had not been raised, he felt it his duty to ask.’ Having lost a near relative who was killed at the head of his regiment storming the Redan, he trusted that the House would excuse his passionate plea for justice, but he deemed it essential to ask for an explanation so that the honour and reputation of the army might be satisfied.
After another short pause, the Prime Minister, Viscount Palmerston, rose to answer French’s question and said that he had written for further details on first receiving an account of the attack on the Redan. Consequently, he found all those details quite satisfactory and entirely exonerated from blame all those concerned with both attacks. He concurred with his Honourable Friend that so far from the attacks casting any slur upon the British army, it was a glowing tribute to the valour of both the officers and the soldiers who took part.
Palmerston reminded the House that the attack on the Redan was the result of a joint arrangement between French and British officers and that if British troops had not succeeded in the assault, so too had the French, who failed to coordinate with the British on both occasions. Palmerston added that ‘the difficulties in the way were very great,’ and he went on to say that all the allied operations were intended to contribute to the taking of the Malakoff Tower - the key to Sebastopol. He agreed that although one might lament the misfortunes which had occurred ‘at other points’ during that day, very probably the assault on the Malakoff might not have succeeded had not those other attacks been made. Then the Prime Minister concluded his statement by saying that in his opinion, ‘the 8 September should not shed dishonour on the British army’, and he thought that both that day and the 18 June, ‘might be mentioned as days that shed lustre on the attackers, not disgrace.’
It is unknown whether the House responded favourably or with some indifference to the Prime Minister’s answers, but Palmerston’s reference to the 18 June 1855 was significant. Indeed, the truth is that this first attack on the Redan, made on the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo, should have prevented a second assault from ever taking place.
However, it seemed Lord Palmerston had missed the point, and there were clearly other contributory factors that prevented British success against the Redan. During a parliamentary debate in July 1855, John Bright, the radical Liberal MP for Manchester, addressed the Sebastopol Committee regarding the sorry state of affairs in the Crimea. It was a long-standing argument of his and yet another chapter in a personal crusade against a British government that was both numb and unwilling to act against recent military negligence and logistical errors of judgment.
Among other complaints about the desperate conditions endured by the British army before Sebastopol, Bright told the following story, which points to the fact that a good proportion of the officers and men who took part in the attacks on the Redan were young and inexperienced. Amid much heckling, Bright said:
I met a gentleman last night who told me a very distressing fact regarding a relative of his: a young boy only seventeen years of age, who had undergone no military drill or studies whatever. This lad was ordered abroad. His father applied to the Horse Guards, and remonstrated against his being sent to the Crimea, where in all probability, from his youth, he must immediately fall a victim to the climate. The father was told by the authorities that he need not be alarmed, that his son would only go to Malta, where he would remain for twelve months and be put through the drill and then he could go on to the Crimea, if necessary. The lad, however, had not been at Malta three weeks before he was sent to the Crimea. He landed there on the 16th of June; on the 17th he went up to the trenches; on the 18th, with his company, he withstood that murderous fire from the Redan; and now, according to the last accounts from him, he is still day after day subjected to the horrors of the siege.
However, it seemed Bright’s speech failed to move the Committee. In fact, there was an impromptu laugh from the backbenches that spoke volumes of a war that was clearly an embarrassment. The argument was destined for the parliamentary wastebasket, and Bright later paid in full for his outspoken beliefs. After being rebuffed in public several times more regarding the disastrous state of affairs in the Crimea, he suffered a nervous breakdown and eventually lost his seat as MP for Manchester.
The concerns of Colonel French, Bright and others were part of a civil campaign to seriously question the blunders made during the Crimean War. But another cause of the disasters before the Russian port of Sebastopol, as hinted at by French, hinged on allied cooperation and the much-quoted truth that the Malakoff Tower (the largest Russian fortification) was the key to victory in the Crimea. Had Sir John Burgoyne succeeded to command the army instead of Lord Raglan at the outbreak of the war in 1854, it is said that he would have demanded the right of attacking the Malakoff with British divisions as well as French ones. In fact, he had pointed out that any attack on the Redan would be ‘a false attack’ and that if the Malakoff were taken, ‘the rest of the Russian defences would fall like a pack of cards.’ However, this was easier said than done, and the French losses before the dreaded Malakoff were extreme. Indeed, they were so significant that orders came from Emperor Napoleon himself that caution should be observed before mounting any further operations like that in the future.
As with all grand military operations in history, capturing the Great Redan was a political necessity. And aside from the dithering and blunders of those in authority, there were many veterans and soldiers that, despite their professional misgivings, took such actions without proper intelligence. Generals blundered their way into unforgivable situations and soldiers were ordered on numerous occasions to do the impossible. A whole catalogue of mistakes had already been made in the Crimea before the assaults on Sebastopol, and heroic deeds were made out of pure incompetence on the battlefield, some of which became legendary despite the carnage.
A hero and later general who became synonymous with the final attack on the Redan was Charles Ashe Windham. Feeling that serious personal repercussions might fall on him following the siege, Windham wrote an account of his incredible exploits at Sebastopol that at the time was not intended for publication. Evidently, the piece was originally written for posterity so that his children might understand the ‘truth of the matter.’ However, such a heroic and controversial story was not destined to remain private for long. In his memoir, which was eventually published in 1897, ‘Redan Windham’ (as he later became known) actually revealed at first hand the horrendous mistakes that were made before and during the attacks on the strongly held redoubt.
Timothy Gowing, a sergeant in the Royal Fusiliers, was equally galled about the decisions made further up in the military food chain. Like John Bright in his speech, Gowing also questioned the calibre of British troops in the trenches before the Redan:
We had now a great many very young men with us that had been sent out to fill up the gaps. They were brave enough for almost anything, but we had a job in front of us that was enough to shake the strongest nerves, and we wanted the men that had been sacrificed during the winter for want of management. They would have done it as neatly as they had turned the Russians back at the Alma and Inkerman. But the work that was about to be carried out was a heavy piece of business and required at least 20,000 men who had been well tried.
The truth was that everyone in authority knew that both attacks on the Redan were fraught with problems. Even the rank and file ‘boys’ that had just arrived from Malta feared that they had been tumbled irreverently into a fight that they might not walk away from. Gowing’s concerns are a testament to the tragic mix of immense courage and gross mismanagement that dogged the British army ever since setting foot in the East. His record of what occurred when the Radan was attacked on 18 June is doubly damning of a military operation that was, to all intent and purposes, doomed to failure before it even started.
Thomas Faughnan, an Irish corporal in the 17th Regiment, went further in his war diary. And after grimly recalling the battle for the Redan, his anger turned directly against those in authority who had blindly sent men to their deaths without any plan or preparation, so much so that some soldiers in the army immediately fell into a deep and long-lasting depression. By this time, the surgeons were at work, and arms and legs were being amputated in the numerous makeshift field hospitals. Friends of those still alive were either dead or dying, and tempers were racing against those they saw as responsible for the bloody massacre before the Redan:
Who’s fault was it? Not the men’s! Who’s fault was it that the Redan was not breached by round shot and the abatis swept away before the assault was made? Not the men’s! Who’s fault was it that supports were not pushed forward to the Redan on the assault being made? Not the men’s! Nothing can be compared to the bravery, daring and courage of the officers and soldiers of the British Army when they are brought properly into action; but when a handful of men are sent to take a stronghold like the Redan, armed with all sorts of destructive missiles, and manned by an immense force, it could not be expected that men could do impossibilities.
In retrospect, the attacks on the Great Redan were tragedies of the highest order. The Crimean War was the first time that the British soldier experienced trench warfare on a large scale to gain a major objective, and it was the same for the French, whose casualty rate was more extreme in every respect.
Like the Great War, the conditions before Sebastopol mirrored the unsanitary, waterlogged and vermin-ridden entrenchments of the Somme sixty years later. Long periods of inactivity and boredom contrasted sharply with impromptu flashes of action and danger. Similarly, movement of any kind was limited before the beleaguered city of Sebastopol, and punitive escalades into enemy territory proved costly for little or no gain. The day and night bombardments of enemy positions such as the Malakoff and the Redan were largely ineffective fusillades that gained no military advantage. Browbeaten Russian soldiers ensconced in myriad dugouts, rabbit warrens, and bomb shelters emerged strategically unscathed to rebuild their defences after artillery had ceased fire.
Leo Tolstoy, the celebrated Russian author, was 26 years old when he first saw action in the Crimea and in his Sevastopol Sketches, he gives vivid descriptions of the hell on earth that turned him from an inflamed patriot into committed sceptic:
On the earth, torn up by the recent explosion, were lying, here and there, broken beams, crushed bodies of Russians and French soldiers…heavy cast-iron cannon overturned into ditches by terrible force, half-buried in the ground and forever dumb, bomb-shells, balls, splinters of beams, ditches, bomb-proofs and more corpses in blue or grey overcoats, which seemed to have been shaken by supreme convulsions.
The static Crimean battlefield was something frustratingly new to commanders and soldiers whose tactical skill and weaponry had been largely comatose since the days of Waterloo. Lord Raglan, the British Commander in Chief (and a veteran of Waterloo), failed to adapt to the new strategic and logistical problems faced by his soldiers. His divisional commanders were no better orientated towards warfare. And on numerous occasions, they too displayed a numbness and austerity to combat that was more at home in the Victorian parlour rather than the battlefield. In fact, most of Raglan’s generals had never been in action before. Famously by 1855, Raglan’s two cavalry brigade commanders had already transferred their private family warring to the battlefield, and the equally famous Charge of the Light Brigade was the result. But Tennyson’s poetic ‘noble six hundred’ were not the only soldiers to suffer from muddle and negligence; thousands of men died of disease, exposure and neglect through no fault of their own in the formidable and changeable Crimean weather conditions.
All this and more was eventually reported to the British public. In newspaper correspondence, despatches were extremely scathing, and shocked readers demanded an answer. Britain quickly learnt of her victories and defeats, the blind courage of her soldiers and the miserable and disease-ridden conditions they lived in at their breakfast tables. The news was transmitted almost live by an extension of the electric telegraph cable direct from the Allied positions before Sebastopol to the London press offices of The Times. The vivid and graphic correspondence of journalist William Howard Russell contributed to the public outcry when it became known that more soldiers were dying of cholera and bad hospital conditions than wounds received in battle. Politicians became targets for their anger, which in the end led to the resignation of the Prime Minister and the downfall of the British government. The combination of mismanagement and the constrained abilities of British generals to make proper strategic and tactical decisions is such a feature of the war that all other reasons for failure pale into insignificance. Logistically the army, and the British people, had been badly let down, and even when Lord Palmerston came to power in 1855, soldiers were still suffering because of incompetence.
Before he died in the Crimea (allegedly out of pure melancholy resulting from the first failed attack on the Redan), Lord Raglan asserted ‘that the descent on the Crimea is decided upon more in deference to the views of the British government than to any information in the possession of the naval and military authorities.’ No doubt he was trying to sweep some blame away from his exposed flanks, but there is no doubt where he was aiming his pistol. In his view, the war was being mismanaged from a distance - something that Timothy Gowing, Windham, Faughnan and the ‘boys’ in the trenches could never hope to grasp.
Russell of The Times and Roger Fenton, the acclaimed photographer of the war, both echoed the fact that the attacks on the Redan were gigantic mistakes and that rumours were rife in the British camp that the French were to blame for it. Indeed, in his correspondence to Lord Panmure, Secretary of State for War, Lord Raglan considered a sudden change of plan as the main reason for British defeat on 18 June. Russell echoed the common feeling in his dispatches along with the outrageous statement that Raglan had ordered the British assault in the full knowledge that it might fail. However, Fenton, in his letters home, was not drawn in by rumour and anti-French propaganda:
Our engineers say that the defect is owing to General Pelissier’s advancing the attack on the Malakoff by 2 hours, thus preventing our batteries from silencing the guns when the Russians had got into the Redan during the night, so that our men when they advanced from the trenches were met with a tremendous fire of grape (grapeshot). I’m incline to think that the failure of the attack was not owing to General Pelissier, but to our own presumption in undervaluing the resistance to be expected.
In a similar vein, describing the failure of the second attack on the Redan on 8 September 1855, William Howard Russell of The Times wrote that most soldiers were confused by their orders and did not know where or what to attack. Russell also eluded again to the apparent ‘state’ of younger recruits prior and during the assault - a sad indictment on British discipline and combat readiness if his observations are correct:
The rapidly increasing swarms of wounded men, some of whom had left their weapons behind them, at last gave rise to suspicions of the truth, but their answers to many eager questioners were not very decisive or intelligible, and some of them did not even know what they had been attacking. One poor young fellow, who was stumping stiffly up with a broken arm and a ball through his shoulder carried off his firelock with him, but he made the naive confession that he had never ‘fired it off, for he could not.’ The piece turned out to be in excellent order. It struck one that such men as these, however brave, were scarcely a lit match for the well-drilled soldiers of Russia; and yet we were trusting the honour, reputation and glory of Great Britain to undisciplined lads from the plough, or the lanes of our towns and villages. Nor can it be considered as ought but ominous of evil that there have been two Courts of Inquiry recently held concerning two most distinguished regiments - one, indeed, belonging to the highest rank of infantry and the other a well-tried and gallant regiment, which was engaged in this very attack - in consequence of the alleged misconduct of their young soldiers during ‘night affairs’ in the trenches.
Undisciplined lads from the plough, courts of inquiry, alleged misconduct in the ranks of well-known regiments, night affairs in the trenches? Was Russell blaming the British soldier for the disaster after all? Or was he accusing a higher authority for the blunders?
So who was responsible for the massacres before the Redan? Who was Colonel French aiming his emotionally charged questions at in parliament? Were Lord Raglan and his successor General Simpson wholly to blame for the mistakes? Or was the problem more complex and far-reaching? One thing is certain, if the British were itching for a fight after forty years of inactivity since the battle of Waterloo, then the ill-fated attacks on the Redan illustrate a tactical and cold-blooded numbness by those in authority that even today points to cold-blooded murder.
But of course, the answer to this numbness in the Victorian age was one of suppression. ‘Redan’ Windham’s heroic sobriquet was almost certainly a media cover-up to the failure using his courage under fire as a convenient smoke-screen. Members of Parliament and even the monarchy pandered to the heroic and patriotic when faced with awkward questions like those brought by Bright and French. Other more tangible phenomena too were eagerly used to commemorate the battles for the Great Redan, including memorials, newly built streets and even public houses with Crimean names. These were all immediately carved into the public consciousness and legend in a similar way to the Light Brigade heroes, who were later glorified in verse by Alfred Lord Tennyson.