The letters home to his family by Gerald Goodlake, a young officer in the Coldstream Guards, make remarkable reading. They vividly describe the ill-preparedness of the British Army and the dire conditions experienced by all ranks in the Crimea. Goodlake's views on senior officers were frank to say the least! Most important, Goodlake's initiative and courage in organising and leading what were 'Special Forces' were rewarded by the award of one of the first Victoria Crosses. Goodlake served in the Crimea from early 1854 to the end two years later.
The Crimean War was the most destructive conflict of Queen Victoria's reign, the outcome of which was indecisive; most historians regard it as an irrelevant and unnecessary conflict despite its fame for Florence Nightingale and the Charge of the Light Brigade. Here Hugh Small shows how the history of the Crimean War has been manipulated to conceal Britain's – and Europe's – failure. The war governments and early historians combined to withhold the truth from an already disappointed nation in a deception that lasted over a century. Accounts of battles, still widely believed, gave fictitious leadership roles to senior officers. Careful analysis of the fighting shows that most of Britain's military successes in the war were achieved by the common soldiers, who understood tactics far better than the officer class and who acted usually without orders and often in contravention of them. Hugh Small's mixture of politics and battlefield narrative identifies a turning point in history, and raises disturbing questions about the utility of war.
Week after week, the guns of the British expeditionary force battered away at the defences of Sevastopol, eight miles away from Balaklava, the port through which all besiegers’ supplies arrived. As autumn turned to winter, rain and frost turned the track from Balaklava into a muddy quagmire and soon it became virtually impassable. Horses were dying daily in their endeavours to pull carts up the hills to the siege lines, and with few supplies reaching the front, the troops suffered terribly from malnutrition and frostbite. Unless a solution could be found, the entire operation was doomed to humiliating, disastrous failure. When news of the terrible plight of the troops reached the UK, a leading railway contractor and his partners undertook to build a railway at cost from Balaklava to the front line – and promised that they could construct it in just three weeks after they arrived in the Crimea. Though it took almost seven weeks to complete the railway, in that time a double track which rose 500 feet from the port and travelled for seven miles to the siege lines had been laid. With food, clothing and ammunition at last able to reach the front, the British along with their French allies were able to capture Sevastopol and bring the Crimean War to an end. In this comprehensive and detailed account of the construction and use of what became known as the Grand Crimean Central Railway the author describes the astonishing achievement in building the first railway ever employed in warfare, and the first to be used for casualty evacuation, thousands of miles from the UK.
The Sniper Encyclopaedia is an indispensable alphabetical, topic-by-topic guide to a fascinating subject.It is intended as a companion volume to John Walter's Snipers at War (Greenhill Books, 2017) and is another addition to the Greenhill Sniper Library which includes a series of first-person memoirs.This is a comprehensive work that covers virtually every aspect of sniping. The work contains personal details of hundreds of snipers, including world-renowned gurus such as Vasiliy Zaytsev and Chris Kyle as well as many crack shots generally overlooked by history. Among them are some of more than a thousand Red Army snipers, men and a surprising number of women, who amassed sufficient kills to be awarded the Medal for Courage and, later, the Order of Glory. Some of the best-known victims of snipers are identified, and the veracity of some of the most popular myths is explored.The book pays special attention to the history and development of the many specialist sniper rifles - some more successful than others - that have served the world’s armies since the American Wars of the nineteenth century to today’s technology-based conflicts. Attention, too, is paid to the progress made with ammunition—without which, of course, precision shooting would be impossible and the development of aids and accessories, from camouflage clothing to laser rangefinders.Finally, The Sniper Encyclopaedia examines place and specific campaigns - the way marksman have influenced the course of the individual battles and locations which have played a crucial part in the history of sniping, from individual sites to sniper schools and training grounds.The book contains authors’ biographies, a critical assessment of the many books and memoirs from the world of the sniper, and a guide to research techniques.
Snipers at War is a detailed history and analysis of the equipment, tactics and personalities of the ‘sniping world’, from the pursuit of accuracy to the latest electronic aids to observation and ranging. Technology and marksmanship from the Crimean War to the present day is examined in detail. The role of the sniper was largely ignored until the Winter War of 1939-40 between Finland and the USSR showed what could be achieved by specialist marksmen: Finn Simo Häyhä amassed 505 kills in less than a hundred days, a lesson learned by the Red Army to its cost. By the Germans invasion of 1941 the Russians were prepared: when the war ended, in addition to men such as Vasiliy Zaytsev, a Stalingrad hero with 242 accredited kills, the USSR had trained more than 2000 women as snipers. After 1945, the sniper’s reputation declined again. However, the Vietnam War, seemingly unending Middle Eastern conflict, internal strife in Sri Lanka, and ever-present urban threats have given new impetus not only to sniping but also to the development of new and more effective weaponry.
This book studies Crimean War nursing from a transnational perspective setting nursing in the five combatant armies into the wider context of European statecraft.
Over the course of more than three centuries of Romanov rule in Russia, foreign visitors and residents produced a vast corpus of literature conveying their experiences and impressions of the country. The product of years of painstaking research by one of the world’s foremost authorities on Anglo-Russian relations, In the Lands of the Romanovs is the realization of a major bibliographical project that records the details of over 1200 English-language accounts of the Russian Empire. Ranging chronologically from the accession of Mikhail Fedorovich in 1613 to the abdication of Nicholas II in 1917, this is the most comprehensive bibliography of first-hand accounts of Russia ever to be published. Far more than an inventory of accounts by travellers and tourists, Anthony Cross’s ambitious and wide-ranging work includes personal records of residence in or visits to Russia by writers ranging from diplomats to merchants, physicians to clergymen, gardeners to governesses, as well as by participants in the French invasion of 1812 and in the Crimean War of 1854-56. Providing full bibliographical details and concise but informative annotation for each entry, this substantial bibliography will be an invaluable tool for anyone with an interest in contacts between Russia and the West during the centuries of Romanov rule.
A history of the grueling Crimean War battle as told through personal accounts of those who fought there. The Crimean War, the most destructive and deadly war of the nineteenth century, has been the subject of countless books, yet historian Anthony Dawson has amassed an astonishing collection of previously unknown and unpublished material, including numerous letters and private journals. Many untapped French sources reveal aspects of the fighting in the Crimea that have never been portrayed before. The accounts demonstrate the suffering of the troops during the savage winter and the ravages of cholera and dysentery that resulted in the deaths of more than 16,000 British troops and 75,000 French. Whilst there is graphic first-hand testimony from those that fought up the slopes of the Alma, in the valley of death at Balaklava, and the fog of Inkerman, the book focusses upon the siege; the great artillery bombardments, the storming of the Redan and the Mamelon, and the largest man-made hole in history up to that time when the Russians blew up the defences they could not hold, with their own men inside. The Siege of Sevastopol also highlights, for the first time, the fourth major engagement in the Crimea, the Battle of the Tchernaya in August 1855, the Russians’ last great attempt to break the siege. This predominantly French-fought battle has never before examined in such in English language books. Praise for The Siege of Sevastopol, 1854–1855 “In this fascinating book, the voices of men involved in the war in the Crimea are heard for the first time. Compelling and intriguing stuff.” —Books Monthly “The author has collected a large amount of previously unpublished material for this new work. Entries from private letters and journal are mixed with French sources previously unused in the English-speaking world. The result is a work that effectively conveys the thoughts and experiences of the participants to the reader.” —Warfare History Network
Officers led and men followed; all were expected to do their duty without thought of reward. Enlisted men rarely penetrated the officer ranks and promotion owed more to money than merit. Then came the Crimean War.The incompetence and ineffectiveness of the senior officers contrasted sharply with the bravery of the lower ranks. Fuelled by the reports from the first-ever war correspondents which were read by an increasingly literate public, the mumblings of discontent rapidly grew into a national outcry. Questions were asked in Parliament, answers were demanded by the press why were the heroes of the Alma, Inkerman and the Charge of the Light Brigade not being recognised? Something had be done.That something was the introduction of an award that would be of such prestige it would be sought by all men from the private to the Field Marshal. It would be the highest possible award for valour in the face of the enemy and it bore the name of the Queen for whom the men fought.This is the story of how the first Victoria Crosses were attained in the heat of the most deadly conflict of the nineteenth century. It is also an examination of how the definition of courage, as recognised by the awarding of VCs, evolved, from saving the regimental colours at the Alma to saving a comrade in the No Mans Land before Sevastopol.
