The Battle of Malakoff, opposed during the Crimean War, the French and Russian armies on September 7, 1855 and is part of the battles that took place as part of the Siege of Sevastopol. It ended with a French victory (France was then allied with the United Kingdom) under the orders of General MacMahon and with the death of all the Russian admirals:Pavel Nakhimov, Vladimir Istomin, and Vladimir Kornilov. The French Zouave Eugène Libaut managed to hoist the French flag on top of the Russian fortress.
This Allied victory would ensure the fall of Sevastopol, a few days later, after what was one of the most memorable sieges of the 19th century, and allow the Allied victory (United Kingdom, France, the Ottoman Empire (to a lesser degree) , and Piedmont-Sardinia).
Defensive preparations
The port of Sevastopol, formed by the Chernaya estuary, was protected from attacks from the sea, not only by Russian ships which had been scuttled to deny access, but also by important granite fortifications at the South. In the city itself and the suburb of Karabelnaya the trace of the works had been laid down for years. The Tour de Malakoff, a large stone tower, covered the suburbs, surrounded on either side by the Redan and the Petit Redan. The city was covered by a line of factories marked by a mast and central bastions, it was separated from the Redan by the inner port.
Lieutenant-Colonel Eduard Totleben, the Russian chief engineer, had from the beginning of the siege begun to work on these sites, repairing, rearming and improving fortifications every day, he finally succeeded in linking them in a continuous way and forming a pregnant. Although Sevastopol was not yet, at the beginning of October 1854, the enormous fortress that it later became, and Todleben himself maintained that if the Allies had attacked immediately, they would have succeeded in take the place, saving time and lives. There were, however, many reasons that dissuaded them from attacking so soon, and the first attack did not take place until October 17.
The Battle
That day a terrible artillery duel took place. The French siege corps suffered heavy losses and its firepower exceeded. The fleet engaged the port batteries near the coast, and lost 500 men, in addition to the damage inflicted on the ships. The British guns, on the other hand, had more success in silencing the Russian guns in and around Malakoff[1], and, if failures had not occurred elsewhere in the town, the assault could have been victorious. However, by the next morning the engineers at Todleben had repaired and improved the damaged fortifications.
For months the siege of Sevastopol continued. During the month of July, the Russians were losing an average of 250 men per day, which led them to decide that Gorchakov and the Russian infantry should launch a new assault on Chernaya, the first since the Battle of Inkerman. On August 16 the corps of General Pavel Petrovich Liprandi and General Read violently attacked the 37,000 French and Sardinians above the Traktir Bridge. The attackers arrived with the greatest possible determination, but the outcome of the fight was never in doubt. At the end of the day, the Russians withdrew from the battlefield leaving behind them 260 officers and 8,000 men; the Allies having lost only 1700.
With this defeat, the last chance for the Russians to save Sevastopol was gone. The same day, Allied bombing had once again silenced Malakoff and its surroundings, and it was with absolute confidence that General Aimable Pélissier planned the final assault. On September 8, 1855 at noon, the entire corps commanded by Bosquet suddenly fell on Malakoff. The fight was most desperate on the Russian side:each casemate, each trench, was taken one by one, but the French did not let go, and despite a new abortive attack by the British on the Redan, the Russians regrouped in the fortress becoming ideal targets for Allied guns.
Even to the west, in the opposite direction from the fort and central bastions, intense hand-to-hand combat was taking place between the two armies. Malakoff's fall marked the end of the siege. During the night, the Russians fled through the bridges on the north shore, and on September 9 the victors took possession of the empty but burning building. The losses in the final assault had been very high:the Allies had lost about 10,000 men, the Russians 13,000; no less than 19 generals had died that day. But the crisis was overcome:with the capture of Sevastopol the losses passed more easily into public opinion. No serious operation was undertaken against Gorchakov, who with his infantry and remnants of the garrison continued to hold the heights of Mackenzies Farm, but Kinburn was attacked from the sea, and from a naval point of view the attack was interesting in that it sees the first major deployment of battleships. An armistice was signed on February 26 and the Treaty of Paris ending the war on March 30, 1856.
The decisive strategic importance of the siege of Sevastopol is not obvious:how the fall of a city, practically without fortification at the beginning of the conflict, brought the Tsar of Russia to his knees. At first glance, Russia might seem invulnerable to an attack from the sea, and the absence of even an overwhelming initial success might have humiliated Nicholas I. Indeed, the capture of Sevastopol in October 1854 would not have had this decisive character, if the Tsar had not decided to defend this arsenal to the end, he was the only one who could appreciate the need to defend the city, and in the end unlimited Russian resources operated in favor of the Allies.
The sea brought the besiegers everything they needed, while the desert roads of southern Russia were littered with the bodies of men and horses who had died before reaching Sevastopol. The hasty nature of the fortifications, too, which pounded every day by the fire of hundreds of enemy cannons, had to be rebuilt every night, this forced the exposure of the workers, and considerably increased the losses. News from Leo Tolstoy, who was present at the siege, painted a picture of the war from the Russian perspective; the misery of crossing the desert, and the still greater misery of life in the casemates, the daily orders to go up to the front to await Allied assaults which did not take place; and no witness to the siege could leave the city without feeling the deepest respect for the courage, discipline, and loyalty of its defenders.
Memory
In France, the victory was celebrated in a strange way:apart from during the Battle of Magenta (during the Italian Campaign), only the Emperor Napoleon III could acquire titles following a victory, but this distinction was granted to Marshal Pélissier. A commune in Hauts-de-Seine, Malakoff was named in honor of the victory. Even today, in Malakhov Kurgan where the battle took place, a flame burns permanently, to commemorate the Siege of Sevastopol (1942)