School of War - Ep 26: Andrew Lambert on the Crimean War

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

Ep 26: Andrew Lambert on the Crimean War  Andrew Lambert, Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies, King's College, joins the show to discuss the Crimean War, including why it shouldn’t have been called by that name. Professor Lambert also explains the relevance of the Crimean War to today’s war in Ukraine. Times  • 01:28 Introduction • 02:20 Causes of the Crimean War • 07:57 Flashpoint in the Holy Land • 12:31 Steamships and Strategy • 16:34 Functional Dysfunction in Policymaking • 21:44 Why Target Sevastopol? • 26:44 What Went Wrong • 31:47 The Press and Public Opinion • 36:31 Reading Events Incorrectly  • 38:57 The Baltic Campaign • 45:30 Mahan and Corbett Interpret the War • 48:39 Ukraine War - An Echo of the Crimean War • 55:34 Can Russia Re-Integrate Into The Global Community?  • 58:32 Will Putin Use Tactical Nuclear Weapons? 

Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them, cannon behind them, volleyed and thundered, stormed at with shot and shell, while horse and hero fell. They that had fought so well came through the jaws of death, back from the mouth of hell, all that was left of them, left of 600. When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made, all the world wondered, honor the charge they made, honor the light brigade, noble 600. You may recognize these verses from Tennyson's charge of the Light Brigade. You may even know that the charge occurred in the course of the Crimean War. But what actually happened in this war? Fought between a liberal Britain and an autocratic Russia

in the context of failing Middle Eastern states and continental European populism. The Russians lost the Crimean War. Indeed, the Tsar who launched it died, as our guest will put it, from a combination of a bad cold and despair. What can we learn of this conflict that is relevant for today. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state of. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran.

We will not see buildings down. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Erin McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. Delighted to have back today by popular demand, Andrew Lambert. Andrews the Lawton Professor of Naval History, the Department of War Studies at King's College. As the author of numerous books, most recently the British Way of War about Julian Corbett, Cepower states, others including some years ago a book about the Crimean War, called the Crimean War. And Andrew, you state in the book that in certain respects this name for the war is a misnesty. So I want to get to that, but perhaps it would be helpful first to step back and give listeners a sense of, you know, between 1815 and 1914, there is a period that I think many perceived to be a kind of long peace in Europe. But the most significant interruptions was this conflict between the British and the French and the Russians. It happened. One of the major campaigns happened to take place in Crimea. Tell us about Europe as this war kicked off and about the fundamental causes of the war. Yeah. So the Crimean War is unlike, for example, the American Civil War that happens not long after, the name actually doesn't describe what the conflict is. It doesn't give us any clue as to what it's about, where it starts, where it finishes. All it tells us is where most of the fighting happened. So it's a kind of results-based name. A lot of people died here, so it must be important. Well, in all honesty, the war is not about the Crimea.

This is a war between Britain and Russia in which the French get involved for some quite significant reasons, mostly French domestic politics. It's a war about the future of Europe and the wider world. It's a war of ideas between a closed, regressive society, which is seeking to extend its territorial control across the Ottoman Empire, particular parts of the then-Ottoman Empire, including modern Romania, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, sections of territory that are still actually part of the Turkish state to this day. And it's a war about trade. Russia is a closed trading power. It takes control of territory. It excludes foreign trade and it maximizes the profits of Russian trade. Britain, by contrast, has a very strong commercial relationship with Turkey based on fairly open trade treaty.

It's advantageous to the British, but it's a two-way process. The British are buying a lot from Ottoman Turkey, and they're trading a lot of goods and capital into the region. So when the Russians make a big play to control the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, the access point between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and pressure the Turkish government in essentially banning British ships going into the Black Sea, it becomes clear that the British will advise the Turks to resist this because they would lose a lot of money. This is a big market. They don't want to lose this market. It's also a long-running struggle about progress and stasis. Russia is very much the autocratic conservative power that's stopping progress in eastern central Europe and is backing autocratic regimes. Britain is much more on the side of the progressive

liberal alignment and is in favor of greater political freedom. The main weapons of what has been a cold war and 20th century historians will be very familiar with the West and the East having a cold war. There is a Cold War. The Russians do not want British ideas in Russia. They don't want British publications in Russia. The Russian Secret Service, by no surprise at all, is the direct ancestor of the current FSB, and its main job is to keep the Russians quiet and to keep bad ideas out of the minds of Russian citizens. Of course, the Russians aren't citizens, they're subjects. They have to do as they're told, and nothing has changed much there.

So it's a war much wider than the Crimea. It will be waged in four significant theatres, of which the Crimea, is only the secondary theatre. The primary theatre is the Baltic. The capital of Russia is in Petersburg. It is on the Baltic. The main Russian economic outputs are coming out of the Baltic and the Black Sea. The Baltic is also a place where Russia is extending its control over regional powers, particularly Sweden. Finland is part of Russia. Sweden is under heavy Russian pressure. Prussia is an ally and subordinate of Russia. So, So the Baltic is largely either Russian or pro-Russian.

And this war will change that quite fundamentally. It's far more impactful in the Baltic than it is in the Black Sea. There's also fighting in the White Sea up around the port of Archangel. There's a major raid on the Murmansk River as well. And there is fighting in the Pacific. So this is pretty much a global war. It's wherever Britain and Russia come together. and it's about who is going to set the agenda going forward.

So it's a war which has many important issues, but it's only the Crimean War if you're an army historian and you think rather messy battles and large-scale casualty events actually define conflicts, and I tend not to. I confess I'm part of the problem here to prepare for this interview. I read two books. One, of course, was yours, and the other was Flashman at the the charge. A marvelous historical novel about the period as all the flashman books are, but of course

it sort of reduces the Crimean War. First of all, it reduces the war as the name does to a war that happens in Crimea. And then it zeroes in on the one event that if you gave anyone a quiz, the one thing the average person might be able to identify with the Korean Crimean War is the famous charge of the light brigade, which will come to, I think we have some sort of obligation to come to in a minute. So stepping back to origins and causes, I think that was a very fine, of course, overview of the actual causes of the war. If you get into, if you like, efficient causes or a chain of causes that, at least in public attitudes, marks the start of the war, the story begins in Jerusalem. Does it not? In a dispute between the French and the Russians there, what happens in Jerusalem?

Essentially, Jerusalem is still part of the Ottoman Empire to rule by the Turks from Istanbul, and they allow Christian pilgrims to go to the holy sites, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, all the things associated with the Christian story. They don't mind, they tax them. As long as they behave themselves, it's fine. Unfortunately, the Orthodox monks and the Roman Catholic monks get into some status disputes about who's allowed to put which emblems in which particular Christian sites, and it ends up in bloodshed with monks fighting with religious instruments in the streets of Bethlehem,

and one or two dead. The Turks obviously want to stop this. It's bad for business amongst other things. So the French say, well, you must allow us to do these things that we want to do. And they send a battleship up to Istanbul in clear violation of international law. It's illegal to send battleships to Istanbul. And it's very significant that battleship is not only a brand new one with a steam engine, which in 1852 is a very impressive novelty, which means it can go up the Dardanelles easily.

The Dardanelles are difficult to go up under sale. But it's also called Charlemagne after the Christian emperor who stopped the advance of the Muslims into Europe. So there's a lot of symbolism here. It's sent by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who's about to become the emperor of France, and he's making a play for Catholic and conservative political support back at home. The Turks who really don't care which bunch of infidel heretics is in charge of what, as long as they behave themselves, tell the French, of course. The Russians then hear of this and protest violently and send a military mission in a series of steamships down to Istanbul and then change the whole dynamic of the process by demanding that the Turks give the Russian Tsar the right to intervene to protect all of the Sultan's. Christian subjects. That's a third of the population of the Ottoman Empire, would be able to ask

the Russian Tsar to overturn the decision of the Ottoman Sultan about how to tax, conscript, or in every other way treat his own subject people. This is utterly unacceptable. It would turn Turkey into a satripy of the Russian Empire. The Tsar, by this stage, Nicholas I, is increasingly minded to support Russian nationalist agendas and Panslavic agendas and Russian Orthodox agendas. And there are strong parallels with the present situation. Nicholas I first is Putin's favorite czar. His portrait hangs right in the antechamber before you go into Putin's office.

I'm reliably told I haven't been myself. Funnily enough, haven't had the invite. is lost. It looks like Putin is almost replaying parts of the Nicholas I I'm the first agenda. So the Russians are essentially putting themselves in a very bad position and the British are looking at this saying we don't want trouble in this area because it's good for business.

We're not big on the pilgrims to the Holy Land thing. Some British people go, but they're not Catholic or Orthodox. They're a very small minority. What we're interested in is maintaining peace and stability in the region. And initially, the British think the French are causing the problem. And then the Russians step in with this really heavy-handed militarized response. And the British realize that the French cannot overthrow the Turkish Empire. The Russians can.

And so the Anglo-French alliance, which is a very strange alliance, given how much we don't like the new French emperor, and the very long history of Anglo-French conflict, is created by the Russians, by their over-ex alliance, by their overbearing and unpleasant behavior in the Turkish region. And the British and the French then get together to put some pressure on Russia to back down, and the Russians don't back down. Failed states in the Middle East, Russian autocracy, French populism, British liberalism,

alignment of states with respect to Russia and the Baltics, it really does seem like not much changes, but the details. Can we talk about steamships for a moment? We'll come back to the war in just a second, but this is obviously a revolution for naval power. How does it affect strategic thinking, the introduction of the steamship? Britain has been pioneering not only steam technology, but in particular the steamship, the British being very much a maritime nation. The second thing they do with a steam engine is put it in a ship. And by 1850, the British are world leaders in marine steam technology.

They're very much in the lead of the new screw propeller technology, which is replacing the paddle wheel. What it means is that when the British think about defending Turkey, instead of sending some ships, they can now send an army as well. They can mobilize an army and they can put most of it on steamships and get it out there quickly, not just men, but also horses. And moving horses has always been difficult over long strategic distances. They've speeded that process up.

So it means that the British can send an expeditionary force to defend Turkey and it will then go on into the Crimea. The Russians are way behind the curve on this one. They have a few steamships. Most of the ones they have in the Black Sea and the Baltic are actually British, where it's British built, and even the Russian-built ones mostly have British or Swedish or other foreign imported engines.

So they are behind the curve technologically. And this is going to impact the war. It essentially means that the Anglo-French navies, which are the two biggest navies in the world, will control the sea. The Russians will not be able to attack Britain or France because the German powers are neutral and will defend themselves against a Russian attack. So this is a war limited by geography and also by commitment on the part of Britain and France, but because it's fought in Russia, it's not limited for the Russians. They are on the defensive and there is no limit to their commitment to defend their country.

So strategy is determined by steamships, by the Austro-Prussian treaties of neutrality, and by the ability of the British and French to deploy large and increasingly larger armies onto the coast, but only onto the coast of Russia. So in 1812, Napoleon marched on Moscow and lost. In 1854, Napoleon III and the British landed on the coast of the Ukraine and the Crimea, and they never left the beach. They fought right on the coast. No British or French soldier ever marched more than a day in Lamb.

So they could always have got away. The Crimean campaign is not a military campaign. It's an amphibious raid. It goes wrong and it takes a long time, but it was always a raid. It had no objective beyond Sevastopol. Yeah. One of the things I found most interesting about your book and is the account not only of of course, of the fighting itself and then of, you know, tense collaboration and competition between

allies, all of which are topics that are, you know, thematically pretty familiar. But the, the documentation and analysis of the bitter and quite unhelpful fighting amongst British officers, politicians, diplomats. The book, I mean, obviously Corbett is a kind of model here, but in a funny way, I don't know how you'll take this, but the book that kind of reminded me the most of is the first volume of Henry Kissinger's memoirs, which to my mind is white house years, which to my mind is one of the finest accounts of how policymaking actually works. Who hates whom? Who do we need to pick up the phone and call first? You know, don't say it this way to him, say it that way. You know, those sorts of questions, which, you know, ultimately are the questions that are preoccupying people in these

sorts of positions. Was the, you know, I don't know if our listeners will be candidly. I'm not particularly familiar with, you know, the British cabinet, circa 1853, 54. So with, with as much context as you think appropriate. You know, was the amount of, I'll just say dysfunction here, because I think you do paint a bit of a picture of dysfunction. It was the amount of dysfunction here, the disagreements, the inability to come up with a coherent strategy, at least early on, unusual? Was it unusually bad in the run of British warmaking, or just kind of part for the course?

The problem of making strategy and policy in certainly the first half of the Crimean War is largely shaped by the fact that this is a period in which the British political system has fractured and alignments have shifted. So at the end of 1852 in December 1852, almost as the crisis in the East is about to start, we get a new government led by Lord Aberdeen. So Lord Aberdeen is the Prime Minister from December 1852. He leads this small group of liberal conservatives who've broken with the mainstream conservative party over free trade economics. What that group is most of the brains of the conservative party. The conservative party is not generally dominated by brilliant people. It tends to have a few skilled leaders and then a lot of

foot soldiers. So he's got all the leaders of the liberal conservatives. And he's formed an alliance with the mainstream Whig Liberal Party. In his cabinet, he now has the last Prime Minister but won, Lord John Russell, who is the last Whig Liberal Prime Minister. He has the highly influential former Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, who has been running Britain's relations with Russia pretty much since 1830, and certainly has some very clear ideas about how to deal with Russia.

He has some members of prominent... aristocratic families who think they're entitled. And outside the cabinet, he has quite a lot of other liberals who think they're entitled too, but they're not in the cabinet and a bit sore about it. So this is not a harmonious team. It's got some very skilled people in it, some very highly effective politicians. Not so much Aberdeen, but certainly Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, Sir James Graham, the First Lord of the Admiralty, two or three others. These, Lord Clarendon, Foreign Secretary, these are exceptionally talented men, but they do not agree. And a lot of the infighting is about what is the policy here.

Instinctively, the conservatives tend to think Russia is better than France, and the liberals tend to think France is better than Russia. So we have a cabinet who don't basically agree on who the enemy is. And you'll find this throughout the war. The British will occasionally refer to the French as the enemy. Lord Raglan in the Crimea actually often described the enemy he was facing as the French, having lost his arm at the Battle of Waterloo. he'd not forgotten who the enemy was.

So there's a problem there. We don't have a single harmonious cabinet. Aberdeen is not a dynamic and dominating leader. He tends to manage rather than drive the cabinet. And that's not a good model with so many powerful and opinionated people in it. There are three future prime ministers and one past prime minister in this cabinet. So you've got too many leaders, not enough followers, not good discipline. So then we get into the question of what the Army and the Navy think strategy should be.

And leading soldiers and sailors disagree quite clearly on this as well. And some of that's on party lines too. So we've got a war machine which hasn't been to war for 40 years. It's got a lot of leaders who were in the last war and think that what they were doing in the last war is important. So the soldiers want to fight the enemy army. The sailors think that blockading the enemy's coast is rather more important. important and dealing with the enemy's fleet. So there's a lot of different agendas in play here. And it all then has to come together into something coherent. And that ends up becoming really

contentious. Because when they decide what to do, the soldiers actually don't approve of it. And they have to be told to do it anyway. You have this great line in the book that the cabinet at the time is, quote, over-blessed with leaders, which I thought was a good way. And what happens at the end of 1854 is that the cabinet is defeated in the House of Commons. And it's then rebuilt under Lord Palmerston because people believe that he actually does understand how to wage war and that Aberdeen isn't really keen. Aberdeen is suspected of being a Russian agent because he's so lackadaisical about waging war. So Palmerston manages ultimately to create a cabinet that he can dominate. And the successful conclusion of the war is very much about Palmerston's cabinet being

much more coherent and unified. And the experience of war providing a reality check to all of those who hold eccentric views that are not particularly positive in terms of getting the war won. Yeah. So back to 1853 into early mid-1854, through all of this churn and disagreement, an idea does emerge. And that idea is we need to go after Sevastopol. And this, of course, becomes the focus of the fall of 54. Why? Why target this one Russian city and port amongst all the available targets out there? Yeah. So that's what, of course, very much in the news. 2014. Sevastopol matters because it's the naval base in the Black Sea for the Russian fleet. It's where the fleet operates from. It's where all of its maintenance facilities are,

including the dry docks. In all honesty, the attack on Sevastopol is designed to destroy the dockyard and sink the ships, blow up the dockyard. Because from Sevastopol, with the prevailing winds and currents, and this is a sailing fleet we're looking at, you can get from Sevastopol to Istanbul in high the time it would take you to go the other way. And that means the Russians can get to Istanbul before the British or French could come up the Daltonelles to save Istanbul. So that's a strategic threat.

And they've got enough troops, and they've planned that operation. And in 1832, they actually carried it out to defend Istanbul against an Egyptian attack. So the British know this. They know that the only way to secure Turkey against Russia long term is to take out Sevastopol. So this is a bit of strong.

strategic engineering. That's a threat. Let's take it out. And of course, Sevastopol then becomes the focal point of the siege, and it's then the focal point of a second siege in the Second World War. So, well over a million Russian soldiers have died defending Sevastopol. Tolstoy writes his first book while serving as an artillery officer in Sevastopol. So if you've read War and Peace, that isn't Borodino that you're reading. That's the siege of Sevastopol. This is firsthand war writing by an experienced military officer, and that's what makes it live. So in 2014, when Putin grabbed it back, there was no way short of starting a very serious war of stopping that because it matters to the Russians. It's one of those half-dozen things every Russian knows.

This is a hero city of the old empire and of the Soviet Union, and it matters in profound cultural ways. You could call it the Pearl Harbor of Russia, but only 3,000 Americans died at Pearl Harbor, a million in this battle. So it matters. And the British are not just thinking about taking out Sevastopol. They intend to take out all the Russian naval bases all around the world. So there will be an attack on the Russian naval base at Petro Pavlovsk in Siberia. They attempt to destroy the naval base at Archangel in the White Sea. They destroy the naval base.

base at Svehbori, just outside Helsinki. They capture and destroy the naval base at Bombsund in the Orland Islands. And at the end of the war, they're planning to destroy Kronstadt, which is the largest naval fortress and naval base in the world and go off to St. Petersburg. And they've been thinking about this since before the end of the Napoleonic Wars, because that's how you deal with the real threat that they've been worried about, which isn't Russia, it's France. The French are building a massive new naval base at Sherbourg on the Normandy. Peninsula and the British have been preparing to knock it down. So they've got all the ideas, the equipment, the long-range gunnery, the whole methodology of attacking fortified naval bases

is in the DNA of the British war-making machine. And all they have to do is cross out France and right in Russia and change the name of the base they're going after. The men who actually destroy the dockyard in Sevastopol, the Royal Engineers, the military engineering branch, they spend every year exercising the attack and destruction of fortified naval bases. That's their 101 standard procedure. And when they finally capture the city, nobody ever mentions this in the history books because it's perfectly simple and straightforward. They spend six months blowing it up.

We capture it in September, 1855. We don't leave until the end of March, 1856, because we've got so much to demolish. strangely enough, I've been to Sebastian. It's in no kind of official capacity. I was a young teenager. It was the 90s in the Black Sea had just opened up to pleasure cruises. My parents took me, and I have a vivid memory. I couldn't have been older than 14 or 15 sitting there in a chinty ballroom in that city

as the choir of the Black Sea Fleet serenaded us over lunch, presumably, for pay. I mean, I was too young to sort of fully capture all. of the sort of the kind of collapse I was witnessing before my eyes, but it was a low point, surely, for the Russian Navy. Yeah, and as you steamed into the harbor on the north side, it's Fort Constantine, which is the last big bit of the defenses that survived from the Crimean War. So all the rest was blown up. So how does the campaign, it goes awry. Things do, you know, from the Iliad on, raids sometimes go awry. People end up sticking around longer than they intend. What actually does go wrong. So the Anglo-French army about 50,000 troops initially deploys up into what is now

Bulgaria, city of Varna, and their plan is to wait for the Russians to cross the Danube and march south into Turkey, and they will ambush them somewhere as they come out of the Balkan Mountains. The Russians are then forced to abandon their position on the northern Danube by Austria. The Austrians and occupy what we would now call Romania. So there is no European landfront between Russia and Turkey. This means the Allied army is sitting with nothing to do. The British cabinet says, right, Sevastopol, they send the orders. The French decide to come along for the ride. They land in the Crimea late in September 1854. They've got about 12 weeks to get this job done. They know the weather's going to break. It'll be appalling in the winter. They plan to get it done quick. So they land,

They march south. They counter the Russian army and defeat them, drive them out of a very strong position. And then instead of going straight to Sevastopol, they march right around it and come up from the south because the French general doesn't want to attack a fortress on the north side of Sevastopol Harbor. The end result of all of this is by the time the British and French have got their siege lines ready to bombard Sevastopol and attack it, the Russians have built up formidable land defense. and they've scuttled half their fleet in the entrance to Svastopol Harbour, so the navies can't steam in to support the army. On the 17th of October, literally three, four weeks after the initial landing, there's a major attempt to storm the city on land with a diversionary attack from the sea, and it all goes terribly badly wrong. The French magazine is blown up by a Russian counter-bombardment. The French are in no position to attack.

the British won't attack without confirming with the French, and the French don't want the British to know that they've made a mess of things. So the attack doesn't happen. Then the Russians reinforce, they attack the flank of the Allied position leading to the Battle of Balaclava, best known for the charge of the Light Brigade, but that's not all that's happening there. The Charge of the Light Brigade, everybody knows, is a catastrophe. In truth, it's not a catastrophe at all, the British light cavalry do something that no cavalry force has done on European battlefields. There are two centuries. They charge right through the Russian gun line and drive off nearly 3,000 Russian cavalry. There are less than 600 troopers involved. The Russians are so frightened by

what they've seen sober men do that they never again come out on horseback. It's written up as a tragedy, but it certainly isn't. It's a remarkable piece of business. The Russians try another major flank attack at the Incomen trying to basically roll up the entire Anglo-French siege line and drive them into the sea. And that's blocked again by relatively small British force at very high cost. And shortly after that, the winter arrives and the siege then stops for about five months because it's just too cold and wet. There's too much rain. Nobody can fight. So it goes into suspended animation.

And then in the next spring, the Allies have reinforced. And critically, they seize control of the strength. creates a Kirch, occupy the Sea of Azov and cut off Russia's main logistic flow into the Crimea, which is coming down the Don River from what we used to know as Stalingrad, and providing all the food and the fodder and the ammunition and the heavy stores. And it's all going by sea and river right into the heart of the Crimea. And as soon as the British gunboat flotilla gets onto the Sea of Azov, they stop that. And the Russians can't feed their horses, so they can't operate cavalry.

they can't move anything logistically and they start to run out of food and munitions. Savastopol is actually starved out. It's never besieged. It's always open to be resupplied, but the Russians simply can't supply it because their logistics have completely and utterly failed. Does that sound in any way like what's just happened in the Ukraine? And because they're Russians, they stand one last major assault on the 9th of September, 1855, but the French very skillfully capture the dominant bastion, the Malacov bastion. And at that point, the defense is untenable.

They blow up the fleet, retreat across the harbor, and the Allies capture Sylvesterpole. one of the things that McDonnell Fraser does a good job of. And if our listeners have not read any of the Flashman novels, I highly recommend them, is through his sort of humorous approach paints a vivid picture of British public opinion, certainly in the lead-up to the war and the sort of war fever in 53 and 54, an anti-Russian sentiment in a sense that the government is dragging its feet and should get on with it, deal with the Russians. And then, of course, you know, public reaction to the actual.

campaign in Crimea, becomes a major factor in the war itself. So talk about the press and British public opinion as a factor in this war. Yeah. So in the 1850s, the biggest selling newspaper in the world is the Times of London. It's a high-end broadsheet newspaper, which has very serious weight. It's taken very seriously, politically. It's very clear that Lord Palmerston, for example, is close to the editor of the Times and is able to use that. Other ministers also have an entree. And what the Times says tends to get reprinted in all the local newspapers. So the day after the Times appears in London, local British newspapers are in most cases echoing the Times. And the Times has a correspondent in theatre, William Howard Russell, who is reporting from the battlefield.

This is the first major war with a war correspondent, effectively embedded with the army, although Russell isn't actually being supported by the army in the way that modern correspondence are. He's having to make his own way. He writes brilliantly, although he's occasionally quite wrong about what's happening. So initially, the British are enormously enthusiastic about fighting Russia. Russia is an obvious enemy. It's an alien and disturbing kind of threat. But as soon as the war begins, they realize that war isn't actually that easy.

and they start to complain about what the Times is telling them. The supplies are not getting through, the sick are not getting evacuated, the wounded not getting treated, the logistics are broken down. It's 3,300 miles from London to Balaclava. And funnily enough, in the 1850s, they can't actually run that logistically. The thing nobody notices is that British are doing better logistically 3,000 miles by sea than the Russians are doing 300 miles by land. And they continue to out-supply the Russians throughout this war,

which is critical to the ultimate outcome. So there's a turn, and Aberdeen's ministry is essentially brought down by hostile commentary in the Times. At times, it's just endlessly sniping at Aberdeen not being fully committed, being a bit pro-Russian, several of his cabinet ministers, not appealing to the Times. And it emerges that Lord Palmerston is a popular choice to be. the Prime Minister. And so the war gets revitalized at the behest of the press and the public.

The public is excited by the fighting. It's then horrified by the casualties. So you can't pick a pattern out of this. They're not consistently pro or anti-war. They're pro-war, but anti-reality. They don't want to know about just how grim it is fighting baffles. Nothing has changed. We're sickened and revolted by war, but we think it's glorious. And it's kind of a schizier about war. The same doesn't happen, obviously, in Russia or to anywhere near the same extent in France, although France has a relatively free press. It's only relative. So this is very much the first newspaper war, and the British cases is particularly interesting. But because it's a newspaper-driven event, we're looking at events. We're looking at the highlights. And that's

why we end up with this reportage of which creates the Crimean War. It's the Times of London that makes it a Crimean War because it's telling you about the big, messy things where people are dying in large numbers. And that's all that anybody remembers. The massive naval campaign in the Baltic, there are less than 50 fatal casualties in two years of fighting. Nobody's interested. you know, as the first sea lord explained to the admiral in the Baltic, he said, nobody minds what's happening up there because nobody got killed or wounded. You know, without a large butcher's bill, really can't be very important, can it? So the metric they're using to measure the effectiveness and consequence of the conflict

is distorting their perception of reality. And the conflict is being won by means that don't involve fighting. Yeah. Well, this is one of the main takeaways, I think, from your book and other things you've written. I'll phrase it in my own way. Obviously, feel free to revise this, but that events in a way prejudice and distort strategic analysis. That things that could happen but don't are things that you're planning to do but end up not, that these are all things that are very significant as well when you're trying to understand the decision making and the policy making and, you know, in a way, the essential history of the affair. And because Crimea happens and because, it's so lurid, you end up with fundamentally a misunderstanding of what the war is actually about. So, yep, people just read it backwards. They look at where all the bloodshed is and they impose a narrative which makes that central. The central object of the war is to remove the Russians from a position where they can threaten to overthrow Turkey. And while destroying their naval base of Zabotephal is a very useful operational level contribution to that. It's the ultimate settlement

that brings security to Turkey for the next 50 years. The Ottoman Empire survives because of this conflict. Nobody bothers to look at that. And they forget that the reason why the Russians give in is not because Sevastopol fell on the 9th of September 1854. It's because by December 1855, It's by December 1855 when the Tsar's Crown Council met to discuss what was going to happen next year, they had to admit they were flat broke. They had no more military resources, and they were anticipating the economic situation getting worse. And this included bred riots, internal dissent, and that the Royal Navy was going to come and knock down St. Petersburg. They decided that this was the rationale for surrendering.

It was not the military defeat in the military. Crimea. It was not the defeat of the Russian army that ended this war. It was the collapse of the Russian economy. And that, as anybody who's watching the news at the moment will know, is brought about by blocking Russian exports. Russia is an economy that exports bulky, relatively low-value products, which are very easy to stop reaching the international market. The British don't even blockade Russia in 1854 because most of the goods coming out of Russia have already been purchased by British interests. So the British would actually be blockading their own trade. They make sure they don't buy any more for the 1854 season and the blockade proper starts early in 1855 and by the end of

the year Russia is bankrupt. The state has no liquidity. It has no access to international finance because funnily enough, the London stock market has called in all its markers and nobody will lend to the Russians. The Baltic is in the news these days, I guess most prominently because of Swedish and Finnish considerations about NATO brought upon by Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Let's talk about the Baltic campaign a bit and about the strategic geography of the Baltic, because again, I confess I have not made much of a study of it because events have not suggested to me that it's enormously significant. And then the last few years have taught me that that probably wrong. What happens there? So the main Russian fleet and the main center of Russian power is on the

Baltic. So the British send a fleet into the Baltic in March 1854. That is the rationale for declaring war in March 1854. It's the retreat of the ice eastward in the Baltic. The British are going into the Baltic just as the ice starts to retreat off the westernmost parts of the Russian coast of modern, parts of modern Poland. what they want to do is catch the Russian fleet locked in harbor in the ice and destroy it. There's a plan to do this. It's a plan Nelson wrote in 1801, didn't get to use. So the whole timing of the war starts with the Baltic.

The object in the Baltic is to break the Russian economy, but also to drive back Russian influence from the Central Baltic. So in 1854, Sweden basically does what Russia tells it, because it's under Russian influence. in ways that we're only too familiar with today. Russia is enormously powerful state. So in the Cold War, we would have called it Finlandized. Finland was a proxy state that had to do, as the Russian said. In 1854, it's Sweden. Finland is a Grand Duchy of Russia. Poland is largely Russian. Prussia is dominated by the Russians. And the Danes rely on the Russians to stop the Prussians invading their country. So Russia looks like it's going to lock down the Baltic as it's locking down the Black Sea. The British are determined that this will not happen. Leverage against Russia

means getting into the Baltic. It means going through the Danish narrows. It means sailing up into the Gulf of Finland. Funnily enough, the British have all the charts they need for this narrow, dangerous sea and for all the other Russian seas because they exchange their charts with the Russians. So the charts used to attack Russia were Russian charts. British had very cleverly exchanged charts, knowing full well the Russians would not be attacking Britain. The British would be attacking Russia. And those charts were translated and printed off just in time for these campaigns. The main British fleet goes into the Baltic.

Far more battleships, cruisers and ultimately gunboats go into the Baltic than the Black Sea. It's a much larger naval deployment. They take control of the Baltic Sea. They try and draw Sweden into the conflict. Swedes don't join until it's effectively over. Denmark and Sweden agree not to interfere with the British going into the Baltic. The Prussians allow the transmit of mail and stores through Prussia for the Royal Navy to use. There's a campaign to open up the coast of Finland and get into the Gulf of Finland.

and in 1854 the Anglo-French fleet lands and captures the Orland Islands, which are halfway between southern Finland and Sweden, less than 200 miles from Stockholm, Russia's advanced base, and that drives the Russians back into the eastern Baltic, into the Gulf of Finland. 1855, a bigger fleet goes in and destroys the naval base just outside Helsinki, big Russian naval base, completely wiped out. by three-day bombardment in which no allied servicemen were killed. So it's a complete non-event as far as the news is concerned. But if you're inside the base, it's really very unpleasant indeed.

The British are then gearing up to attack Cronstadt, huge fortress right outside St. Petersburg. And they're not doing it quietly. They're doing it in the Times. They're saying, look, we've got 250 gunboats. We've got armored batteries. We've got floating factory ships to maintain our assault force. We're going to bombard this place for days and weeks until it collapses.

And then we'll go for St. Petersburg. And this is all part of war termination. So this is what should have been done in 1853. The fleet should have been in the Baltic to signal to the Russians just how seriously the British were taking this crisis. They didn't send the fleet. But by 1855, they've mobilized a very large naval force for assault operations. And when the war ends in March 1856, the British victory parade is a naval review of the Baltic fleet intended for the attack on St. Petersburg.

It happens at Spitthead right outside Portsmouth. It's on the National Day of the English, St. George's Day, 23rd April, 1856. And the inshore gunboat force carries out a mock attack on the fortifications of Portsmouth, just in-exhaired. case anybody's in any doubt as to how the British plan to end this war. And they invite along all the diplomats from all the major powers. And the only one who doesn't go is the American ambassador because he knows exactly what this means and he doesn't wish to be present when the British are boasting about just how strong they are. And this demonstration and the gunboats that serve in it explain why Abraham Lincoln backed down in the Trent crisis in December 1861.

The ambassador in London, Charles Francis Adams, writes to Lincoln and says the British are mobilizing their gunboat fleet. They're serious and we have to back down. And Lincoln took that advice and backed out of a crisis then. So this was now how the British were going to signal their determination. And they would do so to the Russians twice in the next 30 years. They would do so to the French and others. So the British use this war to establish a new language of power, coastal, offensive, steam-powered, assault operations. If you go to war with the British, they will destroy your navy, they will destroy your naval bases, they will crush your economy.

They won't invade your country. That's not what they do, but they will destroy your navy and all of your maritime assets, and this will be deeply damaging. And the problem you've got, it isn't that they can do this. it's that you've got no means of hitting back. And how many Russian soldiers landed in Britain? One thousand five hundred prisoners of war taken in the Orland Islands. That's it. And this is the reality of events that Mahan and Corbett are writing about

and sort of giving a theoretical gloss to. I think one of the problems for the strategic writers, Mahan and Corbett, is that this is so exceptional. that one power should have so much naval power and so little military power, that it's slightly difficult to reduce that to something other than an exceptional case. So Mahan's case is very much about America creating a great naval power and ultimately using that as a means of projecting its military strength. The British don't have any military strength.

It's all at sea. And Corbett is emphasizing in his work just how limited Britain's overall military power is. This massively dominant navy does not have the military weight to translate dominance of the sea into dominance of the land. And in the Great Wars of the 20th century, Britain is only able to be on the winning side, despite controlling the sea, because it's able to operate with powers that can deliver mass armies to the battlefield. The British cannot do this. And when they try to do it in the First World War, it comes within a very small margin of destroying the country and the empire.

That's not the British way of doing things. Limited maritime is the only way that Britain works. It has to command the sea to survive, and it has to maximize that. And as a result, there just isn't a resource base left to do anything else. It's only superpowers like the modern United States, potentially China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War that actually had the resources to look at dominating in all strategic areas. The British had to accept their limits and had to work from the sea rather than there was no transition point in any of Britain's wars where they said, okay, we've done the Navy thing. Now let's do the Army thing. The Navy thing has to be done day in, day out.

because Britain imports its own, it's vital raw materials like food. You can't feed the people. You can't fight a war. We were recording here on Monday, April the 25th. I think it would be a generous assessment of the latest phase of Russian action in Ukraine

to say that they're making minimal gains, I think it's probably more accurate to say making negligible gains in the East. On the theme of the press, despite some lurid reporting over the last couple weeks, that the open terrain of the east would transition the war to one that was much more advantageous for the kind of maneuver warfare that the Russians intend to conduct and not like the quote unquote guerrilla tactics that we saw around Kiev.

I saw all sorts of nonsense running in major newspapers roughly along those lines. What's your assessment? Well, your assessment generally of where things stand today and also very interested in your your assessment of the British, European, American response to what you're. happening and where we go from here. Yeah. Now, thank you for that. It's, as you can imagine, it's been occupying, I think, very large community as has actually in Germany over the weekend. And we had some very interesting discussions there as well. What we're looking at is very much an echo of the Crimean War. We're looking at a leader with a view of the world in which

his potential enemy, in Nicholas the first case, the Ottoman Turks, in Putin's case, the Ukrainians, really aren't very important and are certainly not going to cause any problems. They're just going to be collateral damage in the march towards the securing of an agenda that suits the autocrat. The autocrat has made his mind up. He's dispatched his minions to carry out the mission. And when they fail, consternation descends. Nicola's died of a combination of a bad cold and despair after his troops were beaten. the Evpatoria by the Ottomans.

The world had turned upside down. Russian armies are not meant to be beaten by Ottoman armies. That's simply not meant to happen. Just like happened in the outskirts of Kiev. These guys are meant to roll over. The Ukraine isn't a country, according to the Russians. It doesn't have any right to exist. It should be inside the Russian envelope.

The same problems emerge. The Russian army in 1854 is big. It has a lot of men. It has obsolescent weapons. It has very poor tactical drills. No Russian soldier is taught to aim his musket. They don't have any rifles. They level the musket and fire it like they did 150 years before.

Most of the muskets they're using are 20 or 30 years old. Everything is substandard, apart from how they look on parade. They look great. Putin's army looks great on exercise, but then there's some live fire coming back at them, and it all goes very badly wrong. It's an army of conscripts, both then and now. The only difference is you never got out of Nicholas's army. You were conscripted for life.

You're a Russian soldier in the Crimean War. They had a wake for you before you left the village because you were dead. Even if you survived your 30-odd years in the army, they'd dump you somewhere on the frontier, a set up a new town and defend the empire. So the much-aunted Russian military machine is big but not clever. And the occasional episodes when it looks like it's clever as well as big, flatter to deceive. The Crimea was so easy because the Crimea in 2014, the people who live there are ethnic and political Russians. You know, Sevastopol is a Russian naval base.

It was never a Ukrainian anything. It was in the Ukraine for administrative purposes only because Khrushchev's mother was Ukrainian. It's really, it's got nothing to do with. This battle is about a country which sees itself as separate. And Ukrainians of Russian descent who speak Russian as their first language are still Ukrainians. They do not see themselves as Russians. The separatists in the Donbass, I think, are largely stoked up by the Russians for strategic reasons. I think the reality of that is that the Russians are petrified of having a successful,

democratic, Russian-speaking state on their border that will highlight just how badly they're running the country and how much better it would be if the Russians actually had a vote. I think Putin grossly underestimated the opposition. You don't send undertrained conscripts into fighting in a built-up area. You don't send large armoured columns down wide open roads where there are woods on either side. The Ukrainians clearly fully anticipating what was going on. And I have a suspicion that some special forces from one or two of the interested countries in the West have been involved in training the Ukrainians. There was at least one interview with an American Special Forces officer, which strongly suggested that these American anti-tank

weapons were part of a package which included the doctrine to make best use of them. Interactive users manual. Yeah. If you haven't, you know, the training and the weapon go together. You know, it's all the technology we use. We need to know how to use it, but also how to use it most effectively. British and American anti-tank missiles work really well because they were designed to do exactly that to destroy Russian tanks.

And the Russians are not using their new tanks. they're using the previous generation of tanks, which are utterly hopeless, armored personnel carriers, which are not proof against incoming ordinance, and a lot of frightened and distressed soldiers are now doing what they usually do, which is committing war crimes. And if you send people who are not prepared into harm's way, bad things happen, not just on the battlefield. That's why we've seen so many Russian generals killed,

because when discipline collapses, you have to say, send the senior officers forward to try and restore order. It's also why some of their elite regiments which are also involved have taken such a battering because they've been rescuing the conscripts from the consequences of failed deployment. And then, of course, the Ukrainians did something really brilliant in terms of PR. They sank the Russian flagship. The missile they used was actually a Russian missile, which used to be made in the Ukraine. And it looks like the The cruiser Moscow is an old vessel with a very distinctive magnetic signature when it's got his radars running.

And it looks like the Ukrainians who were waiting for a coast attack around Odessa, picked it up at very long range and fired the missile down the line of bearing and switched on the active homing system in good time. And the Moscow's anti-missile defences were nowhere near good enough. So it was hit by two essentially Russian missiles. and that proved to be catastrophic, cooked off most of the ammunition and blew it up. What is your response to the argument that, as we'll just say, as well as things are going compared to how badly they could go for the Ukrainians, and given the prospect that with enough

supplies, maybe some discrete training, you know, probably outside of the boundaries of the country, but with the right kind of support, you might even see the reclamation of more seized terrain in the east, the argument that actually as attractive a prospect as that is for all the obvious reasons, we need to proceed very carefully because at the end of the day, one of the important differences between the Crimean War and the war we are in right now is that the Russians have nuclear weapons to include tactical nuclear weapons that they might not hesitate to use. We have to be enormously careful in this. This is why the crisis is very difficult to deal with. Russia is a member of the, you know, as a permanent member of the Security Council. So however badly

the Russians behave, the war crimes tribunal will be a long time coming. You know, this isn't Serbia. You know, this isn't Bosnia and Serb war crimes in which the Russians eventually gave up defending their allies. This is Russia itself. The problem we face, I think, is not so much what will happen operationally on the battlefield. So I think stalemate is the most likely outcome. I think the Russians will not be able to secure something meaningful. And if Putin declares that whatever he's got by the beginning of May is some kind of meaningful victory. He's lying and he'll know it. And I think the Russians will know it too. Because he will then have to explain to the mothers of all of those conscript soldiers who haven't come home what's happened. And the Russian population is not dynamic or

expansive. It is regressing. There aren't that many Russians. So for every Russian soldier who's killed, many of these soldiers will not have a brother or a sister. They will be only children. You know, 50-odd years ago, that was not the case. You know, you might. You know, you might. might pay a toll of children to the empire, but now you've only, and China is just the same. If you have a one-child policy and you get a lot of people killed, you've called an awful lot of grief. So the problem will be how it will be possible to reintegrate Russia into the world order in the event of this ending with anything other than a fundamental change of political system in Russia.

The current Russian regime is never going to be reintegrated into global politics. However much money they pay the Austrians to try and stop the Ukraine joining the EU, it will happen. And Finland probably will join NATO and possibly Sweden as well. They might as well be in any way because we work so closely with them. So the politics of this, I think, are going to be more difficult than the battlefield stuff. I think the Western support seems to be adequate to stop the Russians winning. I think finding a way in which Russia can then retreat from its position will mean some kind of recompense.

They will have to pay for this. And I don't see this regime being prepared to do that because the credibility damage would be catastrophic. So we have to hope that the Russians see the light of day and realize that the few, future is not going the way they're going now and that they're prepared to change course and come up with a different plan. That is the only way this is going to come to an end. The prestige that is invested in this by the Russian regime is a matter of life and death. Well, then what do you want to be respectful of your time here, which you're being very generous with. But one more question. How do you rate then the odds of the use of tactical nuclear

weapons, precisely because presumably, Putin does not want to live in a world where he is obviously lying about the gains, quote-unquote gains he's made in Ukraine. He will want a secure a situation where there is some kind of meaningful gain for Russia. And he is at present not employing some of the weapon systems that would make that possible. Yeah, I'm probably a little more optimistic about the rationality of the Russian system than I am about that of Putin. I think that would be an order that would meet some pushback. Also, it won't profit him. There isn't any profit. If he uses nuclear weapons, he has been warned quite explicitly by the American president and others that there will be consequences. Of course, if we go back to the crisis in Syria,

there was a moment there in which this kind of behavior could have been stopped. The British Parliament decided not to commit, and the American president pulled back. I was talking to the French, and they said they had a squadron of bombers ready to go, and they had to stand them down at the last minute when the Americans changed their policy on this. So we have to be very clear that we have to resolve this problem now, because if we don't, it will come back. The Crimea was a very hard one to draw a line in the Sandova because they're ethnic Russians. It's a Russian city. It's a Russian province.

That's hard. This is different. This is a separate country. These people live in a democratic country. They are aligned with the West. And we can see that relationship. I don't think Putin will use tactical nuclear weapons because it won't get him anything. letting off a large bomb is not going to solve this problem.

Whatever he does, he hasn't won. If he turns the Ukraine into a smoking irradiated wasteland, he still hasn't won because he won't be able to move into it. It'll just be a reminder of just how barbaric the Russians are. The Russians have lived for 500 years with a profound sense of anxiety about foreign invasion. the old Russia that was based around Kiev in the early years of the Middle Ages was destroyed by the Mongol Golden Horde and they haven't got over that. The bad people are coming from some one direction or another and the only way to keep Russia

strong is to have a strong man as leader and a big army and to be ready to fight. And so when the Cold War ended, those of us who hoped that the Russians would see a different path forward, ended up as I did, just accepting that Russia would take a very, very long time to change the way it sees the world. The world is a deeply hostile place which surrounds Russia and challenges its values, particularly the values of its current leader. And unless that changes dramatically, it will continue to have an anxiety about the rest of the world.

And the problem is, the more the Russians do what they're doing now, the more likely it is everybody will be ready to fight the Russians because we will all expect that they will do the same thing elsewhere. You know, this is the biggest rallying cry that NATO has had since the 1940s. It's even made the European Union popular in places where it wasn't hugely popular. It's rebuilt connections across the whole of Europe, which looked in danger of collapsing. Poland, for example, was very much on the margins of European Union politics. Not anymore. It's right in the center again. So things are changing.

And they're changing because of what the Russians are doing. And that's exactly the effect they were not looking to have. Russia looks to disrupt and destabilize alliances and political blocks, and it's completely and utterly failed. So finding a way out of this is going to be very, very difficult. So I think my least worst analysis is this will drag on. And eventually somebody will find a way of solving this, which is by no means agreeable to everybody, but it will be the least worst way out. Andrew Lambert, author most recently of the British Way of War, fascinating discussion.

Thank you so much for joining us again. My pleasure. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.