Facts about Crimean War
Find the equivalents:
Не обращая внимания на, периодические столкновения, удаленные места (paragraph 1), с виду, предубеждения, плохо обращаться (paragraph 2), осаждать, транспортный узел, траншея, атака, тупик (paragraph 3), промах, ужасающий, освещение в СМИ (paragraph 4), обрабатывать раны, инфекционные заболевания, примерно (paragraph 5), неотложный, отчаянная нужда (paragraph 6)
It wasn’t fought exclusively in Crimea.
Its name notwithstanding, the Crimean War was a global conflict that featured several different theaters of battle. Early clashes occurred in the Balkans and in Turkey, and the focus only shifted to Crimea after the Allies launched an invasion of the peninsula in September 1854. While most of the war’s most famous battles would eventually take place in Crimea, naval actions and intermittent fighting also erupted in such far flung places as the Caucasus, the Black Sea, the Baltic and the White Sea on the Northwest coast of Russia. In August 1854, French and British forces even launched an unsuccessful attack on Petropavlovsk, a port city on Russia’s Pacific coastline near Siberia.
The Allied forces weren’t very fond of one another.
Though ostensibly united against Russia, the forces of Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire were not natural allies. The British and the French were ancient enemies who had tangled during the Napoleonic Wars a few decades earlier, and they spent most of the Crimean campaign quarreling over strategy and field tactics. British commander-in-chief Lord Raglan, who had lost an arm at the Battle of Waterloo, was even known to refer to the French—not the Russians—as the “enemy.” Meanwhile, colonial prejudices ensured that both the French and the British mistreated their Ottoman allies, who were branded as unreliable and often beaten, ridiculed or relegated to manual labor. According to one account by a British interpreter, some of the European troops even forced the Turks to carry them on their shoulders whenever they marched across muddy roads or streams.
Most of the war was spent in an 11-month siege.
After invading the Crimean Peninsula in the autumn of 1854, the Allied forces scored a victory at the Battle of the Alma and then besieged the vital Russian naval hub at Sevastopol. They believed the city would fall in a matter of weeks, but following a series of bloody Russian counterattacks at the Battles of Balaclava and Inkerman, the war settled into a stalemate. In what became a preview of World War I’s Western Front, both sides dug extensive trench lines around Sevastopol. Soldiers were forced to suffer through a brutal Russian winter, and many fell victim to “trench madness,” or shell shock, from the constant artillery bombardments and threat of enemy raids. It would eventually take 11 months before a French assault forced the Russians to evacuate Sevastopol. The city’s fall was the symbolic end of the Crimean War, but scattered fighting continued until Russia finally admitted defeat the following year.
4. It was the first war to feature news correspondents and battlefield photographers.
Thanks to new technologies such as the steamship and the electric telegraph, the Crimean War was the first major conflict where civilian journalists sent dispatches from the battlefield. The most notable war correspondent was William Howard Russell, a Times of London reporter who won legions of readers—and the hatred of many generals—for his descriptions of British military blunders and the appalling conditions of the army’s camps and hospitals. Russell’s reports helped convince the British government to allow nurses such as Florence Nightingale to join in the war effort, and his coverage of the disastrous “Charge of the Light Brigade” at the Battle of Balaclava inspired Alfred Tennyson to pen his poem of the same name.
Florence Nightingale wasn’t the war’s only famous nurse.
British nurse Florence Nightingale is famous for pioneering sanitary and administrative techniques in the Crimean War’s disease-ridden hospitals, but she wasn’t the conflict’s only notable medical figure. Allied soldiers also received aid from Mary Seacole, a Jamaican-born woman who traveled to Crimea and divided her time between selling supplies, food and medicine and treating the wounded on the front lines. Newspapers later nicknamed her “The Creole with the Tea Mug” for her work in providing battle-weary troops with the comforts of home. On the Russian side, a woman named Daria Mikhailova became known as “Dasha from Sevastopol” for dressing soldiers’ wounds using supplies purchased on her own dime, and doctor Nikolai Pirogov helped introduce field surgery and the use of anesthetics. Despite the best efforts of people like Nightingale and Pirogov, infectious disease still killed far more Crimean War soldiers than combat. The British alone suffered an estimated 16,000 deaths from illnesses compared to just 5,000 from battle.