BATTLE OF MALAKOFF
SEVASTOPOL, CRIMEA, RUSSIAN EMPIRE 8 SEPTEMBER 1855
Colonel Eduard Totleben, a gifted Russian military engineer trained at the prestigious School of Engineering in St Petersburg, arrived in Sevastopol in summer, 1854, to oversee the improvement of the Black Sea port’s outdated defences. The 37-year-old, mustachioed engineer was appalled at what he found. Little had been done over the past several decades to improve the city’s landward defences. Although the port was protected well enough from an attack by sea, it was extremely vulnerable to an attack by land. Yet at the outset of the Crimean War, it was just such a threat that had rapidly materialised when the British and French fleets suddenly appeared in the Black Sea, overwhelming the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
The old town of Sevastopol and the suburb of Karabel, where the dockyards and naval barracks were located, were protected on the landward side by a single 12-foot-high stone wall, but the edifice was not strong enough to withstand a sustained artillery bombardment. When it became apparent in July 1854 that large British and French armies planned to land on the Crimean Peninsula and strike out overland to capture the port, Totleben went to work to ensure that the city’s defences could withstand a protracted siege.
To his astonishment, Totleben found that the city’s arsenal contained neither sufficient building materials nor tools to improve the defences. He requested that these items be shipped to Sevastopol as quickly as possible. He also discovered that only about half of the cannon in the arsenal were serviceable. Added to all this, the garrison of 5,000 soldiers and 10,000 sailors in the city had almost no combat experience. “There was practically nothing to stop the enemy from walking into the city,” he recalled.
The determined engineer soon had the men, women and children of the city, as well as the soldiers and sailors of the garrison, toiling day and night to improve the city’s defences. They assembled fascines and
