British, French, and Ottoman forces had besieged the Russian naval fortress of Sevastopol for nearly a year, enduring brutal trench warfare, cholera, and harsh winters. Continuous bombardment through the summer of 1855 gradually wore down Russian defenses around the crucial Malakhov Redoubt, setting the stage for the assault in early September that finally captured the city and effectively ended the war.
The siege of Sevastopol had already dragged on for eleven agonizing months by late July 1855, a campaign that came to symbolize the horrific inefficiency and suffering of the Crimean War. Soldiers on both sides endured a nightmare of trench warfare eerily prefiguring the Western Front six decades later: mud, disease, and relentless artillery exchanges that killed far more men through sickness than combat.
Florence Nightingale's reforms at British field hospitals, prompted by the war's horrific casualty reports, were transforming military medicine even as the siege ground on outside the city walls. The Malakhov Redoubt, an earthwork fortification protecting the city's southern approaches, had become the key objective; whoever held it controlled Sevastopol.
Continuous bombardment through this period steadily degraded Russian defenses and morale. When French troops finally stormed and captured the Malakhov in September, Russian commanders recognized the city was lost and evacuated, effectively ending major combat operations in a war that had already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives to disease and battle combined.
Key people: Aleksandr Menshikov, François Certain de Canrobert