Two leading articles published unsigned, both under the heading “The Capture of Bomarsund”, in the New-York Daily Tribune, No. 4174, September 4, 1854, p. 4, and No. 4182, September 13, 1854, p. 4; attributed to Friedrich Engels by MEGA² (I/13: “The Capture of Bomarsund (First Article)” and “(Second Article)”). Text from the original newspaper (Library of Congress, Chronicling America). Traducción al español.
[First Article]
Leading article, New-York Daily Tribune, No. 4174, September 4, 1854.
The allied armies have at length begun to act. They have taken Bomarsund. On the 3d or 4th ult., the French troops and British marines were landed on the island of Aland; on the 10th, the place was invested; on three succeeding days the batteries were erected and armed; on the 14th the fire was opened; on the 15th the two round towers were taken by storm, one by the French, the other by the English; on the 16th, after a short engagement in which the allies lost very few men, the large casemated fort surrendered. This short way of proceeding certainly looks rather spirited. From all the information we possessed, it was to be expected that a regular siege, with at least one parallel and about a fortnight of open trenches, would be necessary to reduce the place. Even The London Times, which for a long time had talked in a way as if the allied infantry had but to charge the stone walls with the bayonet in order to make them crumble, had to admit, that after all a siege was inevitable, and that this tedious operation would probably last a fortnight.
If, then, the attack has been brought to a successful issue in about a week from the investment, and on the sixth day after breaking ground, the natural inference is that the besiegers must have found far less difficulty than they expected. What it was that facilitated the attack, we of course can merely guess until the detailed accounts of the siege arrive; but there are many circumstances which may have operated in their favor. A considerable number of the garrison were Finlanders, and in part even Alanders. They certainly were not very much inspired with Russian patriotism; and if the reports from deserters may be trusted, they were even resolved not to fight if they could help it. The inhabitants of the Island appear to have received the allies, as soon as they saw they were about to attack Bomarsund seriously, as deliverers from the Russian yoke, and must have given them all kinds of information and assistance. But the main point, after all, must have been something very defective in the construction of the fortress itself. As no ground plans of it are to be had, and all our knowledge of it is derived from views and sketches, and from non-professional, (at least as far as engineering is concerned) descriptions, which are necessarily very vague, and as both views and descriptions are of a somewhat conflicting nature in the details, we cannot pretend to state where the defect lay.
To judge from the sketches, however, the two round towers flank each other by their fire in a certain degree; but as in every round fortification the guns must have a radiating position, and their fire must be exceedingly eccentric, the smaller the fort, and with it the number of guns, the greater becomes the eccentricity and the less effectual is the fire. Montalembert, therefore, took great care not to propose the employment of such towers unless this eccentricity was counteracted by the strong support which each tower would receive from its neighbors on the right and left and from the main fortress in the rear. If five or six such towers could concentrate their fire on one point, the fire would then become as concentric and effectual as it would be eccentric and weak before. Montalembert, besides, knew very well that in the last stages of a siege, whenever it comes to storming, infantry fire is the most effectual that can be brought to bear on the assailants. Therefore, beside the contrivances in his towers for admitting infantry defense, he generally connected the separate towers by a sort of covered way or trench, not for safe communication only, but also for infantry fire. What such a trench can do, we have just seen at Arab Tabiassi, where the whole flanking defense was confined to such a trench, and where the Russians were driven back, time after time, by a mere handful of Arnauts. Finally, Montalembert tried to make his towers entirely safe against a coup de main. He surrounded them with a ditch, with a covered way, and sometimes considered them merely as the réduit, or last reserved position in a large, strong redoubt. This was his maturest plan, and evidently the best. It has been adopted with more or less alteration in almost all recent fortifications where the smaller towers of Montalembert were adopted. Beside these difficulties of access he has the whole of the lower story or cellar of the tower arranged for infantry defense in a very ingenious way.
Now, in every one of these respects the Russians appear to have omitted important features. The time occupied by the breaching fire, twenty to thirty hours, is evidently too short to enable even thirty-two pounders to effect a practicable breach, unless, indeed, the masonry was of a nature not usually seen in fortifications. It may, therefore, be presumed that the towers were taken by scaling, the soldiers entering through the embrasures, and by bursting open the gates. This presupposes a very ineffectual flanking fire, and as it appears that the large fort has no batteries in the rear to assist the towers, each tower was flanked by the fire of the other only. This fault is the greater, as from the sketches it would appear that the ground was very uneven, allowing storming parties to creep up, covered by accidents of ground, to a pretty close proximity. Then, to judge from the sketches and from the event, preparations against a coup de main must have been altogether neglected. There is no trace of a redoubt thrown up around the towers, and the redoubts which the Russians had constructed in front of them were abandoned almost without resistance. There was, it is said, a ditch around each tower; but it must have been very shallow with no contrivances for infantry defense within it. The towers once taken, the larger fort, which they command, was necessarily at the mercy of the Allies. It consequently fell, very likely with no more than a show of resistance.
Judging these fortifications from what this short siege makes them appear to be, it would almost seem that their constructors never calculated upon a serious attack on the land side. They must have built the towers with a view merely to resisting the attacks of parties of marines, which at the most could not exceed a couple of thousands, and not muster in sufficient strength either to attempt an assault or to conduct to its close a regular siege. Consequently the water-front was the strongest, and the land-front, formed by the towers, more show than reality. And yet the result would almost show that a party of 1,000 marines might have stormed the towers many months ago, and thereby reduced the main fort!
As to the storming itself, it must have been done very well by both French and English. The English are well-known stormers; it is their favorite maneuver, and hardly ever fails them. The French prefer to charge a body of troops in the open field; and in sieges their mathematical turn of mind prefers the methodical march of that eminently French science which Vauban invented. But the ardor of a British veteran seems to have driven them on. There was at Bomarsund an old Colonel Jones—the man who improved upon Vauban, when, with hardly half-sufficient means, and against brave and determined garrisons, at Badajos, Ciudad Rodrigo and Saint Sebastian, he contrived to shorten a siege by about one-third of its prescribed duration. Col. Jones is not a common engineer. He does not, like the rest of his profession, see in a siege a mere school-festival in which the chief engineer is under examination, and must prove before the eyes of the army how far all the rules and regulations of formal sieges and of Vauban’s “attaque des places fortes” are retained and properly arranged in his memory. He does not think that the whole army is there for the sake of the engineers, to protect them while they exhibit their tricks. Instead of this, Col. Jones is first a soldier, and then an engineer. He knows the British soldier well, and knows what he can trust him with. And the short, determined, and yet unpretending way in which Bomarsund was taken in half the prescribed time, is so much like the breaching and storming of the Spanish fortresses that nobody but old Jones can be at the bottom of it. As to the French, they could never have invented this way of taking a fortress. It goes against their grain; it is too blunt, too destitute of manners and politeness. But they could not contest the authority of the man who had tried his irregular way of taking fortresses upon themselves fifty years before, and found it to answer in every case. And when they came to the storming, they appear not to have been behind the English in resolution.
It is singular that the Russians, who have prided themselves so much upon their storming capacities, from Perecop and Otschakoff down to Warsaw and Bistritz, these Russians have been repulsed in every assault upon field-works, and, indeed, were not able, before Silistria, to reduce a field-work by a regular siege, and had to decamp without the fortress being relieved; while on the other hand, the very first act of the war was the storming by the Turks of a permanent Russian fortification—St. Nicolai—while the celebrated fortress of Bomarsund has been taken by assault almost without the honor of an open trench. We must not forget to note that the fleets appear not to have in any way effectually contributed to this victory. They seem, after all, to shun the neighborhood of casemated batteries as much as ever.
This success of the allies, however, is of such a nature that it will very likely induce them to do nothing more in the ensuing autumn. At all events, the grand expedition to Sevastopol has not yet sailed, and a few weeks more delay is already promised. Then it will be too late, and thus that repose and relaxation during the winter, which is so necessary after the fatigues of the camp at Varna, will be secured to the heroes of the allied forces.
[Second Article]
Leading article, New-York Daily Tribune, No. 4182, September 13, 1854.
The particulars of the capture of Bomarsund, so far as published, are still couched in vague and unbusiness-like language. We do not, in fact, learn at what distance from the forts the breaching batteries were erected or the ships anchored during the naval attack. We hear no further details, such as might be expected, on the construction of the forts, now that the allied troops have possession of them. Indeed, almost every point of importance is passed over in order to amuse the public with the more picturesque and less professional part of the business. In so slovenly a manner are concocted even the official reports, that nobody can make out distinctly whether Fort Tzee, (as they spell it,) when taken by the French, had to be stormed or not, as it seems that hardly any one but the commanding officer resisted.
The little we can make out is that, as we suspected from the sketches, the two towers were erected upon ground of so broken a nature that ravines, slopes and rocks formed natural approaches even up to their very ditches. In these ravines the allies could comfortably establish themselves, safe from the Russian shot, which passed over their heads; and being thus enabled to construct their batteries close to the place, at once began the siege with those which are generally the last used in such cases, namely, breaching batteries. That the Russians built their forts upon such ground, without at once leveling it up to at least six or eight hundred yards in front of them, proves that a serious land attack was never calculated upon by them. The breaching batteries must have been erected at no greater distance than five or six hundred yards from the forts, as the French battered them with sixteen-pounders, generally considered not heavy enough for breaching a wall even at one hundred or one hundred and fifty yards distance. Thirty-six hours’ firing, however, so injured the tower that twelve hours’ more would have brought down a whole front. The British battered Fort Nottich with sixty thirty-two-pounders, of forty-five cwt. each.
These guns, according to Sir Howard Douglass’s Naval Gunnery, are used with a regulation charge of seven lbs. powder, and would, at the distance of four to five hundred yards, make the ball penetrate from two to two and a half feet into solid oak. The French sixteen-pound guns, with a charge of five lbs., would have, at four to five hundred yards, a penetration into oak of from one and a half to two feet. If the British, as may be expected, increased the regulation charge to at least eight lbs., there is no wonder that with twice the number of guns and double the caliber, they laid one side of the fort open in less than twelve hours.
As to the sea attack, it was a mere diversion. Only Captain Pelham profited by the occasion to make a scientific experiment. He used his long eight-inch pivot gun with all the steadiness and regularity of breaching fire, invariably hitting, as nearly as possible, the same place. These long eight-inch guns are the finest in the British navy. Their great weight of metal (ninety-five cwt.) permits a charge of sixteen pounds of powder to a solid shot of sixty-eight pounds. The effect of this shot, even at a distance of five or six hundred yards, is inconceivably greater than that of the eighteen or twenty-four-pound balls hitherto generally used in breaching batteries; and when properly used, could not fail to produce a tremendous result. Accordingly, Captain Pelham’s steady firing very speedily unraveled the mystery of Russian granite fortresses. A few shots detached what hitherto appeared a large block of solid granite, but turned out to be a mere facing slab, the thickness of which was in no wise proportionate to its hight and width. Some more shots, and the next adjoining slabs fell in, and then followed an avalanche of rubbish, rattling down the walls, and laying bare the very heart of the fortress. It then was clear that the “granite” was nothing but show; that as soon as the comparatively thin slabs which faced the escarpe were knocked down, there was no solid masonry inside to resist the inroads of bullets. The walls, in fact, were mere casings, the interstices of which were filled up with all sorts of broken stones, sand, &c., having neither cohesion nor stability. If the main fortress was thus constructed, there is no doubt the masonry of the towers was equally bad, and the rapid breaching is fully explained. And these walls, of so little intrinsic strength, had by their imposing outside sufficed to keep the whole Anglo-French fleet at bay for nearly four months! The disappointment of Sir Charles Napier when he saw what they really were made of cannot however, have been greater than that of the Czar, when he learned of what the “granite,” for which he had so dearly paid, consisted. In the land attack, another feature is remarkable. We have already seen that broken ground surrounded the forts not only within gun-range, but even within musket-range. This was taken advantage of by the Chasseurs of Vincennes, who crept up very close, sheltering themselves behind stumps of trees, boulder stones, rocks, &c., and opened a murderous fire upon the embrasures of the casemates. As at a distance of four to five hundred yards their rifles have an unerring aim, and moreover, the sloping-side embrasures, like a tunnel, make every bullet which strikes them enter the central opening at the bottom, it may well be imagined how much the gunners in the fortress were annoyed while loading.
The Russians appear to have entirely neglected the commonest precautions against this rifle fire. They, too, had rifles. Why did they not post them behind the parapet of the roof of the tower, where they commanded the enemy’s skirmishers? But the Finnish rifles at Bomarsund appear to have had no inclination to fight for the glory of Holy Russia. Finally, the French employed, besides the three breaching guns, some mortars and three howitzers. The mortars sent their shells at a high angle on the bomb-proof roof of the tower, trying to crush it by the combined force of the fall and the explosion. This, however, does not appear to have been of great effect. On the other hand, the French howitzers stuck to direct horizontal firing, and aimed at the embrasures. At the short distance of four or five hundred yards a long twenty-four pound brass howitzer, throwing a shell of six inches diameter, might very well hit such an object as an embrasure once in three times; and every shell entering would disable the men at the gun, besides dismounting the gun itself. This fire, therefore, must have been very effective.
Thus we see that the granite walls of Bomarsund turned out mere Russian humbug—heaps of rubbish kept in shape by thin stone-facings, not fit to resist a good and steady fire for any time. If Nicholas had been cheated by their constructors, he has succeeded for all that in cheating the allies out of a whole campaign by these sham fortresses. The defense on the part of the Russians was, upon the whole, indifferent; and this may be traced to the pretty plainly pronounced disaffection of the Finnish troops. The attack of the allies was characterized by a resolution unheard of hitherto in their proceedings, and due, evidently, to Gen. Jones. The difficulties overcome in moving and placing the guns, though exaggerated by Sir Charles Napier, were certainly great. The French attacked with breaching guns of too weak caliber and with mortars that could be of little use under the circumstances, but their mode of horizontal shell-firing and rifle-firing at the embrasures deserves high eulogium. The English, as usual, came down with the heaviest caliber they could move, gave plain, straight-forward and effective fire, underwent difficulties and stood fire with their usual steadiness, and carried their point without fuss, but also without any special distinction.
Bomarsund being taken, the question next arises, what is to be done with it? According to the latest dispatches from Hamburg, at a council of war held by the Admirals, the Generals-in-Chief of the expeditionary troops and the principal commanders resolved upon destroying all the fortifications and abandoning the island, if Sweden should not be inclined to occupy it and buy it at the price of a declaration of war against Russia. If this dispatch prove true, the expedition against the Aland Islands, so far from being a military move, as announced by the Moniteur, would prove simply a diplomatic one, undertaken with a view to entangle Sweden in a dangerous alliance with the same powers whose friendship, to use the words of Mr. Bright, “has brought upon Turkey in a single year such calamities as Russia in her wildest dreams of ambition never imagined.” The Swedish Court hesitates, the Swedish press warns the people against the Danaos et dona ferentes; but the Swedish peasants have already passed a motion that the Chamber should petition the King to take steps that Aland may never again become Russian. There is little probability that the petition of the peasants will be listened to, and we may expect soon to hear that the fortress has been blown up.