The Crimean war was fought between an alliance of Ottoman, British, French, and Italian forces vs a declining Imperial Russia. Every major western military either took part in, or observed the war with the most famous of US Civil-War generals being among such members and the war directly contributing towards Bismark’s rapid modernization and mobilization of Prussian forces to unite the German states in the second Franco-Prussian war.
It is the war that convinced western militaries to begin to abandon smoothbore muskets for rifles and began the adoption of alternative reloading methods to increase range and rate of fire. It was French and British rifles that started the transformation but later Prussian needle rifles would begin mass production of rifling (though the French design remained the greatest performing of the early designs).
In short, every modern war and how it was fought, by train, rifle, officers, and organization can be attributed to this one war, and nobody talks about it.
by _Boodstain_
8 Comments
I think of it as the first *truly* modern war
Lee never read the reports on the Crimean war and it showed. ́Grant, despite being a civilian at the time, managed to read about it, and it showed too.
Lee was emulating Napoleon, Grant was emulating the French at Sebastopol.
Not to mention the medical care aspect.
Not disputing that it was massively influential, but Prussia had already adopted the Needle-Rifle well over a decade earlier.
Dreyse had first presented it in 1836, Prussia had ordered its first 60,000 in 1840, and it started being deployed en-masse in 1848. Most militaries also stayed extremely skeptical of the thing until the prussian victories in 1866
George B. McClellan was one of the three US Officers sent as official observers. From the second hand retelling of what their experience was like, it seemed they wanted to spend most of their time trying to be attached to the French who had no interest in them. The UK was eager to share with the US, but the Commission didn’t really care.
The American Civil War had more of an impact on the US modernizing. I mean, it was the US that developed repeating rifles for that war.
Edit: meant as reply, not top-level comment
Edit 2: nvm I was right the first time
Then observers of the US Civil War and Russo-Japanese War from Europe said, “… I’ll ignore that,” when they saw that rapid fire guns and accurate rifles with magazines lead to trenches.
It was also the first major war to be extensively photographed