Charles Napier (Royal Navy Officer) - Baltic Campaign

Baltic Campaign

On the outbreak of the Russian War, better known as the Crimean War, he received the command of the largest fleet which the Royal Navy had assembled since the Napoleonic Wars, destined to act in the Baltic Sea. This was not without misgivings on the part of the Admiralty, but he was the most senior and experienced officer available. Napier hoisted his flag in February 1854 in the steam ship of the line HMS Duke of Wellington (131), his subordinate commanders being the Rear-Admirals Armar Lowry Corry, second in command, Henry Ducie Chads, third in command, and James Hanway Plumridge, commanding the scouting forces. They were all elderly men, at most a year or so younger than Napier himself. Napier's force, which was augmented in June by a French fleet sent by Napoleon III, though impressive on paper, was radically unsuited to operations in the Baltic, chronically short of men and especially of experienced seamen, while he was hampered by contradictory sets of orders from the Admiralty. Nevertheless he successfully blockaded all the Russian ports, sufficiently overawed the Russian Baltic Fleet that it never stirred from its moorings, and carried out many bombardment operations as far as the northernmost point of the Gulf of Finland. During the campaign the first ever Victoria Cross was won by a Midshipman of the gunboat HMS Hecla who threw a Russian explosive shell overboard before it could detonate. During the campaign Rear-Admiral Corry was invalided home because of poor health; he was replaced by Commodore (later Rear-Admiral) Henry Byam Martin. The major success of the campaign was the capture and destruction, in a near-perfect combined operation by French and British soldiers and sailors, of the Russian fortress of Bomarsund on the Aland Islands, which were temporarily liberated from Russian rule and which Napier offered to Sweden (they were declined). But he refused to attack the great naval bases at Sveaborg (often quoted as the "Gibraltar of the north") and Kronstadt, which observation had established were probably impregnable without shallow-draught bomb vessels which he did not have; and a great outcry (led by The Times newspaper) was raised against him for his apparent lack of determination. (His inaction was thoroughly justified by the sequel: in 1855 a better-equipped Anglo-French fleet did bombard Sveaborg, but despite an enormous expenditure of ammunition caused the fortress only trifling structural damage.) Napier felt he was continually being second-guessed by the Admiralty, and especially by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir James Graham. In fact the Naval Lords were reacting to adverse press coverage and unwilling to accept the assessment of the commander on the spot, and relations between them deteriorated as his ships maintained the blockade in atrocious weather, quite unable to storm or destroy impregnable Russian fortresses into the bargain. Never one to mince his words or submit to what he felt to be unmerited criticism, Napier's 'disrespectful' tone in his despatches, which the Admiralty complained of, sealed his professional fate. Nevertheless, though lacking any dramatic action apart from the capture of Bomarsund, Napier had achieved a great deal. In one modern assessment, the campaign "had successfully bottled up the Russian Navy for the entire first summer of the war. The tsar had been denied an opportunity to reinforce his Black Sea fleet with additional ships. The 30,000 Russian troops posted in the Gulf had also been prevented from joining the army in the Crimea." In addition, Napier's constant training had welded the fleet personnel into a much more competent force for the next year's campaign; and not a single ship had been lost.