Battle of the Alma

Battle of the Alma River

The Coldstream Guards at the Alma, by Richard Caton Woodville

Date	20 September 1854
Location	River Alma
Result	Allied victory

Belligerents

Commanders and leaders

Jacques Leroy de Saint Arnaud

FitzRoy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Menshikov

Strength

French Empire:
28,000 infantry
72 guns
British Empire:
26,000 infantry
1,000 cavalry
60 guns
Ottoman Empire:
6,000 infantry
Total:
60,000 infantry
1,000 cavalry
132 guns

33,000 infantry
3,400 cavalry
120 guns

Casualties and losses

French: 1,340 (including those who died of cholera)
British: 2,002
Total: 3,342

5,709

The Battle of the Alma (20 September 1854), which is usually considered the first battle of the Crimean War (1853–1856), took place just south of the River Alma in the Crimea. An Anglo-French force under Jacques Leroy de Saint Arnaud and FitzRoy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan defeated General Aleksandr Sergeyevich Menshikov's Russian army suffering around 6,000 casualties.

The Anglo-French forces landed on the western coast of the Crimean peninsula some 35 miles (56 km) north of Sevastopol, on 13 September 1854, at Calamita Bay ("Calamity Bay"). Although disorganised and weakened by disease (mostly cholera and dysentery), the lack of opposition these landings met allowed a beachhead of four miles (6 km) inland to be made. Six days later, 19 September 1854, the two armies headed south. The march involved crossing five rivers—the River Bulganak, the River Alma, the River Kacha, the River Belbek and the River Chernaya. At the River Alma, Prince Aleksandr Sergeyevich Menshikov, Commander-in Chief of the Russians forces in the Crimea, decided to make his stand on the heights above the south banks of the River Alma. Although the Russian Army was numerically inferior to the combined Anglo-French army (35,000 Russian troops as opposed to 60,000 British and French troops), the heights they occupied were a natural defensive position—indeed the last natural barrier to the allied armies on their approach to Sevastopol. Furthermore, the Russians had more than 100 artillery field guns on the heights which they could employ with devastating effect from the elevated position.

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