Английская Википедия:Imperial fortress

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Файл:Plan of the harbours and fortifications of Valetta in the island of Malta RMG F0433.tiff
1821 map of the heavily fortified city of Valletta, Malta and its two harbours (Grand Harbour and Marsamxett), an important Royal Navy base in the 19th and 20th centuries

Lord Salisbury described Malta, Gibraltar, Bermuda, and Halifax as Imperial fortresses at the 1887 Colonial Conference,Шаблон:Sfn though by that point they had been so designated for decades.[1][2][3][4][5][6] Later historians have also given the title "imperial fortress" to St. Helena and Mauritius.[7]

The fortresses provided safe harbours; coal stores; and dockyards to protect and supply Royal Navy warships.[8] They had numbers of soldiers sufficient not only for local defence, but also to provide expeditionary forces to work with the Royal Navy, as well as stockpiles of military supplies.[9]

History

Although the War Office took over from local officials the funding and operational control of auxiliary forces in the British Isles from 1871 onwards, the trend of Imperial defence policy during the course of the 19th Century was to remove regular units of the British Army from colonial garrison duty wherever strategic concerns did not require their retention (this included disbanding colonial regular units of the British Army, other than the West India Regiment and the local-service sub-unit of the Royal Artillery that would ultimately be titled the Royal Malta Artillery, though others would later be raised),[10] with local governments expected to organise and fund auxiliary forces for local defence (although these forces would ultimately be controlled by the Imperial government via colonial Governors, most of whom were civilians, acting as military commanders-in-chief). The main exceptions were the four Imperial fortresses, which the regular army continued to garrison, and within which the part-time militia and volunteer units were funded as parts of the British Army and brigaded with regular units.[11] The 1887 Colonial Conference sat in London from April 4 until May 9, 1887. At the conference, it was asserted that:Шаблон:Sfn

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Файл:Map of the cruises of the Bermuda-based HMS York on the America & West Indies Station, 1936-1939.jpg
Map of the cruises of the Bermuda-based HMS York on the America & West Indies Station, 1936-1939

Halifax and Bermuda controlled the transatlantic sea lanes between North America and Europe, and were placed to dominate the Atlantic seaboard of the United States (as demonstrated during the American War of 1812,[12][13] when the squadron of the Royal Navy's North America Station maintained a blockade of the Atlantic coast of the United States and launched the Chesapeake Campaign from Bermuda, defeating American forces at Bladensburg, burning Washington, DC, and raiding Alexandria, Virginia, before ultimately being defeated at Baltimore and forced to withdrawn back to Bermuda),[14][15][16][17][18] as well as to control the western Atlantic Ocean from the Arctic to the West Indies. In 1828,[19] Royal Navy Purser Richard Cotter wrote of Bermuda:

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Gibraltar controlled passage between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and Malta, aside from supporting operations in the Mediterranean and Black Sea, served as a base for naval and military forces that would be able to deploy relatively quickly to the Indian and Pacific Oceans once the Suez Canal was completed in 1869.

Halifax ceased to be an Imperial fortress in stages. With the 1867 confederation of the Dominion of Canada (under which all of the colonies of the British Empire's administrative region of British North America, except Bermuda and Newfoundland, were "federally united into One Dominion under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom ..."),[20][21] military defence of Canada would be transferred to the militia of the dominion government, and the British Army withdrew most of its establishment from the continent, leaving small military garrisons to defend the Royal Naval Dockyard at Halifax, Nova Scotia and the Esquimalt Royal Navy Dockyard in British Columbia. These garrisons were withdrawn along with the Royal Navy establishments when the two Canadian dockyards were closed in 1905, then sold to the government of the dominion.

Файл:America and West Indies Station 1st Division (HMS Dragon, HMS Danae and HMS Dispatch) off Admiralty House Bermuda in 1931.jpg
America and West Indies Station 1st Division (HMS Dragon, HMS Danae and HMS Despatch) off Admiralty House in 1931 as they depart their base at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda to exercise on the open North Atlantic

When the Panama Canal opened in 1914, Britain was able to rely on amity and common interests between herself and the United States during and after the First World War, to also use Bermuda, from which cruisers could patrol the Pacific coasts of North, Central, and South America. The perception that the only navies that could threaten British control of the sealanes or territory around the globe were all those of countries on the Atlantic or its connected seas had meant Imperial fortresses were only established in this region. This was despite the growth of the Pacific Ocean fleets of Russia and the United States of America during the 19th Century.[22][23]

Finally the rising power and increasing belligerence of the Japanese empire after the First World War (The Imperial Japanese Navy was the third largest navy in the world by 1920, behind the Royal Navy and the United States Navy) would result in the construction of the Singapore Naval Base, which was completed in 1938, less than four years before hostilities with Japan commenced during the Second World War.[24]

The need to protect these bases of operation, as well as to prevent, via their captures, their becoming bases of similar utility to an enemy (with ownership of land by foreigners, at least in Bermuda, barred in order to deny a pretext for invasion),[25] each was heavily defended, making fortress an apt designation. "Fortress" was often included when giving the names of these colonies, e.g. "Fortress Bermuda".[26] Bermuda, protected by an almost impassable barrier reef and unconnected to any continent, required the least defences, but was heavily garrisoned and armed with coastal artillery batteries.[27][28][29] Defence of Bermuda, and of the region, was greatly weakened by the economic austerity that followed the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars and the American War of 1812, which resulted in drastic reductions to the regular forces and to Reserve Forces in the British Isles (Militia, Volunteer Force, and Fencibles), and in Bermuda (Militia and volunteer artillery), being allowed to lapse. Bermuda's garrison would slowly increase, with the threat of invasion by the United States during and after the American Civil War resulting in further strengthening of the defences. Bermuda's importance to Imperial defence was only increasing, however.

Halifax was much more vulnerable to attack than Bermuda, which might come over land or water from the United States, Gibraltar was vulnerable to overland attack by Spain (which remains anxious to recover it) and by Napoleonic France, and both Gibraltar and Malta were much more vulnerable to the navies of the Mediterranean (notably those of Spain, France, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire),[30] and were even more heavily defended.

Naval and military establishments of the imperial fortresses

Шаблон:OSM Location map

Bermuda

Halifax, Nova Scotia

Gibraltar

Malta

See also

References

Шаблон:Reflist

Партнерские ресурсы
Криптовалюты
Магазины
Хостинг
Разное

  1. ↑ Шаблон:Cite news
  2. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
  3. ↑ Шаблон:Cite news
  4. ↑ Шаблон:Cite news
  5. ↑ Шаблон:Cite news
  6. ↑ Шаблон:Cite news
  7. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
  8. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book; Шаблон:Cite book
  9. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
  10. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
  11. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
  12. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
  13. ↑ Шаблон:Cite Hansard
  14. ↑ Шаблон:Cite news
  15. ↑ Шаблон:Cite magazine
  16. ↑ Шаблон:Cite magazine
  17. ↑ Шаблон:Cite magazine
  18. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
  19. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
  20. ↑ Шаблон:Cite legislation UK
  21. ↑ Шаблон:Cite legislation UK
  22. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
  23. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
  24. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
  25. ↑ Шаблон:Cite news
  26. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
  27. ↑ Шаблон:Cite web
  28. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
  29. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
  30. ↑ Шаблон:Cite book
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