It was a pity that the mortars were not as efficient as their servers. Already five had been disabled through holes appearing in their chambers. To meet the war effort, numbers had been manufactured quickly and some castings were undoubtedly defective, although probably the unusually high and sustained rate of fire was a major cause. Certainly after a second day's similar firing pattern, sufficient mortars were unserviceable for the operation to be called off. But by that time the level of devastation of the fortress was undoubtedly significant. The prime allied success of the second day was the destruction of the naval dockyard stores on Oster-Svarto, including massive stocks of ship-building timber. There was almost another huge explosion on Gustavsfvard when a vast magazine packed with munitions was set on fire, but frantic heroic efforts by the defenders somehow managed to put the fires out in the nick of time.
In the sudden quiet after two days uninterupted bombardment - the French land mortar battery and British rockets boats had kept firing during the nights - the inhabitants of Helsingfors thought they were about to be invaded, although no shots were fired into the city. Many bundled up a few possessions onto carts and joined the processions setting off for the interior, to return, somewhat crestfallen no doubt, a few days later when the allies had packed up and gone.
The Sveaborg bombardment was the last major operation of the campaign, and after a couple of months of minor actions against merchant shipping and small isolated installations, the fleet withdrew from the Baltic and returned to home ports in November.
The 1855 Baltic campaign was a success for the allies inasmuch as it demonstrated what they were capable of achieving, rather than what they actually achieved. It proved how easy it was to neutralise the Russian fleet with a blockade of only a few ships, and consequently to maraud around the northern Russian empire at will, in spite of the large number of Russian troops tied up in an effort to prevent them. Emperor Alexander knew that the size of the fleet which had been deployed could easily be doubled or even tripled, with sufficient transports to carry a large army, and he would shortly see the first allied armoured floating batteries impressively in action on the southern front. From there it was a short step to realising that the allies now had the ability to storm Kronstadt and invade his capital and he would be powerless to stop them; that was indeed their programme for 1856.
