Battle of Kara Urgan begins

A British chronology of the war records under 8 January 1915 the beginning of the Battle of Kara Urgan (Turkish Karaurgan). This village lay on the old Russo-Turkish border, on the road from Erzurum to Sarikamish, about 40 kilometres from the town. Here the Ottoman XI Corps fought the Russian rearguard of General Nikolai Yudenich. The battle was the last stage of the struggle at Sarikamish. Fighting in this area had been going on since the last days of December. The date of 8 January does, however, roughly agree with a report by the new commander of the Third Army, Hafız Hakkı, who wrote on 13 January of six days of bloody fighting in the XI Corps sector.

XI Corps on the Aras

In the plan of the minister of war, Enver Pasha, XI Corps was to pin down the main Russian forces in the valley of the Aras, while IX and X Corps outflanked them through the mountains. It therefore took no part in the winter march that destroyed the other two corps. At the end of December, when General Georgy Bergmann wanted to withdraw his troops from the border, Yudenich persuaded him to leave him a rearguard. With it he held a line along the border, from Mount Güllü-dağ through the hills between the villages of Yeniköy and Kara Urgan to the Aras. According to the historians W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff he had only 19 battalions and 48 guns, drawn among others from the 39th Infantry Division and the 4th Turkestan Rifle Brigade. XI Corps had more than 30 battalions and about a hundred guns.

On the last day of 1914 XI Corps launched a violent attack. On 1 January the positions at Kara Urgan changed hands several times. On 2 January the Turks broke into a gap in the Russian line, but a counter-attack by the 153rd Baku Infantry Regiment threw them back, and the Russians captured a battery of guns and took 300 prisoners. On 3 January Enver passed through the corps headquarters on his way to Erzurum and the attacks were renewed. On 4 January the Turks took Güllü-dağ on Yudenich’s right wing, but failed to exploit their success. They suffered heavy losses and after 6 January their attack weakened. Turkish studies judge this fighting differently. According to them, the divisions of XI Corps avoided decisive engagements and conserved their strength, which incidentally made X Corps’ retreat easier.

Enver leaves the army

On 8 January Enver appointed Hafız Hakkı commander of the Third Army. He wrote to him that XI Corps had received 5,000 replacements from Erzurum and had 10,000 rifles, and that another corps had been ordered to march from Constantinople to Erzurum. That day he also issued a proclamation to the soldiers. In it he praised them for having overcome the resistance of “the air, the earth and the enemy” and driven the Russians from “the land of our fathers”, and at the end announced that he was returning to the capital. According to Turkish studies he left army headquarters for Erzurum on the morning of 9 January. Allen and Muratoff date his departure two days earlier.

On the way Enver telegraphed the minister of the interior, Talat Pasha, that the Russian army, although not completely defeated, had been thrown back beyond the border, and that the tired troops were preparing for a further advance. He asked that this news be kept secret. The truth was different. The allies, too, did not know it for a long time. News of the destruction of IX Corps reached Berlin only on 8 January, through the German ambassador in Vienna. On 10 January the official newspaper in Constantinople firmly denied Russian “lies” about the capture of an Ottoman corps.

Yudenich goes over to the offensive

On 6 January Yudenich replaced Bergmann as commander of the troops in the field. First he decided to deal with the remnants of the Ottoman X Corps, which had fled from Sarikamish and gathered in the Bardız area. On 8 January he ordered General Nikolai Baratov to form a strike group that was to encircle them with three columns. At the same time he was preparing an attack on XI Corps, which was still facing his positions in the Kara Urgan area. The Russian units, however, were exhausted by weeks of fighting in the frost. The Turkestan rifle regiments, which had withstood the heaviest attacks, were down to a few hundred men each.