End of the battle of Kara Urgan

A British chronology of the war records under 13 January 1915 the end of the battle of Kara Urgan, the last act of the fighting at Sarikamish. On that day the new commander of the Ottoman Third Army, General Hafız Hakkı, admitted in a report that his troops could no longer hold their positions. The retreat of the XI Corps itself, however, came a few days later, between 16 and 18 January, when a Russian detachment reached its rear.

Yudenich’s counter-attack

After a week of Ottoman attacks General Nikolai Yudenich went over to the counter-attack. On 10 January two battalions of the 153rd Baku Infantry Regiment retook Mount Güllü-dağ on the right wing, capturing, according to Allen and Muratoff, six guns and taking a thousand prisoners. The centre of the XI Corps, however, held out in strong positions at Zivin, on the Turkish side of the border, where the Russians had already suffered a bloody defeat in 1877. Yudenich judged that a frontal attack would be too costly and decided to outflank the Turks.

The task went to Colonel Dovgirt, whose Turkestan riflemen had earlier withstood the heaviest attacks. Only 1,500 men with four guns were left of his detachment. For five days they marched through waist-deep snow, covering a few kilometres a day. Yudenich already considered them lost. The fighting went on amid ceaseless blizzards. Contemporaries wrote that the dead and wounded were buried by the snow and no one even tried to look for them.

Hafız Hakkı’s report

On 13 January Hafız Hakkı sent Enver Pasha, who had stopped at Erzincan on his way to Constantinople, a report on the army’s situation. He wrote that bloody fighting had been going on in the XI Corps sector for six days and that there were days when it lost a thousand soldiers. In two regiments, the 54th and the 98th, only five or six officers each had survived. In the north Oltu had fallen. A few days earlier the Russians had surrounded the remnants of the X Corps near the village of Bardız, taking more than 2,000 prisoners, and on 12 or 13 January (sources differ on the date) General Kalitin’s detachment took the town. Hafız Hakkı proposed withdrawing the remaining soldiers to the Köprüköy line and, if the Russians kept up their advance, to the Höyükler hills in front of Erzurum. He also warned that holding Erzurum itself depended on the arrival of fresh troops.

Retreat of the XI Corps

According to Russian sources the decisive fighting took place on 15 January (2 January by the Julian calendar then in use in Russia). At Kara Urgan the Russians then routed several Ottoman regiments, including the 52nd and 54th, and took more than a thousand prisoners. By that time Dovgirt had completed his march and emerged in the rear of the positions at Zivin. The XI Corps command treated the appearance of the Russian column as the signal for a retreat it had already decided on. Between 16 and 18 January the corps fell back towards Köprüköy, to the positions it had held before the start of Enver’s offensive.

The last skirmishes in the mountains took place on 15–17 January, while scattered groups of the X Corps were still resisting the pursuing Russians. On 18 January Kalitin’s detachment entered Id (today Narman) and the pursuit ended, and a day later Yudenich halted any further advance. The Battle of Sarikamish was over.

Toll

The XI Corps was the only one to come through Enver’s offensive more or less intact. According to Allen and Muratoff, by mid-January about 18,000 men were left of the entire Third Army, 15,000 of whom belonged to the XI Corps. Of the two corps that had gone through the mountains towards Sarikamish only remnants survived. The Russians, themselves exhausted and weakened by losses, lacked the strength to march on Erzurum. The front stabilised for several months near the border.

On 16 January Hafız Hakkı wrote in his diary: “Ah, Enver! By hastening this winter expedition, and then driving the IX Corps into this splendid attack, you have stained yourself with the blood of a hundred thousand innocents. May God forgive you.” He himself bore no small share of the responsibility for the defeat. Meanwhile frozen and starving soldiers were arriving at the overcrowded hospitals of Erzurum, where typhus and dysentery raged.