End of the Battle of Sarikamish

The British chronology of the war records the end of the Battle of Sarikamish (Turkish: Sarıkamış) under 2 January 1915. In reality the fighting went on for more than two weeks longer, but by the turn of the year its outcome had already been decided. After the failed assaults on the small town the Ottoman 3rd Army had no strength to renew the attack, and the Russians began to close the ring around its remnants. According to the historians W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, by 1 January the defeat of the Turkish offensive was clear to both staffs. Turkish studies end the battle on 4 or 5 January, when IX Corps capitulated and X Corps began its retreat.

The last days of IX Corps

On 31 December the chief of staff of IX Corps reported that the remnants of the corps, cut off in the woods on the hills near Sarikamish, numbered about 2,500 men, of whom only a thousand could fight. Turkish documents give even lower figures, a mere few hundred soldiers fit for combat. The officers persuaded the Minister of War, Enver Pasha, to leave the encircled corps while it was still possible. Enver went over to X Corps and on 2 January united the two corps under the joint command of Colonel Hafız Hakkı, who was then promoted to general. In those days he himself nearly fell into captivity when, on his way between units, he ran into a Cossack patrol.

Also on 2 January the Russians under General Mikhail Przhevalsky began to encircle the woods in which IX Corps was holding out. They took the Bardız pass, capturing several hundred prisoners and six guns. On 3 January thick fog made fighting almost impossible. On 4 January the Russians attacked simultaneously from the front and from the rear. The Turks defended themselves in trenches dug in the snow, but were surrounded. According to a Russian report, a company of the 154th Derbent Infantry Regiment burst into the headquarters of IX Corps and captured its commander, İhsan Pasha, together with the staffs of three divisions. According to the Russians about 200 officers and a thousand soldiers were taken prisoner, according to Turkish sources just over a hundred officers and fewer than a hundred soldiers. IX Corps ceased to exist.

The escape of X Corps

With X Corps the Russians fared much worse. Hafız Hakkı noticed Russian units approaching from the direction of Kars and ordered a retreat. Sources date it differently. According to Allen and Muratoff the first divisions were already withdrawing on the night of 1–2 January, and by the afternoon of 3 January the main body of the corps was far from Sarikamish. Turkish studies cite a retreat order issued on the evening of 4 January, by which Hafız Hakkı withdrew the last units on the night of 4–5 January. In it he warned that commanders who needlessly abandoned equipment and guns would be shot.

The Russian manoeuvre that was to cut off X Corps’s route over the mountains failed. General Georgy Berkhman, who directed it from Sarikamish, misjudged the position of the Turks and sent his main blow where only their rearguards remained. The fog of 3 January further delayed the attack. When the Russian infantry reached the ridges along which the Turks were fleeing, it was two days too late. The remnants of X Corps gathered on 6 January in the area of the village of Bardız, and some went on towards Oltu.

Russian victory

In the north, on 3 or 4 January (sources differ on the date), General Kalitin’s brigade of Siberian Cossacks retook Ardahan, routing the Ottoman detachment that had seized the town at the end of December. On 5 January the Russians announced their victory at Sarikamish. In Petrograd and in London the news came only after the Russian commander-in-chief had asked the British for help against the Turks.

On 6 January, angered by the escape of X Corps, the deputy viceroy of the Caucasus, General Alexander Myshlayevsky, obtained the viceroy’s consent to remove Berkhman. Command of the troops in the field passed to General Nikolai Yudenich. All that was left for him to do was to pursue the shattered army. The fighting, however, went on. The Russians hunted down the remnants of X Corps in the mountains, and on the Aras the Ottoman XI Corps, which had not taken part in the march through the mountains and had kept most of its strength, was still fighting.