Ottoman troops retake Muş and Bitlis

On 6 August 1916 the Russian 261st Infantry Regiment left Muş, a town in Turkish Armenia west of Lake Van, which the Russians had occupied in February. Ottoman troops marched in. Some tens of kilometres to the south-east the Russians had already lost their positions at Bitlis, which they had captured at the beginning of March. According to the history of the Caucasian wars by W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, they withdrew from there during the night of 4/5 August, and the Turks occupied the town. General Evgeny Maslovsky of the Russian Caucasus Army staff, counting days by the Julian calendar, gives the departure from Muş as 24 July and from Bitlis as 25 July, that is, 6 and 7 August in the Gregorian calendar. In Turkish tradition 8 August is regarded as the day of Bitlis’s liberation. The British chronology of the war records the Turkish reoccupation of both towns only under 15 August, most likely by the day on which the news became established in the West.

A belated offensive

The capture of Muş and Bitlis was part of a great Ottoman offensive by the Second Army of General Ahmed İzzet Pasha. This army, made up largely of Gallipoli veterans, had been moving to the Caucasus since the spring. It was to strike the Russian left wing and, in co-operation with the Third Army, retake Erzurum. The obstacles were the enormous distances and wretched roads. Before İzzet’s divisions could assemble, the Russians had routed the Third Army in July and taken Erzincan. The first to arrive in the Diyarbakır area were the 5th and 8th Divisions of XVI Corps, commanded by Mustafa Kemal, the defender of Gallipoli, later known as Atatürk.

As early as late spring his troops had occupied, without a fight, positions on Kurtik Dağ, a mountain only about 8 kilometres south of Muş. On 12–14 July the Russians pushed them off it in a night bayonet attack, taking, according to Allen and Muratoff, a thousand prisoners and four guns. A single Russian regiment, Colonel Potto’s 261st Akhulgo Regiment, was left on the recaptured positions. After the defeat of the Third Army İzzet could wait no longer. On 1 August he ordered Kemal to attack Muş and Bitlis, while he himself prepared an attack with his main forces further west, in the mountains between the branches of the Euphrates, in the direction of Ognot.

Bitlis

At dawn on 2 August the Ottoman 5th Division attacked the Russian positions south of Bitlis. They were defended by General Foma Nazarbekov with about 6,000 infantry of the 7th and 8th Caucasian Rifle Regiments, supported by a few guns and a howitzer battery. According to Allen and Muratoff the two sides’ forces were roughly equal, and on the first day the Russians repulsed the attack. The Turks renewed it the next day, however, with great determination. On 4 August news reached Nazarbekov that Turkish soldiers and Kurds were infiltrating along a valley east of the town and might come out on Lake Van, in his rear. Fearing being cut off, Nazarbekov withdrew after dark a few kilometres to the north-east, to a gorge near the village of Basan, and the Turks occupied Bitlis. Maslovsky describes this retreat somewhat differently and later: according to him Nazarbekov first fell back to a position just outside the town and left only after the news from Muş.

Allen and Muratoff stress that the 5th Division was no stronger than his brigade. The Turks’ advantage came from auxiliary units: gendarmerie, frontier guards and Kurds, mobile and familiar with the ground. Maslovsky, critical of Nazarbekov, wrote that this brave but overcautious general had given way to nine Turkish battalions while having nine of his own.

Muş

At Muş the fighting was harder. The 8th Division, whose morale Kemal had managed to restore after the July defeat, attacked the Russian positions on Kurtik Dağ on 2 August. Allen and Muratoff reckon that 5,000 Turkish infantry faced Potto’s 3,000 men, supported by a field battery and two howitzers. For three days the Russians beat off the attacks. On 5 August the Turks broke the line at one point, and since the defence had no depth, the next day Potto had to come down from the mountain and abandon Muş, which lay at its foot. He left two howitzers and two machine guns on the positions, and his regiment lost about 30 per cent of its strength in killed and wounded. The losses of the Turkish 8th Division were heavier still: it shrank to about 3,000 men. Kemal no longer had the strength to go further than the town itself. The news of the loss of Muş also sealed the fate of Nazarbekov’s brigade: in the following days it fell back to Tatvan on the south-western shore of Lake Van, and then as far as Ahlat on the north-western shore.

Both towns the Turks recovered were largely depopulated. Their Armenian inhabitants had been massacred in 1915 during the Armenian genocide, and fighting and famine had also driven out many Muslims.

Significance

Allen and Muratoff write that the psychological effect of this “double” was great. At a time when the Third Army had been routed, Mustafa Kemal gave the Turks one of their few successes that summer on the Caucasus front, which strengthened his fame. The commander of the Caucasus Army, General Nikolai Yudenich, took the threat seriously: he feared that the Turks would gather at least three divisions in the Muş valley and strike from there deep into the Russian rear. He therefore ordered the right wing of the IV Caucasian Corps, which was attacking towards Ognot, to withdraw by a flank march closer to Muş, and brought further divisions from the army reserve to the threatened sector.

The success was limited in scope, however. The Second Army’s main attack in the mountains near Ognot and Kiğı was only beginning and, as it turned out, got under way slowly and without vigour. The Russians gained time to regroup, and in August itself they went over to the counter-attack.