Russians capture Erzurum

At 7 a.m. on 16 February 1916 a regiment of Terek Cossacks, followed by infantry, rode into Erzurum, the most important Ottoman fortress in eastern Anatolia. No one was defending the town any longer. At noon the commander of the Russian Caucasus Army, General Nikolai Yudenich, entered it. So ended the five-day assault and the winter offensive, under way since 10 January, in which the Russians shattered the Ottoman Third Army. The date of 16 February is given consistently by the British chronology of the war and by W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff’s history of the Caucasian wars. In Russia, where the Julian calendar was still in use, it was 3 February, and it is under that date that the capture of Erzurum entered Russian memory.

The fortress’s last night

The fate of Erzurum had been decided two days earlier. On 14 February the Russians took Fort Tafet, the last obstacle on the northern flank, and by the evening they were already standing at the edge of the plain of the upper Euphrates, behind the backs of the defenders of the Deveboynu ridge. On the morning of 15 February Russian airmen reported unusual movement in the streets of the town and baggage trains moving west along the roads. The commander of the Third Army, Mahmud Kâmil Pasha, ordered a retreat. By the afternoon the Turks had abandoned all the forts of the outer ring. In Fort Çobandede and the batteries around it the Russians found 42 guns, and in the evening their soldiers saw a great explosion in Fort Gez. The forts on the Palandöken ridge held out until the end of the day.

During the night of 15–16 February Turkish rearguards still tried to stop the Russians at Fort Sivişli, in the middle of the Deveboynu ridge. The fighting went on until 5 a.m. and cost the Turks heavy losses, and their retreat through the town turned into disorder. No one tried to defend the old forts from the time of the war of 1877–1878 or the medieval walls. The first to enter Erzurum were the troops that throughout the assault had faced Fort Kaburga, that is, those closest to the town: the Terek Cossacks and units of the 263rd Infantry Regiment and the 5th Caucasian Rifle Regiment. Some Russian works state that the troops entered the town as early as 5 a.m.

The pursuit

Yudenich organised a pursuit at once, but in doing so lost the best opportunity. On the morning of 15 February he ordered General Mikhail Przhevalsky to advance on Erzurum and take it from the north. Because of this order the commander of the II Turkestan Corps did not allow Vorobyov’s 4th Caucasian Rifle Division, which had reached the river north-east of the town during the night, to march on to Ilıca, a road junction west of Erzurum. During that night the Turkish columns passed through Ilıca unhindered. The real pursuit began only during the night of 16–17 February. Two infantry regiments and the Cossacks took Ilıca, capturing, according to Allen and Muratoff, 3,000 prisoners and 30 guns, and the next day Przhevalsky’s vanguard surrounded the remnants of the Turkish 34th Division north of it and took another 2,000 prisoners.

Most of the five divisions of the IX and XI Corps nevertheless managed to escape encirclement. According to Allen and Muratoff, no more than 25,000 men with 30–40 guns remained of Mahmud Kâmil’s army. Some fell back across the Euphrates plain towards Erzincan, and the X Corps along mountain roads towards Bayburt.

Spoils and losses

In Erzurum itself the Russians captured 327 guns, although most were of an old type. The British correspondent Morgan Philips Price, who saw them a few days later, noticed among them guns from 1873. Russian sources give 323 guns and several standards. There were few prisoners in the town, about 5,000. According to Allen and Muratoff, the Turks lost at least 10,000 killed and wounded during the assault, and thousands more during the retreat, mainly prisoners and deserters. The Russians lost 1,000 killed, 4,000 wounded and as many frostbitten. Price put Russian losses during the assault at no more than 12,000, a large part of them from frostbite.

Price arrived in Erzurum with a military transport on 17 February. In the streets he found Turks in fezzes who, as he wrote, went about their business as if nothing had happened. Outside a house bearing a sign in Russian, “Prisoners received here”, stood Turkish soldiers who had not managed to escape with the army, had hidden in houses and were now asking where they could hand in their rifles. The commander of the I Caucasian Corps, General Pyotr Kalitin, had his office in the former British consulate. The American missionary Robert Stapleton, who had stayed in the town with his family and turned his house into a hospital, told Price how the Armenian inhabitants of the town had in the summer of 1915 been sentenced to deportation and then murdered on the way.

Echo of victory

The fall of Erzurum, which for decades had been regarded as the key to Anatolia and an impregnable fortress, was the Russian army’s greatest success in the Caucasus. The Viceroy of the Caucasus, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, reported it by telegraph to Tsar Nicholas II, and Yudenich was awarded the Order of St George, 2nd class. In the Entente countries the news was received with relief: after the defeat at Gallipoli, and at a time when a British division was besieged in Kut, it was the first great Allied victory over the Turks. The commander of British forces in Mesopotamia, General Percy Lake, learned of it on 17 February. Price wrote that the “great Urus” who had taken Erzurum from the Ottomans was talked about in every bazaar from Shiraz to Samarkand.

The news reached Enver Pasha during his inspection tour of Syria and Palestine. The war minister gave up his planned trip to Mesopotamia and returned to Constantinople. In March he dismissed Mahmud Kâmil and gave the Third Army to Vehip Pasha. The defeat forced the Turks to shift troops and supplies to the Caucasus. In mid-March the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff informed the command in Mesopotamia that this had caused congestion on the Ottoman railways, which was bound to affect the supply of men and ammunition to Baghdad.

The Russians did not stop at Erzurum. In the south, in the same days, their units entered Muş, and at the beginning of March they took Bitlis. In the north, over the following weeks, they reached the approaches to Bayburt. In April 1916 they took the Black Sea port of Trabzon, and in the summer Erzincan. Erzurum remained in Russian hands until the disintegration of the Russian army after the revolution. The Turks recovered it in March 1918.