Russians retake Mamahatun

On 10 July 1916 Russian troops once again took Mamahatun, a small town on the western Euphrates, today Tercan, on the road from Erzurum to Erzincan. According to W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff’s history of the Caucasian wars, the town was taken that day by the 154th Derbent Infantry Regiment. General Yevgeny Maslovsky of the staff of the Russian Caucasus Army writes that this regiment, after a fight with the Turks who tried to hold the town, entered it on 27 June by the Julian calendar, that is, on 10 July. A British chronology of the war and some later studies give 12 July.

Mamahatun was changing hands for the third time that year. The Russians had taken it on 16 March, and at the end of May it was retaken by Vehip Pasha, commander of the Ottoman Third Army. In June Enver Pasha, alarmed that the Russians were bringing reinforcements by sea through Trebizond, captured in April, ordered Vehip to strike along the Black Sea. On 26 June the Turks crossed the crest of the Pontic Mountains and drove a wedge between two Russian corps towards the port of Of. General Nikolai Yudenich, however, had long had a plan for an offensive of his own ready. On 2 July (19 June by the Julian calendar) he ordered an advance along the whole front. The main blow was to fall on Bayburt, while General Vladimir Lyakhov’s 39th Infantry Division, which faced Mamahatun, was to pin down the Turkish forces in the centre.

Lyakhov, an ambitious and impetuous commander, did not confine himself to a feint. Before him, on the mighty Dumanlı Dağ massif, the Turkish IX Corps had dug in with one division of XI Corps, supported for the first time on this front by a dozen German howitzers. On the night of 5–6 July the Russians attacked and took the first line of trenches, and for the next two days they beat off violent counter-attacks. The decisive blow was a second night attack, on the night of 7–8 July. The 155th Kuba Regiment took Mount Akbaba, the key point of the Turkish positions, at dawn, and a battalion of the 153rd Baku Regiment broke into the neighbouring redoubt with the bayonet. Maslovsky describes how, in the first rays of the sun, Colonel Kolesnikov’s Cossack brigade charged the retreating Turks. According to him the Baku Regiment alone took more than 1,500 prisoners and two guns, but also lost about 1,500 killed and wounded.

By 8 July the Turkish IX Corps was in full retreat. Rearguards still tried to delay the Russian advance, but on 10 July the Derbent Regiment entered Mamahatun, and the neighbouring 156th Elisavetpol Regiment reached a bend of the Kara-su river the same day. The Turks fell back towards the only bridge over the Kara-su at Kotur, which they meant to cover from the mountains on the western bank. Allen and Muratoff put Turkish losses in the battle of Dumanlı Dağ at no fewer than 12,000 men, half of them prisoners, and the losses of the Russian 39th Division at about 4,000. They also note that the recovery of ground in itself mattered little, since after the loss of Bayburt the Turks would have had to abandon the Mamahatun plain anyway. More important was that IX Corps had ceased to count as a fighting force.

The fighting was not yet over. The Russians took the position covering the bridge at Kotur on the night of 13–14 July, and a few days later they entered the abandoned Bayburt. Vehip’s shattered Third Army was falling back along the whole front, and the 39th Division soon pushed on towards Erzincan, where the headquarters of the Third Army was located.