Russians take Erzincan

On 25 July 1916 Russian troops entered Erzincan, an old town on the upper Euphrates that housed the headquarters of the Ottoman Third Army. The Turks abandoned it without a fight. The date is given consistently by the British chronology of the war, by the history of the Caucasian wars by W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, and by General Yevgeny Maslovsky of the staff of the Russian Caucasus Army, who writes of 12 July in the Julian calendar. The capture of Erzincan ended the July offensive of General Nikolai Yudenich, in which in less than four weeks he shattered the Third Army of Vehip Pasha.

The pursuit

The offensive began on 2 July. In the north the Russians broke the defence of the Turkish X Corps in the bend of the Çoruh river and around 15 July entered the abandoned town of Bayburt. In the centre the 39th Infantry Division of General Vladimir Lyakhov smashed IX Corps on the Dumanlı Dağ massif and on 10 July retook Mamahatun. The Turkish retreat turned in places into flight. According to Allen and Muratoff, units of X Corps, exhausted by the defence of Bayburt, scattered into the mountains, and Vehip lost control of them. On 18 July plastun Cossacks occupied Gümüşhane, where they captured large stores; the same day Siberian Cossacks routed a rearguard with a charge on the road from Bayburt to Kelkit, taking about 800 prisoners, and on 20 July the Russians occupied Ardasa on the road from Trebizond. On 23 July, after a short fight, the road junction at Kelkit fell, from which routes led into the interior of Anatolia.

Seeing how chaotically the Turks were retreating, Yudenich decided to seize the opportunity and on 19 July ordered the 39th Division to march on Erzincan. First, however, it had to cross the Kara Su, the western Euphrates. The Turks had blown up the only stone bridge on the old road from Armenia to Anatolia, at Kotur. Sappers built a wooden footbridge, across which two regiments, the guns and the transport passed. The other regiments waded the rushing river chest-deep, carrying their weapons and cartridge pouches above their heads. The crossing took three days, and the march through difficult mountains, along paths impassable for wagons, another three.

Entering the town

Maslovsky writes that on the evening of the third day of the march the broad, blossoming valley of Erzincan opened before the soldiers, and in the distance the town itself against a background of burning buildings, set on fire by the retreating Turkish troops. At dawn on 25 July the regiments came down into the valley, covered with orchards. They had only mountain artillery with them, because the rest of the guns were far behind on the only road along the river. Vehip Pasha concluded that with the shattered IX Corps he could not hold the town. He decided to defend only the exits from the valley to the west and south-west, on the roads to Sivas, Şebinkarahisar and Kemah, between a dozen and twenty-odd kilometres beyond the town.

According to Allen and Muratoff, at noon on 25 July Erzincan was occupied by the 154th Derbent Infantry Regiment, while Turkestan riflemen were already approaching from the north along the road from Bayburt. Maslovsky states that scouts of the Derbent Regiment entered the town from the east at the same time as scouts of a Turkestan rifle regiment from the north, and that Lyakhov himself, having ridden ahead of his troops, was in the town before the regiments arrived. He at once sent the 153rd Baku Regiment along the road to Kemah, where the Russians ran into strong positions of the Turkish 29th Division and the fresh 36th Division, supported by artillery from both banks of the river. Fighting went on on 26 and 27 July, when the Russian field guns and howitzers came up. On 28 July the Turkish rearguard was thrown back and Yudenich considered the operation complete.

The balance

Allen and Muratoff estimate that in the fighting at Bayburt and on Dumanlı Dağ and during the retreat to Kelkit and Erzincan the Third Army lost 17,000 prisoners and no fewer killed and wounded. By the beginning of August only a few badly depleted divisions remained of its fifteen, and desertions continued. They put Russian losses in the July offensive at about 12,000 men. In their view the Third Army ceased to count as a force capable of attack, and the Russians gained bases at Bayburt, Gümüşhane, Kelkit and Erzincan from which they could in future strike into the interior of Anatolia. Yudenich could also shift reserves to his left wing, where on 2 August the long-prepared offensive of the Ottoman Second Army began.

The British chronology adds that Erzincan was the westernmost point reached by Russian troops. That is a simplification. Erzincan was the largest town occupied by the Russians in the interior of Anatolia, but their patrols and outposts reached even further: Allen and Muratoff write of a squadron of Cossacks stationed in the winter of 1916–1917 at Refahiye, several dozen kilometres west of the town. The Russians did not, however, advance further, and they held Erzincan until their army disintegrated after the revolution. The Turks recovered it in February 1918.

The Russians found the town without its Armenian inhabitants. In the summer of 1915, during the Armenian genocide, the Ottoman authorities had deported the Armenians of Erzincan and its surroundings, and in the nearby Euphrates gorge at Kemah mass killings were carried out on the deportees, including those driven through Erzincan from other places.