Start of the advance on Trebizond

On 6 April 1916 (24 March by the Julian calendar then in use in Russia) a Russian transport flotilla carrying two brigades of plastuns, the foot Kuban Cossacks, was sailing across the Black Sea towards the coast of Lazistan. In the morning it was joined by the main force of the Black Sea Fleet, which covered it from a distance. The reinforcements were to strengthen General Vladimir Lyakhov’s coastal detachment before the final advance on Trebizond, the most important port of northern Anatolia. The British chronology of the war records under this day the start of the Russian attack on Trebizond. In reality the day saw the transfer of reinforcements: the plastuns were put ashore on 7 and 8 April, and the main attack came on 14 April.

Since February Lyakhov’s detachment had been advancing along the coast, supported by the fire of warships and by landings in the Turkish rear. On 8 March it took Rize, and at the end of March, after fighting for the small town of Of, it reached the Kara Dere river near Sürmene, a few dozen kilometres from Trebizond. On its western bank the Turks, reinforced by battalions from Trebizond, occupied the last strong position before the city. Lyakhov had too few men to take it and feared a Turkish counter-attack. General Nikolai Yudenich, commander of the Caucasus Army, decided after the capture of Erzurum to take Trebizond as well, through which the Russians could supply their forces deep in Anatolia. The Tsar’s headquarters agreed to send two plastun brigades back to the Caucasus, and the fleet commander, Admiral Andrei Eberhardt, promised to cover their transport.

On 4 and 5 April the 1st and 2nd Kuban Plastun Brigades, with their artillery and trains, were embarked at Novorossiysk. On the afternoon of 5 April the flotilla under Rear-Admiral Khomenko put to sea. General Yevgeny Maslovsky, head of the operations section of the Caucasus Army staff, puts it at 38 transports, while the British historians W.E.D. Allen and Paul Muratoff write of ten transports and twelve elpidifors, flat-bottomed coastal freighters. Destroyers and seaplane carriers sailed close by, watching for submarines. The Russians had reason for caution: on 30 March the German U-33 had sunk the hospital ship Portugal near Rize. In these days the destroyer Strogiy rammed a diving submarine off the Anatolian coast. According to Allen and Muratoff this happened on 6 April itself, according to Russian sources two days earlier. The damaged U-33 made off to the Bosporus.

According to Maslovsky, the main force of the fleet, which had sailed from Sevastopol, met the flotilla on the morning of 6 April and continued at some distance from it. Allen and Muratoff write of two battleships, two cruisers and six destroyers. During the night of 6 to 7 April Yudenich and his staff sailed from Batumi to Rize. In the morning he found that Lyakhov considered the situation on the Kara Dere critical, and demanded that the plastuns be landed not at Rize but further west, just behind the front line. Khomenko had orders to unload at Rize, and Eberhardt, alarmed by reports of German submarines, refused to change the plan and announced that after unloading the fleet would return to Sevastopol.

Yudenich managed without the fleet. The 2nd Brigade was loaded onto the elpidifors of Lyakhov’s detachment and landed without escort on the morning of 8 April near the village of Humurgan, while the 1st Brigade marched along the coast on foot. Lyakhov’s fears proved exaggerated: the Turks did not attack. With the plastuns his detachment grew, according to Allen and Muratoff, to about 20,000 infantry, and after a few days of regrouping it was ready to attack the positions on the Kara Dere.