Start of the assault on Erzurum

A British chronology of the war records under 12 February 1916 the beginning of the Russian attack on Erzurum, the largest Ottoman fortress in eastern Anatolia. According to the history of the Caucasian wars by W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, the Russian artillery opened fire on the forts as early as 2 p.m. on 11 February, and the infantry went into the assault during the night of 11–12 February. 12 February was thus the first full day of fighting for the fortress. In Russia, where the Julian calendar was in use, it was 30 January.

The fortress and its defenders

After the defeat at Köprüköy in January the Ottoman Third Army fell back behind the forts of Erzurum. The ring of fortifications, built after the war of 1877–1878 to plans first by British and then by German engineers, covered the city from the east, from the Deveboynu ridge, and from the north and south, from the Gürcübogaz gorge and the Palandöken ridge. The stone forts, however, were not prepared for modern artillery, and of the fortress’s several hundred guns only 25–30 per cent were modern. More dangerous than the forts were the trenches and wire entanglements the Turks had built between them under the direction of a German specialist, Colonel von Posselt.

According to Allen and Muratoff, about 75,000 soldiers were needed to man the whole system. The commander of the Third Army, Mahmud Kâmil Pasha, had at most 50,000, many of them newly enlisted recruits, and the morale of the units that had been through Köprüköy was low. He placed three divisions of IX Corps in the Deveboynu forts, kept the remnants of XI Corps in reserve behind Fort Sivişli, and X Corps defended the northern sector. General Nikolai Yudenich, commander of the Russian Caucasus Army, gathered about 80,000 infantry, at least a quarter of whom were militia and recruits. His siege train, cobbled together from the guns of the Kars fortress, numbered twelve guns and seven howitzers.

Yudenich’s plan

Yudenich did not intend to besiege the fortress. He wanted to break through its lines at weak points and come out onto the plain behind the defenders’ backs. This time the main blow was to be delivered by the II Turkestan Corps of General Mikhail Przhevalsky. His riflemen were to take Fort Karagöbek, pass through the Gürcübogaz gorge and seize Fort Tafet. They were to be helped by General Vorobyov’s 4th Caucasian Rifle Division, which since the end of January had held the Kargapazar ridge, considered impassable by the Turks, and by Don Cossack infantry.

On the Deveboynu ridge the 39th Infantry Division was only to pin down the Turkish reserves with a strong attack on Forts Çobandede and Dalangöz. Further south, Colonel Dokuchaev’s detachment was to take a path across the slopes of Palandöken, and the Georgian General Chikovani, with a few militia units, was sent towards the Palandöken forts to draw the Turks’ attention there. On 8 February Yudenich invited his commanders to dinner and announced the attack for 10 February. When some of them began to ask for a delay, he cut them short: “Very well. We attack on the eleventh.”

The night in Fort Dalangöz

The bombardment of 11 February did little damage, according to Allen and Muratoff, although the Russians were helped by a Turkish artillery officer who had recently gone over to their side. When darkness fell, a battalion and a half of the 153rd Baku Infantry Regiment under Colonel Pirumov, an Armenian, approached Fort Dalangöz in complete silence. The surprised garrison, which had probably expected a longer artillery preparation, spotted them only at the very foot of the wall. One company climbed the wall and broke in, and the rest followed. Bayonet fighting went on in the fort until dawn. Meanwhile the neighbouring 156th Elizavetpol Infantry Regiment entered the gorge of the Toy stream and took a hill south-east of Fort Çobandede, capturing 500 prisoners according to Allen and Muratoff. The British correspondent Morgan Philips Price, who viewed the battlefield a few days later, described that night somewhat differently: according to him a Turkish battalion managed to withdraw from the surrounded fort to neighbouring Uzunahmet. He also remembered that the Russian soldiers went into the attack in white cloaks, invisible in the dark against the snow.

12 February

In the morning the Turks concentrated their artillery fire on Dalangöz and throughout the day, eight times in a row, tried to retake it. Pirumov held out, cut off from the rest of the regiment by a barrage, and several times his men almost ran out of ammunition. By evening, of his 1,400 soldiers 300 remained fit to fight, most of them wounded. He nevertheless held the fort, and during the night his men were relieved by other companies of the regiment. Things went less well in the south. Dokuchaev’s column lost the path in the dark and spent the night on a plateau lashed by an icy wind. More than 600 soldiers suffered severe frostbite, and many of them died. In the morning the column came upon a deep gorge in front of Fort Gez and had to turn back under artillery fire. Chikovani’s militia, on the other hand, got to within a kilometre of the eastern Palandöken fort.

The outcome of the day was decided in the north. From the morning Przhevalsky’s riflemen attacked the Gürcübogaz gorge in several columns, some of which outflanked Fort Karagöbek through the surrounding mountains. The Turkish X Corps fought with its divisions separated, without mutual support. At about 3 p.m. a Turkestan regiment took the village of Karagöbek, and the Russian artillery brought the fort under fire. Soon afterwards there was a powerful explosion in the fort. The Russians thought it was the result of their fire, but it was most probably a sign that the Turks were blowing up their stores before leaving. In the evening the riflemen entered the abandoned fort.

During the night of 12–13 February the Elizavetpol regiment tried to climb the steep mountain on which Fort Çobandede stood. Some of the soldiers managed to crawl almost to the walls, but at dawn they were discovered and wiped out by machine-gun fire. Even so, Yudenich could be satisfied with the first twenty-four hours of the assault. He held two forts, the Turkish reserves were tied down by fighting on the Deveboynu ridge, and Vorobyov’s division and the Don Cossacks, wading through snow up to two metres deep, were coming down the slopes of Kargapazar almost unhindered.