Turks retake Erzurum

On the morning of 12 March 1918 units of the Ottoman Third Army entered Erzurum, the greatest fortress of eastern Anatolia. Two years earlier, in February 1916, the Russians had taken it by storm. Now the Turks recovered it after brief fighting. The last defenders, Armenian soldiers and volunteers of General Andranik Ozanian, withdrew during the night of 11–12 March. This date is given consistently by the British chronology of the war and by the historians of the Caucasian wars W.E.D. Allen, a Briton, and Paul Muratoff, a Russian émigré, and in Turkey 12 March is celebrated as the day of the liberation of Erzurum. Armenian accounts, counting days by the Julian calendar, describe the same events at the end of February.

After the capture of Trebizond and Erzincan, the commander of the Third Army, Vehip Pasha, moved on Erzurum. According to Allen and Muratoff, a Turkish advance guard, two regiments of the 36th Caucasian Division with Kurds, approached the town around 25 February, and by 8 March further units of that division and parts of the 5th and 11th Caucasian Divisions had arrived from Bayburt. Turkish tradition credits the recovery of Erzurum above all to the commander of I Caucasian Corps, Kâzım Karabekir. Erzurum was defended by the detachment of Andranik, the famous partisan leader who had been promoted to major-general. Allen and Muratoff put it at 3,000 infantry and 400 cavalry with eight guns: the 1st Rifle Regiment, a battalion of the 4th Regiment and five battalions of volunteers from Erzurum and Erzincan. A great many Russian guns and much ammunition had indeed been left in the fortress, but food, discipline and the will to fight were lacking. Andranik’s biographer Antranig Chalabian describes how Armenian soldiers from the Caucasus refused to fight on Turkish soil and deserted en masse, and some commanders fell back without orders.

On 10 and 11 March the Armenians fought at Ilıca and Tekedere west of the town, but Turkish columns outflanked their positions from the north and south. The enemy’s superiority was obvious, and during the night of 11–12 March Andranik ordered Erzurum to be abandoned. In the morning the Turks entered the town. The fighting of the Armenian rearguard at the gates raised the defenders’ losses at Erzurum to about 600 killed and wounded. Together with the troops fled thousands of Armenian inhabitants who had survived the genocide of 1915 or had returned to the town behind the Russian army. On 12 March the commander of the Armenian corps, General Tovmas Nazarbekian, also ordered the evacuation of Hınıs. By 14 March the Armenians falling back from Erzurum were standing on the old Russo-Turkish frontier at Karaurgan.

The fall of the town was accompanied by violence against civilians. Historians, among them the French scholar Anahide Ter Minassian, write that Armenian irregulars, seeking revenge, killed Muslims and burned and looted villages, while Ottoman soldiers and Kurds murdered Christians who had not managed to flee. The Ottoman side at once began collecting accounts of crimes against Muslims. According to Karabekir’s memoirs, on 15 March he spoke with Russian officers who had stayed in the town and been taken prisoner, and one of them, Lieutenant-Colonel Tverdokhlebov, wrote down accounts of the Armenians’ conduct, later translated into Turkish and French. Turkish historiography relies on such testimony and gives high numbers of victims that cannot be precisely verified today.

Erzurum was for the Turks the gateway to Transcaucasia. Two days after its capture, on 14 March, a peace conference with the Transcaucasian delegation opened at Trebizond. The first item on the agenda was a telegram from Vehip Pasha of 10 March demanding the immediate evacuation of the districts of Kars, Ardahan and Batum, from which Russia had undertaken in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to withdraw its troops. The Transcaucasian delegates replied that they did not recognise the treaty and were not bound by it. The Turks, however, had no intention of waiting. At the end of March their troops moved from Erzurum towards the old frontier, and on 30 March they took the frontier post at Karaurgan, on the road to Kars.