Turks retake Köprüköy

A British chronology of the war records under 14 November 1914 that a Turkish counter-offensive retook Köprüköy, a village on the Aras on the road to Erzurum. According to studies, the decisive fighting took place a few days earlier. On 11 and 12 November the Ottoman Third Army forced the troops of General Georgy Bergmann to retreat from Köprüköy to the positions they had occupied in the first days of the war, in the area of the village of Azap.

The counter-offensive began on 7 November on the orders of the Minister of War, Enver Pasha. The commander of the Third Army, General Hasan İzzet Pasha, first pinned the Russians down with XI Corps and then brought IX Corps and the cavalry into the battle. On 11 November the Turks attacked on both banks of the Aras and came out on the flank of Bergmann’s troops. The Russians, who a few days earlier had reached Köprüköy, found themselves in danger of encirclement and had to withdraw.

They avoided disaster thanks to reinforcements brought up from the depths of the Caucasus, which stabilised the front around Azap. Between 17 and 20 November the Turks tried once more to encircle the Russians on this line, but their exhausted divisions could not break through the mountains. On 21 November Hasan İzzet broke off the attack and fell back a dozen or so kilometres. Soon afterwards a blizzard swept over the battlefield, in which many soldiers of both sides froze to death.

The Russians held a strip of land about 25 kilometres deep inside Turkey, but their first offensive in the Caucasus had ended in failure. They took Köprüköy only in January 1916. In Constantinople Bergmann’s retreat was greeted as a great victory. Enver Pasha concluded that the Russian army in the Caucasus was weak. In December he took command of the Third Army himself and led it on a winter march across the mountains to Sarikamish, which ended in disaster for the Turks.