Turks retake Muş

The British chronology of the war records under 30 April 1917 that Ottoman troops occupied Muş, a town in Turkish Armenia west of Lake Van. Turkish historians give the same date, for them the day of the town’s final liberation from Russian occupation. The Turkish TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam gives 1 May, and the history of the Caucasian wars by W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff speaks generally of May. This time the Turks did not have to fight for Muş. The Russians withdrew from the town of their own accord, and Allen and Muratoff call it the first important point abandoned by the Russian Caucasus Army as it disintegrated after the revolution.

A town changing hands

Muş was changing hands for the fourth time since the beginning of 1916. In February of that year, after the fall of Erzurum, Russian Cossacks took it. At the beginning of August the XVI Corps of Mustafa Kemal retook Muş and Bitlis, but only a few weeks later the Russians went over to a counter-offensive and again approached the town. Sources differ as to when they returned to it: some speak of the second half of August, while Allen and Muratoff write that the Turks held on in the surrounding hills and left Muş only at the end of September. Bitlis remained in Ottoman hands.

In the winter of 1916–1917 both armies struggled more with hunger, frost and disease than with the enemy. According to Allen and Muratoff, Russian Caucasian riflemen in the mountains sometimes received only half a pound of bread a day and made soup from the meat of donkeys, cats and dogs, and in March 1917 typhus broke out in the Russian 66th Infantry Division, perhaps brought in from Muş itself. By mid-March many Russian units were at only 60–70 per cent of their strength. On the Ottoman side things were even worse. The soldiers’ rations had been cut by two-thirds, typhus was spreading, half the artillery horses had died of starvation, and the six divisions of the Second Army numbered no more than 30,000 men in March. On 7 March Mustafa Kemal took command of this army.

Effects of the revolution

Allen and Muratoff have no doubt that only the outbreak of the February Revolution saved the Turks from complete defeat in Asia Minor. The disintegration of the Caucasus Army proceeded more slowly and less violently than on the European front. The soldiers still obeyed orders, but committees and delegates from Tiflis and Petrograd interfered in command, and there were riots in the garrisons in the rear. Through the spring and summer the army held almost all of the previous year’s gains. There were only small withdrawals, to leave as few soldiers as possible in the front line, and the first important place abandoned in this way was Muş.

The Turkish historian Haluk Selvi writes that the units that entered the town were subordinate to Mustafa Kemal as commander of the Second Army. Muş was in ruins. Its Armenian inhabitants had been massacred in 1915 during the Armenian genocide, and war and flight had also depopulated the Muslim part of the town. Selvi states that even in the 1927 census Muş had barely more than 4,000 inhabitants.

Significance

The recovery of Muş did not change the situation on the Caucasus front. In the summer of 1917, according to Allen and Muratoff, only the Turkish 5th Division with part of the 8th Division stood in the Bitlis and Muş area, because the weakened Second Army had in practice become a depot from which the forces fighting in Iraq and Palestine were replenished. Kemal himself soon left the Caucasus. On both sides of the front there was stagnation. According to Allen and Muratoff, General Nikolai Yudenich, commanding the Russian forces, could not bear the interference of the committees and gave up his command in June. Muş was nevertheless a sign of what was to come: when the Russian army disintegrated completely at the beginning of 1918, the Turks recovered all the lands they had lost to the Russians.