Turks take Sarıkamış

On 5 April 1918 Ottoman troops regained Sarıkamış, in Polish Sarykamysz, a small town and railway station on the former Russian frontier, about 50 kilometres south-west of Kars. Three winters earlier, at the turn of 1914 and 1915, the Third Army led by Enver Pasha had perished in the snow at Sarıkamış. Now the Turks entered it almost without losses, because the Russian Caucasus Army no longer existed and the Armenians defending the frontier withdrew before the Turkish ring could close around them. Turkish tradition marks 5 April as the day the town was recovered by the units of Kâzım Karabekir’s I Caucasian Corps, and according to the British historians of the Caucasian wars W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, the last Armenians left on the night of 5/6 April. The British chronology of the war gives the date as 4 April.

Sarıkamış lay in territory that Russia had won in the war with Turkey of 1877–1878. In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 3 March 1918 the Bolsheviks undertook to withdraw from the districts of Kars, Ardahan and Batumi, but the Transcaucasian authorities in Tiflis did not recognise the treaty. From mid-March their delegation was negotiating with the Turks in Trebizond, while the commander of the Third Army, Vehip Pasha, had been moving troops towards the former frontier since the last week of March. After the capture of Erzurum the whole I Caucasian Corps, three divisions, was preparing to march on Kars. On 30 March the Turks occupied the frontier post at Karaurgan, and their patrols reached Bardız on the left flank and Karakurt on the right. As at Erzurum, they were preparing a wide outflanking movement meant to manoeuvre the defenders out of Sarıkamış.

The commander of the Armenian corps, General Tovmas Nazarbekian, saw this manoeuvre clearly. According to Allen and Muratoff he had thirteen weak battalions at Sarıkamış, against which the Turks could throw three divisions. In his rear, on the road to Kars, Muslim irregulars were growing ever bolder. Nazarbekian feared being encircled by a stronger enemy in the narrow defile in which Sarıkamış lies. On 5 April the Turks attacked the Armenian positions where the highway forks into the roads to Karaurgan and Karakurt. At the same time they attacked Colonel Morel’s volunteer brigade on the Armenian right flank, in the area of the Egek-meydan pass, and took the village of Verişan. The threat of the Turks breaking out onto the plain near Novo-Selim became real, and in the night the Armenians abandoned Sarıkamış. They fell back to new positions near Novo-Selim station, from which to defend the road to Kars.

The soldiers at the front had no doubt that the war with the Turks had just resumed. The government in Tiflis, however, was still counting on an agreement, and, as Allen and Muratoff write, its hesitation robbed the army of its last chance of serious resistance. The Turks did not wait for the outcome of the talks. According to some sources, on the same day as Sarıkamış they also took Ardahan, on the way to Batumi. On 6 April an ultimatum from Constantinople reached Trebizond, demanding that the disputed districts be evacuated by 10 April.

The fall of Sarıkamış opened the road to Kars, the strongest fortress in Transcaucasia, to the Turks. The Armenians gathered more than a dozen battalions at Novo-Selim, but they had only a few thousand rifles among them on a front more than 40 kilometres long. On 19 April the Turks broke through this line and advanced right up to the forts of Kars.