To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Russian diplomacy in the pre-war years aimed to neutralize and isolate eastern Anatolia, not overrun it. Its expansionism was directed towards Persia. By creating a cordon sanitaire between its own interests and Turkish irredentism, it freed itself for a forward policy in Azerbaijan. The southerly route adopted for the Baghdad railway was the most obvious manifestation of Russian success. In 1911 Germany recognized Russia’s sphere of interest in northern Persia, and the two powers agreed that Russia would build the line from Teheran to Khanikin, south of Kirkuk, to link with the Berlin-Baghdad route. Eastern Anatolia seemed condemned to backwardness.60 Its principal cities, Erzurum and Trabzon, were already in decline before 1914.61 The railway from Tabriz to Tiflis sucked the Tatars and Turkic populations of Persian Azerbaijan northwards into the economic nexus of Russia, not westwards into holy alliance with Turkey.

  Almost every scenario concerning the Caucasus suggested to Russia’s military planners that the front would retain this secondary status.62 In the case of war with Germany and Austria-Hungary, but not Turkey, the three Caucasian corps were to be used to feed Russia’s western front. If Turkey joined the Central Powers, Russia still planned to concentrate in the west, leaving two of the three Caucasian corps to conduct an active defence. In August 1914 the first of these contingencies was fulfilled, and II and III Caucasian army corps left for the west. One corps remained. However, the alliance with Britain removed the possibility of a clash between the two Entente powers in Persia. Therefore the two corps in Turkestan could be released for the Caucasus front, bringing Russian strength there to about 100,000 infantry, 15,000 cavalry, and 256 guns.63 A mishmash of reservists and volunteers, Cossack brigades (or ‘plastouns’), and so-called Caucasus Chasseurs added about 60,000 more: the numbers are imprecise because there was insufficient equipment for the 150,000 men available. Stavka did not, therefore, discount Turkey’s joining the enemy. But the advice from the Russian ambassador in Constantinople was that the Turkish efforts would be directed towards the Balkans.64

  The Russians took the Turkish military threat with sufficient seriousness to raise the number of divisions which they reckoned they might confront in the Caucasus from eleven to eighteen. But they seem to have done little else to explore Turkish intentions. Perhaps this was no more than a reflection of the fact that the Ottomans’ plans were themselves in flux. More probably the Russians were bewitched by the excellence of their own maps. Any perusal of the terrain argued that an offensive in the Caucasus was a doubtful proposition. The theatre of operations was effectively an enormous valley bounded by two mountain ranges, the Caucasus to the north and the Taurus to the south. The Russian railway to the front followed a circuitous route that showed both its commercial priorities and its respect for the Caucasus barrier. From Vladikavkaz, it proceeded south-east to Baku before doubling back north-west to Tiflis, and then to Poti and Batum on the Black Sea. A line south from Tiflis forked at Alexandropol, one route thrusting towards Kars, Sarikamish, and the Turkish frontier, the other going to Erivan and then along the Aras valley to Julfa and Tabriz. The configuration of this line made Batum and Kars the pivots of defence; neither it nor they were adapted as bases for attack. Given their own assumptions, it was not surprising that the Russians anticipated similar conclusions to be drawn by the Turks. The latter’s railheads at Ulu Kischla, at the northern end of the Taurus mountains and at Tell Ebiad, at the head of the Euphrates and actually behind the Taurus range, were 1,120 and 640 kilometres respectively from Erzurum. The only good road ran from Erzurum to Trabzon and the Black Sea. The poverty of the area meant that even in peacetime its subsistence economy could barely support the indigenous population. Thus, there were neither the lines of communication nor the local means to supply a large army entirely dependent on baggage animals.

  Russian insouciance had no cause to be shattered when finally Turkey did reveal its hand at the beginning of November. Winter had already begun. In the Asiatic interior it could be expected to last until at least March and even May. The snow in December might fall for up to a week, and then lie at depths of 2 metres in the valleys and 4 metres in the mountains.65 Temperatures would drop to minus 20 degrees centigrade and below.

  Russian assumptions were right. The reports sent back from Constantinople by Wangenheim and Pallavicini, talking of Enver’s plans for a Caucasian offensive, were pap, designed presumably to keep the Germans in play. Between August and November 1914 little was done to prepare the Turkish 3rd army for major operations. Its commander, Hassan Izzet, was not forewarned of Souchon’s sally into the Black Sea and was taken by surprise when war was declared.66 Of his two corps, IX corps, based in the area Trabzon-Erzurum-Erzincan, was by virtue of its proximity to the main towns and the sea-lanes of the Black Sea fully mobilized. XI corps, inland at Malatia, Kharput, and Van, had had more problems, resting on poorer communications and reliant on recalcitrant Kurdish reservists. To these six infantry divisions Izzet could add about 20,000 Kurdish irregular cavalry, which proved useless, and a few frontier and gendarmerie battalions, which did not. His maps of the area, on a scale of 1:200,000, were good on land forms, less good on roads and paths. His staff lacked the knowledge of the country to tell him which routes were accessible and which not, and local lore proved unreliable. His chief of staff, Felix Guse, one of the few Germans in the 3rd army, had only arrived at Erzurum on 1 June. Erzurum’s fortifications were outmoded and incomplete. Izzet’s principal task was therefore defensive, to protect the town by anticipating the likely lines of Russian advance from the direction of Kars and Oltu. The basic stance of Turkish deployments was confirmed by the role of X corps, placed in reserve to the rear of 3rd army around Samsun and Sivas. X corps had suffered heavy losses in men and material in the Balkan wars, and was not yet up to strength. Its task was to go to Thrace or to the Caucasus according to the situation; it was not finally allotted to the 3rd army until early November. The outbreak of war thus brought the nominal strength of the 3rd army to 190,000 men, but of these 66,000 only could be classed as combatants. It was deficient in artillery (it had 168 guns) and cavalry. The summer had not been used to collect transport or to preposition supplies.67

  Efforts to make up the deficit in the autumn were not helped by the failure of the Turkish navy to assert its command of the Black Sea after Souchon’s strike at the end of October. Stavka, to which the Russian navy was subordinated, was sufficiently concerned by the prospect of Turkish amphibious landings to demand that the Black Sea fleet disperse to protect the Russian coastline. But the fleet’s commander, Eberhardt, believed that pure defence would expose his ships to defeat in detail. His answer to the firepower of the Goeben was to seek battle on his own terms, with his three pre-Dreadnoughts concentrated. A brief action off Cape Sarych in the the Crimea, as his ships were returning to Sevastopol on 18 November 1914, vindicated his tactics. Despite the failure of the Russians’ centralized gunnery control, the Goeben suffered some damage and over 100 casualties. Eberhardt’s sweeps along the Anatolian coast in November and December sank troop transports and coastal shipping. Russian mines closed the harbour at Trabzon, leaving only Rize open, and on 25 December the Goeben struck a mine in the Bosporus and was out of commission until 3 April 1915. Although Eberhardt’s strategy left both Poti and Batum vulnerable to offshore bombardment, it also ensured that the Turks could not derive compensation for the deficiencies of their landward communications in northern Anatolia by the exploitation of the maritime route.68

  The Russians were, therefore, correct. The external danger was manageable and secondary. The primary threat was internal. The propaganda of the Committee of Union and Progress and the covert activities of Turkish agents in the Russian Caucasus before the war were an indirect recognition of the same fact. What pushed Enver into action on the Caucasian front was less a belief in his own pan-Turanian rhetoric than a need not to lose the initiative to others.

  In September 1914 a Georgian nationalist committee, under the direction of Prince Georg Matschabel
li and Michael Tserethelis, was established in Berlin. Germany recognized a potentially independent Georgia. Matschabelli asked the Germans for 50,000 rifles and 5 million rounds. Falkenhayn offered 14,000 outmoded rifles and 1.4 million rounds, but then, owing to the blockage of the Budapest-Bucharest route, could not deliver them. German support for Georgia was therefore nominal rather than actual. But its motivation—to create an army out of nothing but diplomacy—was one which Matschabelli kept in play. In April 1915 he would talk grandly of raising a force of 500,000 Caucasians in two or three months.69

  Given the fact that Germany could not prime the pump with munitions, the Georgians had in addition to speak to Talaat and Enver. This Leo Keresselidse did in September. The Georgian aim was independence for Georgia and neutrality in the Caucasus; their kingdom, once independent, would embrace not only its Christian population but also the Muslims. Keresselidse’s objective, therefore, was an alliance with Turkey, not Turkish suzerainty. Enver could not afford to renounce Georgian manpower, but nor could he bring himself to abandon the pan-Turkish dream. If Turkey wished to have a say in the settlement of the region it would have to use its own forces and upstage its German ally.

  Other German initiatives in the autumn also threatened to steal a march on Turkey. In September and October 1914 schemes were floated variously to exploit Armenian nationalism, Azerbaijani nationalism, and revolutionary socialism in order to bring Baku’s oil production to a standstill. Paul Schwarz calculated that the destruction of the stocks of crude oil and the disruption of production in the region would halt Russia’s railways in two to three months, thus causing the collapse of the entire eastern front. Schwarz was appointed Germany’s consul-general in Erzurum, specifically to advance this scheme.70

  The political effects of German involvement confirmed that Enver’s putative allies in the Caucasus were more often Christian than they were Muslim. In 1912 the Armenians in Turkey had appealed to Russia, and by 1914 aspired to autonomy within the Ottoman empire under great-power protection. One answer to Russia’s own Armenian problem had thus become Russian guardianship of Armenians elsewhere. In the summer of 1914 the Young Turks tried to turn the tables by asking the Dashnakists at Erzurum to incite rebellion within Russia in order to support a Turkish invasion of Transcaucasia. As a quid pro quo, the Turks offered to create an autonomous Armenia formed of the Russian Armenian territories, plus the vilayets of Erzurum, Van, and Bitlis. The Armenians refused, but they confirmed their allegiance to Turkey.71

  Pan-Islamic feeling seemed, therefore, to play little part in the destabilization of the Russian Caucasus in 1914. Indeed, the Muslim population of Russia remained, broadly speaking, loyal throughout the war. Muslims were exempt from military service, and therefore any immediate crisis of conscience was avoided. The Caucasus committee, founded by an Ottoman senator, Fuad Pasha, in August 1914, embraced the recognition that independence and nationalism were the goals of all the Caucasian peoples, while trying to harness these forces to Turkish ends by achieving those objectives under Turkish protection. By the winter of 1914, therefore, Enver was having to recognize that the strength of opposition to Russian rule lay in directions which might take the peoples of Turan away from Turkey, not towards it. Equally, that opposition was not in itself so broad as to cause the collapse of the Russian position in the Caucasus without an external nudge. The 3rd army would have to attack if Turkey was to retain control of its own foreign policy.

  Once again, however, the actions of others more than his own pan-Turkism shaped Enver’s strategy. The structure of the Russian command was confused. The Russian viceroy in the Caucasus, Count Vorontsov-Dashkov, an ailing man without military experience, delegated effective command to his deputy, Myshlayevskii. The latter had been shunted out to the Caucasus by Sukhomlinov because his narrow-mindedness and conservatism had created obstacles to reform on the general staff.72 His headquarters constituted a small and able team headed by Nicolai Yudenich. Both it and Myshlayevskii’s general reserve were based on Tiflis. The main Russian concentration, I Caucasian corps under General Bergmann, was formed up in the area Alexandropol-Kars-Sarikamish-Karakurt to guard the approaches from Erzurum to Oltu and Kars. Lesser formations blocked the other main routes across the frontier, at Batum, from Bayazit to Erivan, and from the Persian Azerbaijan. The whole front was 600 kilometres long. Therefore, in order to shorten the Russian front, Bergmann was ordered forward to the line Bayazit-Eleskirt-Id. By 5 November this manoeuvre had been completed.

  Bergmann now decided to exceed his instructions and push on to Hasankale on the main road to Erzurum. The Turks used IX corps to hold what they took to be the main Russian concentration (in fact only a brigade) advancing south from Oltu and Id, while assembling XI corps at Hasankale and Köprüköy against Bergmann’s right. Their counter-attack on 6 November, carried out in snow and rain and with insufficient reconnaissance, was driven back. But on the 9th Izzet himself arrived on the battlefield, and with the weather clear could direct operations from the Hasankale heights. The Russians were held. Izzet had been told by Enver to attack isolated Russian columns. He was now aware that the major Russian forces were on the Aras, and not to the north at Id. He could therefore draw in IX corps north of the Aras and begin to threaten the Russian positions with XI corps from the south. Furthermore, the Russian artillery, whose efforts had been so striking in these first clashes, was short of mountain guns and could not elevate sufficiently to be effective against the Turks on the higher ground. The Turks’ counter-attack on 11 November drove the Russians back to the line Horsan-Sanamer. Izzet pushed towards the Russian flanks and rear. But his units were becoming confused, and the poor state of at least one of XI corps’ divisions was evident. Bergmann reinforced his right with elements of II Turkestan corps. Izzet’s ammunition began to run short. On the night of 21/2 November he broke contact and fell back, establishing his headquarters at Köprüköy.73

  MAP 26. THE SARIKAMISH REGION

  Around Batum as well, the Russians were thwarted. A force of 5,000 Adzhari guerrillas (Georgian Muslims) harried the Russians into the evacuation of the lower Coruh. Only in Azerbaijan had Myshlayevskii’s limited advance been successfully accomplished. The spell of Turkish military inferiority, woven by the defaults of the Balkan wars, was sundered.

  Thus, finally, at the end of November, with the victory at Köprüköy and the accession of X corps to the 3rd army, Enver embraced the idea of a major offensive. Persuaded that he should exploit the newly recovered strength of the Turkish army before it was overhauled by the Russians, he was also anxious to exploit the reports of Muslim insurgency. Conscious too, and perhaps jealous of74 Djemal’s pan-Islamic offensive against Egypt in the south, he now clothed his project with pan-Turanian oratory. He talked of breaking through to Afghanistan and India. The grandeur of such schemes, given the season and the terrain, rather than an attack per se was what alarmed the minister of war’s German advisors. Enver offered the Caucasus command to Liman von Sanders. Liman refused. However, his response was not typical. Both Bronsart von Schellendorff at the war ministry and Guse at the front itself supported a limited offensive. Only thus could the Turks tie down significant Russian forces and contribute to the overall situation on the eastern front. What worried them was the fact that bravado had replaced caution.

  It worried the normally nervous Izzet too. A rift opened between Constantinople and Erzurum. Enver, remote from the action and fired by his own schemes, blamed Izzet for not exploiting the victory at Köprüköy. Izzet stressed the incomplete state of his army. On 29 November he reported X corps as short of 17,000 overcoats, 17,400 pairs of boots, 23,000 ground-sheets, and 13,000 knapsacks.75 Enver’s response was to send Hafiz Hakki,76 the 30-year old, thrusting deputy chief of the general staff, to form a personal view. Hakki stoked Enver’s ambitions. He glossed over the difficulties and announced that the envelopment of Oltu would take the Russians completely by surprise and open the way to Kars. On 10 December Enver appeared at Izzet’s headqua
rters. Guse briefed Enver in Izzet’s presence. Nine days later Izzet was relieved, and Enver himself took over the 3rd army, with Bronsart as his chief of staff and Guse as Bronsart’s deputy. Hakki was given the task of putting fire into the belly of X corps.

  After Köprüköy the Russians had consolidated their positions for the winter, describing an arc round the Soganli Mountains, their right resting on the Çakir-baba ridge and their left along the Aras, so guarding the railhead at Sarikamish to their rear. Enver’s plan reflected the lessons of Tannenberg, that the Russians were vulnerable to attacks against their flanks.77 He reinforced XI corps’s right with two divisions originally bound for Iraq and Syria, and gave it the immense task of fixing by frontal attack the main weight of two Russian corps (both bigger in establishment than a Turkish corps and totalling about 54,000 men). Meanwhile IX corps was to follow a path along the Cakirbaba ridge. This path, the top yol, was known to the Russians but was considered impracticable for large bodies of troops. Enver reckoned that its exposed position would keep it swept of snow, and would take it above the ravines which would otherwise impede IX corps’s progress. IX corps was to begin its march on 22 December so as to reach Çatak on 24 December. Catak lay on a transverse track connecting Oltu to Bardiz and Sarikamish. The Turks would therefore be able to fall on the Russians’ main base and railhead from the north-west on Christmas day.

  But it was to X corps that the task of deep envelopment fell. A single Russian brigade (8,000 men) held Oltu. Therefore X corps was to set out from Id on 22 December and take Oltu on the 23rd. Parts of X corps were then to use the Oltu-Bardiz path to reinforce IX corps, although it was left open to Hakki to press on 73 kilometres to Merdenik and thence to Ardahan (a further 42 kilometres and held by 2,000 men). X corps’s northward drive would be facilitated and supported by the eastward attack of elements of the 32nd division, which were to be landed at Rize on the coast and were to advance on Ardahan by way of Artvin.