Sarıkamış
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Sarıkamış (Armenian: Սարիղամիշ Sarighamish) is a town and a district of Kars Province in the Eastern Anatolia region of Turkey.
Sarikamis, "Turkey's Insburg", which has got one of the longest skiing pistes of the World, is 50km from Kars Airport. The duration of the skiing season is 120 days a year. The altitude in the skiing area of Sarikamis is 2200-2634 m and covered by pine forest.
[edit] History
An important battle took place between the armies of the Ottoman and Russian Empires in and around the city in late December 1914-January 1915 as part of the Caucasus Campaign of World War I.
Enver Pasha, the leader of the Ittihat ve Terakki party in Istanbul, personally led the army along with Hafız Hakkı, who was his brother in-law to scale the Mount Allahu Ekber and afterwards attack the Russian army in Sarıkamış to occupy the town in order to halt logistic support to the city of Kars lost to Russians in 1878 which he was planning to reoccupy.
In mid December, Enver Pasha entered the Caucasus region through Armenia. Enver's ordered his forces to attack along many routes with the goal of arriving suddenly at Sarikamis at the same time. The chief German military advisor, General Liman von Sanders strongly argued against this plan but was ignored. Governor General Vorontsov planned to withdraw his forces to the city of Kars. But Yudenich ignored Vorontsov's wishes to withdraw and instead stayed to defend Sarikamis.[1]
Enver's forces lost touch with one another and arrived at Sarakamis at different times from December 29 through the 3rd of January. The first divisions to arrive briefly took control of the barracks in the western part of the city but were driven off. In the following days, as more Ottoman forces arrived at the battle, they attacked without coordination and the Russians under the skillfull command of General Yudenich fought off the attacks one by one. The battle finally ended on January 4 and the Ottoman army retreated in complete disorganization back through the mountains in the middle of winter.
The number of Turkish losses is estimated to be 60,000-80,000 dead out of an army of 90,000. It is very likely that the majority of Turkish soldiers died because of inadequate winter clothing and field shelters during the attack and retreat. In any event, this was an extraordinarily costly defeat for the Turks; in losses this was the worst single defeat they suffered in the entire war.Turkish soldiers reached to the targets but they were too weak to win. The Russian casualities were estimated at 35,000.[2]
As one German officer attached to the army wrote later, the Ottoman 3rd army had "suffered a disaster which for rapidity and completeness is without parallel in military history."
On the other side, the victor of the battle, General Yudenich, was appointed commander of the Russian Caucasus Army and he launched an offensive of his own in the summer of 1915 towards Erzincan where was the last point of Russians reached.This winter campaign is not known very well as Napeleon's (1812) and German's (1943) winter campaigns or defeats. But from military operations point of view , there are lots of similarities,same mistakes etc.
The war resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of soldiers without firing a bullet and the collapse of the 3rd army in the Eastern front because of the imprudent actions and ambitions of Enver and Hafız Hakkı Paşa. The front was later bolstered by moving the 2nd army to the East from Southeast which later resulted in weakened resistance to British assaults in 1917. This finally resulted in the general surrender to the allies after the capitulation of the Ottoman ally Germany.
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