The Ottoman Army
The need for extensive reform of the Turkish army and its institutions had by the early 19th century been obvious for a considerable time. The process of reform began under Sultan Mahmud II. This only became possible after the bloody suppression of the Janissaries in June 1826. The process was far from complete by the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-1829, but a new system of organisation, based upon that of France, had been introduced, together with a westernised form of dress. Helmuth von Moltke, in his history of that war, noted the essential change that had been brought about:
The splendid appearance, the beautiful arms, the reckless bravery of the former Muslim horde, had disappeared; but yet this new army had one quality which placed it above the numerous host which in former times the Porte could summon to the field – it obeyed.1
During this war the Ottoman army performed somewhat better than expected, and at times put up a strong resistance against the invading Russian army; the campaign proved to be far from the cakewalk to which the Russians had looked forward. Ultimately, however, the outbreak of war seriously set back the military reforms, as Moltke observed:
If Turkey had enjoyed ten years of peace after the destruction of the Janissaries, Sultan Mahmud’s military creation might in that time have gained some strength; and, supported by an army on which he could depend, the Sultan might … have made himself formidable to his neighbours. All this was prevented by Russia, which nipped the Sultan’s military reforms in the bud.2
The army’s weakness was dramatically demonstrated in the campaigns it fought against the forces of Muhammed Ali, the rebellious Viceroy of Egypt. In December 1832 the Egyptian forces under Muhammed’s son Ibrahim routed a Turkish army at Konya, and threatened to strike deep into Anatolia. Further humiliation was averted when a peace deal was patched up with French mediation; but the Sultan accepted the arrangement with reluctance, and for the rest of the decade hankered after a renewal of the war. He finally resumed hostilities in 1839, when Moltke had a first hand opportunity of seeing for himself the quality of the Turkish army, when serving on the staff of Hafiz Pasha, the commander of an army with the task of advancing south on Aleppo. Moltke’s sound advice was rejected by his commander, who preferred the opinion of the mullahs who accompanied the army. When confronting Ibrahim’s forces near Nisib on June 24 1839 Hafiz was comprehensively defeated, as Moltke had predicted. Moltke himself was lucky in the resultant chaos to escape with his life. He described the disaster in a letter written a fortnight later:
The army of Hafiz Pasha has ceased to exist. The Turks threw down their arms and abandoned their artillery, flying in every direction.3
Mahmud II died before the full reports of Nisib were received, and was succeeded by his son, the sixteen year old Abdul Mecid. The intervention of the Great Powers resulted in the curtailment of Muhammed’s ambitions; and the removal of this military threat ushered in the ‘Tanzimat’ era of reform. The political and social changes that were contemplated by the Imperial Rescript of the Rose Chamber, announced in November 1839, involved an extensive programme of westernisation. In the year that followed the reform programme extended to the armed forces of the Ottoman Empire, and the benefit of this was seen in the performance of the Turkish forces in the Crimean War. Under Omar Pasha they gave at least as good as they got in the fighting along the Danube in 1853-1854, until, under Austrian pressure, the Russians evacuated the Principalities in July 1854. When it was decided to make Sebastopol the war’s principal objective, 6,000 Turkish troops formed part of the Allied invasion force that landed at Eupatoria in the Crimea.
During the ensuing campaign the French and British had mixed views of the Turkish infantry. 13,000 Turkish troops fought well in defending Eupatoria against an energetic assault by 20,000 Russian troops in February 1855, throwing back the attackers with heavy loss. They were also effective in the part they played during the Battle of the Tchernaya in repulsing a Russian sortie in August of that year, as they had been in the Franco-Turkish expedition to seize the town of Kerch on the eastern coast of the Crimea.
Recruits from Salonika arriving in Constantinople to be clothed and armed. (Illustrated London News)
Turkish infantry on the march. (Russes et Turcs)
In the Caucasus, the Turkish forces did not do so well at first, and were defeated a number of times in the winter of 1854 and again during the following year. In the siege of Kars, however, under a British commander in General Fenwick Williams, they fought bravely against heavy odds, and although the fortress ultimately fell on November 25, its Turkish defenders could feel pride in their lengthy defence of the place.
All in all, therefore, the Turkish army had come out well from the Crimean War, with its reputation to some extent enhanced.
In 1877 the Turkish army was still recruited only from the Muslim population, Christians not being allowed to bear arms but instead obliged to pay a poll tax in lieu of military service. The army was divided into four categories. The standing army, or Nizam, consisted of infantry who served for four years and cavalry and artillery who served for five. After completing their terms of service all soldiers passed into the Ithiat, or first reserve, where they served a further term to make up a total of six years. Next came the Redif, or second reserve. This consisted of men who had served in the Nizam and the Ithiat, together with those who had avoided conscription. Service in the Redif was divided into four classes. The first class consisted of soldiers that had served in the Nizam; after four years in this class they passed into the second class. Men who had escaped conscription received a certain amount of military training during a term of four years in the third class, at the end of which they passed into the fourth class. The whole of the Redif was organised in battalions by classes, and these battalions were formed and called out for service as complete units. Finally there was the Mustafiz, which consisted of all men who had completed their time in the Redif, in which they served for a further term of six years.4
During the reign of Abdul Aziz, progress was made in improving the standard of military education, with the opening of new military high schools to support the Military Academy and the Military Engineering School. By 1877, however, the process had produced for too few academy trained officers, or Mekteblis; out of a total of 20,000 regular officers, only 1,600 were from the academy. Even more seriously, there were only 132 academy trained general staff officers for all the armies which the Ottoman Empire put into the field, with potentially disastrous consequences for their manoeuvrability. On the other hand, the artillery was more fortunate, some 20% of its officers being Mekteblis.5
The basic unit of the Turkish army was the battalion, which notionally consisted of 800 men, divided into eight companies. All larger units were assembled on an ad hoc basis, although for administrative purposes in peacetime the standing army was organized in seven army corps, two of which were based in European Turkey and the remainder in Asia Minor.
Considerable confusion resulted from the way in which the army was organised, as was noted by one British observer serving with the Turks:
The administrative and tactical unit was the battalion, not the regiment. For administrative purposes three battalions are formed into a regiment; but the tactical formation of a regiment was arbitrary, differed nearly always from the administrative one, and was often changed from one ordre de bataille to another. Thus the colonelcy had no real tactical value. The major was the fountain-head, the source, the authority.6
Turkish recruits being put through their paces near Erzerum. (Russes et Turcs)
Turkish troops transported by railway. (Russes et Turcs)
One consequence of this is that historians have found it to be extremely difficult to calculate accurately the distribution of the Turkish units during the war and the numbers of troops engaged.
Although the nominal strength of a battalion was 800 men, practically all Turkish units were well below their establishment, due to the losses sustained in the recent campaigns against insurgents, which had not been made good from the Ithiat. However, the army was better prepared for war in 1877 than had been the case for many years. The Ithiat and the first class of the Redif had been called up to reinforce the Nizam on the outbreak of fighting in Herzegovina in 1875. Early in 1876 a large part of the second class of the Redif was called up when war broke out with Serbia and Montenegro. Finally, the third class of the Redif had been called up in November 1876 when the Russian army began to concentrate in Bessarabia.
The Turkish army was also very much better equipped than ever before, a large part of the national budget, as well as the proceeds of international loans raised in Europe, having been lavished upon it. Three-quarters of the infantry were now armed with the Peabody-Martini rifle, sighted to 1,800 yards, which has been described as being as good a weapon of its kind as any in the world. The rest of the Turkish infantry were equipped with Snider rifles, with a shorter range; and the contingent of twelve battalions that arrived from Egypt had Remingtons. Major Maurice, in his history of the war, described the qualities of the Turkish infantry:
The Turkish foot soldier only requires leading and training to make him one of the finest fighting men in the world; he is sober, capable of enduring great privation, and a good marcher; a fatalist by religion, he is without fear of death. While insufficiently trained to be able to manoeuvre under fire and to attack, the Turkish infantry were by their natural qualities admirably suited for defensive tactics.7
Types seen accompanying a Turkish baggage train. (Histoire de la Guerre d’Orient 1877-1878)
The supporting services of the Turkish army were decidedly mixed. There was a plentiful supply of ammunition, although the Turkish infantry were generally extremely wasteful in its use. They were also very well equipped with entrenching tools, and were trained to dig in at once on occupying a position. On the other hand, the commissariat was dreadful; a regular supply of adequate rations could never be depended on, and Turkish troops were obliged to forage for themselves, which led to much straggling on the march. Transport, too, was unreliable and often non-existent.
The cavalry units were poorly trained and badly mounted. A cavalry regiment consisted of six squadrons, each nominally of 150 men. Dragoons were armed with Winchester repeating rifles, as were the two flank squadrons of a Lancer regiment, the remaining four squadrons being equipped with lances instead of rifles. The artillery was well equipped with modern four and six pounder breechloaders from Krupp. Like the cavalry, they were badly horsed, and were insufficiently trained. Finally, there were the Bashi-Bazouks, the irregular cavalry, which were untrained and almost completely lacking in discipline. Frederick William von Herbert succinctly described his own experience of Turkish troops in the field:
The artillery was splendid (despite the bad supply of horses), the infantry very good, the regular cavalry mediocre (apart from the fact that it was insufficient in numbers), the irregular, on the whole, useless. Train, commissariat, sanitary service, engineers etc were either absent altogether or bad.8
A Turkish battery near Rustchuk. (Strantz)
Abdul Kerim Pasha. (Hozier)
The higher leading of the Ottoman army left in general a lot to be desired. The first commander appointed to lead the Turkish army to face the Russians was Abdul Kerim Pasha. Aged seventy-one in 1877, he had studied for five years in Vienna, which gave him the reputation of being something of a military intellectual. During the Crimean War he served on the Caucasus front, where forces under his command won the Battle of Bayandir. He acted as commandant for some time of the fortress of Kars, a position from which he was removed after a defeat in January 1854. He commanded the army in the war against Serbia, but his success in that campaign was due more to the efforts of his subordinates and the troops under their command than to his own leadership; he is said to have conducted most of the campaign at a distance, remaining in Sofia. He was vividly described by a correspondent of the Daily News:
The Commander in Chief is a Turk of the good old time, about sixty-seven years old, with white hair and beard, lively round brown eyes, and dark complexion. His jovial face and corpulent body do not at all indicate a soldier of nervous disposition, consumed by arduous activity and ambition, but one of passive energy, capable of stubborn resistance.9
Ahmed Eyoub Pasha. (Russes et Turcs)
Mehemet Ali Pasha. (Hozier)
Mukhtar Pasha. (Hozier)
Faizi Pasha, the Chief of Staff of the Turkish forces in the Caucasus. (Album della Guerra Russo-Turca del 1877-78)
The most influential of Abdul Kerim’s immediate subordinates was Ahmed Eyoub Pasha, commander of the corps based at Shumla, the largest individual concentration of Turkish forces. To the west, however, on the extreme left of the Turkish line along the Danube, was the force commanded by Osman Nuri Pasha, based at Widdin. Osman was to prove the outstanding military hero on the Turkish side. He was born in 1837. He served under Omar Pasha in the Principalities in 1853-1855, and fought at Eupatoria in the Turkish victory there. He distinguished himself in a number of minor campaigns in the Lebanon, Crete and the Yemen before in 1876 he was appointed to the command of an army corps in the war against Serbia. He defeated Cherniaev, the Russian commander of the Serbian forces, at the battles of Saitschev and Yavor, and advanced to the invasion of Serbia, where he captured Alexinatz and Deligrad. His Chief of Staff was the able Tahir Pasha.
Herbert, who admired him greatly, described Osman thus:
Osman, though not tall, was of dignified presence. He was taciturn and grave, abrupt of speech and manner, rather disdainful in looks and words, and had naught about him of the petty forms of politeness. A peculiarity of his was a violent dislike of foreigners – English, French, Germans, Russians, all alike.10
The Turkish commander in the Caucasus was Ahmed Mukhtar Pasha. Born in 1832, he served as an adjutant during the Crimean War, and later took part in the Montenegrin campaign of 1862 and the Yemen campaign of 1870-1871. In 1873, he was given command of an army corps, and in 1875 led the Turkish forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He knew the Asian theatre well, having been Governor of Erzerum for a number of years before the war. He had the benefit of a particularly reliable Chief of Staff in Faizi Pasha. Born in Hungary, the latter had served as Chief of Staff to General Williams during the siege of Kars in the Crimean War.
At the start of the war the Ottoman Empire had some 378,000 men under arms. Of these, 168,000 were under the command of Abdul Kerim. Elsewhere in Europe another 140,000 men were deployed to deal with a large number of threats to Ottoman security. The single largest force, under Suleiman Pasha, was in Montenegro and Herzegovina, with 15,000 more under Veli Pasha in Bosnia. 20,000 men were concentrated in Albania under Ali Saib Pasha, with 10,000 more at Novi-Bazar under Mehemet Ali Pasha. In addition to these there were some 45,000 men scattered in small garrisons throughout European Turkey and Crete. On the Caucasus front there were a total of 70,000 men, of which Ahmed Mukhtar directly commanded 50,000, with another 20,000 at Batum.11