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Plaque on the Shipka Pass, note the rugged terrain (Bulgarian Tourist Board)

Although the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 has been relegated to no more than just another incident in the troubled history of the Balkans, it did make one outstanding contribution to the knowledge of combined arms warfare, and in particular to the use, instead of abuse, of cavalry.

The small subsidiary operation conducted by the Russian advance guard commander, General Joseph Vladimirovich Gourko, in which he advanced from the River Danube and captured the Turkish stronghold at the Shipka Pass with a mixed force of some 8,000 infantry, 4,000 cavalry and 32 guns, was nothing short of an object lesson in what could be achieved by sound planning and the brilliant coordination of his forces.

Born in 1828, Gourko was educated in the Imperial Corps of Pages. He joined the Hussars of the Imperial bodyguard as a second lieutenant in 1846, and thereafter became its captain in 1857.  In 1860 Gourko was employed on the Emperors staff as adjutant, and then, in 1861 as colonel. He then took command of the Mariupol Hussars in 1866, and was promoted to Major General on the Emperors suite in 1867. Taking command of a guard grenadier regiment in 1870, he subsequently transferred to the guard cavalry where he led the 1^st brigade of the 1^st guard cavalry division in 1873. It can be seen from this that, although he did not take an active part in the Crimean War, he had a good working knowledge of both infantry and cavalry.

Gourko’s campaign in which he manoeuvred his little mixed force across and around torturous mountain tracks, outflanking the Turkish forces at the Shipka Pass, to fall on their rear, while the Russian VIII corps engaged them frontally, is fully covered in First Lieutenant F.V.Greene’s work, ‘Russian Campaigns in Turkey 1877-1878.’ The real point of interest is the composition of Gourko’s forces and the methods he used in employing his mounted troops which, ‘…was clearly based on thorough and intelligent study of the great cavalry sweeps of the American Civil War.’[i]

 
Russian Cossack and Dragoon, 1877 (Boris and John Mollo)

As well has having one regular cavalry brigade, consisting of two regiments of Dragoons and a horse battery, Gourko also had a mixed brigade of Hussars and Cossacks together with a Cossack horse battery. In addition he had a detachment of mounted pioneers made up of Don, Caucasus and Ural Cossacks who were specially trained in demolition and engineering skills. His regular cavalry, armed with the shortened Berdan rifle to which a bayonet could be fitted, had been fully trained to act as mounted infantry, and were so adaptable that they were just as much at home being employed as light infantry as they were being used for quick mounted raid against an enemy’s flank.

The Balkans 1878

His advance guard took the town of Trinova in central Bulgaria on July 7^th 1877. The town itself was a natural fortress situated in a bend of the river Yantra on its left bank, surrounded by rocky cliffs rising over 500 feet above the town. As Gourko’s troops approached from the western passes the Turks pulled back to cover the town. They had some 3,000 infantry supported by six guns, and some 400 Bashi-Bazouk irregular cavalry who were very unreliable. Correctly gauging that speed was of the essence, Gourko quickly opened up on the Turkish positions with his horse battery, while these guns were going into action he bought up four squadrons of Cossacks with orders to work their way around the Turkish flank and come at them from the rear. He then dismounted his regular brigade of Dragoons and sent them forward in a direct assault on the town itself. These tactics proved so effective that, with only 1,400 men, and with his regular cavalry on foot, the Turks broke and fled. Thus at the cost of two men and eight horses wounded Gourko had taken a key point in the Turkish lines, had captured enough food and forage to last him for the remainder of the campaign, and supplied the Russian Grand Duke Nicholas with a base for his headquarters.[ii]

With Trinova secured Gourko now pressed on and captured Hainkoi, Uflani, Maglish and Kazanlyk. On the 18^th of July he attacked the Shipka itself, which was hastily evacuated by the Turks on the following day. In the sixteen days since crossing the Danube, Gourko had cleared and secured three Balkan passes and caused consternation in Constantinople. Not one to rest on his laurels, Gourko now took his troops on a reconnaissance raid into the Tunja valley. Here he cut the railway line in two places, occupied Stara Zagora and Nova Zagora, bought the main Turkish army under Suleiman to a halt, and then proceeded to re-cross the Balkans leaving chaos in his wake. As McElwee states:

‘Gourko had thus demonstrated one lesson which the rest of the world’s armies were very slow to learn: that cavalry still had an enormous potential value in country where there was plenty of room to manoeuvre, provided that they would forget the legendary charges of history, exploit their mobility to the limit, and train themselves to do their fighting on foot. In the course of his subsequent and highly successful operations he was to teach two more…Gourko’s enterprising cavalry patrols deep into enemy territory not only kept him informed of Turkish dispositions on his own immediate front, but enabled him to keep the Grand Duke Nicholas posted on every phase of the concentration of the main Turkish army in Roumelia and its advance to what was to prove the decisive winter battles of the south of Shipka…Finally Gourko, alone among the generals of his age, had digested what was, perhaps, the supreme lesson of the American Civil War: the value of powerful cavalry raids deep into the enemy’s territory to disrupt their communications and interrupt their supplies.’[iii]

 

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