On the foggy morning of 8 February 1913 Ottoman troops attacked the Bulgarian lines at Bulair, the narrow isthmus that joins the Gallipoli peninsula to Thrace. By evening the Bulgarian 7th Rila Division under Major General Georgi Todorov had thrown them back with heavy losses. The attack was meant to work together with a landing at Şarköy on the Sea of Marmara, but the landing came too late and both operations failed. Bulgaria still used the Julian calendar at the time, so Bulgarian sources date the battle 26 January 1913, Old Style.
A war resumed
The First Balkan War had gone badly for the Ottoman Empire. By the end of 1912 the Bulgarians were besieging Adrianople (Edirne) and had advanced to the outskirts of Constantinople, and an armistice was signed on 3 December 1912. On 23 January 1913 Enver Bey led a coup that brought the Committee of Union and Progress back to power, and the war resumed. The new government planned to land a corps at Şarköy, behind the Bulgarian lines, while the troops at Bulair attacked at the same time, with the aim of relieving besieged Edirne.1
At Bulair the Ottoman force was commanded by Fahri Pasha, with Major Ali Fethi (later Fethi Okyar) as chief of staff and Major Mustafa Kemal, the future Atatürk, as head of the operations branch, according to the Atatürk Encyclopedia. Bulgarian accounts name Fethi Bey as the commander of the attacking force.2
The attack in the fog
The attack began at about 6 a.m. on 8 February, under cover of fog and without an artillery preparation. Two Ottoman divisions, a composite (Mürettep) division and the 27th Division, advanced against two Bulgarian regiments of the 7th Rila Division, the 13th Rila and the 22nd Thracian. The Ottomans took the Doğanarslan farm and began to envelop the left of the 22nd Regiment, but a counterattack by the 13th Rila Regiment drove the composite division back. At about 3 p.m. the 22nd Regiment counterattacked on the left and the Ottoman line broke; a last Ottoman attack at about 5 p.m. was repulsed.3
The Turkish account is similar in outline. The Atatürk Encyclopedia says the attack went well until about 2 p.m., but no reinforcements arrived, and the force withdrew behind the fortified Bulair line with heavy losses.4
The landing that came too late
The plan depended on timing, and the timing failed. The ships that were to carry the 10th Corps from Constantinople to Şarköy did not sail on time, and nobody told the force at Bulair, which attacked on schedule on the morning of 8 February. The corps landed only on the night of 8 to 9 February, when surprise was lost, and it was withdrawn without result.5
Mustafa Kemal and Fethi afterwards sent their own plan for relieving Edirne to the government, but it was not taken up. Edirne surrendered on 26 March 1913, and under the Treaty of London of 30 May 1913 the empire lost almost all of its remaining European territory.6
Numbers, dates and memory
Bulgarian accounts give about 10,000 Bulgarians against 37,355 Ottoman troops. The Bulgarian Ministry of Defence gives Bulgarian losses of 114 killed and 416 wounded and says the fighting left about 6,000 Ottoman dead. The Bulgarian News Agency says the Ottoman divisions lost more than half of their men. No Ottoman count appears in the sources used here.7
The battle was fought on 8 February 1913 in the Gregorian calendar, which is 26 January 1913 in the Julian (Old Style) calendar that Bulgaria then used. The Bulgarian News Agency lists the battle under 26 January in its history calendar, but marks the anniversary on 8 February, and it is still commemorated in Samokov, home of the 22nd Regiment. Two years later the same peninsula became the scene of the campaign told in our article on Gallipoli, in which Mustafa Kemal again fought.8
Also on this day
- 1971: Operation Lam Son 719. South Vietnamese forces, backed by US air power, artillery and logistics but no US ground troops, attacked the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southeastern Laos during the Vietnam War.
