Two very different battles fell on 30 October. In 1805, at Caldiero east of Verona, Marshal Masséna threw the French Army of Italy against Archduke Charles's entrenched Austrians in a battle that ended at nightfall with no clear winner, and historians still argue about the result. The archduke retreated all the same, because Napoleon had already crushed Austria's main army at Ulm. On 30 October 1920 Kâzım Karabekir's Turkish army took Kars, the great frontier fortress of the young Republic of Armenia, almost without a fight. Within weeks Armenia had lost the war, much of its territory and, by the end of the year, its independence.
Caldiero, 1805: the other front
In the war of 1805 Austria gave its most successful general, Archduke Charles, what it intended to be its main army, in Italy. Napoleon needed an able commander to keep the archduke in check there while the Grande Armée struck in Germany, and he chose Marshal André Masséna, who took over the Army of Italy that summer. The two armies faced each other across the Adige at Verona. On 18 October Masséna seized a crossing inside the city.1
Then came the news from the Danube: Napoleon had destroyed the Austrian army at Ulm, and Masséna ordered an immediate offensive. Thiers says the archduke, expecting soon to have to fall back to defend Vienna, wanted a decisive success that would let him retreat undisturbed. The numbers are uncertain. Thiers gave Masséna 50,000 men against 80,000 Austrians.2
30 October: redoubts, marshes and a column on the high road
The fighting ran from 29 to 31 October. According to Thiers, on 29 October Masséna took the divisions of Gardanne, Duhesme and Molitor across the Adige and drove back the Austrian outposts. The French faced a front running from the entrenched heights of Colognola, through the village of Caldiero on the high road, down to the marshy banks of the Adige. Masséna's plan had three parts: on the left, Molitor was to take the entrenched heights of Colognola; in the center, the main force would push along the high road through the village of Caldiero; on the right, General Verdier was to cross the Adige and turn the Austrian flank.3
Thiers describes Molitor's men climbing the slopes under heavy fire. Count Bellegarde, who commanded the Austrian right, sallied from the redoubts against them, and Molitor threw the only regiment he had at hand, the 6th Line, at his column. Colonel Teste of the 5th Line got into one redoubt and raised his regiment's colors there, but the Austrians took it back.4
In the center, in Thiers's account, the French fought through the enclosed and built-up ground along the road to the edge of Caldiero. The archduke counterattacked with a column of his best infantry led by a reserve of grenadiers, in whose ranks, Thiers writes, three archdukes were fighting. Masséna rallied his divisions, massed his guns on the road, fired canister into the column at point-blank range and sent in the bayonet against its flanks. On the right, Verdier failed to get across the river in strength. Darkness ended the battle.5
Who won at Caldiero?
Charles did not renew the fight. In the night he sent off his baggage and guns and, covered by a rearguard, began to retreat, and the French followed and harried him. Beyond that, the sources cannot agree. The Napoleon Series lists Caldiero as a French victory. John Rickard calls it an indecisive Austrian victory. Older reference works split the same way. The Austrian biographer Constant von Wurzbach wrote that Charles defeated Masséna on 30 and 31 October, and the American Cyclopaedia of 1879 speaks of the archduke's victory. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica manages to say both: one article has Masséna defeating Charles, another credits the archduke with a success over Masséna in a desperately fought battle.6
Napoleon was not impressed with his marshal. Writing to his brother Joseph from Schönbrunn on 15 November, he complained that Masséna "has behaved indifferently. He made bad dispositions, and got himself beaten at Caldiero".7
The cost, and a victory that changed nothing
No reliable casualty total exists. Thiers gave the Austrians 3,000 killed and wounded and 4,000 taken prisoner, and the French no more than 3,000 in all. Thiers adds that a column of 5,000 men under General Hillinger, sent toward Verona to cover the retreat, could not get back in time and was captured whole.8
Whoever won the day, the campaign was decided elsewhere. Rickard writes that Caldiero was negated by Mack's surrender at Ulm, and the 1911 Britannica says the defeats on the Danube neutralized the archduke's success. Masséna's pursuit kept Charles too busy to turn against Napoleon's main army or join the Austrian forces on the Danube. For the battle that ended the war, see our article on Austerlitz.9
Kars, 1920: the fortress on the frontier
Serdar Korucu notes that Russia annexed Kars from the Ottoman Empire after the war of 1877 to 1878 and gave it up in 1918 under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and quotes an Armenian family's memoir of returning to Kars and its villages in 1919. By 1920 it was, in Tatul Hakobyan's words, the third largest city of the First Republic of Armenia.10
At the end of September 1920 the Turkish nationalist army of the Eastern Front under Kâzım Karabekir invaded. Hakobyan writes that Mustafa Kemal had authorized Karabekir on 20 September to occupy the province of Kars as far as Kaghzvan, Novo-Selim and Merdenek, and farther if conditions allowed, with the destruction of the Armenian army as the main goal, and that when Kaghzvan fell on 30 September without a shot being fired, the Armenian government declared martial law and mobilization. According to Mikael Yalanuzyan, an Armenian counterattack on 14 October failed, Armenian forces fell back on Kars after a new Turkish attack on 25 October, and the Armenian command reported that the fortress could hold out for two to three months.11
30 October: the fortress falls in a day
It held for less than a week. In Yalanuzyan's account, on 30 October the Turks attacked from three directions, took the Radinsky and Lazarev forts and then the fortress and the city, where they met no resistance. Hakobyan writes that Kars was occupied almost without resistance. Eddie Arnavoudian calls its capture, almost without a shot fired, the greatest Armenian military disaster of the twentieth century. Ruben Safrastyan of the Armenian Academy of Sciences writes that the fall of Kars predetermined Armenia's military defeat. In Turkey, 30 October is still celebrated as the day Kars was liberated from enemy occupation, with Karabekir credited as commander of the Eastern Front.12
Why a fortress expected to hold for months fell in a day has been argued over ever since. Arnavoudian points to desertion and to leaders paralyzed by incompetence. The minister Artashes Babalyan, quoted by Yalanuzyan, wrote that the people wanted to fight but "their leaders were incompetent and dishonest". The governor of Kars, Stepan Ghorghanyan, gave the bitterest verdict, quoted by Hakobyan: "Kars fell, but it was not defeated; it became the victim of our criminal negligence".13
The prisoners, and the end of the republic
Among those captured were General Daniel Bek-Pirumian, commander of the Kars front, Generals Kazaryan and Araratyan, Colonel Vekilov and Babalyan himself. Yalanuzyan gives 1,500 to 2,000 soldiers taken in the city, and Hakobyan about 2,000. Hakobyan writes that most were sent by rail to Erzurum, where many died in the harsh winter of 1920 to 1921, and that only in October 1921 were nearly 100 officers and more than 500 men released to Armenia.14
Alexandropol, now Gyumri, fell within days. Yalanuzyan calls Karabekir's ceasefire offer of 7 November "really more of an ultimatum". A treaty was signed at Alexandropol on 2 December 1920. In Yalanuzyan's summary it gave Kars and Surmalu to Turkey and made Armenia renounce the Treaty of Sèvres, and he and Arnavoudian both describe an army cut to a token force, 1,200 men by Yalanuzyan's count and 1,500 by Arnavoudian's. By the end of 1920 Armenia had become a Soviet republic. The Soviet-Turkish Treaty of Kars of October 1921 left the city in Turkey, where it has remained.15
Also on 30 October
In 1918 the Ottoman Empire signed an armistice with the Allies aboard the British battleship Agamemnon in Mudros harbor, on the island of Lemnos. It opened the Dardanelles and the Bosporus to the Allies, ordered the demobilization of the Ottoman army and ended hostilities at noon the next day. For the wider story, see our article on how the First World War ended.16
Also on this day
- 1805: Battle of Caldiero. At Caldiero east of Verona, Marshal Masséna's French army fought Archduke Charles's Austrians in the Third Coalition war.
- 1920: Battle of Kars. During the Turkish-Armenian War, Kâzım Karabekir's Turkish army stormed the fortified city of Kars, held by the First Republic of Armenia.
