Siege of Plevna

In July 1877 the Russian army crossing the Danube found that Osman Pasha had marched his troops into the town of Plevna and fortified it with trenches and redoubts. Three frontal assaults in July and September were repulsed with heavy losses, helped by modern Ottoman breech-loading rifles. The Russians then brought in the engineer Eduard Totleben, who surrounded Plevna and starved it out. On 10 December Osman tried to break out, was wounded and surrendered with his army. The delay had cost Russia months, but the road to the Balkans was open.

Plevna is often cited as an early lesson in the power of entrenched infantry with breech-loading rifles against massed attack, a lesson that many historians argue the great powers failed to absorb before 1914. Bulgarian memory treats it as part of the national liberation, and Russian military history as a hard-won triumph, while Ottoman sources remember Osman Pasha's endurance. Casualty figures for all sides vary by source, particularly for civilians and for the wounded who died after the surrender.