The Arsenal

The Ottoman infantry's principal arm was the American-designed Peabody-Martini, a hard-hitting single-shot breech-loader firing a heavy .45 cartridge to long range. Hundreds of thousands were bought from the Providence Tool Company in the United States, and in the hands of Osman Pasha's entrenched troops at Plevna they cut down the attacking Russian columns at distances the Russians could not answer.

The Ottomans also bought tens of thousands of Winchester Model 1866 lever-action repeaters, which they used alongside the Peabody-Martini in a deadly two-rifle system: the long-range Martini to break up an assault at a distance, then the fast-firing Winchester to drench the final rush with close-range fire. At Plevna the combination turned the redoubts into killing grounds.

The best Russian infantry rifle of the war was the Berdan II, a bolt-action single-shot breech-loader designed with American help, firing a 10.75 mm cartridge. It was a fine weapon — but too few were available, and many Russian units still carried the older, inferior Krnka conversion rifles, leaving Russian infantry generally outgunned by the Ottomans.

Both armies fielded modern steel breech-loading field guns, many from the German firm of Krupp — the Ottomans in particular had re-equipped with excellent Krupp artillery. These rifled, breech-loading guns fired further, faster, and more accurately than the muzzle-loaders of a generation before, adding to the lethality of the defensive at Plevna and Shipka.

The Ottoman defensive system at Plevna — a ring of mutually supporting earthwork redoubts, rifle pits, and entrenchments thrown up by Osman Pasha's men — was the true war-winning 'weapon' of the defence. Cheap, quickly dug, and nearly invulnerable to frontal assault, the earthworks multiplied the effect of the modern rifle many times over.

Barred from the Black Sea by treaty from keeping a battle fleet, the Russians improvised a mosquito navy of small steam launches carrying spar torpedoes and the new self-propelled Whitehead torpedo. In January 1878 Lieutenant Stepan Makarov's launches sank the Ottoman gunboat Intibah off Batumi — the first successful attack in history by a self-propelled torpedo.

The Ottomans dominated the Danube and Black Sea with a modern fleet of ironclad warships and armoured river monitors that threatened the Russian crossings and coastal flanks. Countering them, without a battle fleet of their own, was what drove the Russians to their inventive torpedo-boat warfare.

The Russian army's irregular Cossack horsemen provided its reconnaissance, screening, raiding, and pursuit, ranging ahead of the columns through the Balkans and harassing the Ottoman flanks and rear. Their mobility was essential in the mountainous, roadless theatre.

The Russians deployed early rapid-fire weapons — Gatling guns and volley-firing mitrailleuses — in limited numbers, among the first battlefield uses of the machine gun's ancestors. Their tactical value was still poorly understood, and they played only a minor role compared with the rifle and cannon.

The war was moved and coordinated by rail and wire: Russia's mobilisation and supply depended on its railways to the frontier, and the electric telegraph linked commanders, governments, and — crucially — the war correspondents whose dispatches reached European newspapers within days.

To neutralise the Ottoman river fleet and protect their crossing points, Russian engineers laid extensive fields of naval mines across the Danube, hemming in the enemy monitors and helping secure the pontoon bridges over which the invasion flowed.