page_title: Armen Garo
section_title: World War I
hierarchical_section_title: Armen Garo / Biography / World War I
caption_attribution_description: English: Staff of Armenian volunteer units pictured in 1914
context_page_description: Garegin or Karekin Pastermadjian, better known by his nom de guerre Armen Garo or Armen Karo was an Armenian nationalist activist and politician. Armen Karo was a leading member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation for more than two decades. He was one of the masterminds of the 1896 occupation of the Ottoman Bank in response to the Hamidian massacres and Operation Nemesis, in which several perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide were assassinated. Between 1918 and 1920 he served as the first ambassador to the United States from the First Republic of Armenia.
context_section_description: In the autumn of 1914, a month and a half before the beginning hostilities, Armen Garo went to the Caucasus on a special mission given after the Armenian congress at Erzurum, and joined the committee which had been appointed by the Armenian National Council of the Caucasus to organize the Armenian volunteer units.
  In November 1914, he accompanied the second battalion of the Armenian volunteers as the representative of the executive committee of Tiflis. 
  On 14 November, at the Bergmann Offensive, the second battalion of the Armenian volunteers engaged in battle for the first time, near Bayazid. In the course of a bloody combat which lasted twenty-four hours, Dro, the commander of the battalion, was seriously wounded, and Armen Garo was forced immediately to take his place. From that day to March of the following year, he remained at the head of that battalion, and led it into eleven battles in the neighborhood of Alashkert, Toutakh, and Malashkert, until Dro recovered and returned to resume the command.
  In the summer of 1915, he went to Van during Defense of Van, becoming one of the first to enter the city after the Russians had liberated it. Khetcho (Catchik), his assistant, died on the shores of Lake Van in July 1915.
  In the spring of 1917, when the Russian Revolution turned the Caucasus upside down, Armen Garo and Dr. Hakob Zavriev were sent from the Caucasus to Petrograd to negotiate with the Russian provisional government concerning Caucasian affairs.
  He left for America in June 1917 as the representative of the Armenian National Council of Tiflis.
  He was elected to be ambassador of the First Republic of Armenia to the United States in Washington, D.C.
caption: The staff of Armenian volunteers of the 2nd Battalion in November 1914. Khetcho, Drastamat Kanayan, and Karekin Pastermadjian are among those pictured
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