Nearly a century after the end of the First World War, historian Odile Moreau puts Turkey back at the center, and underlines the importance of this conflict for the Turkish destiny. If the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of Germany, it is in fact the Republic of Turkey that will emerge from it.
In these times of commemoration of the centenary of the First World War, the work of historian Odile Moreau on Turkey during the Great War will interest all those who regret that the Eastern Front has too often been considered a secondary theater of peripheral operations, even though a series of strategic issues were being tied up there whose importance has been brutally rediscovered in recent years. But this contribution will not leave indifferent either the assiduous observers of contemporary Turkey, often shaken, in the recent period, by debates and historical controversies concerning the First World War and its consequences.
We remember that in April 2015, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan decided to bring forward by one day the celebration of the centenary of the Battle of the Dardanelles (a bitter setback for the Allies in 1915, in the face of a resolute Ottoman defense organized, among others, by Otto Liman Von Sanders and Mustafa Kemal), so that it would coincide with that of the centenary of the genocide of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. This is to say that knowledge of the Great War in the East leads to opening files, which are not only military, but also historical, diplomatic, geopolitical, and often of burning topicality. In this respect, and by its multidisciplinarity, Odile Moreau’s work will not disappoint. The author does not stick to a pure and simple history of the war in the East, but aims to show how the disappearance of the Empire in this conflict is also, as much the product of the setbacks experienced by the Ottomans at the beginning of the 20th century,e century (Tripolitania War and Balkan Wars, in particular), as well as the announcement of the transformations which would give birth to contemporary Turkey.
The Ottoman Empire’s Entry into the War Revisited
It is probably in its first pages that the author delivers the most original and interesting analyses, destroying in particular the received idea of an Ottoman Empire doomed to an alliance with Germany. We devour the first two chapters, which reveal the secrets of the Ottoman alliance with the central empires, showing brilliantly that this choice was far from inevitable. Contrary to certain received ideas, it was not easy for the Empire to turn its back on the United Kingdom and France, which were then making it attractive financial offers and had given it their support since the beginning of what is called the Eastern Question, that is to say the difficulties induced by the decline of the Ottoman Empire and by the correlative Russian push towards warm seas. It was also not easy for the Ottoman leaders to enter the war alongside the Alliance knowing that they were ill-prepared, despite the reforms underway since the Balkan Wars. It was thus necessary to wait nearly three months, after the signing of the secret treaty with Berlin, to see the Ottoman navy cross the Rubicon, by bombarding the Russian port of Odessa. The role of the Young Turk triumvirate (Talaat, Enver, Cemal), during the Empire’s shift into war, is here de-demonized. The author, who knows this period perfectly, shows how, at the beginning of the Great War, the Ottoman government was “a non-combatant ally”, which “made its neutrality last”, as if it wanted to be perfectly sure of the relevance of a strategic choice that it knew to be decisive.
The Ottomans, who in 1914 were emerging from two difficult conflicts that had ended badly for them, were also aware of the new implications of modern warfare. In the Balkan Wars in particular, they had experienced the trinomial TBM (trenches, barbed wire, machine guns), which the First World War would generalize, and one could add that they had equipped themselves with air forces since 1909-1911. They also know that a contemporary conflict will probably lead to a total commitment of the States participating in it. Despite its ethnic and religious diversity, the Empire established conscription in 1909, it painfully experienced in the years that followed the migratory consequences that the occurrence of a war can have and, in debt, it measures that its military commitment in this conflict will have major economic consequences. Basically, the stimulating reading of the first two chapters of this work leaves only the regret that they were not included in a more formalized and structured first part, devoted to the theme of the Empire’s entry into the war, because they probably deserved better than the status of an introductory statement.
From the war of influence to total war
The body of Odile Moreau’s work is essentially made up of two parts, devoted to the forces present and the course of the conflict as a whole. Westerners have mainly remembered the epic of Lawrence of Arabia from the war in the East, and in particular the way in which the British succeeded in stirring up the Arabs against the Turks, despite the caliphal authority held by the Ottoman Sultan. This allied success in a war of influence and propaganda should not make us forget that the Ottoman Empire also had assets in this area, which it clearly did not know how to exploit, despite its real efforts. In the aftermath of the entry into war, Sultan-Caliph Mehmed V Resat had called for jihad, hoping to stir up the Muslim populations of the colonies of the Entente countries. In the series of fascinating developments that inaugurate the second part of her work, Odile Moreau shows that the failure of this enterprise was not only Ottoman, but also… German. Shortly after the secret agreement of August 2, 1914 sealing the German-Ottoman alliance, in fact, Emperor Wilhelm had ordered his diplomats and intelligence services “to set the Muslim regions of his enemies ablaze,” relying on German orientalists, some of whom, like Max von Oppenheim, had already cheerfully moved “from erudition to action.”
After a synthetic analysis of the state of the Ottoman army and its mobilization in 1914, the work devotes a long chapter to the special services (Teşkilat-i Mahusa) which definitively allows us to understand the failure of the Ottoman call for jihad. But this chapter, which constitutes almost a study within the study, is all the more interesting because it is also an opportunity to better understand a Turkish institution, like so many others inherited from the Ottoman Empire, to which the government of theAKP has recently played a controversial political role (diplomatic action in Syria in 2011, participation in attempts to resolve the Kurdish question).
On the war itself, the author, in her third part, evokes both the main military operations and the total character of the conflict. Chapter 6, devoted to the different fronts, contains interesting developments on certain little-known aspects of the war in the East, notably the battle of Celebrationsthe various offensives on the Suez Canal, the fighting in Gaza and the Battle of Jerusalem. No doubt on the strategic level it would have been necessary to insist even more on the logic specific to this war, and in particular on the crucial territorial gains recorded by the Ottoman Empire in the east in 1918, following the Russian withdrawal, at the very moment when it itself was preparing to request an armistice. In any case, the author also strives to show that this war is a total war, by evoking the influence on society of the unionist nationalism defended by the Young Turks in power, largely initiated in 1913, the economic difficulties posed by the continuation of such a conflict, the correlative suffering endured by the civilian populations, linked in particular to the famine in Lebanon and Syria, without forgetting the tragic fate of the Ottoman Armenians.
From the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Türkiye
The main conclusions are reached when Odile Moreau evokes the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in a chapter that aims to understand the collapse of its army. Beyond the logistical problems (in terms of transport in particular) and health problems (under-equipped medical personnel and multiple epidemics), it is above all on desertions, a real scourge specific to the Ottoman army, particularly during the second part of the war, that the author insists. She convincingly shows that they affected all the communities mobilized by the Empire, including the Anatolian Turks, who were nevertheless considered the most loyal subjects. In addition to the scale of the geography of the conflict, which made it difficult for the Ottoman command to control its troops, it was the very poor daily living conditions that were probably the main cause of these numerous and permanent defections. Symptomatically, the author reports how in Palestine, after storming an enemy trench, Ottoman soldiers stripped the bodies of British soldiers, not hesitating to put on their uniforms and taste the menthol toothpaste they found in their packs.
Dedicated to the war of independence led by Mustafa Kemal, the final chapter justifies the title and subtitle of the book, because in reality, if it was the Ottoman Empire that entered the war, it was the Republic of Turkey that put an end to it, the Turks having been the only people to contest the unenviable fate reserved by the Allies for the defeated empires. This chapter undoubtedly deserved to be better justified and exploited on the analytical level. It remains to be understood how this defeated Ottoman army, this army of deserters, which constituted the bulk of Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist troops, was finally able to impose itself on the Anatolian battlefields between 1920 and 1922. In addition to the value of its leader, which would subsequently be widely highlighted during the construction of Turkish national history, its merits probably lie in the fact that, in the end, during the Great War, as the author very opportunely recalls in her conclusion, the Ottoman army had “fought well against considerable forces and on multiple fronts”, victoriously opposing at the Dardanelles “the largest amphibious operation of the First World War”, after having undoubtedly made the most of the military reforms carried out in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars.
Several suggestions emerge in the last pages of the book, albeit somewhat late, to explain how the defeat of the Empire was able to generate the military victory of the Republic. It emerges that the battles of the First World War undoubtedly contributed to forging a national spirit in a decisive way, before this finally imposed itself definitively during the war of independence. The turn taken, in recent years, by the commemoration of the Great War in Turkey shows that it is more than ever mobilized to build a national collective imagination. At a time when the Battle of the Dardanelles is now more celebrated than the Zafer Bayramı (celebration commemorating Mustafa Kemal’s victory over the Greeks on August 30, 1922), the interest of Odile Moreau’s work is to offer us a rigorous study of the real history of this period, which will be useful, not only for understanding the facts, but also for deconstructing the political instrumentalization of which it is too frequently the object.