The Ottoman Empire in the First World War

The Ottoman Empire entered the war on 29 October 1914, when its fleet, under a German admiral and without a declaration of war, shelled Russian ports on the Black Sea. The Young Turks who ruled the state tied it to Germany, hoping to regain lost lands. The Turks fought in the Caucasus, at the Dardanelles and in Mesopotamia, and during the war the authorities destroyed the Armenians. On 30 October 1918 the empire signed the Armistice of Mudros, and fighting ended at noon on 31 October.

The road to war

At the start of the 20th century the empire was losing one territory after another. In 1911 Italy declared war on it to seize Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, and Turkey’s weakness emboldened the Balkan states. In 1912 Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece started the First Balkan War, and the Treaty of London of 30 May 1913 took from Turkey its European lands west of the Enos–Midia line. In January 1913 the Committee of Union and Progress seized full power in a coup. From then on the state was ruled by a triumvirate: the minister of war Enver Pasha, the minister of the navy Djemal Pasha and the minister of the interior Mehmed Talat.

Entry into the war

The Ottoman Empire concluded a secret alliance with Germany as early as 2 August 1914, and the government ordered a mobilisation, which began on 3 August. For three months, however, the empire delayed entering the war. On 9 September it announced the abolition of the capitulations, the privileges of foreigners, and in September the German admiral Wilhelm Souchon took command of the Ottoman fleet. Enver told the allies that he would like to restore the borders from before the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878.

On 29 October Souchon’s ships shelled the Russian ports. On 2 November Russia declared war on Turkey, and on 5 November Britain and France did the same. The Ottoman Empire formally declared a state of war on 11 November, and on 14 November in Constantinople the call of the sultan-caliph to holy war against the Entente was proclaimed. The Germans hoped it would set off Muslim uprisings.

At the fronts

The first campaigns ended in defeat. In the winter of 1914 Enver Pasha led the Third Army across snowbound mountains into the Russian rear at Sarikamish, where frost, typhus and a Russian counter-attack destroyed his army. On 3–4 February 1915 Djemal Pasha’s army tried to cross the Suez Canal but was beaten back. From November 1914 British and Indian troops fought the Turks on the Tigris and Euphrates.

The Turks won their greatest victory in defence. From 19 February to 18 March 1915 the British and French fleet tried to force the Dardanelles but lost three battleships to mines. On 25 April the Allies landed at Gallipoli. The defence was commanded by the German general Otto Liman von Sanders, and Mustafa Kemal became the hero of the fighting. On the night of 8–9 January 1916 the last British troops sailed away from Helles. After eight months of fighting the campaign ended in defeat for the Entente.

On 29 April 1916 in Mesopotamia the garrison of Kut surrendered to the Turks, and more than 13,000 soldiers and followers of General Townshend went into captivity. It was, however, the last great success. Already in February the Russians had taken Erzurum, a fortress thought impregnable. On 5 June the sons of the Sharif of Mecca proclaimed Arab independence from the Turks. On 11 March 1917 the British entered Baghdad, and on 9 December Jerusalem surrendered.

Already during the war the Entente was dividing the empire’s lands. On 4 March 1915 Russia claimed Constantinople and the Straits for itself, and in April France, the last to do so, agreed. On 24 October 1915 Sir Henry McMahon promised the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein, that Britain would recognise Arab independence. In 1916 the allies agreed a secret plan for partitioning Asiatic Turkey, and on 2 November 1917 Arthur Balfour gave an assurance that Britain supported the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.

Russia’s exit from the war gave the Turks a chance in the east. In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Russia agreed to cede to Turkey the districts of Kars, Ardahan and Batum. On 4 June 1918 the empire made peace at Batum with Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and on 14 September the Turks took Baku. At the same time General Edmund Allenby broke the Turkish front at Megiddo, and the Turkish Seventh and Eighth Armies ceased to exist. On 1 October Australian horsemen and Faisal’s Arabs entered Damascus.

The home front and the Armenian genocide

The war ruined the state. By one calculation it cost 398.5 million Ottoman lira. Famine gripped Syria, made worse by the British and French blockade of its ports. Djemal Pasha, governor of Syria, brutally suppressed the Arab national movement. Between about half a million (by Mehmet Beşikçi’s estimate) and a million soldiers deserted from the army, and many of them turned to banditry. On 4 February 1917 Talat Pasha became grand vizier, the minister of the interior and the chief organiser of the Armenian genocide.

On 8 April 1915 the first convoy of deported Armenians left Zeytun in Cilicia. The ruling committee arrested and murdered Armenian leaders and deported whole communities from Anatolia to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. People died at the hands of escorts and bandits, of hunger, thirst and disease. According to most historians’ estimates, between about 600,000 and over a million Armenians died in 1915–1916, while the Armenian side speaks of 1.5 million. On 24 May 1915 France, Britain and Russia called the massacres crimes “against humanity”. Today the crime is called the Armenian genocide. Turkey does not accept this description.

The end of the war and the toll

On 3 July 1918 Sultan Mehmed V died, and his brother took the throne as Mehmed VI, the last sultan of the empire. Bulgaria’s capitulation cut Turkey off from Germany by land. On 14 October, after Talat’s resignation, Ahmed İzzet Pasha became grand vizier, with the task of taking the empire out of the war. On 30 October, aboard the British battleship Agamemnon in Mudros harbour on Lemnos, the minister of the navy Rauf Bey signed the armistice with Vice-Admiral Somerset Gough-Calthorpe.

Turkey had to open the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, hand over the forts on the Straits to the Allies and demobilise its army, while the Entente could occupy strategic points of the empire in the event of a “threat to security”. Fighting ended at noon on 31 October. Soon the British, French and Italians occupied Constantinople, which they held until 23 September 1923. The Treaty of Sèvres of 10 August 1920 took Syria and Mesopotamia from the empire as future League of Nations mandates, gave Greece the right to occupy and administer the Smyrna region, and provided for an independent Armenia and an autonomous Kurdistan. The Turkish national movement under Mustafa Kemal prevented it from coming into force, and in 1923 it was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne.

During the war the empire mobilised 2,850,000 men, although in the summer of 1914 its army numbered, depending on the source, between about 150,000 and 210,000 men. Between 325,000 soldiers according to the Ottoman statistics of 1922 and 772,000 according to Edward Erickson’s archive-based research were killed, of whom 467,000 died of disease. Together with civilians, including the victims of the Armenian genocide, losses came to between 13.3 and 15.4 per cent of the population.