Turkey breaks off relations with the US

On Friday 20 April 1917, at a quarter past one in the afternoon, Şevki Bey, the head of the Ottoman foreign minister’s private office, brought to the United States embassy in Constantinople a note from the minister, Ahmed Nesimi. It stated that since the embassy had announced on 8 April that a state of war existed between the United States and the German Empire, the Ottoman government, an ally of Germany, “is obliged to break off diplomatic relations with the Government of the United States of America, beginning from today”. The Swedish legation took over the protection of American interests in the Ottoman Empire. Thus ended relations established in 1831. They were restored only in 1927, with the new, republican Turkey.

An ambassador in fever

The American ambassador since the autumn of 1916 had been the New York lawyer Abram Elkus, successor to Henry Morgenthau. At the beginning of April he was still trying to save relations. On 5 April he urged the grand vizier Talat Pasha that the United States had no quarrel with Turkey and wished to remain friends, and that the conflict concerned only Germany. Talat answered evasively: for the time being relations were friendly, but the Americans surely knew that Turkey was Germany’s ally, and what it would do in the event of an American–German war had not yet been decided. Elkus cabled that the Germans publicly pretended not to want Turkey to break with America, but secretly urged it to do so. He also wrote that many Turks were hoping for a separate peace with the new Russia.

On 11 April Elkus visited the finance minister, Mehmed Cavid, who openly admitted that German pressure on the Sublime Porte to break with America was growing day by day. That same day the ambassador fell ill. It turned out to be typhus, and for two weeks the doctors were not sure he would survive. The sultan sent an aide-de-camp with expressions of sympathy for Mrs Elkus, and the grand vizier, the minister of war and the foreign minister enquired after the ambassador’s health. On 16 April one of the Ottoman ministers said at the embassy that the cabinet was being “forced” to break off relations and that it was only a matter of time. When delivering the note, Şevki Bey asked that Mrs Elkus be told that the ambassador could of course stay as long as necessary. Elkus later wrote that since the Turks had sent the note on a Friday, they must have been under very strong pressure, unless they had done so deliberately to create that impression.

No war

The break in relations was not a declaration of war, and both sides stressed this. On 21 April Talat left for Germany, and Cavid, standing in for him at the interior ministry, sent a telegram to the provincial authorities that Americans and their institutions were to be treated as before, only without official contacts with the consuls. This was not understood everywhere at once. On the evening of 21 April soldiers occupied Robert College and the American girls’ school at Arnavutköy on the Bosporus, claiming that they were to set up hospitals there. After representations to one of the ministers and to the Swedish minister, they withdrew the next day. In Beirut the governor ordered the Syrian Protestant College, the later American University of Beirut, to close, but it was then allowed to finish the academic year. As early as 10 April the Ottoman authorities had demanded that the American station ship Scorpion leave Turkish waters within twenty-four hours. Her commander did not attempt to sail; the ship was interned and her guns were removed.

Washington did not want war with Turkey for the same reasons the Turks did not declare it. American missionary societies had spent about 20 million dollars there over a hundred years, and before the war several tens of thousands of children and students had attended American schools and colleges. More than three hundred Americans worked in the empire; about 75 were waiting to leave Constantinople, and about 175 more were at missions in the interior. Above all, American money funded relief for the survivors of the Armenian genocide and for starving Syrians and Greeks. The missionary official William Peet asked that the soup kitchens and other charitable work be allowed to continue, and the embassy warned that a halt to aid from America would be keenly felt.

Departure

Sweden officially took over American interests on 26 April; the British, French and Russian interests that the Americans had looked after until then were taken over by the Netherlands, and the Italian ones by Spain. Elkus left Constantinople only on 29 May, once he had recovered. An official of the Ottoman ministry accompanied him to the border, and neither his luggage nor the embassy’s was searched anywhere. Two members of staff assigned to the Swedish legation remained in Constantinople, and about a hundred Americans running schools and relief work remained in the country.

In December 1917, as the United States was declaring war on Austria-Hungary, Secretary of State Robert Lansing argued to the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that war with Turkey would bring no military advantage, but would endanger American citizens and property, and the Turks might retaliate with new massacres of Christians. The United States never declared war on the Ottoman Empire.