Von der Goltz leaves for Turkey

On 10 December 1914, according to the British chronology of the war, the German field marshal Colmar von der Goltz left Germany for Constantinople. The British wrote that he was going to take charge of the Turkish army. In reality his role was more modest and less clearly defined. Goltz became aide-de-camp general to Sultan Mehmed V, that is, his military adviser. According to the memoirs of General Otto Liman von Sanders he arrived in Constantinople on 12 December. Some sources give 11 December as the date he took up his new post.

Goltz Pasha

The seventy-one-year-old field marshal was a very well-known figure in Turkey. From 1883 to the mid-1890s he had reorganised the Ottoman army. He directed training at the general staff school, received the rank of marshal and the title of pasha, and the Turks called him Goltz Pasha. He trained a whole generation of Ottoman officers, many of whom held high posts in 1914. He returned to Turkey several more times in 1909–1910 to advise on a further reform of the army. He was also a respected military theorist, author of the celebrated book The Nation in Arms of 1883.

When the war broke out Goltz had already retired. Because of his age he was not given a command at the front. On 23 August 1914 he became Governor-General of occupied Belgium, where a few days earlier the Germans had taken Brussels. In the autumn he announced that acts of sabotage on the railways and telegraph lines would be punished on the nearby localities, regardless of whether their inhabitants were guilty. At the end of November Kaiser Wilhelm II appointed General Moritz von Bissing as his successor, and Goltz was given a new task on the Bosporus.

An awkward adviser

Goltz’s journey was the idea of the German ambassador in Constantinople, Baron Hans von Wangenheim. The ambassador hoped that the field marshal would replace General Otto Liman von Sanders at the head of the German military mission; Liman had been training the Ottoman army since the end of 1913 and often quarrelled with the embassy. The Turks did not agree to Liman’s recall, but Goltz’s arrival was not called off.

Formally the Ottoman army was commanded by the Sultan, who however had no real power. In practice it was directed by the Minister of War, Enver Pasha, one of the Young Turk leaders who had bound Turkey in an alliance with Germany. Goltz thus had no command authority at all. Liman later wrote that for a man as active as Goltz the post of the Sultan’s aide-de-camp could only be temporary. The field marshal quickly set himself up with an office in the War Ministry and began to take part in the conferences of the Turkish general staff. He called Enver his “young friend”. His relations with Liman were cool.

Later years

In the spring of 1915 Goltz took command of the Ottoman 1st Army in the Constantinople area, and in the autumn of that year of the 6th Army in Mesopotamia. There he fought the same Indian Expeditionary Force “D” that in November and December 1914 had taken Basra and Qurna. He died in Baghdad on 19 April 1916, officially of typhus, ten days before the surrender of the British division besieged by the Turks at Kut.