By the end of 1918, the government
of the Ottoman Empire had collapsed and its leaders had fled the
country. Defeat in World War One was to see their empire be
carved up by European powers, but nearly as soon as their occupations
began, furious Ottoman Turks began to resist. Under the command of Mustafa
Kemal, they would defy some of the most powerful countries on Earth
— raising an interesting question: how? How could Kemal’s Turkish nationalists beat
the Entente and supplant the Ottoman Sultanate? How did Atatürk start and win
the Turkish War of Independence? Well, the Ottoman Empire entered WW1 as a shell
of its former self. In the previous hundred years, they’d lost the Balkans to independence movements,
Egypt and North Africa, and generally been treated as a pawn by Europe’s Great Powers. Attempts
by a number of Sultans at modernizing their state had not been enough to prevent that, and
in 1908 the last one to wield sovereign power, Abdul Hamid II, was forced to sign
a constitution and then abdicate. That was the Young Turk Revolution, led
by the Committee of Union and Progress, and it created (in theory) a
parliamentary state. In practice, by the outbreak of war the Empire was
a dictatorship ran by a triumvirate of the CUPs leaders, the ‘Three Pashas.’
The new sultan was largely a figurehead. So, the Young Turk program was
something of a predecessor to Kemalism. They wanted to modernize (specifically secularise
and increasingly Turkify) the Ottoman state, and to remove meddling Europeans from
Ottoman territory. Regarding that second point in particular, the Young Turk regime
would screw up. Their revolution had been inspired by decades of decline, but it
didn’t halt it. Defeat to Italy in 1912, and then the Balkan League in 1913 made
it clear that the Empire was vulnerable. They had no allies, and the powers of the Triple
Entente had no interest in their preservation. It was not out of totally unmerited fear
then that, as war loomed in July 1914, Enver Pasha signed Constantinople
up to a secret alliance with Berlin; the Germans already having
influence in the Ottoman army. By November, the Ottomans were using
German vessels to shell Russian ports and were officially in World
War One as a Central Power. The war would not go well for the
Turks, however, and by late 1918 their army was exhausted,
undersupplied, and afflicted by disease. The only real Ottoman triumphs had been repelling British Commonwealth forces at
the Dardanelles and Gallipoli. Incidentally, that’s where
Mustafa Kemal, or Atatürk, first distinguished himself as a commander. Elsewhere though… it was pretty bad. The Great
Arab Revolt (eagerly aided by the British) pushed the Ottomans out of most of the Arab world.
Britain and Russia checked them in nominally neutral Persia. Greece joined the war against them
in 1917, and while the Russian revolution allowed for fleeting success in the Caucuses, an Entente
army was being assembled west in Thessaloniki. It pushed through the Macedonian
front in September 1918. So with Constantinople exposed and their
allies capitulating or disintegrating, the Ottoman Empire sought peace in October. The armistice that ended the fighting on October
30th was, in effect, an unconditional surrender. An allied high commission was
set up to govern Constantinople and control the Sultan, who appointed
a new pro-Entente Ottoman government. By then, the Levant, Palestine, and the
rest of the Ottoman Arab territories had effectively ceased to be part of
the empire, while elsewhere British, French and Italian troops were
sent to occupy pre-agreed on areas. That constituted the start of a partition
plan that Mustafa Kemal would fight to reject. Greek troops were allowed to join
the occupation in force in 1919 when it became clear that Turkish
resistance wouldn’t be light. Ironically though, Greece’s presence was
particularly antagonising to the Turkish nationalists and it helped Kemal
unite various disparate factions. Why? Well, because the other powers clearly
wanted influence in Turkey, but Greece, by right of their own nationalistic
cause, the Megali Idea, was intent on fully incorporating plenty of land the
Turks considered to rightfully be theirs. In defeat, the regime of the CUP and the Three
Pasha had collapsed. The triumvirate went into exile, and all three were assassinated
by Armenians within just a few years. Their fall from grace opened the way for
Mustafa Kemal to take charge of Turkey. But not from Constantinople. There, Mehmed VI,
the very last Ottoman sultan had taken the view that he had no choice but to fully cooperate
with the Entente. That was not a view shared by the Turkish people, however, and Kemal’s
supporters, the Turkish National Movement, began to set up a rival Ottoman government based
in Ankara. For now, they remained ostensibly loyal subjects but were already skirmishing with
the officially sanctioned occupation forces. Furious at having their country invaded,
at conferences in Erzurum and Sivas in mid-1919 the nationalists officially
spelt out the principles they would fight for. The National Pact passed by
the last Ottoman parliament called for the complete independence of a Turkish state
without either the behind-the-scenes foreign control that afflicted them pre-war, or the
occupations they were enduring in the moment. The Treaty of Sèvres, signed in 1920, formally ended the war between
the Entente and the Ottomans. It also lit a fire beneath
the nationalist movement. Sèvres was not to be negotiated but
imposed by the Entente and the plan was very much to truncate the Ottoman Empire. It would hardly resemble what it did in
1914. The Arab world was lost — to become British and French mandates, plus
the Kingdom of Hejaz around Mecca and Medina. The Armenians were to receive a
state in eastern Anatolia and the Caucuses, while Greece was to get Thrace just up to
the outskirts of Constantinople. The city and the Turkish Straits would remain nominally
Ottoman territory but as an international zone, largely under British influence. Most of the rest
of Anatolia was also parceled out into spheres of influence for the victorious powers, with plans
to set up an autonomous Kurdistan in the east, and eventually for the Greek zone around
the city of Smyrna to be annexed outright. Sèvres’ terms were never implemented. To the Turkish Nationalists,
the treaty was outrageous, and the Ottoman parliament elected in 1919
made it clear that they felt that way. So, the occupying powers simply had
the Sultan dissolve it and rule as their puppet by decree. The problem was
that everyone knew he was their puppet, which made the ruling difficult. Dissolving
the nationalist-led parliament shattered the legitimacy of the government in Constantinople
and prompted the Turkish National Movement in Ankara to officially declare itself the actual
government as Turkish society rallied around them. In May 1920 they elected a new body, the Grand National Assembly, and
voted in Kemal as their president. That said, they had not yet
formally deposed Mehmed VI. Still, Constantinople gave Kemal
and plenty of his supporters death sentences in absentia for treason.
In turn, the Grand National Assembly stripped all of the signers of the Treaty
of Sèvres of their Turkish citizenship. So, unlike the rest of the war-weary Entente,
Greece was going to put up a serious fight for territorial concessions. The Greek landings
around Smyrna in 1919 mark the start of the Turkish War of Independence, and they had expanded
their zone far beyond the city by June 1920. But the Greco-Turkish War wasn’t
Kemal’s only theatre. In the south, French forces were attempting to subdue
Arabs in Syria and Kemal in Cilicia, though by late 1921 momentum was with the Turks.
Both France and Italy were plagued with domestic problems — aftershocks from the Great War — and
Italy in particular was teetering on the edge. That would see them both out
of Turkey by the start of 1922, effectively recognising Atatürk’s government. The Nationalists also had to deal with
their eastern flank. There they fought primarily against Armenians, who had a pretty
good reason for opposing Turkish expansion. From 1915 onwards, partly out of frustration
at advances by Tsarist Russia, partly because of an influx of wretched, angry Muslim
refugees from lost Ottoman Balkan provinces, and in very large part because of the brutal
nature of the CUP’s ethnic Turkish nationalism, Armenians became the targets of terror.
At least several hundred thousand, and up to well over a million, were killed
by official Ottoman forces and civilians, or else deported and allowed to die by
neglect during and in the years after WW1. In fighting the First Armenian Republic,
Kemal found an ally in Russia’s Bolsheviks. They were both enemies of the Western powers and
signed a treaty of friendship and support in 1921. Together, nationalist Turkey under Atatürk, and
the soon-to-be Soviet Union under Lenin, carved up the Caucuses. The Turks regained Kars which
had been lost to Russia in 1878, and with the Bolsheviks, they partitioned lands that would’ve
gone to the Armenian Republic under Sèvres. That left Greece and Britain as
Kemal’s remaining, serious opponents. The Greek army still controlled
western Anatolia and Thrace, while the British had Mehmed VI’s
government under watch in Constantinople. The front in the west had also been bloody—entire
villages were razed to the ground—and both sides killed civilians, though the nationalists
very intentionally targeted Greeks as they had Armenians. Aiming to wipe them out from
Anatolia, they killed hundreds of thousands. The end of the war would see something like a
million and a half people made into refugees. Backed by the British, Greece had launched
a successful summer offensive in 1920—a response to Ankara’s rejection of
the Constantinople government—and they secured a border region around
the official Greek occupation zone. Nine months later, as Atatürk was
making his deal with the Soviets, the Greeks started another offensive in
the west; this time the goal was to take Ankara and decapitate the nationalist movement.
And at first, they were largely successful. The Turks, under Kemal’s right-hand man İsmet İnönü,
were forced back across the countryside, though he did prevent the Greeks from advancing towards
the Black Sea. Still, Greece continued through the Summer of 1921 until they met nationalist
forces entrenched on the Sakarya River in August. By that point, both Greece and Turkey
had been fighting… someone… for a decade. A generation of men on both sides
had been scarred by war, not to mention the devastation to civilian society. But there would be no ceasefire in
1921, and the war would be decided in part by each nation’s ability to maintain
national cohesion and the will to fight. Unlike the empire under the absolutist
Sultans, and the Young Turk regime, Atatürk’s Turkish National Movement
had won the hearts and minds of Turks, rallying them in defense of their homeland.
Of course, it helped that a decade of brutal, often murderous, policies towards ethnic
minorities had left that homeland much more Turkish. The nationalists also had the advantage
of a charismatic and capable leader in Kemal. Greek politics, on the other hand, had
been afflicted since 1913 by a fierce rivalry between a liberal faction under
Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos and a conservative one under King Constantine I.
That tore the Greek state apart—literally: for two years it endured a semi-civil war. In 1917, Venizelos achieved
control, Constantine abdicated, and Greece entered WW1, but their problems
weren’t over as the King's son, Alexander, died of monkey-bite-induced sepsis three years
later. Venizelos lost the next elections, and Constantine returned to prosecute the war
against Atatürk at the head of a Venizelist army. The Sakarya River was the last natural barrier
between the Greeks and Ankara, and for three weeks they fought the Turkish Nationalists for
the right to cross it, but Kemal’s men held. Sakarya was a disaster for Greece - they
could advance no farther. Meanwhile, Kemal regrouped, Constantine’s well-known
Germanophilia won Greece no powerful allies, and a year later, the nationalist’s
Great Offensive smashed Greek forces, pushing them back to the
Aegean in just over a week. At the gates of Constantinople, Kemal ordered
British forces out (they left only about two hours before the shooting was to start), the
Grand National Assembly then formally deposed the Ottoman dynasty, and a triumphant Mustafa
Kemal became President of the Republic of Turkey. Sèvres was torn up, and a new agreement, the
Treaty of Lausanne confirmed Turkey’s borders. Kemal was given the surname Atatürk, ‘Father
of the Turks’ by the assembly a decade later. The Greeks never did manage to reclaim
Constantinople, today’s Istanbul. but you can find out how Greece did grow in the video
to the left. If you liked this one, it should be right up your alley, and as always, I’ve been
James and thanks for watching Look Back History.
