When the War Came Home

The Ottomans' Great War and the Devastation of an Empire

Yiğit Akın

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503604995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The Ottoman Empire was unprepared for the massive conflict of World War I. Lacking the infrastructure and resources necessary to wage a modern war, the empire's statesmen reached beyond the battlefield to sustain their war effort. They placed unprecedented hardships onto the shoulders of the Ottoman people: mass conscription, a state-controlled economy, widespread food shortages, and ethnic cleansing. By war's end, few aspects of Ottoman daily life remained untouched.

When the War Came Home reveals the catastrophic impact of this global conflict on ordinary Ottomans. Drawing on a wide range of sources—from petitions, diaries, and newspapers to folk songs and religious texts—Yi?it Ak?n examines how Ottoman men and women experienced war on the home front as government authorities intervened ever more ruthlessly in their lives. The horrors of war brought home, paired with the empire's growing demands on its people, fundamentally reshaped interactions between Ottoman civilians, the military, and the state writ broadly. Ultimately, Ak?n argues that even as the empire lost the war on the battlefield, it was the destructiveness of the Ottoman state's wartime policies on the home front that led to the empire's disintegration.

1

FROM THE BALKAN WARS TO THE GREAT WAR

On 12 November 1912, in a rare, emotional entry in his colossal diary, Cavid Bey described his feelings about the fall of Salonika, the birthplace of the Young Turk Revolution, to Greek forces three days earlier: “Between sleeping and waking I think of Greek and Bulgarian flags flying over the harbor of Salonika. I want to believe that this is a vision; I cannot consider it as a matter of fact. Is this the reason we strove to save this country from the foreigners’ yoke? Did we launch the constitutional regime [meşrutiyet] to attain this conclusion? Where did the meşrutiyet, instituted to save Rumelia [i.e., European provinces of the empire, which prior to the war included Epirus, Thrace, and Macedonia], deliver us in the hands of the greedy and the betrayers? A Turkey without Rumelia, an Ottoman government without Salonika. How unbelievable and unbearable!”¹ The pain that this leading Unionist politician poured into the pages of his diary was not solely felt by him. The humiliating defeat during the First Balkan War and the subsequent loss of most of the empire’s remaining Balkan provinces deeply shocked the Ottoman political elite and traumatized Ottoman society. That all this took place in a remarkably short span of time only deepened the agony, which had no parallel in the empire’s modern history.

Historians have long noted the importance of the Balkan Wars as a harbinger of the general conflagration that would occur a year later. Against the historical background of the events surrounding the Balkan War crisis, political and military tensions built up in Europe, which would soon erupt in worldwide conflict.² Beyond their broad international repercussions, however, the Balkan Wars also had a strong formative influence on participating nations. The wars’ outcomes affected dramatic shifts in belligerent countries’ political, social, and cultural landscapes, while wartime experiences triggered new concerns and deepened already existing prejudices. How belligerent societies and their political elites perceived the Balkan War crisis and responded to it would have a profound impact on these societies’ experience of World War I. The Ottoman Empire was no exception.

Vanquished at the hands of four small neighboring states, the Ottomans were gripped by an overwhelming sense of existential crisis, leading to an extensive, heated debate about the possible causes of the disaster that had befallen the empire. This process of self-questioning did not remain confined to military matters. The Ottoman army’s defeat highlighted broader sociopolitical and cultural issues and precipitated an all-encompassing search for a new type of society.³ The questions raised and the answers arrived at in this process would be crucial in shaping Ottoman policies during World War I.

The Balkan War experiences evoked a dramatically heightened sense of vulnerability among the Unionists, which stemmed from three closely interrelated sources. First, the Unionists emerged out of the war with a deep conviction that the empire’s defeat was rooted in overall political and military weaknesses. Partial and palliative measures implemented since the beginning of the Constitutional Revolution had been unable to ward off the disaster. Second, the war revealed plainly and forcefully that the empire had been pushed into diplomatic isolation by the European powers. At critical moments during the war, they favored the Balkan allies’ claims and left the Porte to contend for itself. In the Unionists’ minds, there was little reason to believe that things would be different in coming years. They believed that in a future crisis they should be able to count on the empire’s own strength first and foremost. Third, the Unionists were convinced that the first two conditions generated a discernibly enhanced political energy among the empire’s Muslim and non-Muslim minorities, encouraging decentralizing tendencies. In the highly emotional climate of the Balkan Wars’ aftermath, these three sources of vulnerability became inseparably fused in the Unionists’ minds and bred a deep sense of urgency. If the empire was to be preserved, sweeping measures would have to be put in place to mitigate these vulnerabilities. The very survival of the empire would depend on the Unionists’ performance in implementing those measures. Those measures and policies, however, would have far-reaching implications for the Ottoman people’s relationship with the state.

The Ottoman Defeat in Detail

The First Balkan War began on 8 October 1912, with Montenegro’s declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire. Within a couple of days, Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia joined Montenegro and declared war on the Ottomans. The quick turn of events had caught the Porte underprepared. Merely two weeks after the declaration of mobilization, the Ottoman army had to enter the war. The Balkan armies’ advance through Ottoman territories was swift and devastating. By the time of the ceasefire on 3 December 1912, the Ottoman army had withdrawn to the Çatalca Line, only forty kilometers from the empire’s capital, Istanbul/Constantinople, lost almost all of its provinces in Europe, and surrendered thousands of soldiers and tons of military matériel. Three fortified cities, Yanya/Ioannina, İşkodra/Scutari/Shkodër, and Edirne/Adrianople, continued to be defended under difficult conditions. The Ottoman army’s performance in this first phase of the war was horrendous. Strategic blunders, logistical malfunctions, failure of the supply and sanitary systems, lack of general coordination, widespread disorder, poor weather conditions, and the low quality of manpower all contributed to the army’s collapse.⁴ Pitched against more capable and better-motivated forces, Ottoman troops panicked and fled in the face of the looming defeat. A young Arab Ottoman officer, Jafar al-Askari, described the situation as such: “When finally the army halted to camp two or three miles from Kirk-Kilisse [Kırklareli in eastern Thrace], a doom-stricken scene like the Day of Judgment lay all around: soldiers shivering from the bitter cold, animals mired in mud—the beasts hauling the artillery were wallowing and stumbling chest-deep in it—and men crying out for their units like lambs bleating for their mothers.”⁵ “It would take an [Émile] Zola to describe” the Ottoman troops’ traumatic rout, another contemporary wrote.⁶

Two months of prolonged negotiations in London did not yield an agreement between the fighting parties, and hostilities resumed on 3 February 1913. This second phase of the conflict lasted until mid-April. Ottoman Rumelia’s three fortress cities fell, but the imperial army held the Çatalca Line. The fall to the Bulgarians of Edirne, the empire’s second capital, was a particularly staggering blow to the Unionists, who had just come to power in a coup d’état in January 1913. Pressure from the Great Powers and the specter of losing Istanbul compelled the CUP government to sign the Treaty of London on 30 May 1913, which officially ended the First Balkan War. The treaty terms stipulated the surrender of all Ottoman provinces in Europe to the west of the Enos-Midia line, including Edirne. The allies’ victory was complete and resounding. Reflecting the agony and anger overwhelming Unionists and non-Unionists alike, Babanzade İsmail Hakkı declared in an editorial in the Unionist daily Tanin that there had been no disaster in Ottoman history even remotely comparable to the recent cataclysm: “Never have the Ottomans and Muslims been subjected to such disgrace, massacres, and cruelties.” He proposed that May 30th henceforth be a day of mourning, writing: “Had our religion permitted it, I would have begged for a law that would oblige all Ottomans to dress in black. . . . We will carry that blackness in our hearts until the day we get our revenge.”⁷

An unexpected opportunity for revenge in fact presented itself within a few weeks’ time. Disputing over the territories they had won, the victors of the First Balkan War, formerly united by their hostility to the empire, now embarked on the bloody struggle among themselves that would come to be known as the Second Balkan War. Seizing the opportunity presented by Bulgaria’s preoccupation with its erstwhile allies, the Ottoman forces staged a surprise attack, recapturing Edirne and most of eastern Thrace. These gains partially restored the CUP’s much tarnished prestige and injected a degree of self-confidence into its leadership.

Nevertheless, the overall price that the Ottomans had to pay was staggering. The empire’s humiliating defeat forced the government to relinquish most of its territory in Europe, home to nearly four million inhabitants. It also precipitated the migration of hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees, under deplorable conditions, from their homes in the Balkans to Anatolia and other Ottoman provinces. The areas where battles were fought, particularly in Thrace, were almost totally devastated. The war also exacted a heavy toll on the Ottoman army; of 340,000 soldiers, at least 50,000 died in battle and 75,000 died from disease. An additional 100,000 men were wounded, while 115,000 ended up in captivity.⁸ The war also depleted the army’s stocks of weapons, ammunition, artillery, equipment, and animals. A list of surrendered items prepared by Mahmut Şevket Pasha, the grand vizier of the post-coup regime, included 500,000 rifles, 700 pieces of artillery, 20,000 horses, 40,000 other draft animals, 30,000 tents, and 100,000 uniforms, worth a total of more than 15 million lira.⁹ The overall cost of the war put enormous pressure on the already frail Ottoman fiscal structure and added considerably to the empire’s indebtedness.

The discrepancy between the unrealistically heightened popular expectations of victory and the imperial army’s deplorable performance on the battlefield aggravated the shock of defeat. The Ottoman press almost unanimously greeted the coming of the war with excitement. The Unionist daily Tanin was not alone when it wrote that in the face of the approaching war, “a joy and enthusiasm that had not been seen for years suffused the streets of Istanbul.”¹⁰ Public opinion in the empire perceived the Balkan allies’ challenge to Ottoman authority and demands for greater autonomy as scandalous and unacceptable. Irrespective of political opinion, everyone was equally outraged by the Balkan nations’ impertinence, and calls to teach them a lesson abounded.¹¹ Exasperation and anger were voiced not only in the newspapers but also in the streets. Reporting on a massive pro-war rally in Sultanahmet square, Tanin wrote that thousands of participants chanted, “Long live the nation; long live the war.”¹²

Excitement about the war was accompanied by a gross underestimation of the enemy. People from all walks of life expected that the imperial army would easily triumph over its Balkan enemies. Newspapers voiced utterly unrealistic ambitions of capturing Sofia, Belgrade, and Athens in a short span of time and without much resistance. An observer noted that Bulgarians were mocked with the term “milkman” (sütçü), alluding to a common occupation among them.¹³ In addition to entrenched derogatory perceptions, what helped foster the sense of Ottoman superiority was a deeply felt yet misguided conviction that the Ottoman army was much better prepared for a war than its adversaries. The confidence in the army’s invincibility and its fighting prowess was particularly remarkable in the Unionist press, but could also be found in non-Unionist journals and newspapers. For instance, a cartoon published by a major satirical magazine, Cem, showed Nazım Pasha, the commander in chief of the army, leaning over a ticket counter conversing with the seller:

—I’ll be traveling to Sofia, Belgrade, [Montenegro’s historic capital] Cetinje, [and] Athens. I want to buy a ticket.

—Are you alone?

—No, me and my guys, for now, 700,000–800,000 of them.¹⁴

This misapprehension mostly arose from the transformation that the army underwent under the Unionists in the first three years after the Constitutional Revolution. “At no time in the past few centuries has [the empire] had a more perfect army with regards to military equipment, munitions, science, preparation, and combat. . . . [and Ottoman troops] have never fought under more suitable conditions,” Cenin asserted at the start of the war.¹⁵ Many ordinary people apparently shared these sentiments. A German resident of the capital related people’s enthusiasm about the war to this belief in the army’s superior fighting capabilities.¹⁶ Warnings about the unpreparedness of the army fell on deaf ears amid the patriotic frenzy. Abdullah Pasha, one of the most knowledgeable officers, had warned the cabinet, the grand vizier, and other politicians that the army was not even powerful enough to defeat Bulgaria, let alone an alliance of the four Balkan states.¹⁷ The next few weeks proved him right.

The Impact of the War

Dreams of Ottoman flags flying over the Balkan capitals were soon shattered by the collapse of the army in under two months. The public enthusiasm at the outbreak of the war quickly gave way to bewilderment and despair. People from all walks of life were not only reminded of the empire’s vulnerability and its army’s inefficiency, they also realized that the war had a direct material impact on their own everyday lives and communities. Civilians were by no means spared the horrors of the conflict. On the contrary, modern warfare necessitated unprecedented levels of direct and indirect contributions from the civilian population, while simultaneously exposing them to previously unknown levels of violence.

The fact that the Balkan Wars were fought in such a close proximity to the imperial capital made their impacts all the more tangible and visible. On a daily basis the inhabitants of Istanbul came across wounded soldiers arriving from battlefields, many of them exhausted, half-clad, and wretched.¹⁸ They became concerned about the cholera outbreak among the troops and worried about the possibility of its spreading to the city. They experienced a slowdown of the economy, suffered from soaring prices, and faced occasional shortages.¹⁹ They witnessed the plight of Muslim refugees passing every day through the streets of the capital with their carts and oxen by the thousands. They saw them living outdoors, in schoolyards, mosques, and train stations, begging on the streets, and queuing in front of municipal bakeries and soup kitchens. They heard stories of the unfortunate refugee women and girls who had been forced into prostitution. This was the first time since the 1877–78 Russo-Ottoman War that Istanbulites found war at their own doorstep.

The war’s impact was also felt well beyond the capital. Young men everywhere were called up to join the ranks. The extraction of these men from the agrarian economy and consequent labor shortages affected the harvest season of 1912 and especially of 1913. Additional war taxes imposed by the government compounded the negative impact of conscription. Especially in the northwestern provinces of the empire, people had to bear the burden of surrendering their animals and transport vehicles to requisitioning officers. The war disrupted economic activity throughout the empire, albeit to varying degrees.²⁰ While some provinces suffered significantly from ...