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The Sublime Porte prepares for the new era of Total War
The Great War would go down in history as the bloodiest and most brutal war of all time, dwarfing all conflicts since the Napoleonic Era and drawing in powers from across the globe. Its unprecedented scale and cost created an entire spectrum of unexpected consequences, and its shattering impact would redefine the very world we live in. Most of all, it was a Great Surprise: A war which was forecast to end in mere months would become an attritional death spiral from which none could escape. The following chapters will attempt to purvey its many facets and the effect it had not only the Ottoman Empire, but its many citizens during this most mighty of showdowns.
Grand Vizier Hilmi Pasha’s decision to build up the Ottoman Reserves meant that when the German Call to Arms was received, the Sublime Porte did not hesitate to accept it. The recovery from the Ottoman-Persian War had brought joy, optimism, and wealth back to the Ottoman Empire, and the chance to avenge our previous humiliation with the support of our allies meant that even the usually anti-war liberals were cheering our boys as they headed to the front. With Germany at our side, the Russians could surely be defeated before their annual celebration of Christmas, and Pan-Turkics even dreamed of a dismantled Russian Empire giving way to Ottoman control of the entirety of Central Asia.
At its initial core, the Great War pitted the “Triple Entente” of the Russian Empire, France, and the United Kingdom up against the “Triple Alliance” of Germany, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire. Also on the side of the Entente from the beginning were the British dominions of Australia and New Zealand, their Indian princely state satellites, and the Russian allies of the recently independent Kingdom of Norway, the Grand Duchy of Finland, and the Far East nation of Korea. While on the side of the Alliance, the Kingdom of Galicia-Lodomeria and the Central American republic of Nicaragua would also join their German allies from the very beginning.
Alliance warplans for the West African Theatre of the Great War
Alliance warplans for the Iberian and Moroccan Theatres of the Great War
Ottoman warplans for the European and Caucasian Theatres for the Great War
In co-ordination with our Spanish and German allies, the Ottoman General Staff drew up a number of plans at the beginning of the war to develop strategies for all the many fronts this war would be fought on. In West Africa, the Anglo-Sokot War would now be subsumed into the Great War, and with three Spanish armies stationed in Spanish Benin, it was decided that two of them could launch a great offensive west through British West Africa to reach French Africa, and potentially the lightly garrisoned Spanish Guinea and Spanish Mauritania. The Ottoman Army of the Sahel would meanwhile guard the long desert borders in the Sahara and support the Spanish where possible.
In East Africa, the huge German military presence in German East Africa would be utilised to invade British Africa with the support of the Spaniards, while the Ottomans would guard the Horn of Africa and seize the British port of Aden to prevent any British counter-attacks. Meanwhile in North Africa & Iberia, the Ottoman Army of Algeria would invade French Morocco to seize the city of Tangier, and the Army of the Maghreb would launch a secondary attack further south to reach Casablanca. The Spanish would then seize Gibraltar in order to close the Mediterranean Sea off from the British Royal Navy, while Spain also prepared to defend itself from an expected French invasion of Catalonia.
Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire would put to good use what it had learnt about fighting the Russians from the Ottoman-Persian War. With Persia not involved in this war, Armenia and Azerbaijan would be temporarily abandoned to set up a defensive line across Ardahan and Kars and lure the Russians into assaulting our heavily defended mountain provinces in terrain that would be deeply unfavourable for them. Our main offensive would instead come in Europe, where the Army of Rumelia would counter an anticipated Russian attack at Tulcea and cross the Danube into Bessarabia while the Army of Bosnia would sneak through neutral Romania and outflank the Russians. The Ottoman Royal Fleet would also be used to help the Army of Egypt make an amphibious assault on the Crimean Peninsula before crossing the Sea of Azov to outflank the Russian forces in the Caucasus.
The Sublime Porte scored an important victory at the Battle of Tulcea in Bessarabia (September - October 1904)
The Alliance began attempting to persuade more powers to enter the Great War in November 1904
As the Empire entered a state of Total War, the first Ottoman action of the war saw the French 10th Army defeated at the Battle of Wujda in Morocco on October 3rd 1904, and this was followed up by a significant Ottoman victory over the Russians at the Battle of Tulcea five days later. With confidence high, the Porte even found time to accept a proposal for an archaeological expedition to the jungles of Guatemala on October 9th 1904, after reports of recent discoveries there during the ongoing construction of the Panama Canal. Meanwhile the Russians were pursued and destroyed at the Battle of Izmail, and the French also suffered another defeat at the Battle of Melilla.
In the Caucasus, the Russians refused to fall into the trap however. After initially seizing the city of Batum, they did not assault our positions and instead seemingly withdrew the 34th Army from the area entirely, leaving only the Russian 19th Army in Sheki, Azerbaijan on the Caucasian Front. With Sheki itself on a plain below the mountains, the Army of Iraq was therefore sent to attack the Russians there while plans to invade the Caucasus were drawn up after all. The Battle of Sheki became another stunning victory for Ottoman Forces, and the retreating Russians were pursued to Derbent across the border and wiped out entirely there on December 23rd 1904. These successes all continued to the early success for the Alliance Powers and ensured that as Christmas approached, the Entente found itself very much on the back foot.
Ottoman forces score a major victory at Sheki after the Russians withdrew most of their forces from the Caucasus (November - December 1904)
Ottoman forces are defeated in the Sahel at the Battle of Say (December 1904)
On Christmas Day itself however, the French scored a key victory against us at the Battle of Say, deep in the Sahel, forcing General Edhem Bey’s army to begin a long retreat to the Army of the Sahel’s HQ on the shores of Lake Tchad. While the remote desert regions were of little strategic significance to the war, the defeat of the Army of the Sahel meant that the Entente could concentrate more force on dealing with the Spanish offensive in West Africa. Conditions in the desert were merciless, and many more men were lost on the long retreat that followed the defeat at Say. An excerpt from the diary of Army of the Sahel artillery captain Mustafa Kemal now follows:
27th December 1904: The heat of the sun beats down on our necks as we continue to pull back through the Hausaland. Deep, desolate deserts stretch far as the eye can see all around us, unbroken by the slightest undulation. The horses suffer as much as the men, keeling over in droves, with only the camels seeming unaffected. A brilliant rainbow shone off far to the south, where perhaps a light shower of rain fell upon the utmost edge of the world where the sand and the sky merge into one. There are times in all men’s lives when they experience something that remains forever remarkable, either due to being so unexpected or simply contain so much hardship. These days will live with those of us who survive forever, as the punishment for the shame of our defeat.
The porters carry the water, that most precious of resources, but it is a crime to touch it unless ordered. There is none to be obtained from the land here, and what locals there are melt away as soon as they see us. Desertion is low solely because what is there to desert for? One cannot escape the dunes. We just keep marching, marching, marching. The sick and wounded were left in Niamey; no doubt they are French prisoners now. But without the guides even our enemies may offer no escape from this burnt land. Do we march to salvation or merely to our dooms? Only the circling carrion-birds can tell.
Ottoman soldiers on the Great Retreat after the defeat at Say
The British open the Arabian Front of the Great War (December 1904)
As 1904 came to a close, we were further struck by the British opening a new front against us. Persia may have remained neutral, but they were freely permitting British troops to march through their lands, and the Straits of Hormuz were crossed in great force by the British Indian Armies in late December 1904. It was clear that the Entente had each selected an Alliance member to focus their efforts on: Russia on Germany, France on Spain, and Britain on us. The Franco-German Border in fact saw little fighting in 1904, with the hills of Catalonia, the plains of Poland, and the deserts of Africa being the main fighting grounds. The hopes that the war would end soon were rapidly fading, with no army yet cracking under the strain. But just how much longer the war would last would come to surprise all involved.
The World at War in December 1904
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Chapter Forty: The Western Theatres of the Great War (1905)
Due to the immense scope of the Great War, it is almost impossible to report on all its many great battles concurrently and do the great tragedy justice. As such, these chapters will be divided into the “Western” and “Eastern” Theatres, with each containing a significant number of fronts, and the chapter focusing solely on events taking place in those theatres. The Western Theatres of the war as such contain the West African Front, the Moroccan Front, the Iberian Front, and the Western Front on the Franco-German Border, as well as another which opened up during 1905. These theatres were chiefly an assortment of Alliance Members fighting against the Kingdom of France, with occasional support from the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland.
One unfortunate side effect of the impressive expansion of the Ottoman Empire in recent decades was that it now found itself with extremely large borders to defend in Africa, with a very limited number of forces. The Great Retreat following the defeat at Say therefore left most of the southern and western flanks of the Empire entirely unguarded, and during 1905 this would come back to haunt the Sublime Porte. As the year began however, the only Ottoman forces seeing action in the Western Theatres were the Armies of Algeria & the Maghreb in French Morocco; where the French defeats in 1904 had left their protectorate very weakly defended.
Instead, the chief action in the Western Theatres was being seen on the Iberian Front, where the beleaguered Spanish 2nd Army was desperately attempting to pin back the French invasion of Catalonia. At the start of the war the Spanish 2nd Army had not been in position to defend the Pyrenean Passes; and as a result, the French had quickly steamed over the border into Vasconia & Catalonia, and seized key cities along the border from Pamplona to Girona. By Christmas 1904 the French were besieging Barcelona, and while the Spanish had bravely repulsed attacks on Bilbao and Zaragoza, it was clear that the French were preparing a new offensive deep into the Spanish heartland.
Spanish forces defend Barcelona from the advancing French (January 1905)
In March 1905 that offensive was launched through Aragon, and the foothills of the Pyrenees around Zaragoza became the scene of some of the most vicious fighting of the entire war. The outnumbered Spanish had fortified every hill-top they could, while vast lines of trenches covered the plains in between. The conditions were brutal: Spanish artillery spotters on the hills would signal to their guns on the rear-side where to fire, and the French soldiers were consequently pummelled without mercy by the shells of the Spanish. But with the fall of Barcelona in April freeing up another French army to advance along the coast, where the cities of Tarragona and Castellon were rapidly taken, the Spanish war-effort continued to falter. For all their height advantages in Zaragoza, they simply lacked the war materiel to fire as many shells as their opponents: And what the French lacked in accuracy they made up for in quantity.
While Aragon quaked beneath the French shells, The Spanish 1st Army which had at the start of the war looked to secure the Straits of Gibraltar by securing both the British fortress at Gibraltar and the French fortress at Tangier now paid the price for its failure to take these objectively promptly, when a British army landed at Cadiz after the Royal Navy and the Armada Española had traded blows in the Straits before the Spanish fell back, despite the Spanish giving the British a very bloody nose at sea in the process. The opening of this second front now split the Spanish 1st Army in half, with the forces in Africa trapped and unable to help their comrades drive the British back into the sea. The British numbers were far smaller than those of the French, however, and so a bloody stalemate quickly ensued with the British beachheads at Cadiz and Gibraltar pinned in by the remaining Spanish forces.
Spanish forces pen the British in their beachhead at Cadiz (May 1905)
Ottoman forces in Morocco after the capture of Fez (March 1905)
The other consequence of the defeat of the Armada Española was that it had left the Allied invasion of French Morocco without naval support, and while the Ottoman forces had captured the key city of Fez, they were yet to lock the French Protectorate down entirely. The French were therefore able to land a new army at Rabat - removed from the Sahel where it no longer faced any opposition - and launch a counter-offensive against Ottoman positions around the recently captured city of Wazzan. Concurrent to the brutal fighting at Zaragoza, the brutal fighting at both battlegrounds prevented either Ally from coming to the aid of the other, despite both Ottoman armies in Morocco having combined to face this new threat.
Instead the French General Elie Joffre, one of France’s brightest young generals, was able to pin down more and more Ottoman forces at Wazzan, where the colonial troops of the Army of Algeria were beginning to buckle. And so after a brief respite, and on a quiet morning in July, a sudden heavy artillery barrage signalled the renewed attack on the colonial sector of the Ottoman lines – and they broke. French soldiers stormed the first trench lines and the colonial troops suddenly melted away as a huge hole was torn in the Ottoman left flank. Artillery and guns were abandoned en masse as terrified soldiers fled the French, and before Ottoman General Fevzi Bey could react, the entire Army of Algeria had collapsed. This disaster immediately led to another, as the Army of the Maghreb was now surrounded by the triumphant French; and despite Fevzi Bey ordering a belated attempt to withdraw, the deed was soon done. Both Ottoman armies in Morocco had been utterly obliterated by the ferocious French assault, with even the Ottoman general captured in the defeat.
Ottoman forces in Morocco are utterly obliterated at the Battle of Wazzan (April - June 1905)
The shockwaves of this defeat were felt not only in the Sublime Porte but also in Madrid, where the Spanish government soon faced a similar calamity. Reports of the Ottoman defeat had filtered through to the Spanish soldiers on the frontlines of Aragon, and morale had collapsed there, too. In a few short weeks, the entire Spanish 2nd Army imploded, cities from Bilbao to Valencia rapidly capitulated to the advancing French, and the fighting had reached the outskirts of Madrid itself by August. Here however the frontlines stabilised as the overextended French were checked by the hastily assembled new Spanish 3rd Army. In truth this was nowhere near the full strength of an army; but with the remnants of the 2nd Army absorbed into it, it was able to repel French attacks on the key rail-hub of Avila, and thus keep open the Spanish supply lines to the frontlines of Leon and Galicia.
In reality, the reason for the French halt was caused less by the Spanish resistance and more by the newest addition to the Alliance: the Kingdom of Italy. At the start of the Great War, both Italy and the Habsburg Empire had remained neutral due to their war-exhaustion after their recent conflict. Italy’s good relations with the Sublime Porte, combined with German promises to recognise Italian claims to Savoy and Corsica, however, had lured Italy into declaring war in May 1905, and beginning a limited invasion of Southern France. Italy did not have a huge army after its recent defeat, but with the French committed deep into Spain, the Italians found little opposition as they marched into Savoy and Provence. The Italian Front saw comparatively little action in 1905 as the French hurriedly set up defensive lines on the River Rhone and into the key city of Marseilles, and the Italians were content to defend what they had secured early on as they built their armed forces back up.
Italian troops marching unopposed into Savoy and Provence (June 1905)
Fierce fighting at Sedan eventually gave way to an Alliance victory, but the steam of their offensive soon ended (February - March 1905)
German heavy artillery played a critical role in supporting the Belgians after their entrance into the war
Meanwhile the French were also committed heavily to the Western Front against the Germans: A front which had extended significantly in February 1905 when a change in government in Belgium saw a strongly pro-German government come to power and join both the German economic sphere and the Alliance. With both France and Germany having removed forces from the Western Front at the start of the war after neither side launched any major offensives; the Belgian entrance in fact significantly changed things. Firstly, whilst the French had excellent defensive positions in Alsace-Lorraine to dissuade any German attacks, they had no such defensive terrain in the fields of Flanders and Picardie. And secondly, the planned French offensives against Spain and the Ottoman Empire had seen the large parts of the French reserves shipped overseas already: Meaning that the Belgians, supported by their German allies, were able to rapidly seize key cities such as Calais, Lille, Saint-Quentin, and Sedan.
While the Belgians did not have the numbers to make a push on Paris itself, the French line in Alsace-Lorraine had now become a very prominent salient, and the railing of significant German forces through Belgium meant that by Autumn 1905, the French had had to use up their entire strategic reserve and required the support of the British Expeditionary Force to help prop their lines up. Had the Germans had the numbers on the Western Front in the summer of 1905 it’s almost certain they could have made a decisive breakthrough; but their decision to focus on the East at the start of the war had allowed the French to stabilise the situation and this front, too, now developed into a stalemate of Trench Warfare.
The financial costs of the Great War rapidly escalated for all involved after the start of the Great Depression
The shock of the early Belgian success had however caused deep panic in Paris for a time, and it is believed that the after-effects of this played a part in events later in the year. A significant number of prominent French businessmen had moved their offices into the southwest of France due to the Belgian and Italian advances, and were slow to move back after the threat had passed. This meant that when the Paris Stock Exchange began to crash on November 27th 1905, the French entrepreneurs were not able to quickly make public statements due to the confusion over just where everyone was. This rapidly combined with scare-mongering of an (in fact non-existent) Alliance breakthrough and led to panic on the streets and a massive run on the banks. By the end of the day several major French financial institutions had collapsed, and the ripples of this soon affected the private sector and the indebted French government. With the French links to the other Entente economies, this consequently spread around the world and even triggered similar events on the Berlin and Istanbul Stock Exchanges for the Alliance powers, soon leading to beginning of what would later be known as the Great Depression.
The Great Depression did however hit the French hardest of all, and made it even more difficult for them to fund their war effort, which in turn provided some relief for the Alliance power teetering closest to collapse. By the end of 1905 the Spanish had somewhat stabilised their lines in a NW-SE line across their country, though with roughly half of Spain occupied they were heavily reliant on German & Ottoman War Subsidies to keep them in the war. Good news had also come in October 1905, as the Alliance was joined by a new and altogether far mightier member, after some very successful German diplomacy: The United States of America.
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Chapter Forty-One: The Eastern Theatres of the Great War (1905)
The Arabian Front and the Battle of Mecca in March 1905
Due to the immense scope of the Great War, it is almost impossible to report on all its many great battles concurrently and do the great tragedy justice. As such, these chapter will be divided into the “Western” and “Eastern” Theatres, with each containing a significant number of fronts, and the chapter focusing solely on events taking place in those theatres. The Eastern Theatres of the war as such contain the Eastern Front, the Bessarabian Front, the Caucasian Front, the Arabian Front, and the East African Front, as well as four minor fronts which opened up during 1905. These theatres were chiefly an assortment of Alliance Members fighting against the Russian Empire or the United Kingdom, with occasional support from the minor Entente powers.
As 1905 began, the Ottoman Empire found itself facing the new threat of the British landings in Arabia and the steadily increasing horde of British troops that had crossed the Straits of Hormuz into Ottoman territories. This front would eventually require the assignment of all five uncommitted Ottoman armies, as the armies of the Sudan, Abyssinia, and Cyrenaica were sent to join the armies of Arabia and of the Trucial States that were already in the region. All of these armies were made up of the less reliable colonial troops, and so numerical superiority was quickly identified as being key for going toe-to-toe with the best armies of British India.
The Arabian Front, like the other Eastern Theatres, had very little of the Trench Warfare that characterised much of the fighting in the Western Theatres. Here the war was one of movement, and harsh conditions of the Arabian Desert would test both forces to the limit. For the British, their invasion of Arabia sought to capitalise on the ongoing Arab Revolt. The British did not initially expect much resistance from the Ottoman Empire, and they hoped that if the Arabs would rise up alongside them, they could advance toward their true strategic goal of the invasion: Suez. If the Brits could secure the Canal, the Royal Navy would be able to give the Entente full naval superiority in the Mediterranean and potentially allow them to try and force the Dardanelles to provide support to their Russian allies.
The Sublime Porte, for its part, was determined not to let the Brits anywhere near Suez. As such, initial proposals to fall back out of Arabia to Mesopotamia and the Levant were quickly turned down, and a new Ottoman strategy of hit-and-run tactics was embraced. Ottoman forces were sent to the Peninsula but only to engage detached British forces where we could gain local superiority, with the aim of slowing the British advance to a crawl. Engagements with British troops which outnumbered our own would be avoided where possible. The first test of this came at Halaban in the deserts of Nejd, where a British corps of 6000 men was surprised and captured by the Army of Arabia in February 1905. The British had scrambled reinforcements upon hearing of the engagement, but British forces under General Alfred Battemberg suffered a second defeat at Halaban at the end of the month, despite briefly outnumbering our forces.
By attempting to relieve the initial corps, Battemberg’s Army had itself become extremely detached from the rest of the British forces, which for the most part were still in the Trucial States, apart from another British army which was liberating the city of Aden. Furthermore, Battemberg’s Army had become very disorganised in its retreat and lost its way in the desert, instead finding themselves retreating deeper into Ottoman territory as they entered the eyalet of Mecca. With the Holy City itself threatened, Sultan Abdulhamid II now made a personal intervention in the war to declare a Jihad against the Entente, calling upon all Muslims to put aside their differences and defend the holy cities.
The Battle of Mecca saw off the Entente threat to the Holy City (March 1905)
The British attack on Mecca, combined with the Sultan's call for Jihad, saw Arab Leaders end the Arab Revolt in April 1905
Arab tribal leaders gather to begin the Jihad and defend Arabia (April 1905)
The Sultan’s designation of the Great War as a Jihad, combined with Battemberg’s force making an ill-advised attempt to capture Mecca in March 1905, helped to heal the wounds caused by the Arab Revolt and turned the Mashriqi and Bedouin Arabs decisively against the invading British forces – much to the surprise of London. Meanwhile Murat Pasha’s Army of Abyssinia had hurried to defend Mecca, and with great help from the local tribes a huge victory was won, with Battemberg’s force being entirely wiped out by the end of the March, and Battemberg himself captured. His vain dreams of bringing glory to the British Empire by capturing Mecca had united the Ottoman population in a way that the Sublime Porte had not been able to do in years, and in April 1905 the Arab Revolt was officially ended as a result. Outraged tribal leaders had met with representatives of the Porte and agreed to heed the call to Jihad and accept the olive branch offered by Grand Vizier Hilmi Pasha.
Meanwhile in Europe, Ottoman forces on the Bessarabian Front continued to advance into Russian territory, with the city of Odessa falling in January 1905, and a Russian army annihilated at Proskorov in March. By April, Ottoman forces had reached the River Dnieper and were threatening the city of Kiev itself, while a Russian counter-attack had been defeated at Odessa and the Army of Egypt had secured control of most of the Crimean Peninsula. In the Caucasus too, the entirety of Georgia had now been occupied by Ottoman forces with only Tbilisi holding out by the end of March, although a new Russian army had invaded Ottoman Azerbaijan, where the Russian suffered another catastrophic defeat at the Second Battle of Sheki in April. Pertev Pasha’s Army of Syria then pursued the Russians and forced the surrender of that entire Russian invasion force at Derbent.
Simultaneously, the Eastern Theatres saw two new fronts open up in early 1905. Firstly the British allies in the Kingdom of Greece joined the Entente on March 25th, opening a new front against the Ottoman Empire while our forces were heavily committed against the Russians. And secondly, at the same time, the Empire of Japan officially joined the Alliance and began an invasion of Korea and the Russian Far East. These new fronts were joined by more British forces marching through the supposedly-neutral Persia to directly attack Mesopotamia, where they suffered a defeat at the Battle of Basra in late April but instantly withdrew back over the border. While this frustration saw yet more protests by Ottoman diplomats in Tehran, the Porte was not too disappointed by the splitting of British forces as it left them more vulnerable in Arabia. As a result the Ottoman Indian Ocean Fleet sallied forth from Kuwait in May and defeated a flotilla of outdated ships from British India that had been helping to supply the British in Arabia, and now began a campaign of raiding that made the chance of further British crossings of the Straits of Hormuz very unlikely.
The entrance of the Empire of Japan into the Great War saw new fronts opened in Korea and the Far East (April 1905)
Russian forces suffer another crushing defeat at the Second Battle of Sheki (April 1905)
Ottoman forces score important victories at Doha and Zhitomir after the Fall of Kiev (June 1905)
British forces appearing on the Caucasian Front were less welcome, however, and they contributed to the end of the Ottoman advances into Russian Empire by Summer 1905 as our forces had to turn back to protect our supply lines. Much of Circassia had by then fallen to the Army of Egypt and ensured that the entire Black Sea coast was under the control of our troops by summer – save for the coastline of the Sea of Azov. Our Romanian allies had also entered the war in April and as such a great celebration was had when Ottoman and Romanian troops met up with German and Galician forces of our Alliance Partners around Rovne in May. The Alliance advance into Russia seemed unstoppable at this point, and the fall of Kiev to Ottoman troops in early June reinforced this fact – as did the destruction of another Russian army attempting to counter-attack at Zhitomir soon afterward. And when in Arabia, British forces under General Edmund Tyrwhitt suffered a heavy defeat at Doha, it seemed clear that the Entente Powers were heading to a heavy defeat.
The Allied Tide was halted that same month however, after news of the catastrophic defeat at Wazzan in Morocco reached the other fronts, and more British Indian reinforcements began to arrive in Russia itself after being railed through Central Asia. The defeat at Doha was avenged by the main British host in Arabia managing to engage us at Hufuf and inflicting extremely heavy losses on the combined armies of Arabia and the Trucial States, and Princely State forces under Balwantry Vaghela were narrowly defeated by the Army of Rumelia after a costly battle at Nikolaev soon afterward. As such, the second half of 1905 saw Alliance forces move to the defence against the Russian reserves, combined with the huge numbers of the British and Indian regiments; and saw our forces begin to be pushed back on all fronts - despite still managing to win a number of important victories at Kutaisi and Vladikavkaz in the Caucasus, Cherson in the Crimea, and Aden and Bayda in Arabia.
The peak of the Ottoman Advance into the Ukraine in July 1905
The Arabian Front in August 1905
By August the Russian counter-attacks had also driven our German allies back in Poland, leading to the Sublime Porte deciding to assign our most north-westerly army, the Army of Bosnia under Vefik Bey, to the German High Command and march it to the Eastern Front to help prop the Germans up. With the Army of Bosnia removed from the Bessarabian Front and the Army of Egypt having crossed the Straits of Kerch to join the fighting in Circassia by capturing the major city of Ekaterinodar in late August, this now left us to move to a heavily defensive strategy in the Bessarabian Front – particularly after the Alliance attempt to re-link the fronts was defeated by the Russians at Kovel. Good news did at least come from the Korean Capitulation at the end of August 1905 after Japanese forces had occupied almost the entire country, which in turn freed up more Japanese troops for their invasion of the Russian Far-East, but while Korea was the first country to be forced out of the war, they were also the least of concerns for the Sublime Porte.
Instead, September 1905 brought the news that the Porte had most feared: the Habsburg Empire had mobilised its forces. On September 9th 1905, the Habsburgs declared war on the Ottoman Empire – although they did not join the Great War itself but instead claimed that they were fighting a separate conflict to retake Croatia. The Habsburgs hoped that this would mean that they would fight us alone, but most Alliance members heeded the call to arms, with Germany, Japan, Romania, Spain, and South Africa all coming to our defence. Italy however, bound by their truce since the failed liberation of Venetia, did not, although they had already done their part in ensuring that the Habsburg force which invaded us was far smaller than it could have been a few years ago. Nonetheless, the Porte knew that we had no forces able to counter the Habsburgs and we were able to do nothing to prevent them from occupying key industrial areas in Croatia, Slavonia, and Bosnia in winter 1905.
Doomed Romanian Cavalry charges offered some of the only early resistance to the Habsburg invasion of Croatia (October 1905)
The "Triumphs of November 7th" saw Ottoman forces score crucial victories on three separate fronts
The Army of Rumelia had been recalled from Bessarabia upon the Habsburg declaration of war, but was no match for the Habsburg forces, so the Porte instead came up with a new plan. The Army of Rumelia was sent south to deal with the irritation of the Greeks, who had made little headway with their small and outdated army since their declaration of war – seizing only the cities of Larissa and Volos in Thessalia. This led to the triumphs of November 7th, when Ottoman forces on three separate fronts all reported major victories: The Greeks had been crushed at Trikkala, the British at Jerusalem, and the Russians at Stavropol. The remaining Greeks were then obliterated entirely at Arta in December, and the Porte began occupying Attica as we looked to drive them out of the war entirely, before the Habsburg advance could link up with the Greeks and offer them an opportunity to stake any claim on Ottoman territory.
As 1905 drew to a close, the war of movement had seen British armies enter much of Mesopotamia as they continued to push toward Suez, but they had not secured the Arabian Peninsula as intended, and their supply lines were very narrow as a result. The Ottoman Indian Ocean Fleet had also sprung the “Miracle of Bahrain” in December 1905, when British forces (despite battering the Ottoman army defending the island) were trapped on Bahrain by our naval forces, who now looked solely to blockade the 30,000+ British men trapped on the island. And with the Army of Egypt ending the year by scoring two significant fresh victories over Entente forces at the Battles of Chirskaya and Ekaterinodar, 1905 ended with the Porte experiencing some fresh optimism despite some heavy setbacks. The expected help of the Americans and the continued Japanese drive into Siberia gave us great hope for the long-term, despite the fact that the Russians had liberated Poland and Lithuania from German occupation meaning that for the moment at least, the Entente homelands remained unoccupied.
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Chapter Forty-Two: The Western Theatres of the Great War (1906)
Due to the immense scope of the Great War, it is almost impossible to report on all its many great battles concurrently and do the great tragedy justice. As such, these chapters will be divided into the “Western” and “Eastern” Theatres, with each containing a significant number of fronts, and the chapter focusing solely on events taking place in those theatres. The Western Theatres of the war as such contain the African Fronts, the Moroccan Front, the Iberian Front, the Italian Front, and the Western Front. These theatres were chiefly an assortment of Alliance Members fighting against the Kingdom of France, with occasional support from the United Kingdom, and other Entente powers.
The Ottoman Empire saw comparatively little fighting in the Western Theatres in 1906 as the Sublime Porte continued to reel from the disaster of Wazzan in July 1905. A new full strength army was being raised across the Empire and gathered in Tunis for a return to the Moroccan Front, but this would not be ready until summer 1906 at the earliest. In the meantime, only the recovering Army of the Sahel covered the entirety of Ottoman Africa, and that was still rebuilding its strength on Lake Mao. While this meant that the Porte was unable to influence events on the Western Front for the Alliance; it also meant that when the French launched their Spring Offensive of 1906, the Porte was not the one standing in its way.
Instead, after a fairly quiet winter, the French general staff began the offensive on March 16th 1906 on the plains of Iberia. The Spanish 3rd Army which had so stubbornly – and narrowly – halted the French advance in August 1905 once again found itself fighting against numerically superior opposition, and with half the country occupied Spain had been unable to regain much strength during the winter. The initial French assault was aimed at the key rail-hub of Avil; through which the vast majority of Spanish supplies to the provinces of Leon and Galicia now flowed. After much brutal fighting through March as the Spanish reinforced the city in a desperate bid to keep the supply corridor open, the superior French numbers and particularly their far more numerous supplies of artillery shells bore fruit. The Spanish were slowly but surely driven back to the city itself, despite continuing to inflict huge casualties on the French, and on April 28th the French cut the railroad just north of Avila.
The Spanish Army began to fall apart following the Battle of Avila (March-June 1906)
Infrastructure around Madrid was devastated during the French Spring Offensive of 1906
This devastating blow now left the Spanish defenders in the north extremely isolated, and the French launched their secondary attack. A swift drive along the coast obliterated the weak Spanish defences and saw the rapid capitulation of Santander and Oviedo, before another Spanish implosion saw the entirety of Leon and Galicia fall in June 1906. Meanwhile at Avila, the exhausted Spaniards now found themselves fighting fresh French forces as troops were siphoned away from the north following the Spanish capitulation, and the 3rd Army was forced to retreat back to Madrid itself. With the British also now breaking out of their beachheads at Cadiz and Gibraltar, the final Spanish collapse now began. As British troops marched into Seville almost unopposed, the French artillery made a swift and merciless pounding of the Spanish capital. It surrendered after just 6 days. The Spanish government had fled via to the town of Huelva and from there escaped across the sea to Melilla before eventually reaching Istanbul by train, but the Spain was almost entirely occupied.
It was amidst this collapse that the newly raised Ottoman 3rd Army – named in solidarity of our battered Spanish allies, made a desperate attempt to take Gibraltar and provide an escape route through Southern Spain for the remaining dispersed Spanish forces. 42,000 brave Ottoman men attacked the British fortress, but the Entente were soon able to bring reinforcements to the defenders. Throughout September vicious fighting roared as Ottoman and Spanish troops defended our beachhead against a combined Anglo-Franco army. But despite inflicting more extremely heavy casualties on our foes, we could not force their surrender. On October 2nd 1906 the Porte called the attack off. We had lost around 15,000 men and inflicted over twice that on the Entente… But critically, we had failed to prevent the fall of Spain.
The Alliance defeat at the Battle of Gibraltar signalled the end of fighting on the Iberian Front (August-October 1906)
It should not, however, be said that the Spanish Army found no success in 1906. The French decision to pull troops from Africa had left the remaining British and French troops in West Africa in an extremely difficult position, and the Spanish and German forces in Africa had seized the entirety of British Central & Southern Africa, along with the Dominion of Botswana, by the end of April. West Africa meanwhile saw much fighting, with the Spanish scoring numerous successes over their French and British opponents. The Ottoman Army of the Sahel was therefore sent to support the continued Spanish drive through West Africa, and in August & September of 1906 scored two major victories over the British at Jugu and Atakpame in British Nigeria. While the African theatre was of little strategic importance to the overall war effort, the Porte was nonetheless determined to ensure that the Spanish armies in Africa remained valid and intact fighting forces, in order to persuade the Spanish government-in-exile not to make a separate peace with the Entente – something which was successful even after the final fall of Spain.
The West African Front and the Battle of Jugu (August 1906)
Exit Italy
However, despite the success in Africa, the collapse of the Spanish Army in Iberia had freed up significant French forces for an Autumn Offensive on the Western Front or the Italian Front – and in the end the French decided to attack on both. The Italians had been slowly pushed back out of Provence & Savoie through 1906 despite the small number of French forces that had been available in the region, and this had already culminated in the French liberation of Nice on July 27th 1906, much to the embarrassment of the Italian government. The Autumn Offensive – pitting some of the best French veterans against the Italians, then became a whitewash. Within a week of its launching in late September 1906, the Italian army had collapsed across the entire front and suffered a catastrophic defeat on the outskirts of Turin. The demoralised Italians began surrendering in droves – to the point that when the beleaguered Italian Commander in Chief Luigi Cadorno ordered a counter-attack at Genoa on October 17th, his own staff at his HQ shot him and surrendered instead.
The almost farcical collapse of the Italian Front triggered huge recriminations in the Italian capital, as politicians and military officers scrambled to find scapegoats for the obliteration of the Italian army. But most importantly, with the Italian people offering little to no support for the war effort, the Italian government signed an armistice on December 8th 1906. While Cadorno and his deputy were eventually blamed for the Italian unravelling, the quick surrender of the Italian government did successfully spare the Italian industrial regions of the North from occupation. And though the terms of the Treaty of Turin that ended the war for Italy involved harsh reparations to the French government, and prohibitions on increasing the size of the Italian army for five years; they did avoid ceding any Italian territory to the Entente.
French forces celebrate the Italian Surrender in December 1906
Historians would later reflect on the collapse of the Spanish and Italian armies as being the first of a series of dominos, the effects of which would be felt all across the world, but the most immediate effects were felt on the Western Front – which was now the only front where the French were fighting in significant numbers. The Western Front had been comparatively quiet in 1906, with the Germans still heavily involved in the East, and the French having stabilised the front along the rivers Somme, Oise, and Marne. The French Autumn Offensive had been concentrated largely on the Belgian Sector around Saint-Quentin – where the largest creeping artillery barrage yet seen had turned the battlefield into a quagmire and triggered the start of three months of constant fighting at an immense cost to both sides… But by the end of 1906, the French had driven the Belgians back to the pre-war border – save for some of the coastal regions around Calais, and were poised to invade Belgium itself. It was clear that the Western Theatres had turned decisively in favour of the Entente through 1906; and that the only salvation for the Alliance would require a dramatic change of fortune - Or the arrival of the long-awaited American Expeditionary Force. But from that hope there was, perhaps, the most devastating defeat of all.
The Battle of the Atlantic had begun as soon as the United States of America had joined the war, with the British Royal Navy attempting to intercept all American shipping while also maintaining the blockade of Germany and the Straits of Gibraltar. The US Navy, whilst significantly smaller than that of the British, was large enough to threaten that blockade, and indeed perhaps join with the German navy to destroy the British merchant shipping fleet and inflict a blockade on Britain instead. To counter this threat, the British planned to prevent the American Fleet from reaching Europe at all costs, and so through Spring and Summer of 1906 the Atlantic blockade on Germany was in fact loosened as the British instead concentrated on hunting down and destroying the American Navy. For Germany, whilst the relief from the blockade was welcome, the increasingly dire situation in Spain and Italy meant that American troops were more desperately needed than ever, and the US Army was rapidly expanding to become the single largest military force in the entire world. But getting that force to Europe required an incredibly dangerous crossing of the Atlantic.
A German U-Boat operating in the Atlantic during the Great War
It wasn't until September 1906 that the Americans finally responded to the increasingly desperate pleas of the Allies and authorised a crossing. Virtually the entire American fleet was gathered, with the Americans ready to support the combined Spanish-Ottoman forces in Southern Spain and reopen the Spanish Front. The US 7th Army, with over 60,000 men, would be the first across the Atlantic, but more would follow. The American fleet set off from Norfolk, Virginia and swung South, hoping to avoid the Royal Navy at all costs by travelling through more tropical waters. The gambit failed. British submarines operating in the Caribbean spotted the US Task Force early and relayed it back to the Royal Navy Grand Fleet, and the British moved to intercept the Americans south of the Azores. On September 28th 1906, at 10:27am, the British attacked. Throughout the day brutal action between Battleships and Cruisers on both sides saw numerous ships sunk, but a British submarine was able to score a direct hit on the transport ship USS Mercury just after midday, and the shock caused US Admiral William S. Sims to order a retreat lest other troop transports be hit.
It was too late. By the end of the day, 7 more transports had been sunk, along with 5 American battleships, 16 cruisers, and 25 destroyers and other light ships. While the British had also lost 7 battleships, 20 cruisers, and over 40 destroyers and submarines, the Royal Navy's greater size won out, and the remnants of the US Navy were utterly crippled by the greatest naval battle in history - known as the Battle of the Azores. Over 40,000 American soldiers and sailors were dead, the American war plan was in tatters... And as news of the catastrophe reached America, the American public turned heavily against sending any more troops overseas. Never again for the rest of the war would the Americans attempt to cross the Atlantic. The old adage had proven true: Britannia ruled the waves.
British ships in action at the Battle of the Azores (September 28th 1906)
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Chapter Forty-Three: The Eastern Theatres of the Great War (1906)
Due to the immense scope of the Great War, it is almost impossible to report on all its many great battles concurrently and do the great tragedy justice. As such, these chapter will be divided into the “Western” and “Eastern” Theatres, with each containing a significant number of fronts, and the chapter focusing solely on events taking place in those theatres. The Eastern Theatres of the war as such contain the Eastern Front, the Bessarabian Front, the Caucasian Front, the Arabian Front, the Greek Front, the Siberian Front, and the Croatian Front. These theatres were chiefly an assortment of Alliance Members fighting against the Russian Empire, the United Kingdom, or Austria-Hungary, with occasional support from the minor Entente powers.
The defeat of the final Ottoman forces in Circassia on January 7th 1906
1906 on the Eastern Front began shortly after a series of Ottoman victories in Circassia at Chirskaya and Ekaterinodar, but the success did not continue on into the new year. The First Battle of Ekaterinodar only a few weeks earlier had repulsed an Indian force at heavy cost to both sides, but left Namik Pasha’s Army of Egypt facing a critical shortage of both manpower and supplies… And the Porte could not ship replacements to him quickly enough. On January 7th, Russian General Mikhail Tukhachevsky launched a new attack on Ekaterinodar that rapidly surrounded the now heavily outnumbered Ottoman forces and forced the surrender of Namik’s army. It was a bad omen for the year to come, and a clear sign of the growing disparity between our own forces and those of the Russian Empire.
On the Arabian Front however, the hit and run tactics embraced by the Ottoman Empire in 1905 had begun to pay dividends since the victory over the British at Jerusalem the previous November. In January, British forces under General Frederick Plummer were attacked in Kaf in the Arabian Desert by Rifat Pasha’s Army of Cyrenaica, which had seen their isolation from the other British forces. Utilising a new ‘creeping barrage’ by the Ottoman artillery which had the infantry moving right behind our own shells, tactical surprise was achieved as the British troops had barely manned their positions before our men were upon them, and a major lopsided victory was achieved as a result, forcing the British once more to retreat away from the Levant.
Ottoman forces inflict a major defeat on the British at the Battle of Kaf (January 13th 1906)
Meanwhile far to the east, the Army of Abyssinia under the command of General Murat Pasha had been trapped at Qatif while attempting to pull back to Mesopotamia. Recognising that escape was no longer possible, Murat had ordered a rapid fortification of positions outside the Gulf Port, and prepared to inflict maximum damage upon the British before his expected surrender. Instead, in one of the greatest miracles of the Great War, and against overwhelming odds, a hugely unexpected triumph for the Ottoman Army came about. As British General Richard Beatty began his attack in January, his forces outnumbered the Ottoman forces by 4:1, and Beatty believed they would have no trouble forcing a surrender. Instead of making a detailed plan or trying to outflank the Ottoman troops, Beatty instead decided to simply launch a full frontal assault on the Ottoman positions.
As Beatty’s attack began, his artillery barrage failed to even dent the Ottoman positions which had been placed on the rear side of a high ridge, meaning British spotters couldn’t target our batteries. The Ottoman counter-barrage punished this mercilessly, and British troops were massacred on the Qatif Heights. With morale in the Army of Abyssinia booming following the clear British failures, the few places where the British even reached the Heights saw immediate Ottoman counter-attacks drive them back down at heavy cost. As the days rolled by, Beatty’s incompetence showed further as he simply continued to feed his reserves into the same battle, believing that our troops were on the verge of breaking when they were in fact anything but. Weeks rolled by but no matter what, the British could not dislodge the Ottoman forces, and the British began to realise they were on the verge of a catastrophic defeat. Finally, on February 22nd, Beatty’s battered force disengaged, but the damage was done. At the “Massacre of Qatif”, the British had lost almost an entire army with extraordinary speed due to his almost criminal mismanagement.
British forces are massacred at Qatif through January and February 1906
Ottoman reserves maintained high discipline during the Battle of Qatif
For roughly 20,000 Ottoman casualties we had inflicted almost 100k upon the British, and while Murat’s force was almost destroyed he had succeeded in driving the British back and escaping the trap. The Army of Abyssinia would live to fight another day, while Richard Beatty’s reputation was utterly destroyed by the vengeful British Press. With the Ottoman election underway despite the occupation of several provinces, Grand Vizier Hilmi Pasha’s position had come under heavy scrutiny due to the war, but the Battle of Qatif was a propaganda coup at exactly the right moment for Hilmi. On March 11th, the wartime election took place in the Ottoman Empire under the new Jefferson Method of voting, with Women voting for the first time since being given Suffrage in 1901.
Despite the new voting system making majorities less likely, Hilmi Pasha’s Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi won 310 of the 600 seats (100 seats from occupied territories were not elected), utterly dwarfing the opposition – which was in fact now led by the socialist Osmanli Ahali Firkasi on 97 seats. Due to the small majority however, the libertarian Ahrar Firkasi was brought into the governing coalition, along with the social liberal Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi, which had 47 and 49 seats respectively. The Conservatives suffered another humiliation, dropping to just 66 seats for the Hükumet-i Hümayan, although the Teceddüt Firkasi re-entered parliament on 12 seats, and the far-right pan-Turkic Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Committee of Union and Progress) won 18, with one final seat going to the communists. In return for the support of their junior coalition partners, Hilmi Pasha was forced to pass the Suffrage Act of 1906 which calmed the home front by enacting Universal Suffrage, albeit with Weightings against the newly enfranchised poor.
The wartime election of 1906 saw Hilmi Pasha retain power but enter a coalition due to his reduced majority
Beatty's humiliated army surrenders at Rafha (March 25th 1906)
Meanwhile in Arabia, Beatty’s retreating forces were caught at Rafha by Fevzi Pasha’s fresh Army of Arabia, forcing his surrender and ensuring his humiliation was absolute. This brought further good news to the Porte, despite the simultaneous surrender of Ziyauddin Pasha’s Army of Sudan at Kuwait, and as the front quietened down in Spring, further Ottoman success was scored with the capture of an Indian army at Basra in April 1906. As a result, with the British licking their wounds in Arabia following Beatty’s Folly, attention moved back to the Caucasian Front, where General John Madden proved he had learned little from his countryman’s failure at Qatif. Due to the massive size of the British forces opposing us, the Ottoman Armies of Syria, Iraq, and Anatolia had gathered together to form Army Group Caucasus, under the overall command of Pertev Pasha of Syria. Despite the impressive numbers, the armies of Anatolia and Iraq were heavily undermanned at this point, but they were defending in solid defensive territory at Ardahan… And Madden once more inexplicably launched frontal assaults on the Ottoman lines. British artillery was more accurate at the Battle of Ardahan, but British casualties were even higher than at Qatif and the British were once more defeated, this time losing over twice as many men as us. The Porte may have been battered, but it was far from out.
The 1906 Battle of Ardahan was fought in the freezing heights of the Caucasian Mountains
The Caucasian Front after the Ottoman victory at Ardahan (May 15th 1906)
May passed with further minor Ottoman victories at Rafha and Kars, utilising the Hit & Run doctrine to wipe out two minor Indian and British corps respectively, before Tukhachevsky’s Russian army was defeated at Poti on June 25th, and another British offensive in Mesopotamia was heavily defeated by Suleyman Bey’s Army of the Trucial States at Rutbah a couple of days later. But even despite this string of victories, the Sublime Porte knew the war was going poorly as the German army continued to fall back in Russia. Vefik Bey’s expeditionary force was destroyed under German command in April, and the Russians had now pushed back almost to the pre-war border. If the war was to end in anything other than catastrophe for the Ottoman Empire, we needed to win an awful lot more before the year was out.
Ottoman forces defeat the British at Rutbah (June 27th 1906)
The Mesopotamian Front after the British defeat at Karbala (September 8th 1906)
And so, extraordinarily, that was exactly what the Sublime Porte set out to achieve. Offensives were planned on all fronts for the Summer and Autumn, despite the complaint that with the faltering war efforts of Spain, Italy, and Germany, the Empire was now “shackled to a bunch of corpses”. Whilst the offensives in Africa and Gibraltar were getting underway in the Western Theatres, more hit & run victories were targeted in Mesopotamia, and were duly delivered by Rifat Pasha in a minor skirmish at Baghdad and then a major victory against Plummer’s forces at Karbala in September. With the British in retreat, the Porte now looked to try and hit the Russians and provide some indirect relief to the beleaguered Germans, but despite driving back Tukhachevsky’s forces again at Akhaltsikhe in October (on the same day as a devastating earthquake hit San Francisco in America and directed even more American attention away from the war), it wasn’t until November 13th that a major victory over the Russians could be achieved – at the Second Battle of Poti. A new Russian army under the inexperienced Vladimir Kolchak was caught attempting to liberate the city by Hamza Pasha’s combined Armies of Iraq & Anatolia (Pertev Pasha’s Army of Syria had been decoupled from the Army Group), and massive casualties were inflicted upon the Russians – the remnants of Kolchak’s army surrendered a fortnight later at Kutaisi at the total cost of just under 5000 Ottoman troops across the two battles.
Russian forces suffer a major defeat at the Second Battle of Poti (November 13th 1906)
With further success in Mesopotamia against the dwindling remains of the British invasion force at Kut and Nasiriyya 1906 ended, against all odds, with the British invasion of the Ottoman Empire defeated. Baghdad was liberated by Suleyman Bey in a major morale boost on December 13th 1906, and the remaining occupied territories in Eastern Anatolia were now pretty much undefended. But whilst the threat in the East was over, the German army remained on the retreat in Poland, and the Austro-Hungarian forces continued to march through the Balkans. The Sublime Porte had been knocked down, but the Great War was a long way from over. Many more men would yet perish ere the guns fell silent.
The Mesopotamian and Caucasian Fronts at the end of 1906
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Chapter Forty-Four: The End of the Great War (1907)
At an Allied War Conference in Constantinople in January 1907, the true scale of the challenges facing the Allies was laid bare for all to see. The Spanish government-in-exile was threatening to sign a separate peace, and only extremely smart diplomatic work by the German and Ottoman delegates was able to persuade the Spaniards to stay in the war. But no amount of diplomacy could persuade the Americans to send more troops over after the disaster at the Azores, and with the Belgian and German armies in full retreat, it was clear that the only forces that could be relied on were those of the Ottoman Empire and those of the Empire of Japan – and the latter were unfortunately unable to influence matters on the decisive fronts.
Following the War Conference, Grand Vizier Hilmi Pasha was left feeling profoundly depressed, believing that the conference had shown once and for all that the war could not be won. Consequently discussion now took place with the Ottoman Chiefs of Staff on how to best maximise the damage limitation from the outcome of the war, and if at all possible avoid territorial concessions. With the Entente powers demanding huge reparations and a massive cut to the size of the army in return for peace, and Austria-Hungary still demanding the return of Croatia, it was clear that surrendering to the Entente would almost certainly lead to capitulation to the Habsburg’s being unavoidable. As such, Hilmi Pasha hoped that more lenient peace terms could be won by inflicting more damaging defeats on the Entente forces, even though they would be unlikely to change the wider strategic picture.
The defeat of the British invasion of Mesopotamia could potentially free up significant Ottoman forces to send to the Balkan Theatre, but the Russian liberation of Circassia and Georgia had now reduced the territory we held there to the coastal city of Poti and land around the city of Akhaltsikhe, both of which now had significant Russian armies attempting to liberate them. Furthermore Russian forces had occupied almost the entirety of Ottoman Azerbaijan, and significant swathes of Armenia, while parts of Anatolia were still under British control despite the defeat of their main field armies. As a result, only Rifat Pasha’s Army of Cyrenaica began the long transfer west, with hopes of a lenient peace now focused on inflicting maximum damage on the chief opposition of the war: The Russians.
The Russians suffer a heavy defeat at Akhaltsikhe (January 1907)
The first strike against the Russians was made by Pertev Pasha’s Army of Syria, which had been reinforced significantly over the winter by conscript forces. Attacking Tukhachevsky’s smaller forces at Akhaltsikhe a significant victory was achieved with few Russians escaping, ensuring that further Russian attention would be needed to complete their liberation of lands, while the few casualties suffered by Ottoman forces ensured that further offensive operations could be launched in future.
Meanwhile in the Balkans, Said Pasha’s lone Army of Rumelia had continued to fight the Greeks ever since defeating their invasion of Thessaly in 1905, and had by now occupied much of Attica. The Greeks were one of the Entente powers most likely to demand Ottoman territory in peace negotiations, and so Hilmi Pasha was determined to force them out of the war even at the cost of allowing the Habsburg forces to occupy much of the Balkans down to Belgrade and Sarajevo almost unopposed. Despite the criticism he received for this, he was vindicated on February 27th 1907 after the Siege of Athens finally ended in an Ottoman victory and the Greek government sued for peace. While some hawks in the Ottoman parliament had demanded territorial concessions from Greece in the Aegean Sea and a few even cried for full annexation, Hilmi was loathe to risk the Greeks continuing the war and being rewarded with Thessaly, Crete, or any other claims later on, and so all that was demanded was costly financial reparations and a limit on the size of the demobilised Greek Army.
The Kingdom of Greece surrenders following the fall of Athens to Ottoman troops (February 27th 1907)
The Balkan Front after the Battle of Bitola in April 1907
It turned out that the armistice with the Greeks had not been signed a moment too soon. The British forces, so humiliated in Arabia and Mesopotamia in 1906, determined to reclaim their honour and made multiple landings in Montenegro, Albania, and Epirus in March 1907. Had Said Pasha still been fighting in Greece then it is likely the Balkan Front would have collapsed entirely, but with the armistice signed he was able to rail his troops with impressive speed to face the disorganised British landings and inflict another defeat on the British at Gjirokaster at the end of the month. As April passed with more bad news from the Western Front (where the Kingdom of Belgium had capitulated to the advancing French tide on April 15th) and the Russians beginning to advance on Berlin, another British force under General Charles Thesiger was defeated at Bitola and heavy casualties once more inflicted upon the British - though critically neither British army had been annihilated.
Unfortunately, Hilmi Pasha had not counted upon the German collapse freeing up significant Habsburg forces from the fighting in Bavaria and Silesia, and in June 1907 a major new Austro-Hungarian offensive was launched against the Porte in Macedonia and Bulgaria, linking up with Russian forces that had occupied Rumania and were marching into Dobrudja. The Habsburg forces were performing well in the field – or at least far better than the British – and whilst Said Pasha was able to repulse two attacks on Skopje in June and August, it was clear that reinforcements would be needed to rescue the front. Reinforcements that were simply not available.
The first and second battles of Skopje after the Habsburg troop surge in Summer 1907
Pertev Pasha scores a major victory at Agdam in the Ottoman Caucasian Offensive of Summer 1907
Tasked with the full liberation of Armenia and Azerbaijan in Spring before the Habsburg Offensive had been launched, as these vilayets had been deemed those most likely for the Russians to demand if they could, Pertev Pasha’s Army of Syria, supported by the Army of Anatolia, had advanced deep into Azerbaijan and liberated the cities of Sheki and Agdam by August, while the Army of Abyssinia was attempting to retake control of Poti once more when the news of the renewed Habsburg attack reached the front, meaning it was too late for further armies to be transferred away to Europe. The belief that the Russians would target the Caucasus rather than Europe had been similarly misguided, but all that could be done now was to inflict as much damage on the Russian forces that had attacked in the Caucasus, and Pertev Pasha made sure to do just that. At Agdam he lured a full Russian army under the inexperienced Fyodor Voroshilov into attacking what he thought to be a separated Ottoman division but in fact was merely bait. As Voroshilov entered one of the high mountain passes he suddenly found himself facing the full might of an entrenched Army of Syria, and his army was utterly destroyed. Pertev Pasha had made a success of the task given to him, but it was to prove almost the last hurrah of the Ottoman war effort.
Even as news was filtering through to Constantinople of Pertev’s great victory, an even greater catastrophe was looming on the Balkan Front. The Entente Control of the sea had reached such a level that they were able to trap our ships beyond the Dardanelles and grave news arrived that our most feared foes, the French Army, had landed in force in Thrace and were planning to open the straits. Rifat Pasha’s Army of Cyrenaica attempted to drive them back into the sea, but the results were disastrous. At the Battle of Edirne Rifat’s force was all but eliminated by a massive combined Franco-Russo-Finnish army, while four days later on August 29th news of a further disaster arrived with Said Pasha’s Army of Rumelia defeated in a massive battle at Sofia. The road to Constantinople was wide open, and the government began immediately to evacuate to Ankara in the Anatolian interior.
French landings in Thrace lead to the disaster at Edirne in August 1907
Outnumbered Ottoman forces are defeated at Sofia in August 1907
Hilmi Pasha still hoped to prevent the Russians from making any territorial demands however, and Pertev Pasha’s army scored another victory at Nakhichevan in early September to defeat the final Russian army in the Caucasus. Surprising good news was also received when Ottoman forces in Morocco inflicted a major defeat on the French at Tetouan through October, but in truth these battles were meaningless to the result of the conflict. Berlin had fallen to the Russians on October 18th and Constantinople on October 29th. Hopes that the capital might yet be saved by Said Pasha’s remaining forces foundered after another narrow defeat at Petrich, and the Ottoman government made the difficult decision to officially request an armistice, which after much negotiation was signed on December 6th 1907.
The Ottoman defeat at Petrich ensures that Constantinople falls to the Entente, while Tetouan saw the last Ottoman battle of the Great War (November 1907)
The Balkan Front at the time of the armistice to end Ottoman involvement in the Great War
The Caucasian Front at the time of the armistice to end Ottoman involvement in the Great War
To his credit the Grand Vizier had achieved his goal of avoiding any territorial concessions, with the British and French unwilling to tolerate continued Russian presence in Constantinople due to the anticipated major Russian gains that would be made at the expense of Germany. The remaining Ottoman field armies were also numerous enough to drag the war out for another year at least and inflicted tens of thousands more casualties upon the invaders if forced to fight to the bitter end, with Hilmi Pasha threatening to cancel negotiations when ludicrous demands for the Russian re-annexation of Azerbaijan and British acquisition of the Gulf Coast were proposed. The Treaty of Edirne therefore agreed to pay reparations totalling 25% of the Ottoman revenue to the Entente Powers for five years, and to demobilise the Ottoman army down to a quarter of its pre-war strength for the same period of time. Despite knowing that this would almost certainly spell the end of resistance against the Habsburg’s, Hilmi Pasha knew it was the best offer he would get, and the treaty was signed.
The Ottoman Empire signs an armistice with the Entente Powers (December 6th 1907)
The German surrender marks the end of the Great War (January 12th 1908)
The Great War itself would in fact last another month before the broken Germans offered their own surrender, with Entente occupation of their country utterly complete, and an armistice being signed on January 12th 1908 to officially end the ‘war to end all wars’. The war with Austria-Hungary had one final twist, with Pertev Pasha’s remaining forces having been hurriedly transferred for one last attempt to defeat the Habsburgs. Pertev in fact managed to defeat the Austro-Hungarian forces at Dedeagatch in February 1908, but at such a high cost that it was clear that continuing the offensive would only delay the inevitable. The Treaty of Zagreb was therefore signed with Austria-Hungary on March 9th 1908, ceding the vilayet of Croatia back to the Habsburg’s but avoiding the loss of Slavonia due to Habsburg concern over Dedeagatch and the fact that they now fought without any allies. The Great War was over, the guns had fallen silent at last. And the Sublime Porte had lost.
The Pyrrhic victory of Dedeagatch forces the Sublime Porte to accept Habsburg terms of surrender (March 9th 1908)
Germany signs the Treaty of Berlin to officially end the Great War (April 4th 1908)
A map of Post-War Europe in 1908
German East Africa was split between the British and Russian Empires by the Treaty of Berlin
When the guns fell silent at the end of the Great War and negotiations between the Entente Powers and the defeated Allies began, it was clear to all that the map of Europe would be redrawn in a way not seen since the Congress of Vienna ended the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. With the Russian Tsar Nicholas II a noted Germanophobe who was determined to ensure that Germany could never threaten the Russian Empire again in future, it was clear that Germany would bear the brunt of the pain to be inflicted, and so it proved to be. When the Treaty of Berlin was signed on April 4th 1908, Germany’s humiliation was complete. The Russian Empire directly annexed the majority of East Prussia, leaving only the land around Elbing under German control. But separating this remaining sliver of German clay from the rest of Germany was a series of Russian client states in Pomerania, Poznan, and Silesia. These Russian-backed states were ruled by Poles, with the Tsar hoping that by dividing the Poles into multiple petty-kingdoms then Polish Nationalist dreams of a united independent homeland could be defeated.
The Treaty of Berlin also saw the creation of the French Protectorate of the Saarland over the German industrial city of Saarbrucken in the west, along with the renunciation of any German dreams of reclaiming Alsace-Lorraine from the French. Northern Schleswig was also ceded back to Denmark to further weaken the German state. Finally, the German colonies in East Africa were mostly handed over to the British, save for a narrow coastal strip opposite Zanzibar which was made into the new Russian East Africa province, which the Tsar intended to be used as a coaling station should the Russian Imperial Navy head to the Pacific in future.
The rest of the Alliance powers avoided any territorial concessions at the end of the war, but all members of the Alliance were forced to pay huge war reparations to the Entente, and military expenditure was to be severely curtailed for the five year duration of these reparations. Squabbling between the victors curtailed attempts to seize further lands from the defeated powers, with Spain in particular avoiding the dismemberment of its colonies due to the British and French delegations being unable to agree on who should gain what - and thus the status quo ante bellum being the only compromise possible.
The Sublime Porte defaults on loans following the end of the Great War (April 1st 1908)
Nevertheless the cost of the war had been extremely high, and with the heavy cost of the reparations now being added, it was a bill that the Sublime Porte was simply unable to pay. To the disgust of international creditors, Grand Vizier Hilmi Pasha was forced to declare the Empire bankrupt on April 1st 1908 and default on our huge loans that had been run up in the wartime, most of which had come from German bankers. The ill-feeling this caused between Berlin and Constantinople contributed to a major souring of relations that had already become toxic when both governments began to blame the other for the failure of the war effort, and by June 21st the Ottoman-German Alliance had been officially ended. The Porte had been involved in three major wars in a decade, and the Grand Vizier was not prepared to risk being dragged into a fourth by an unstable and ungrateful ally. And so a period of Ottoman Isolationism officially began.
Universal Suffrage and the ending of gerrymandering were among a number of liberal bills passed by Hilmi Pasha in Summer 1908
Democracy triumphs in the Ottoman Empire with the Sultan being reduced to a symbolic, unifying figurehead (June 19th 1908)
Meanwhile on the home front, the disaster of the defeat of the war threatened to spill over into violence on the streets. The Ottoman public had been shocked by the brief Russian occupation of Constantinople, and the image of Russian troops in the city itself remained large in the minds of the public. That occupation had been comparatively brief compared to the Habsburg occupation of much of the Balkans though, and industry in Ottoman Rumelia had been devastated. Fearing the hordes of unemployed workers turning revolutionary, Sultan Abdulhamid II demanded that measures be taken to placate any protesters and head off any revolts in advance. And so in early 1908 the liberal dawn was once more embraced, and bills ending the gerrymandering of parliamentary constituencies and finally abolishing the weightings of votes to enact true Universal Suffrage within the Empire were passed. With these bills the final powers of the Sultan were passed over to Parliament and the Ottoman Empire became a Crowned Democracy, like much of the rest of the Europe had before it.
Hilmi Pasha was not finished there though. Knowing that despite the embracing of Ottomanism, many of the minorities in the Empire remained second-class citizens whose loyalty was wavering following occupation by Habsburg, Russian, and British forces, the Hatt-i Hümayan, or “Imperial Reform Edict”, was drawn up in summer 1908. The concept of Ottomanism was taken to its logical conclusion by allowing each religious group within the Empire to be judged under its own religious law, with the Bosniak, Bulgarian, Misri, and Azerbaijani peoples being fully embraced within the Ottoman state bureaucracy as a result. Thus Hilmi Pasha at a stroke slashed the risk of revolt in a number of the most populous ethnic groups within the Empire, and secured for himself a legacy that he hoped may yet overshadow the calamity of the defeat in the Great War.
The Hatt-i Hümayan concludes the long process of Ottomanisation in the Empire (July 10th 1908)
The effects of the Hatt-i Hümayan
While the Ottoman-German Alliance had been ended, the agreements signed with the United States of America were maintained by the Sublime Porte, and when America went to war with Peru over Peruvian aggression against Ecuador, the Grand Vizier agreed to sever ties with the Peruvian government and officially declare war, although no troops were sent to the new world for the duration of this minor conflict. Instead, the eyes of the world were focused on the Americas for different reasons when the long overdue Panama Canal was officially opened by the French on February 28th 1909. Many thousands of workers had perished in its construction, which had proven far more difficult than the (Ottoman-built) Suez Canal – something which secretly pleased many an Ottoman engineer. The newly built canal dramatically shortened the journey time for a ship to go from the east coast of America to the west coast, and may prove a hotly-contested strategic base in future.
For the most part however, the eyes of the Sublime Porte remained fixed upon internal matters throughout 1909 and 1910. Middle Class conservatives had begun pushing the issue of temperance and prohibition, inspired by the movement in the United States, and brewery owners were horrified by the Porte’s refusal to guarantee that no steps would be taken in this direction – Hilmi Pasha was unwilling to lose the middle class vote by taking a clear stance on the issue. The conservative Hükumet-i Hümayan (Imperial Government Party) party however took up the cause of prohibition with gusto, and under their new leader Rifat Pasha they began to show signs of a conservative recovery after a very bleak decade.
The Temperance Movement exposes divisions in the Ottoman Cabinet, boosting conservative prospects (September 22nd 1909)
General Rifat Pasha rebrands the conservatives as the Osmanli Demokrat Firkasi (January 6th 1910)
Rifat Pasha had risen to national attention as a general during the Croatian War when he had been assigned command of the Army of Cyrenaica, and his performances both in that war and in the Great War had been solid if unspectacular. He was by now one of the most senior generals in the Ottoman Army however, and for a conservative bereft of leadership since the fall of Ferid Pasha’s government in the liberal landslide of 1900, Rifat was a gift. Born in Ankara on September 8th 1846, Rifat had first trained as an architect but after struggling for work, he had joined the army aged 28 and worked his way up through the ranks. He retained a lifelong interest in architecture and pushed for the conservatives to embrace plans to redevelop the shattered Ottoman cities in Europe. With the Sultan now no longer anything more than a figurehead, he was also keen to shed the Hükumet-i Hümayan’s label as a branch of the Topkapi Palace, and so at the party convention in January 1910 he succeeded in persuading the party to rebrand itself as the Osmanli Demokrat Firkasi and make clear that the party did not want to roll back the recent shift to democracy in the Empire.
While the conservatives had been revitalised under Rifat Pasha, the socialists were also keen to make their mark in the Empire. A mining accident in Tlemcen, Algeria saw the loss of several lives and the maiming of many others on November 21st 1909, and the government response supporting the mining company had incensed labourers in the region. Barbs were exchanged in parliament throughout the winter and on May 6th 1910, a group of senators left the Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi and the Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi to join the socialist Osmanli Ahali Firkasi in protest over the issue. Further flashpoints came to a head after the widespread unionisation of workers in the vilayet of Bulgaria later that month, as Hilmi Pasha struggled to keep the issue from turning violent.
Disputes over Labour Rights and Unionisation triggered mass defections to the opposition socialists in 1910
The Ottoman transition to democracy is completed with the requirement for Secret Ballots in future elections (April 10th 1910)
One key piece of legislation that the government did pass in 1910 was a new Voting Act that demanded that all elections take place with Secret Ballots, bringing Ottoman democracy finally on par with most of the rest of the Europe. But even despite this success, the Grand Vizier was struggling to maintain control of his party, and when the party convention began in June, he announced that he would retire after the election, win or lose. His replacement as head of the Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi was to be another Ottoman war hero – General Pertev Pasha. By running a general of their own (and indeed the most senior general in the entire Ottoman army), the liberals hoped to take the wind out of Rifat Pasha’s sails. Even as the electoral campaign was ongoing, Pertev further increased his star by rapidly putting down a minor nationalist insurrection in Algeria & Tunisia in July 1910. Pertev’s energetic persona was in sharp contrast to his rivals, Husseyin Bey of the socialists and Rifat Pasha of the conservatives, and helped him garner immense popularity with the Ottoman electorate.
Elsewhere in 1910, a German exploration team became the first to reach the South Pole on April 18th, narrowly beating an Ottoman expedition there. This wasn’t enough to calm tensions in Germany though, and rising public anger over the Treaty of Berlin and the harsh war reparations was causing chaos there. Protests in July turned violent, and after government orders to disperse them by force failed to end the riots, the situation changed drastically once more. On August 4th 1910 the revolutionaries stormed the Reichstag and forced Kaiser Wilhem II to abdicate. The House of Hohenzollern, which had ruled Prussia and then Germany for centuries, was forced into exile while a new liberal regime called for immediate elections.
Erich von Drygalski led a successful German expedition to win the race to the South Pole (April 18th 1910)
Kaiser Wilhelm II is forced to abdicate in the German Revolution (August 4th 1910)
It was thus with this background that the Ottoman election of 1910 took place, and as the results came in it was another strong victory for the liberals despite minor gains for both the socialists and the conservatives. Out of 700 seats, the ruling Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi had won 299, which was in fact a drop of 11 despite 100 seats being uncontested due to the war in the prior election of 1907. They once more went into coalition with the Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi and the Ahrar Firkasi which had won 70 seats and 52 seats respectively. This was an improvement of 21 seats for the former and 5 for the latter as both grew at the expense of the ruling party following strong campaigns.
The opposition was once more led by the socialist Osmanli Ahali Firkasi, who had improved from 97 seats up to 132 on the back of very strong performances in the vilayets most damaged by occupation in the Great War, in Europe & Mesopotamia. Conservative hopes that the party rebranding would lead them back into government were crushed, with the Osmanli Demokrat Firkasi picking up just 85 seats, a paltry increase of 19. The Islamist Teceddüt Firkasi doubled their seats to 24, and the Pan-Turkic Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti also doubled their tally to 36. The latter, the party led by the organisation known as the “Young Turks”, wanted the primacy of Turks within the Empire and for minority rights to be stripped away by abolishing Ottomanism, but failed to make the big breakthrough the organisation had been expecting. Finally the communist Ihtilalci Avam Firkasi also gained another seat in Sofia to go with the one they already held in Salonika.
The results of the 1910 Ottoman General Election
The failure of the conservatives to win the election led to much soul-searching within the Right of Ottoman politics, but it was the disappointing results for the socialists that saw a much more immediate reaction. Just one month later socialist protesters took to the streets in a series of violent riots centred in Europe and the Levant, demanding a revolution like the one in Germany. Even worse for the Sublime Porte, it was confirmed that some of the protests had been infiltrated by Croatian Nationalists who looked to carve an independent homeland for the Croats in the vilayets of Slavonia, Bosnia, and Dalmatia. And so as Hilmi Pasha passed the baton of leadership to his successor Pertev Pasha, it was clear that it would be a challenging start for the general.
Socialist and Nationalist forces take to the streets to protest against the 1910 Ottoman election results
Pertev Pasha officially succeeds Hilmi Pasha as Grand Vizier (December 4th 1910)
Grand Vizier Pertev Pasha found the Sublime Porte in disarray as he took office, with socialist protesters in Constantinople itself as well as across the Balkan Peninsula and in the Levant and Africa. With the Ottoman Army still chafing under the restrictions of the Treaty of Edirne, it was clear that despite the relatively low number of protesters, using force to put down the rebellion would be difficult for the Porte to achieve. Furthermore, Pertev Pasha found the coalition that his predecessor had put together following the election results to be extremely unwieldy, as one of his coalition partners (the Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi) favoured making concessions to the socialists while the other (the Ahrar Firkasi) was vehemently opposed to any increase in government spending or oversight in people’s lives.
With his own Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi 51 seats short of majority, Pertev found himself with the difficult choice of siding with the social liberals [1] for a workable majority of 19, or siding with the libertarians for a majority of just 1. While keeping both on side was the safest way to a strong majority (of 71 seats), it was by no means clear that Pertev would be able to keep up the balancing act that Hilmi Pasha had so successfully managed before him. Pertev therefore decided to buy himself some time by dispatching the Ottoman 1st Army, which had been stationed in Europe, to clear the capital of protesters before heading to Croatia to deal with the secessionists.
For the Ottoman military, this was not an enticing prospect. Forced to demobilise by the Treaty of Edirne and operating under its severe restrictions of manpower, the old system of assigning armies to different regions of the Empire had been abolished by Pertev himself as Chief of Staff in the aftermath of the war. In its place had come a continental system of numbered armies, with the 1st and 3rd Armies being full strength armies of almost 70,000 men, and the 2nd Army being a corps-strength unit of half of that which could be rapidly shipped by the Ottoman Navy to assist either of the main forces. The 3rd Army was at this time stationed in North Africa where it was putting out the last remnants of the Algerian nationalist insurgency, and the 1st Army had been stationed in Thessalia where it had been keeping an eye on the Greek border following political unrest there. The 2nd Army was meanwhile stationed in the port of Adana in Eastern Anatolia.
Unfortunately, the widespread nature of the socialist protests meant that the 2nd Army had to be kept separate and focus on the pacification of some of the more minor revolts in the Levant, so clearing the streets of the Empire entirely was simply not a plausible option. Pertev Pasha therefore decided that a compromise had to be made: Concessions would indeed be granted. After meeting with both Husseyin Bey, leader of the opposition socialist Osmanli Ahali Firkasi, and with his coalition partner and Interior Minister Ahmet Bey of the Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi, Pertev agreed to sideline the Ahrar Firkasi and pass a bill providing government subsidised healthcare for both veterans of the Great War and for their widows and children, a key demand of the socialists. The bill passed through parliament on December 20th 1910 to the fury of the conservatives and the libertarians, with the Ahrar Firkasi walking out of the coalition in disgust.
The Healthcare Act of 1910 provided subsidised healthcare to veterans of the Great War and their families
Socialists in the vilayet of Gibe in Ethiopia make a short-lived attempt to secede from the Ottoman Empire (January 10th 1911)
To the delight of the Porte however, the move worked. Protesters melted away in its aftermath, allowing the army to crush the Croat nationalists as they no longer had the crowds to blend into in January 1911. In Africa the rebellion lingered longer, with socialists demanding nothing less than the total decolonisation of the Dark Continent (a ludicrous proposal that even most of the Osmanli Ahali Firkasi thought to be too extreme), and the vilayet of Gibe in Abyssinia even briefly dared to claim independence (a situation unrecognised by any world power, with all of them extremely wary of giving a voice to the same sentiments in their own Empires). But in non-Croatian Europe and the Levant the protests ended peacefully, and by February the last holdouts in Africa had been crushed by the 3rd Army, finally allowing Pertev Pasha’s government to move forward on domestic matters.
The long-term demographic stagnation of the Kingdom of France finally began to improve in 1911
Elsewhere in the world, worrying news arrived from the Kingdom of France that the strangely low population growth of the previous century, which had seen the population of France fall far behind that of Germany prior to the Treaty of Berlin, had finally stabilised and returned to normal levels. Whilst there remained no satisfactory explanation for the French people’s previous reluctance to breed, it was nonetheless concerning for the Porte that their persistent enemy may find itself boosted in the mid-term future. Still, the Grand Vizier sent a telegram congratulating the French King Philippe VIII and his government, as he looked to repair the status of the Ottoman Empire in the world.
This reputation had taken a damaging hit both in the defeats of the Ottoman-Persian War and the Great War, and then even more so in the declaration of financial insolvency that had followed. Finances remained extremely tight for the Porte, and the reparations continued to bite hard into the budget (a matter not helped by the healthcare reform despite its low level of investment). Pertev Pasha was determined to repair the prestige of the Empire however, and so despite the tight budgets, he ordered the hosting of a colonial exposition to be prepared, as he aimed to prove that the Ottoman Empire was open for business once more. While bureaucrats fretted over how to pay for this, the Grand Vizier was secretly working with the Ottoman Museum to outfit an expedition into the Andes Mountains, where the recent discovery of Machu Picchu had awakened interest in the archaeological community. Pertev hoped that the discovery of priceless artefacts could both boost Ottoman prestige and provide him with something that would very much be worth selling, in order to balance the books…
Pertev Pasha uses some unorthodox sources of funding to begin planning a new colonial exposition in summer 1911
Long-held anti-British sentiments in Ireland finally erupt into the Irish War of Independence (September 15th 1911)
September 1911 saw the peace in Europe disrupted for the first time since the end of the Great War and its associated conflicts, when the Irish War of Independence began. The Irish had been disgusted by the conscription introduced during the Great War by the British government and the immense loss of life suffered as a result, with the persistent military humiliations that the Brits suffered in the war rubbing salt into the wounds. With the potato famine of the 1840s still in the memory, the thousands of Irish dead in the deserts of Arabia and the frozen heights of the Caucasus burnt raw, and the failure of the Home Rule bills in the UK Parliament saw a wave of violence culminate in a declaration of independence of September 15th 1911. For the British this was yet another problem, with the army still reeling from its immense casualties in the Great War causing a lack of manpower that had seen the British hold on India begin to fall apart in recent years [2].
The rest of the world watched on as the stung Brits declared war and attempted to salvage the situation, though it soon became clear that the chance of a full reversion to British control had passed, and the Brits began to push for just a retention of the heavily protestant populated county of Ulster and for the rest of Ireland to accept dominion status like Australia and New Zealand. Soon however, events elsewhere in Europe saw war reignite in far more dangerous ways. Austria-Hungary, buoyed by its victory in the Great War, saw an opportunity to reclaim control over its former territory in the Kingdom of Galicia-Lodomeria. After an ultimatum demanding the Galician government’s full submission to the Habsburg Crown suggesting a tripartite monarchy with the Poles elevated alongside the Germans and the Hungarians was rejected on January 1st 1912, Austria-Hungary declared war.
The 2nd Great War begins following an Austro-Hungarian declaration of war on Galicia-Lodomeria (January 1st 1912)
The Kingdom of Galicia-Lodomeria had long been protected by Germany, and its King Carol I was a cousin of the deposed German Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Habsburg’s had believed that the German Revolution meant that the Germans would not come to the aid of their ally with the royal links dead, but they were to prove mistaken. Germany declared war on Austria-Hungary in response and once more called in their ally the United States of America. The Habsburg’s responded by triggering secret agreements they had signed with France, Britain, Switzerland, and Sweden. The Second Great War had begun; though some would later debate that it was a mere continuation of the first, following Habsburg dissatisfaction that it had been ignored by the Treaty of Berlin due to its late entrance into a war that it had initially claimed to be fighting separately.
While the Germans and the Americans both pleaded with the Ottoman government to intervene on their behalf once again, Pertev Pasha was not moved. The dissolution of the Ottoman-German Alliance meant that no debt was owed to the former (except for the financial debts that the Porte had failed to pay, of course), and Pertev Pasha now publically ended the alliance with the United States as well to avoid being dragged into this war. In truth, the Porte was in no shape to fight a new war even without the Russians being involved, and nobody could guarantee that the Russians wouldn’t intervene regardless. The eyes of the Grand Vizier were instead fixed on the troublesome neighbour of Oman, where a military junta had recently deposed Sultan Sayyid in favour of his son Taimur and declared itself a Fascist State, with Ottoman citizens being attacked in the streets in the violence that followed.
Fascists in Oman cause an international incident after attacking Ottoman citizens (January 18th 1912)
Some in the Empire, including Rifat Pasha and the conservatives, cried for the Sublime Porte to declare war and finally annex the upstart heretics, but diplomat back-channels alerted Pertev Pasha to an agreement between Oman and Great Britain, which would see Britain intervene in any war. And so, much to the surprise of the outside world, the most decorated general in the Ottoman military once more rejected calls to go to war, as the mantra of isolationism was now fully embraced. It was far from the last time that fascists would cause the Vizier problems though.
In February 1912 the Young Turks, with fascist ideals of their own under their pan-Turanist leader Enver Pasha, attempted to form an anti-socialist trade union in Trabizond, where they had allied with local Turkish businesses by making verbal and occasionally physical attacks on the large Greek minority there. The socialists were outraged, and Pertev Pasha was pressured by Ahmet Bey to permit the banning of this new trade union, which was duly delivered. And in the neighbouring Kingdom of Greece, fascists in the military led by chief of staff Ioannis Metaxas seized power following mass street protests on March 21st. This new and violently nationalist ideology was spreading, fast.
The Pensions Act expands military pensions for Great War veterans (October 16th 1911)
An anti-socialist trade union affiliated to the Young Turk organisation is banned in Trabizond (February 19th 1912)
Fascists in the Greek military seize control after massive street protests against the government (March 21st 1912)
To combat the spectre of street protests, Pertev Pasha had passed another reform giving expanded pensions to army veterans in late 1911, and now found himself considering increasing these and expanding them to include navy veterans and civil servants to ensure that they did not prove fertile soil for the Young Turks to recruit in. The Ottoman army had a very mixed background, with traditionalist officers such as Rifat Pasha being deeply conservative, but many others who had grown up in the Tanzimat Era being far more liberal, such as Pertev Pasha himself. With Oman and Greece both having seen ultra-nationalists in the military seize power, Pertev was determined to make sure that the conservatives in the Ottoman military did not follow the same path.
Meanwhile on the other flank, communists following the militant philosophy of Karl Marx also launched a series of riots in April 1912, calling for a working class rebellion to rise up and overthrow the Sublime Porte entirely. The communist demands for an end to religion and the abolition of the Caliphate deeply troubled Sultan Abdulhamid II, but Pertev Pasha resisted his pressure to meet this new threat with force, lest the street battles spiral and the Young Turks take advantage of the chaos. Instead the riots petered out naturally, but the communists were much emboldened by them, and even an increase in pensions in August 1912 and the opening of the colonial exposition to much international fanfare failed to quieten the streets. Ottoman politics were entering a new and more divisive era, and it was from clear that the Sublime Porte could emerge from it unscathed.
Political anger in the Empire spreads following a series of communist riots in April 1912
Summer 1912 sees the opening of the new Ottoman colonial exposition and an expansion of the state pension to more Ottoman citizens
[1] Social Liberalism is an ideology added in the PDM mod and given political parties by Divide by Zero. Social Liberals support all political and social reforms in game terms.
[2] A number of Princely States have broken free from the British in the years following the Great War
The decision of the Sublime Porte to maintain neutrality in the Second Great War began to reap dividends in late 1912 and early 1913, with the Ottoman economy booming due to increased demand for Ottoman goods. With Germany blockaded from the North, West, and South, it had massively increased its imports from the Russian Empire, and the Russians themselves were keen to make as much profit as possible from this – meaning that they were happy to buy huge quantities of Ottoman goods and then sell them on to the desperate Germans. Ottoman businesses were also able to sell goods to the Entente Powers, and the Ottoman merchant navy found itself in high demand around the world.
This economic boon, combined with the final paying off of the Great War reparations in spring 1913, allowed Pertev Pasha to begin rebuilding the Ottoman Military. The restrictions of the Treaty of Edirne also expired in March 1913, and the Bosphorus Tolls were restored with the rest of the world too busy to prevent it. The 1913 Ottoman Census was thus one of the most important in decades, as the Sublime Porte was keen to know where they had plentiful supplies of manpower and to track the many new businesses partaking in the export boom.
The census revealed that the Ottoman population had reached 19.69M households, with the vilayets of Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt being the most populous along with Gibe in Ethiopia. Just over a quarter of the population of the Empire was made up of ethnic Turks (much to the horror of the Young Turks), while Misri, Maghrebi, Mashriqi, and Bedouin Arabs made up another quarter between them. Oromo, Greeks, Amhara, Serbs, and Bulgars also made up significant minorities; while one quarter of the population was made up of non-Muslim peoples (predominantly Orthodox Christians, though Copts in Africa and Catholics in the Balkans were also quite common). The overall Ottoman literacy rate had also increased to an impressive 67.8%.
The headline figures of the 1913 Ottoman Census
More figures from the 1913 Ottoman Census
Using the new population figures the Sublime Porte began to raise the new Fourth Army in the Levant, and an ambitious five year plan to fully restore the Ottoman Army back to its pre-war strength began. Despite the isolationism that had been embraced by Pertev Pasha’s ministry, he was fully aware that the Russians may yet attempt to reconquer their former lands in the Caucasus, and that if the Habsburgs were victorious in the Second Great War then we might be their next target, too. As a military man himself, Pertev also knew that despite the introduction of new superior Guards regiments and advances in artillery that had seen the Ottoman military at the forefront of technology, there was no substitute for raw numbers in modern warfare – Something the first Great War had shown to our cost.
Meanwhile in the Empire, Enver Pasha’s Young Turks began to look for new strategies for growth in 1913. Following the outlawing of their anti-socialist trade unions, they looked for new legal loopholes to exploit, and in April 1913 began organising a series of soup kitchens for unemployed Turks in the vilayet of Ankara. While many liberal and socialist commentators decried this as nothing short of open bribery of voters, the kitchens were not technically illegal and thus Pertev Pasha begrudgingly permitted them to remain open.
The Young Turks began opening Soup Kitchens for unemployed Turks in April 1913
The vilayet of Armenia is paralysed by a series of strikes in summer 1913
Pensions were expanded to include all Ottoman workers in the Universal Pensions Act of July 1913
He was in a far less tolerant mood when a minor factory strike spiralled via a series of sympathy strikes to cause a total collapse of industrial output in the vilayet of Armenia later in April however, and ordered the immediate curtailing of all local newspapers believed to support the strikers. This put him at odds with his coalition partner and interior minister Ahmet Bey, and when the Adana Bank collapsed in June 1913 and triggered a series of heavy bank runs, the Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi forced the Porte to agree to stricter regulation of the banking sector despite the ruling liberal’s belief in free trade. Sensing Pertev Pasha’s position of weakness, Ahmet Bey was further able to persuade the Grand Vizier to pass a new bill increasing pensions once more and expanding them to include all workers in the Ottoman Empire in July 1913, in return for supporting a final crackdown in Armenia to end the strikes there.
Pertev Pasha had now been forced into implementing a series of social reforms that his Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi had been opposed to during the previous election campaign, but the constant spectre of communism was leaving him with no option here. There had been a handful of defections to the conservative Osmanli Demokrat Firkasi over the measures, but this had only served to increase his reliance on his Sosyal Demokrat coalition partners and move the government further to the left – with the opposition socialists often agreeing to support certain liberal bills in return for further social reforms. This continued into September 1913 when another key socialist demand was passed into law with the 14 Hour maximum Work Day, which severely restrained some of the most exploitative employers in the Empire. Even so, trade unionism continued to grow and the eyalet of Gallipoli near the capital saw itself become the latest hotbed of the left as a result.
The collapse of the Adana Bank saw the Sublime Porte move to implementer tighter regulation of the Ottoman Financial Sector
The Ottoman Empire implemented the 14 Hour Work Day in September 1913 despite heavy industrial opposition
September 21st 1913 had also seen huge news from the Second Great War with the German government surrendering for the second time in six years. Austria-Hungary annexed the majority of the Kingdom of Galicia-Lodomeria, leaving only the city of Krakow as a technically independent Free City, while the Germans were once again humiliated and forced to agree to massive reparations and more military restrictions. Their punishment stretched even further this time however with the Kingdom of Bavaria gaining independence from Germany, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand von Habsburg being put on the restored Bavarian throne [1]. The Great War itself continued on however, as the American government refused to surrender, and President Eugene V. Debs vowed to continue the war rather than suffer a humiliation like that which the Germans had had inflicted on them.
And so 1914 began with the submarine campaigns in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans continuing on unabated, as both sides attempting to damage the merchant shipping of the other. Ottoman public outrage hit fever pitch following the sinking of the steamer SS Trabzon by British submarines in March 1914, but any chance that this might lead to an Ottoman declaration of war was swiftly ended when the Americans also ‘accidentally’ sank the Ottoman steamer Topkapi just five days later. Instead, Ottoman public attention once more turned inward, and the socialists began to press for mandatory health and safety regulations following a serious accident at a Clothing Factory in Bulgaria which garnered significant sympathetic media coverage.
A series of tragic accidents in factories led to calls for minimal safety regulations to be implemented in the Empire in 1914
Huge protests in the liberal heartland of Hudavendigar saw Pertev Pasha increase Pensions yet again in October 1914
Nevertheless the economic boom continued through 1914, and while the workers remained on the edge in a number of vilayets, the Ottoman Treasury was delighted by the continued increase in revenue, and the expansion of the army continued at pace with the formation of the Fifth Army in Egypt that summer. And when the state of Hudavendigar saw more widespread strikes in October 1914, the Porte once more moved to make concessions to the workers with yet another increase in Pensions; an act which saw Pertev Pasha suffer numerous backbench rebellions and as a result call a new election for March 1915.
While the reforms that his government had passed had been very popular, Pertev knew that there was significant danger that credit for them was given more to his coalition partners and the opposition socialists – especially if the liberals ran another campaign opposing said reforms. As a result, Pertev Pasha’s 1915 election campaign saw a marked swing to the left from the Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi as Pertev championed a new “socially responsible capitalism” and promised that he would consider further reforms in future, even despite many businesses slamming the liberals as a result. The continued embracing of the temperance movement by Rifat Pasha’s conservatives, and the strongly moralist positions they took up, scared many businesses away from fully abandoning the liberals however, as did the highly protectionist policies espoused by the Osmanli Demokrat Firkasi.
The 1915 Ottoman General Election Results (March 13th 1915)
As the results came in there were mixed feelings for the Grand Vizier. His Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi had once more remained the largest party, but had dropped 17 seats from the previous election down to 282 of the 700 available seats. Ahmet Bey’s Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi renewed the governing coalition following an excellent night for them, as they increased their share by 40 up to 110 seats – overtaking the conservatives to become the third largest party in the process. This leftward shift was replicated across the Empire as the opposition socialist Osmanli Ahali Firkasi under their young leader Husseyin Bey saw their best ever results: winning 169 seats (an increase of 37). Even worse for the Grand Vizier, the communist Ihtilalci Avam Firkasi (Revolutionary Commoners Party) made its first electoral breakthroughs in the capital as they gained five new seats to a total of 7, with a seat in Constantinople itself alongside their traditional hotbeds in Salonika and Sofia and other new seats in Smyrna, Nicosia, and Belgrade.
For the Right however it was a disaster. The Osmanli Demokrat Firkasi dropped 9 seats to just 76, which was little better than the previous conservative nadir of 66 in the 1906 election, when there had been 100 fewer seats up for grabs. The islamist Teceddüt Firkasi also suffered heavy losses; down 15 to just 9 seats, predominantly in Eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan. The libertarian Ahrar Firkasi had been decimated as it lost 35 seats to hold just 17, as many of its voters blamed it for walking out of the coalition and thus being unable to prevent the passing of the social reforms it so vehemently opposed. And even the Young Turk-affiliated Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti lost 6 seats down to hold just 30.
This defeat for the Young Turks was the best news for Pertev Pasha from the election though, and he retained the Grand Viziership even as the stamps went down for a new more socially liberal government. Pertev had proven that he was able to blow with the wind in Ottoman politics, and by recognising that the population had shifted to the left and moving that way himself, many credited him with keeping the Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi in power and preventing a far bigger shift to the socialists from occurring. He would be forced to showcase his left-wing credentials on numerous occasions in 1915, both when he blamed the Ottoman bureaucracy for heavy bread queues in August 1915 and promised to increase the budget for the Transport and Logistics Department to prevent this from happening again; and again in November when the Ottoman government officially recognised May 1st as International Labour Day.
The Sublime Porte officially recognises May 1st as International Labour Day (November 1915)
The rapidly expanding Ottoman Army made a number of impressive public marches through cities in August 1915
The Ottoman government also began to show signs of returning to the international arena when they agreed to uphold their alliance with the Empire of Japan in their new war restoring Japanese control over the Korean peninsula in 1915, although this localised conflict was not attracting much international attention due to the continued fighting in the Americas in the Second Great War. The newly raised Ottoman Sixth Army also marched through Constantinople in an impressive display of military might in August 1915 as Pertev Pasha aimed to restore calm in the streets of the capital following new Young Turk backed unrest. And so as 1915 ended, Pertev Pasha’s hold on power was once-more at full strength; and the Sublime Porte itself was finding its feet again in the post-war world. With the economy going from strength to strength, perhaps now it was time to start looking for revenge for the defeats of the previous decade…
[1] Only the state of Upper Bavaria was released, and it became a satellite of Austria-Hungary
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Chapter Forty-Eight: The Sparks of War (1915-1916)
The period of Ottoman Isolationism following the end of the First Great War and the Habsburg Reconquest of Croatia had been something which the Sublime Porte had had little option but to initially embrace on the back of those defeats. With the treasury bankrupt, the navy outdated, and the army defeated there had been little doubt in the Empire that renewed conflict with the Entente would lead to anything other than another defeat even more costly than the first. And so when the Second Great War broke out and the Germans and Americans once more marched to war (and indeed, to another defeat), the Ottoman general public had shown no appetite to join them in a second misadventure. Peace had been embraced across the political spectrum as an obvious necessity, as all sides appreciated the need for recovery.
It could not however be said that the Sublime Porte had been inactive during this period of isolationism. Yes, the Ottoman Army had remained small and demobilised even when the Porte was ‘technically’ at war with Peru and with Korea, with neither conflict eliciting anything more than a raised eyebrow and the cutting of already almost non-existent trade ties. However, the Sublime Porte had been furiously attempting to repair its prestige on the global stage, with one singular goal driving Ottoman Foreign Policy for this entire period: The end of the Quadruple Entente.
The Entente Cordiale had initially begun as an alliance between the Kingdom of France and the Russian Empire signed at the turn of the century, and had soon been joined by the United Kingdom shortly before the outbreak of the First Great War. By the end of that war the ‘Triple Entente’ had been joined by Austria-Hungary, and the Coalition had dominated European – and indeed Global – affairs ever since. The doomed attempt of the German-American alliance to overturn this had however shown the first cracks in this alliance when the Russian Empire elected to remain neutral in the Second Great War, which they argued had been technically started by Austro-Hungarian bellicosity against the Kingdom of Galicia-Lodomeria (an opinion coincidentally shared by the Sublime Porte).
When Pertev Pasha had taken office as Grand Vizier he had immediately surmised that even after the restrictions of the Treaty of Edirne had lapsed, the Porte would still be in absolutely no position to challenge the world order dictated by the Entente, and that fighting all four members again would inevitably lead to another defeat. And so his overriding goal was to therefore secure an alliance with at least one of the Entente, and thereby prise them out of the Coalition. With the increase in tensions between Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire, it was perhaps logical that agreement with one of these would be sought... But Pertev believed that any alliance with either of them wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on, due to both having irredentist claims against the Ottoman Empire: Austria-Hungary in Slavonia, and the Russian Empire in the Caucasus.
Grand Vizier Pertev Pasha established a strong relationship with French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré
And so the candidates that Pertev most sought to woo were the French and the British, with work beginning on improving relations with both of them. The British Empire however was a star that was clearly on the wane by now: The increasingly fractured hold on British India had seen a number of Princely States declare independence, and when the Irish War of Independence began, it looked like the final nail in the coffin. Even the apparent British triumph here had only seen them reassert full control over the country of Ulster; with the rest of the island now made of the “Irish Free State” which was technically a Dominion of Britain but which maintained a great deal of distance between the London and Dublin governments.
The Kingdom of France, on the other hand, was the world’s premier power. The French Navy was scarcely smaller than the British Royal Navy by now; and the French Army was the most formidable fighting force in the world. The devastating defeats it had inflicted on the Sublime Porte in the Great War remained in the memory, and the successful crossing of the Rhine and occupation of Germany in both the first and second Great Wars had only further illustrated its superiority. Pertev Pasha had made two trips to France since taking power, and a third was already planned to begin at the end of 1915.
There was however a hitch in any plan to ally with the French: Sultan Abdulhamid II. The Sultan was a noted Francophobe who was unafraid of making publicly critical statements of the French due to their treatment of Muslim subjects in the French Protectorate of Morocco and in French West Africa. In his role as Caliph of Islam Abdulhamid saw himself as the true protector of these Muslims, and he was loath to allow the détente between Paris and Constantinople to translate into an actual alliance. The Sultan however was in poor health by 1915, and even as Pertev Pasha was preparing for his new trip to France in December 1915, the elderly Sultan passed away.
Abdulhamid had reigned for almost eighteen full years through which the Ottoman Empire had gone through huge social and political upheavals. His vocal support of the suffragist movement had seen the Ottoman Empire lead the world in Women’s Rights, while his liberal instincts had seen him sign away his own powers without any protest. His death was deeply mourned across the empire, as the Sultan had been a greatly unifying figure popular with almost everyone – and official condolences were sent by governments from across the world. His successor was to be the 71 year old Sultan Mehmed V, another son of the former sultan Abdulmejid and half-brother of Abdulhamid.
Sultan Mehmed V succeeds Abdulhamid II on the Ottoman throne (December 16th 1915)
The Franco-Ottoman Alliance officially ends decades of hostilities and promises a new future of friendship (January 2nd 1916)
The death of Abdulhamid had however cleared the final barrier for Pertev Pasha away, and so during his week-long visit to France, high-level discussions took place between Pertev and his French counterpart, the conservative Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré. The result was the Franco-Ottoman Alliance, signed January 2nd 1916. Whilst not repudiating France’s commitment to the Entente, the new treaty obligated either party to come to the others aid if they were attacked. Strictly defensive in nature, it nonetheless gave the Sublime Porte a great deal of protection should the Habsburgs or the Russians come knocking – and it restored the place of the Sublime Porte at the heart of global affairs.
The Franco-Ottoman Alliance led to a great deal of outcry from the other Entente Powers, but despite their protestations Paris held firm. It had been very difficult for the liberal and democratic French to justify alliance with the oppressive Tsars of the Russian Empire, while the alliance with their eldest enemies in Britain had never been popular with the French populace. The French on the other hand had been historic allies with the Ottoman Empire for centuries prior to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, and following the Ottoman liberal reforms there was now a great deal of similarity between the two – further cementing the new ties.
The Sublime Porte harshly condemns Russian actions during the Polish Uprising (February 8th 1916)
The most immediate reaction however was that of the Poles, who believed this would be an opportunity for them to redraw the map of Europe. On February 8th 1916 protests across the former lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth now under Russian control erupted into a violent revolution, and the so-called ‘Polish Congress’ declared independence. The Poles sent a delegation to the Sublime Porte expecting immediate support and backup from Pertev Pasha due to our mutual hatred of the Russians, but the Grand Vizier demurred. The Ottoman Army was only halfway through the five year plan to bring it back to strength, and with rearmament so incomplete hostilities with the Russian Empire could prove disastrous – especially as the French might see such actions as offensive rather than defensive and thus side with their Entente Partners.
So Pertev Pasha refused to join the Polish War of Independence, and instead supported the Polish with words only – harshly condemning the Russian actions in attempting to restore order there. Grateful though the Poles were for this moral support, the lack of Ottoman men and arms proved to be a hurdle that the Poles could not overcome, and their rebellion was mercilessly crushed within a few months as a result. The Russian Empire in fact emerged from the Polish rebellion stronger than ever – with many disloyal citizens now imprisoned and no longer fermenting unrest – leading to criticism from conservatives in the Ottoman Parliament that Pertev had missed a big opportunity here.
British Prime Minister Herbert H. Asquith played a key role in the New Guinea Crisis of 1916
Tensions between the Entente Powers were by now beginning to rise elsewhere however due to the New Guinea Crisis. Clashes between settlers from the French Empire and settlers from the Netherlands had sparked an international incident, and with the British outraged over the recent signing of the Franco-Ottoman Alliance, they saw this as an opportunity for revenge by backing the Dutch. The liberal British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was determined to prove that the Sublime Porte made for an inferior ally compared to the strength of the Entente, but in doing so he merely drove the wedge between France and Britain further apart. What started off as a minor diplomatic spat in April 1916 began to escalate rapidly through the year, and would come to dominate newspaper headlines world-wide by Summer.
It was in the midst of the growing crisis over New Guinea that the Second Great War finally came to an end. The 1915 US Presidential Election had seen incumbent Socialist Party President Eugene V. Debs run on a platform supporting the continuation of the war, but he had been defeated by anti-war Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson, with the American public tiring of the blockade inflicted on them by the British, French, and Russian Navies. Following Wilson’s swearing in, he had immediately sought an armistice on January 29th 1916, and after months of negotiations the Treaty of Washington officially ending the Second Great War was signed on May 5th, resulting in a brutal dismemberment of the United States of America.
The USA would not only be forced to slash the size of the military and pay the by-now ‘standard’ heavy war reparations, but the USA would see numerous states carved out of the union. The independence of Hawaii was restored, and the state of Oklahoma was turned into a fully independent national home for the Cherokee people. The Californian Republic seceded, taking the state of Oregon with it. Texan Independence was also restored, and included New Mexico and Arizona as all the former Mexican territories were granted independence – with the disputed territory of the Rio Grande being formed as a buffer state between Mexico and Texas. Finally, the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Maine seceded to form the Republic of New England, which had strong trade ties with the British Empire.
Anti-War Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson defeated incumbent President Debs in the 1915 US Election
The United States of America is dismembered by the Treaty of Washington at the end of the Second Great War (May 5th 1916)
The signing of the Treaty of Washington was hotly followed by the end of the Korean War as the Japanese triumphantly resecured control of the peninsula, which meant that the Sublime Porte no longer had an excuse to maintain neutrality in the New Guinea Crisis. Tensions had continued to grow with neither the Anglo-Dutch nor the French backing down through summer 1916 for fear of losing face, and so even despite the British and French governments having no wish for war, there seemed to be nothing stopping this from happening. Italy and Germany had both declared for the British side; keen to inflict a defeat on their French neighbours. The Italian declaration had however triggered their interminable enemy Austria-Hungary to declare for the French, and the Russian Empire followed suit in July.
Pertev Pasha continued to hesitate, with the rearmament program so incomplete, but the Sublime Porte had put too much stock into the Franco-Ottoman Alliance to abandon it now, and so the Porte found itself in the strange situation of siding with both the Habsburgs and the Russians, and against their former allies in Italy and Germany. After declaring public support for the French position on August 26th 1916, it seemed inevitable that the Empire would be drawn into a new world war within weeks, but while the army remained undersized it was nonetheless confident that a repeat of the British invasion of Arabia and Mesopotamia could be thwarted – not least because the Persian government remained in the Russian Orbit and would be far less likely to grant transition rights to the British in this new war.
The Sublime Porte officially backs the French during the New Guinea Crisis (August 26th 1916)
Perhaps this was on the mind of Prime Minister Asquith, too. The British premier had grown increasingly isolated in the British Parliament as tensions over a pacific backwater had spiralled so far out of control, and the Westminster Parliament grew increasingly anti-war following the Russian declaration for the French. The threat of a Russian invasion of India had worried British politicians for decades, but with British control of the sub-continent so clearly on the wane it was now feared that this would be the final nail in the coffin. And so on September 4th 1916, Asquith caved. The French were granted sole colonial rights to Southern New Guinea, and the Dutch received nothing. War had been averted, but at great political cost.
Asquith is forced to make a humiliating climb-down to avert war over the New Guinea Crisis (September 4th 1916)
In Britain, Asquith was forced to resign and replaced by his great rival David Lloyd George, who immediately sought to re-establish strong ties with the Russian government. Russian Tsar Nicholas II was happy to renew the Anglo-Russian Alliance, but he sensed an opportunity here. The Russian military had grown during the New Guinea Crisis, but with that war now averted, the aggressive Tsar recalled his success in beginning the First Great War and the subsequent dismemberment of the German Empire. The Tsar had not forgotten Pertev Pasha’s vocal support for the Poles, and with a new British government keen to recover its prestige after the humiliation over New Guinea, Nicholas took his chance. On September 16th 1916, just 12 days after the end of the New Guinea Crisis had averted a global war… Russian emissaries arrived at the Sublime Porte. The world would see war after all – the Tsar had decreed it.
Russian aggression sparks the beginning of the Third Great War (September 16th 1916)
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Chapter Forty-Nine: The Third Great War (1916-1917)
The Third Great War was a massive confrontation between two behemoths in the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. On one side the Russians were supported by their vassals in the Grand Duchies of Finland and Uzbekistan, and their allies in the Kingdom of Norway, the Persian Empire, and the British Empire. On the other side, the Ottomans were supported by their Romanian vassals, and their allies in the Empire of Japan, the Empire of Brazil, the Kingdom of Belgium, the Republic of South Africa, and their most recently gained ally: The Kingdom of France.
The fourth member of the Quadruple Entente – Austria-Hungary – elected to maintain neutrality upon the outbreak of the war, as no direct treaty between the Russians and the Habsburgs had existed since the Russian failure to support the Habsburg position upon the outbreak of the Second Great War. The Sublime Porte was nonetheless very concerned over the possibility of a Habsburg Intervention, and the memory of their invasion of Croatia during the First Great War weighed heavily upon Pertev Pasha and his cabinet [1]. Maintaining that Habsburg neutrality would be a key goal pursued by the Porte throughout the Third Great War.
Rearmament was still only partially complete by the time of the outbreak of the war, with the Ottoman Army having six full strength armies of 69,000 men alongside the half strength colonial Second Army. As a result, Pertev Pasha authorised an aggressive and high-risk plan where almost all the Ottoman forces would be thrown against the enemy. Pertev himself would take personal command of the 1st Army in the Balkans, where it would be supported by the 5th Army and by the Romanian forces. The 4th Army, 6th Army, and 7th Army would fight in the Caucasian and Persian Fronts; which left only the 3rd Army in a general reserve & garrison duty in North Africa, while the 2nd Army would be tasked with the capture of Aden and then dealing with any British incursions from British East Africa into Ottoman Ethiopia or Somalia.
Ottoman forces drive the Russians back at the Battle of Iasi (October 1916)
The Caucasian Front following the crushing Ottoman victory at Agdam, south of Ganja (November 1916)
The first Ottoman battle of the war saw Pertev’s two European armies combine to drive out a Russian army under Giorgi Kuropatkin that had invaded Romania at the Battle of Iasi in October 1916, and Halim Bey’s 5th Army then pursued Kuropatkin to inflict another defeat on him at Botosani the following month while the Allied invasion of Bessarabia began, with the Romanians besieging the city of Chisinau and Pertev’s 1st Army besieging the great port city of Odessa. Whilst Ottoman forces impressed in these early skirmishes, it was clear that the main Russian effort would come in the Caucasus, and that given the second-string nature of the Russian forces in Europe they had performed remarkably well against us – something that caused a fair amount of concern in the Sublime Porte.
Meanwhile in the east however, things began in an even brighter fashion. Said Pasha’s 4th Army came up against a Persian force under General Kamran Khan at the Battle of Agdam in Azerbaijan in early November 1916 and utterly destroyed it before it could link up with the invading Russians. Said followed this up a couple of weeks later by destroying a second Persian force under Hossein Meshhedi at Lankaran; with the twin victories doing much to balance out the early numerical superiority in the Caucasian Theatre that the Russo-Persian forces were enjoying, with the 6th Army still making its way to the front.
This numerical inferiority was causing the Sublime Porte a lot of worries however, with the three Ottoman armies being concentrated in the Caucasus which left most of lower Mesopotamia completely unguarded. The fact that the British would potentially be able to once again march their Indian armies across Persia meant that the Porte were desperate for reinforcements: and therefore requested French aid. The French responded with the French Expeditionary Force, which was to land in the Caucasus and ensure that the Ottoman 6th Army could be redirected to Mesopotamia. The French force under General Felicien Bazaine arrived in November, and immediately linked up with the Ottoman 4th and 7th Armies to attack the main Russian prong with overwhelming force at the Battle of Sheki in December, where it succeed in inflicting heavy casualties and forcing the withdrawal of the Russians under General Nebogatov.
The French Expeditionary Force arrives while the Persians are annihilated at Lankaran (November 1916)
Allied forces score a massive victory at Sheki (December 1916)
At this point however it became clear that the threat to Mesopotamia was not emerging; and that the destruction of the two Persian armies had all but eliminated the threat on that front. The 6th Army therefore began a preliminary invasion of Persia by seizing the city of Urumia in late December 1916. In fact, the opening salvo of the war had gone so well that the Sublime Porte officially declared its intention to annex the entirety of the Persian region of Tabriz with its large Azeri population – the very region that the Porte had unsuccessfully attempted to conquer in the Ottoman-Persian War seventeen years previously. The Porte also demanded the permanent British withdrawal from the city of Aden at the same time, with the British reeling after a heavy French naval victory at the Battle of the Bay of Biscay. The victory at Biscay, whilst not sounding the death knell for the Royal Navy, saw the French sink 6 modern British dreadnoughts and 3 battlecruisers at the loss of just 2 French dreadnoughts and 4 battlecruisers of their own: a disaster which forced the British to keep the rest of their navy in port and ensured that the British effect on the war would be extremely minor.
The other effect of the British defeat at the Bay of the Biscay was that the Sublime Porte found the Ottoman Empire had almost complete control of the Mediterranean Sea, and that even though the Porte had none of the modern dreadnoughts employed by the French and the British, we were still able to blockade the British in their port of Malta. And thus one of the most ambitious Ottoman naval operations in centuries was hatched: the 3rd Army that was being kept in reserve in North Africa would make an amphibious invasion of Malta itself. Ottoman forces had not seriously threatened Malta since the Battle of Lepanto over three hundred years earlier in 1571, but with the British prevented from accessing the Mediterranean by the French, the operation was deemed feasible by the Porte.
The Ottoman government demands the acquisition of Tabriz as compensation for Entente Aggression (December 21st 1916)
HMS Invincible is sunk at the Battle of the Bay of Biscay (December 24th 1916)
And so even as the Porte encountered stiffening Russian resistance on the European fronts during narrow victories at Suceava and Odessa in late December, the 3rd Army was shipped from Tunisia to successfully land on Malta. The British were taken completely by surprise and most of the island rapidly fell with its fortifications proving hilariously obsolete. Only the city of Valletta held out for long, where it was besieged from both land and sea as the Ottoman Navy celebrated its seamless triumph at the dawn of the New Year. Valletta would in fact last just one month longer; falling by the end of January.
The Third Great War was in fact turning out to be nothing like the First. The deadly attritional trench warfare had simply not been encountered, save for on the relatively static Bessarabian Front. Mobility had been ensured by the combination of rocky terrain in the Caucasus making digging in more difficult, and the increased use of motorised vehicles on the well-developed Ottoman roads in Armenia and Azerbaijan. This meant that the Russian decision to split their forces into smaller units for ease of supply would prove time and again to be the wrong decision, as Ottoman forces could use their mobility and greater numbers to inflict defeat after defeat upon the Tsar’s forces: Sabaheddin Bey scoring another victory at Gyumri in early January.
The Caucasian Front following the Ottoman victory at Gyumri (January 1st 1917)
Entente forces inflicted a rare defeat on Ottoman forces in January 1917 at the Battle of Pervomaisk
On the one front where warfare had remained static, Russian numbers were however beginning to tell. The Russians launched a diversionary attack at Cernauti to tie-up Halim Bey’s 5th Army in early January, before launching a far larger offensive against Pertev Pasha at Pervomaisk in Ukraine. While the Russian attack at Cernauti was easily repelled, the combined Norwegian-Finnish-Russian army under Olav Bratzland was able to use its superior numbers to inflict a very heavy defeat upon the Grand Vizier as a result, forcing a major retreat back across the Dniester and Danube rivers.
This front however was not the one that truly mattered; and in the East things continued to go well as the retreating Russian army suffered a further defeat at Tblisi in Russian Georgia. Indeed the Russians had now been pushed back across the border along the entire front while Ottoman forces were continuing to occupy Persian lands in the Tabriz region – and the city of Tabriz itself fell to Ottoman troops on February 25th 1917. The Russians were beginning to struggle as they suffered setback after setback with the French Expeditionary Force also scoring a number of important victories over them at Poti and Batum in early 1917, before battle was renewed when Ottoman forces once more drove the Russians back from Baku in early March.
Naturally the Sublime Porte was by now dreaming of a rapid end to the war that many had feared would last years. Aden had fallen to Murat Pasha’s 2nd Army in January and the only British response had been a half-hearted invasion of Somalia under General Charles Thesiger, while the much-vaunted Russian army was being overwhelmed by the Japanese in the Far East and by the Franco-Ottoman forces in the Caucasus. The French and British were continuing to clash in West Africa but on every occasion French forces had been triumphant, leaving the Anglo-Russian position in an increasingly precarious state. By the end of March this had got markedly worse as a renewed Persian offensive saw yet another Persian army destroyed by Cevad Bey’s 6th Army at the Battle of Siyazen; and the British invasion of Somalia was also driven back after minor skirmishes at Kismayo.
Entente forces were retreating on all fronts by the end of March 1917
The first Russian peace-feelers were therefore received at the Sublime Porte in April 1917, but the War Cabinet was unwilling to accept Russian suggestions of a return to the Status Quo Ante Bellum. The Porte was determined to make the Tsar pay for his unprovoked aggression, and was at this point dreaming of making even greater territorial acquisitions at the expense of the Russian Empire. The frontline in the Caucasus had by now seen the Allied Forces gain numerical superiority over the Russian forces, and after further Ottoman victories at Baku and Agdam in April and May 1917, the Sublime Porte officially demanded the entirety of Russian Georgia be returned to Ottoman control after a century of Russian domination.
Tsar Nicholas II was outraged, and immediately ordered yet another futile offensive to begin: which was promptly driven back at Gyumri in June. The Russians had however attacked along the entire front, and the French were pushed back on the shores of the Caspian Sea at Siyazen. Even so, the Russians increasingly found themselves outmanoeuvred by our armies, with Ottoman forces taking up defensive positions in the mountains and then attacking the Russians in the plains whenever the opportunity arose. Two Russian corps were destroyed at Agdam and at Tblisi with a third almost obliterated at Poti in June 1917, and July saw further huge victories at Akhaltsikhe and Sheki.
The Caucasian Front sees a string of crushing Ottoman victories at the beginning of Summer 1917
Russian gains in Bessarabia were also reversed following the Ottoman victories at Chisinau and the second battle of Pervomaisk, where Pertev Pasha avenged his earlier defeat. This string of unbridled success prompted the Sublime Porte to make its final territorial demand of the war: The permanent control of Malta. The island was the last remaining British naval base in the Mediterranean beyond Gibraltar, and by seizing control of it the Royal Navy could be kept away from all Ottoman waters and the critical Suez Canal.
The British were outraged, but in truth they had no option but to accept terms at this point. The French were preparing for a potential invasion of the British homeland itself, and the British forces in West Africa had been utterly routed by the advancing French Army. And so, with Entente forces retreating on every front, the Tsar once more sued for peace on July 23rd 1917. This time he accepted every Ottoman demand. A war which many had expected to last for years ended in just ten months: and it had been an utterly one-sided affair. The Russians had started the war, but it was the Sublime Porte that ended it. An astonishingly complete victory was ours.
The Bessarabian Front at the time of the Entente Surrender (July 23rd 1917)
The Caucasian and Persian Fronts at the time of the Entente Surrender (July 23rd 1917)
The new borders in the Caucasus following the end of the Third Great War
[1] - The Austro-Hungarian Army is the second largest in the world after the French, and it spent almost the entire war with most of that army camped on our border...
The stunning Ottoman success in the Third Great War elevated Pertev Pasha’s popularity to almost unheard of levels, with even conservatives on the right and the socialists on the left admitting that his handling of the war had been exceptional. While the Socialists were less keen on the large territorial annexations that had followed at the end of the war, the harsh oppression of minorities under the Tsarist rule in Russia or the Shahdom in Persia meant that even many on the left were happy to ‘liberate’ the workers who had suffered under them. And on the Far Right the Young Turks were naturally delighted with the liberation of the huge Azeri population in Tabriz and the major step forward in their pan-Turkic dreams. So with the exception of the Communists, Pertev received accreditation from virtually all parties in the aftermath of the Great War, and ushered in a new age of glorious peace in the Empire.
The many reparations being paid to the Sublime Porte by the defeated powers allowed an unprecedented level of investment in the economy to be made. Import subsidies were raised to levels far beyond the international norm [1], even after tax rates were cut, leading to a massive boom in Ottoman industry. The discovery of large oil reserves in Albania and in Azerbaijan only further contributed to the success, and rearmament was thus renewed at an ever increased pace. Military spending was further augmented by the significant upgrading of many of the out-dated fortifications in the Empire, ensuring that the new frontiers were more defensible than ever.
While it could not be said that all dissent in the Empire had been entirely silenced, the constant stream of Communist and Fascist violence was at least for a time halted, and any showings of violence were extremely sporadic. A minor rebellion of the Persian minority in the newly acquired vilayet of Tabriz was crushed in January 1918, and a similar Russian rebellion a year and a half later met the same fate. The Sublime Porte was instead able to focus entirely on the rapidly improving Ottoman international prestige, which had been massively boosted following the success of the Third Great War and the utter humiliation of the warmongering Russian Tsar.
A minor Persian Revolt at the end of 1917 was one of the few interruptions to peace in the Empire following the Third Great War
Constantinople is awarded hosting rights for the Sixth Olympic Games (26th December 1918)
A new opportunity to demonstrate this prestige arrived in December 1918 when the Ottoman Empire was awarded the hosting rights for the Sixth Olympic Games. Based in the capital, the city that merged two continents would become the first Ottoman city to host the games, and no expense was spared in their preparation. Further Ottoman success on the international stage came when the Republic of South Africa was officially brought into the Ottoman economic sphere, a situation recognised and tacitly accepted by the other Great Powers. With the Empire already enjoying extremely strong trade links with other nations such as Brazil and Belgium, the Porte now began to look further afield, and new links were established and cultivated with the Sultanate of Atjeh in the East Indies.
Indeed the Ottoman government was keen to invest wherever it could. After large bread queues affected the vilayet of Bulgaria in April 1919, Pertev Pasha authorised the expensive use of large-scale military relief to help ease the situation and avoid any localised famine. And in January 1920, the effects of the Ottoman industrial boom were further illustrated with the foundation of an impressive international Naval School in the port of Janina in Thessalia.
The Janina Naval School is founded on the back of a strong surge of orders from shipyards in Thessalia (28th January 1920)
The story of the successful integration of a Croatian refugee family made headlines across the Empire in 1919
The long informal truce with the extremists in Ottoman politics did finally begin to unwind in 1919 however. While the story of former Croatian refugees who had found great success as Ottoman citizens in Constantinople made for great headlines supporting the government, it was rather less pleasing to the Young Turks. And the communists also began to agitate once more following some particularly militant trade unions partaking in industrial sabotage campaigns in both the vilayets of Georgia and Basra in winter 1919.
Still, the economy continued to go from strength to strength and the problems of the extremists was fairly minor compared to those in the not-so-distant past. It did however lead to Pertev Pasha authorising the establishment of a series of Ottoman Penal Colonies deep in Africa near Lake Tchad, which allowed for criminals of all extremes to be dealt with without resorting to the Death Penalty. While the socialists were strongly against this measure, the conservatives were happy to support it, and Pertev himself favoured it in order to illustrate the divides between his ruling Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi (Freedom and Accord Party) and the Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi; after years of co-operation had led the public to see them as essentially one party.
Pertev Pasha authorises the construction of a series of Penal Colonies deep in Africa (27th September 1920)
In fact, the future of the government was on the mind of Pertev Pasha a lot throughout this period. It was clear that the Ottoman economy was in fantastic shape, and the army had finally finished rearmament in 1920 with it now reaching a peacetime size of 10 armies - 2 of which were made of colonial troops but even these had been expanded up to almost 60,000 men – meaning that there were almost 700,000 men in the Ottoman Army. The army was even beginning to embrace new technologies, with the development of the motorised tank a logical next step following the success of the use of motorised infantry divisions in the Third Great War. Still, Pertev was not getting any younger, and if there was one thing that was lacking at this time, it was a clear successor to Pertev within the Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi.
Even as Pertev himself was turning 70 in late 1920, the elderly Sultan Mehmed V also passed away. Mehmed’s reign had been brief and he had been beset by ill-health throughout, but the seniority succession law in the Empire ensured that he was succeeded by yet another son of Abdulmejid. Mehmed VI was however the last of the elder generation of the House of Osman, and it was at least possible that stability might return to the Topkapi Palace in the near future. In the meantime however Mehmed VI was crowned on November 1st 1920, at the stripling age of 59.
Mehmed VI succeeds to the Ottoman Throne (November 1st 1920)
Of course the days of the Sultan playing an active part in the daily running of the Empire were long in the past by now, and the succession of elderly Sultans was therefore far less of a problem than it could have been only a few decades earlier. It did however illustrate the difficulties of an aged leader in an all too familiar fashion, and for the Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi the question of the next Grand Vizier saw the party begin to divide between two camps in 1920.
Pertev’s chosen successor was naturally another military man like himself, and the by-now second most senior general in the army (Rifat Pasha had retired from both military and political life prior to the Third Great War) – Murat Pasha. Murat was a skilled general who had succeeded in the conquest of Aden and was a veteran of both the Great Wars that the Porte had fought in. As someone who had regularly commanded colonial troops he was greatly appreciated by his men due to his constant concern for their welfare – something which naturally helped Murat’s position with the many minorities in the Empire.
Murat however, had one significant drawback: He was boring. No one doubted that his heart was in the right place, and his performance as a commander was exemplary, but if there was one thing men serving under Murat dreaded, it was one of his speeches. His tendency to waffle on at huge tangents risked sending men to sleep, and one rumour spread by the opposition was that at the Battle of Kismayo in the Third Great War, his men had actually begun the attack before he even gave the order simply to get out of listening to him for any longer. While this had no basis in the truth (not least because the days of Generals giving speeches at the frontlines before a battle were long in the past), it was a rather apt description of Murat’s oratory abilities.
Murat himself was a continuity candidate – supporting the continuation of Pertev’s laissez-faire economic policies and his embracing of Free Trade, whilst avoiding further social reforms unless the clamour became unassailable. His counterpart however was anything but. Mustafa Kemal Pasha was also a military man by background, although nowhere near as senior as Murat. An artillery captain who had served in the brutal (and oft-forgotten) desert campaign in the First Great War, he had later impressed as a corps commander during the putting down of the Algerian Insurgency of 1910, before being awarded the honorific Pasha for his strong performance on the Bessarabian Front under Halim Bey during the Third Great War; his corps receiving special praise for encircling the Russians without being spotted at the Battle of Cernauti in January 1915.
Mustafa Kemal Pasha began challenging the liberal leadership with his support for secularist reforms in 1920
Mustafa Kemal was, at age 39, fourteen years younger than Murat Pasha. He was also far more reform minded. While the great political reforms of the Ottoman Empire were by now mostly in the past, with the Empire being as liberal and democratic as any of the European powers, the role of religion had remained relatively untouched in the Empire for centuries, and religious law still played a key role in the governance of the Empire. Mustafa Kemal however wanted to abolish the millet system that saw the different religions of the Empire be free to govern people under their own laws, and instead replace them with a universal code of law that would treat all people equally. By removing the role of religion and turning the Empire into a secular state, Kemal believed that people would finally and totally embrace the concept of Ottomanism, as they would be treated exactly the same as their neighbours, whether they were Armenian or Jewish; Muslim or Copt.
This commitment to secularism put him at odds with much of the establishment within the Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi, with many of the elder generation believing that Kemal’s ideas would risk the extinction of the Caliphate. Pertev himself distrusted Kemal, suspecting him of enjoying alcohol a little more than in moderation, and believing that his radical ideas would only open the doors to the socialists or even worse. So as the campaign for the election got underway in July 1920, Pertev publicly brought Murat to many of his events, and made it clear that he would support Murat when he did finally come to retire.
The strong performance of the Ottoman economy during Pertev's ministry contributed to his already great popularity
Of course this was a risky move, with Murat’s already mentioned lacklustre speaking performances doing little to help the liberals in the polls even despite the still-huge popularity of Pertev Pasha. Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi leader (and Coalition Interior Minister) Ahmet Bey was hopeful of making a big step forward, but the rise of the secularisation debate had in some ways drowned out the calls for further increasing the ‘welfare state’ that had begun to form under the reforms his party had championed from in the government. The Sosyal Demokrat’s themselves were generally opposed to Kemal’s ideas, but the opposition socialist Osmanli Ahali Firkasi (Ottoman People’s Party) under Husseyin Bey were a lot more supportive of the idea of abolishing the millet system. Husseyin had taken over the party leadership over a decade ago but was still a relative youngster at age 47, and the socialists were naturally supportive of any attempts to curtail the power of religion in the Empire.
The conservative Osmanli Demokrat Firkasi on the other hand was obviously strongly opposed to any move to abolish the millet system. They were now led by Ali Riza Pasha following the retirement of Rifat Pasha, and Riza's background was in the Ottoman bureaucracy before ruling as governor of the vilayet of Upper Egypt; which was one of the final strongholds of the once electorally-mighty conservatives. Riza Pasha was however not a particularly impressive politician, and the Conservatives were targeting only modest gains – hoping to retake the position of third largest party in the Parliament – but some in fact feared being completely overtaken by Enver Pasha’s Young Turks, or even by a resurgent Ahrar Firkasi (Freedom Party) – with the libertarians under Nurettin Ferruh Bey gaining support following his strong support of the Millet System, and his vows to fight any attempt to centralise legal authority tooth & nail without changing the liberal economic policies currently in place.
The start of the Chinese Civil War following the fall of the last Qing Emperor was overshadowed by the Ottoman electoral campaign
The country went to the polls on January 2nd 1921, with the incoming Ottoman Parliament slated to increase in size by 150 seats to 850 following boundary reviews after the previous census and with the new electoral districts in Tabriz and Georgia, and in fully integrated vilayets in Sudan, Sinai, and West Sahara; which had all also recently gained voting rights. While there was some criticism over the size of the new Parliament, the liberals and the socialists had worked together to pass the boundary review in order to shut-down any accusations of gerrymandering, with even the conservatives reluctantly voting in favour of the bill. Election day itself was marred by news of a huge fascist revolt in neighbouring Romania, which it seemed certain would require Ottoman troops to suppress in order to protect the pro-Ottoman satellite’s government from complete collapse.
As the results came in however, there was much shock in the Sublime Porte. Pertev Pasha – who had brought the Empire back from the brink of utter ruin and had then won the Third Great War in such triumphant fashion – had won… But only just. The Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi remained the largest party, but had actually lost seats despite the huge increase in the number of constituencies – winning just 277 from their previous tally of 285. The decision to bring Murat Pasha so far to the forefront had utterly backfired, and the result was a massive blow for the liberals.
The 1921 Ottoman Election Results and the Romanian Fascist Uprising (January 2nd 1921)
The big gainers were the opposition Osmanli Ahali Firkasi; with the socialists winning 237 seats (an increase of 67) to the delight of Husseyin Bey. The Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi however failed to make the step forward that they had hoped for – gaining just two seats to a total of 112. This left the ruling coalition between them and the liberals on just 389 seats; 36 short of a majority. The libertarian Ahrar Firkasi had however surged back to 39 seats (an increase of 22), so the old three party coalition of Hilmi Pasha was a possible route forward.
The conservatives had avoided catastrophe but failed to make big gains either, with the Osmanli Demokrat Firkasi returning 108 MP’s for a modest increase of 32. The Young Turk affiliated Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Committee of Union and Progress) had also gained 23 MP’s for a total of 53, with the Islamist Teceddüt Firkasi (Renewal Party) gaining 14 for a total of 23. The communist Ihtilalci Avam Firkasi (Revolutionary Commoners Party) suffered a nightmare however, as the huge socialist tide all but wiped them out. They returned just a solitary MP from their stronghold of Salonika – a bitter pill for them to swallow.
The failure of the communists did however let the liberals somewhat off the hook. The possibility of a coalition between the Osmanli Ahali Firkasi, the Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi, and the Ihtilalci Avam Firkasi had struck fear into the hearts of liberals and conservatives alike prior to the election, and following the huge socialist gains then had this been feasible then it was plausible that the Sosyal Demokrat’s may have agreed to it. With this out of the question however, it became clear that there were only two potential governments. Either the Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi would form the old three-party coalition with the Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi and the Ahrar Firkasi… Or they would have to bite the bullet and make a move that would mark the end of two decades of liberal electoral dominance: Invite the socialists into government in a grand coalition.
[1] – In game terms, I was able to run tariffs as high (or is it low?) as -90% at times after the end of the Third Great War.
The results of the 1921 Ottoman election had been a bitter blow to Pertev Pasha. While he retained his huge personal popularity, and was respected across the spectrum by politicians, there was zero doubt whatsoever that this respect and popularity had not extended to his chosen successor, and the electorate had made it resoundingly clear that Murat Pasha was not the man to fill Pertev’s boots. For the Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi this meant that those who had supported Murat were pushed firmly into the background, and the faction supporting Mustafa Kemal Pasha came to the fore.
Pertev himself was no fool, and he realised that even though he retained his own popularity, the next party convention would almost certainly rubber stamp Mustafa Kemal as his successor, and his days in charge from that point would be numbered. And so rather than fight an unwinnable battle to stave off the inevitable, Pertev approached Mustafa Kemal directly. Agreeing to step down at the next convention, Pertev offered Mustafa Kemal the Deputy Vizier position and a seat at the table in the discussions for forming the next coalition government. Mustafa readily agreed, and the two men then opened negotiations with the opposition parties.
The ascendancy of Mustafa Kemal and his strong support for secularisation policies ruled out a renewal of the old three party coalition of Hilmi Pasha, as the libertarian Ahrar Firkasi were bitterly opposed to any reform of the Millet System. And with the conservatives even less likely to come on board, this left the pathway clear: the socialist Osmanli Ahali Firkasi would have to be welcomed into the government. While the socialists were strongly opposed to the ruling liberals on economic matters, they were far more receptive toward secularisation policies than many even in Mustafa Kemal’s own party, and they were also keen to join the government for the first time. The Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi were also invited to the negotiations, as they in many ways bridged the divide between the liberals and the socialists with their support of liberal economics alongside social reforms. While Ahmet Bey had stood down as their leader following the disappointing election results, his replacement Rauf Bey was keen to make his own mark in government.
An increase in the Healthcare budget was a key precondition for the forming of a new coalition government
Within a week of negotiation a general program had been outlined: Healthcare would get an immediate boost in funding, and the Health Ministry would be taken by socialist leader Husseyin Bey. Rauf Bey would take the Interior Ministry, while Mustafa Kemal would take over the role of Foreign Minister from Pertev Pasha. Socialists would also hold the Housing, Naval – and importantly – the Education ministries. With Mustafa Kemal unsure of how firmly his party would support him in his drive for secularisation, he manoeuvred the Education brief to a socialist so that they could ensure that secular reforms to the education would pass more smoothly, and the removal of both Islamic and Orthodox institutions from the state school program could be achieved more easily.
The treasury and trade ministries remained in liberal hands, along with most of the minor roles, and so the general economic program remained much the same as it had before – the socialists remained keen to embark on large scale programs of nationalisation to ‘seize the means of production’ – but recognised that with the Ottoman economy enjoying an unprecedented boom, there was little to no hope of them being able to garner support for such drastic measures in parliament. Instead they contented themselves with expanding the welfare state and working with Mustafa Kemal to reform (and potentially abolish) the Millet System.
When the new government was announced at the end of January 1921 it provoked outrage from conservatives, who were horror struck by the dread scenario of socialists in the Sublime Porte. But aside from a minor rebellion in Egypt - where the conservatives remained a powerful force - there was little that they could do about it. And with liberals remaining in charge of economic matters, the general population was reassured that there would be no fundamental overthrow of the capitalist system that had so successfully been embraced in the Empire in the past decades.
Mustafa Kemal Pasha takes over as Grand Vizier following the retirement of Pertev Pasha (May 9th 1921)
For Pertev Pasha though, this was his final success. At the annual Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi convention on May 9th 1921 he officially resigned as Grand Vizier and as party leader, and was replaced by Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Pertev Pasha had taken over an Empire in chaos after the defeat in the First Great War; with far left and far right violence on the streets, the treasury in tatters following the Ottoman bankruptcy, and international prestige at rock bottom. In his decade of leadership he had turned all this around – the economic was booming, street violence had been significantly reduced, labour relations were up. The Ottoman military had proven itself once more a force to be reckoned with in the Third Great War, and the Russian menace had been humbled. The Sublime Porte was once more at the centre of global affairs, and it was clear to all that Pertev had been the architect of this boom.
For Mustafa Kemal Pasha however, it was also clear that it was time to pass the baton on to a new generation. He was 31 years younger than the retiring Pertev, and part of a younger generation of Ottoman society that had grown up after the Tanzimat Reforms. And now that he was in charge, he was determined to end the role of the Millet System and bring in a true universal secular code of law. Mustafa was greatly inspired by the French concept of “laïcité” – separation of Church and State – and he was keen to work with our French allies and borrow from their ideas. Laïcité had originated in the ideals of the French Revolution and been embraced in recent decades to remove the influence of the Catholic Church from public institutions in France. Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Thought were at the core of this philosophy, which determined that people should be free to hold whatever religious belief they wish in private, but that in public life they would all be treated equally.
A rebellion by the Young Turks and countered by the Communists failed to stop the process of secularisation (December 1921)
As such, on December 19th 1921, the long debated ‘Secularisation Act’ was passed by the Ottoman Parliament by a vote of 504 votes to 268, with a significant number of liberal and social liberal MP’s abstaining and a small number rebelling to vote with the opposition. The Secularisation Act was sweeping in its powers: The Millet System was formally abolished, with a universal code of law applying to all Ottoman citizens regardless of race or creed, which had been based upon the Swiss Penal Code. The Ulema (Islamic religious police) were also abolished, while the Caliphate itself was reformed to work more along the lines of the British Monarch and the Church of England – with the Sultan remaining in his role of Caliph, but all political function being removed from the role. Political parties were forbidden from claiming to be ‘protectors of any certain religion’, and a new Department for Religious Affairs was founded to govern the religions in the Empire – particularly the Sunni Mosques. Madrasahs and Orthodox and Armenian schools were also transformed into secular state schools, and imams and priests were formally barred from teaching.
While the law had to be signed into effect by Sultan Mehmed VI, and there was much debate about whether he would accept it or if he would provoke a constitutional crisis by refusing to ratify it in his role of Caliph, the Sultan acquiesced to the passing of the bill. Reaction in the public was mostly supportive, with the past year having seen liberals and socialists take over public offices from top to bottom to ensure that the new system would be implemented smoothly. However, the Young Turks utilised the anger to take to the streets in a series of public protests, which were widespread across much of the Empire but which lacked significant numbers. Communists also came out to counter-protest, and the Ottoman Army was required to put down the revolts as a result.
The Khuzestan Crisis of October 1921 saw the Arab majority there succeed in gaining independence from Persia
Ottoman Athletes performed well at the Constantinople Olympics of 1922
The Secularisation Debate had lasted throughout 1921, and the eyes of the Sublime Porte had therefore been focused inward and ignored external affairs. This had led to a slow Ottoman response to the Khuzestan Crisis of October 1921, when Arabs in the Persian Empire had demanded greater autonomy and had their cause surprisingly taken up by Germany, which was looking to recover some of its international prestige following its repeated humiliations in recent wars. With the Russian Empire still licking its wounds from the Third Great War they failed to jump to their Persian ally’s aid, and as a result the Arabs were successful in gaining full independence as the Republic of Iraq formed on the borders of the Empire.
1922 also saw the final paying off of the war reparations to the Sublime Porte from the Third Great War by Russia and Britain, and as a result the significant Ottoman import subsidies were reduced back to a more manageable level, although taxes remained low. The Olympic Games were also held in Constantinople to much international fanfare; and Ottoman athletes performed impressively to finish in third place on the medal table, behind the French and the Americans. The Ottoman delegation to the World Fair in Rome was also well received, as Mustafa Kemal’s government was able to return its attention to international affairs – and plans for a new Colonial Exhibition were approved in September 1922 as well.
The Health and Safety Act and the National Art Endowment were further reforms passed by the Sublime Porte in 1922
Tax reforms were also passed at the behest of the socialists in October 1922
Domestic reforms remained on the table however, and with the secularisation debate over, social concerns returned to the fore. Firstly a series of basic safety regulations were implemented, with the many industrial accidents in recent years having led to strong calls for safety reform from the Trade Union lobbies. Then a government Arts Program was funded, leading to the formation of the first Constantinople Orchestra and a series of new theatres, museums, and opera houses opening across the Empire. Tax Reforms were also implemented to make it more difficult for the wealthy to evade payment, with this particular policy being at the behest of Husseyin Bey and the socialists.
1923 began with the Sublime Porte once more finding itself drawn into a war in the Far East. The Republic of Japan had recently overthrown the Emperor in a bloody revolution, but following the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War the Japanese had been keen to improve their position in the Far East, and expand outward from their puppet Korean regime by invading the so-called ‘Fengtian Clique’ in Manchuria. This brief war would last for six months before the Japanese triumphed, and the last Qing Emperor Puyi was placed on the throne of the ‘Manchurian Empire’ by the Japanese.
The Sublime Porte was briefly called in to the successful Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1923
Mustafa Kemal Pasha repeatedly took on the 'old guard' of Ottoman aristocrats and conservatives in 1923
The results of the 1923 Ottoman Census suggested that the population had fully embraced the secularisation process
Aside from this brief break in peace however, the Porte remained focused on ensuring the success of the new secular state. Conservatives were successfully resisted on all fronts as the reforms took hold, and the general public began to embrace their new freedoms - making any future rollback far less likely to occur. The 1923 Ottoman Census included some simple questions regarding faith and secularisation and saw the public overwhelmingly back the secular options. The Census itself revealed little of surprise, although the acquisition of the vilayet of Tabriz had seen the Empire gain a significant Shia minority, and the overall percentage of ethnic Turks had slightly increased to 27.1%. The literacy rate had also seen another very impressive increase up to 82.8%, while overall population had increased to 22.91M households (over 91M people overall).
The Empire continued to prosper under the new leadership, and the new Colonial Exposition was officially opened in 1924 to more fanfare. However, a new threat to world peace emerged in May 1924 which caused much alarm in the Sublime Porte. The Kingdom of Canada had gained independence from the United Kingdom decades ago and had placed a relative of Queen Victoria’s on the throne, but the Canadians had proceeded to stay isolated from global affairs. This changed in May 1924 when the Canadians declared war on the United States of America; ostensibly to support the idea of Alaskan Independence (although many suspected this was just a show so that Canada itself could annex Alaska following the discovery of oil and gas reserves there). The Canadians had allied with the French and called them into the war, but America remained allied with Germany, along with a large number of Central and South American nations.
The Alaskan Conflict brought the world to conflict yet again in May 1924
While the Sublime Porte were not directly involved in the war [1], there was a lot of anxiety in the Porte about the prospects of the conflict – with few keen to go to war with our former allies even despite the embracing of the Franco-Ottoman Alliance, but many also concerned about the possibility of a German victory and the Porte finding itself once more allied to the ‘wrong side’ – as Germany finally had the opportunity to fight a war on a single front, for the first time in decades. Thus there was much for Mustafa Kemal to ponder as the world moved in to the summer of 1924, and the possibility of the Alaskan Conflict spreading was at the forefront of the Grand Vizier’s mind…
[1] - A Great War requires two GP's to be involved on each side, and because Canada is not a GP, the Alaskan Conflict has not become a Great War, meaning that France cannot call its allies in.
This document contains the latest report from the Ottoman Foreign Ministry on the status and countries of the world:
The Kingdom of France is without doubt the leading power in the world at this point; having taken the mantle from the British Empire over the course of the past two decades. Precisely when this occurred remains under debate, but the Third Great War conclusively proved it regardless. French industrial output is the highest in the world, with their population of 23M working households being the largest in Europe. France has an adult literacy rate of 99%, and French industry is particularly noted for being the world leader in the production of Cigarettes, Fertilizer, Paper, and Furniture, amongst much else. France is a Crowned Democracy under King Philippe VIII and led by Conservative Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré.
The Habsburg Empire of Austria-Hungary is regarded by many to be the cultural capital of the world, and its international prestige is surpassed by none. The long reign of Franz Josef saw it transformed into a bastion of liberalism and inclusivity, with the Empire seemingly triumphing over the forces of nationalism to found a true multicultural empire not unlike our own. Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Slovenes, and Poles are all recognised and embraced minorities alongside the dominant Germans, and together make up a population of 14.31M working households – with just under a million more households in the autonomous Habsburg satellite kingdom of Bavaria. Austria-Hungary has a literacy rate of 94%, and its industry is particularly noted for being the world leader in the production of Iron Ore and Luxury Clothing, as well for major output of Fabrics, Fruit, and Luxury Furniture. Austria-Hungary is a Crowned Democracy under Emperor Karl I and led by Conservative Chancellor Dr Ignaz Seipel.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a power firmly on the wane, with the collapse of the Quadruple Entente and the British defeat in the Third Great War being the clear culmination of decades of stagnation and decline. The Irish War of Independence saw the Irish Free State gain de facto independence from London, despite its technical acknowledgement of British supremacy; but more critically the British Raj has fractured apart in the last two decades and seen a significant withdrawal of British power on the subcontinent. The British Empire is however still made up of 29.63M working households, and has an adult literacy rate of 94%; while British industry is the world leader in the production of Gunpowder, Coal, Rubber, Machinery, Coffee, and Liquor, amongst other things. The United Kingdom is a Crowned Democracy under King George V and led by the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald.
Germany has lurched from one disaster to another in recent decades, with its loss of Alsace-Lorraine to France preceding catastrophic defeat in the First and Second Great Wars, leading to the partitioning of East Prussia, the independence of the Polish states, and the removal of the Saarland and Bavaria from German control. The German Revolution also saw the toppling of the House of Hohenzollern and the transformation of Germany into a federal republic, with yet more turmoil occurring during this transition. Nonetheless, Germany has a population of 14.34M working households and an adult literacy rate of essentially 100%; while German industry remains the world leader in the production of Silk, Oil, Cement, and Financial Services. Germany is a Republic under the leadership of liberal Chancellor Gustav Stresemann.
The Russian Empire’s meteoric rise from the depths of the Civil War and the Tsarist Restoration proved half of the old adage that ‘Russia is never as weak as it appears, but nor it ever as strong’ – and the other half was proven in the Third Great War. Russian bellicosity has plunged the world into devastating conflict twice in the past two decades; but their recent defeat was a huge personal setback for the Tsar, and forced him to cede much of his remaining authority to the re-energised Russian Duma. Russia has a population of 22.23M working households and an adult literacy rate of just 51%. Russian industry is however the world leader in the production of Timber and Lead, and is also noted for its large production of Grain, Liquor, and Cattle. Russia is a Crowned Democracy under Tsar Nicholas II and led by liberal Prime Minister Prince Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov.
The Kingdom of Italy is the last of the Great Powers, and most definitely the least. Italian industry lags far behind even our own; let alone that of the industrial giants of Western Europe and the USA. The failed Italian attempt to ‘liberate’ Venetia from Habsburg control at the turn of the century was followed by its complete defeat by the French in the First Great War, and Italy has since remained isolated and aloof from European politics, with no real allies. Italy has a population of just 9.1M working households and an adult literacy rate of 67%; while Italian industry is noted for having the largest fishing fleet in the world, and for its significant production of Iron Ore and Luxury Clothing. Italy is a Crowned Democracy under King Alphonse I and led by conservative Prime Minister Luigi Facta.
Elsewhere in Europe, Spain remains a significant force with 16.14M working households under King Jaime III, although the country has yet to truly recover from its devastating occupation in the First Great War. The Spanish literacy rate remains a lowly 55%, and its industrial output is very low. Belgium and the Netherlands remain secondary powers with colonial holdings in Africa and the East Indies; Portugal also maintains an impressive array of colonial holdings; while the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg has risen to a position of impressive international standing following its hosting of a number of great conferences, exhibitions, and a World’s Fair. Europe is almost entirely made up of liberal Crowned Democracy’s or Republics at this point; with the sole exceptions being the Constitutional Monarchy in the Kingdom of Silesia, and the Fascist Dictatorship of Greece.
The Dark Continent of Africa remains divided between the European powers following the start of the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s; and while recent international agreement has lent toward the era of open colonial expansion having coming to a close, no power is yet to willingly undergo decolonisation. North Africa is dominated by our own holdings, aside from the French Protectorate of Morocco. West Africa on the other hand is split between the colonies of Spanish Mauritania, Spanish Benin, and Spanish Guinea; French West Africa; the British colonies of Gambia, Sierra Leone, and British West Africa; Portuguese Guinea; Dutch Benin; and Austro-Hungarian Biafra – along with the long independent nation of former slaves in Liberia.
East Africa is also made up of our own holdings, while Central Africa is dominated by the huge colony of Spanish Africa. The former colony of German East Africa is now administered as part of British Africa, aside from the minor colony of Russian East Africa on the coast. The minor colony of Belgian Zaire sits just south of Spanish Africa, while Southern Africa is dominated on both flanks by Portuguese Angola and Portuguese Mozambique. The British Dominion of Southern Rhodesia has recently gained autonomy from the British Empire, while the Republic of Botswana gained full independence some time ago – following the example of the Republic of South Africa. South Africa itself is split in two by Austro-Hungarian Africa; while the Spanish also maintain their colonies of Zululand, Madagascar, and Zanzibar.
In the New World, the United States of America remains the most significant nation despite its crushing defeat and partition in the Second Great War, which had come hot on the heels of another defeat in World War One. Even with these setbacks, American industrial output is still second only to that of the French; while the USA maintains a population of 17.61M working households and an adult literacy rate of 91%. American industry is particularly noted for its world leading output of Copper, Bronze, Steel, and Shoes. The USA is currently a Republic under the Presidency of Democrat John W. Davis.
Bordering the United States of America is the Kingdom of Canada, which has recently opened hostilities between the two. Canada has benefitted greatly from remaining neutral in all three Great Wars, and while its population and industrial output continue to be dwarfed by its neighbour, the Canadian administration has had far fewer crises to deal with than their more illustrious neighbours in recent years. Canada has a population of 3.41M working households and an adult literacy rate of 93%; while Canadian industry is particularly noted for its production of explosives and artillery – both of which have led to an export boom during the major wars of recent years. The Kingdom of Canada is a Crowned Democracy under King Arthur I and led by Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Meighen.
The rest of North America is made up of various minor republics such as New England, California, and the independent Cherokee state. The Republic of Mexico has recently made something of a resurgence following its reconquest of the briefly independent republics of Texas and Rio Grande; following their secession from the United States in the Treaty of Washington that ended the Second Great War. A Mexican invasion of the Californian Republic was however defeated following British intervention, which forced the belligerent Mexicans to withdraw their forces.
Central and South America are made up of a series of minor powers which play little part in greater global affairs; save for the Empire of Brazil which remains a key and longstanding ally of the Sublime Porte, under its leader Emperor Pedro III. Monarchism in South America has however receded following its strange growth in the late 19th century, and in Brazil as in the Kingdoms of Chile and Cisplatina, the power of the monarch has been reduced to that of a Crowned Democracy. Only the constitutional monarchy of Paraguay retains significant powers, although Paraguay itself has lost much of its territory to Bolivia – which is in turn currently losing a war to Brazil and Chile over a Bolivian attempt to regain its access to the sea.
The continent of Asia has seen the largest changes to the map in recent years, with new states seemingly cropping up once a month following a series of huge wars of independence or various civil conflicts. West Asia has seen the Persian Empire take some major hits following our conquest of Tabriz and the recent successful secession of the Republic of Iraq, while the secretive Fascist Dictatorship in the Sultanate of Oman continues to cause trouble on our border.
Central Asia is dominated by the Russians still, although their control has suffered following their defeat in the Third Great War, and led to attempts to gain independence by the Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Tajik populaces – none of which look likely to succeed, but all of which seem to at least have guaranteed themselves significant autonomy from the Tsarist Court.
The largest changes however have taken place in the Indian subcontinent, where the recession of British power has led to major changes. Direct British rule is now limited to a handful of provinces in North and Central India, although Southern India is dominated by Princely States which have retained their allegiance to the British Crown. Significant numbers of Princely States have continued to declare their independence from British control however, and Indian Nationalist Rebellions are occurring almost throughout the entire continent – with the beleaguered British barely able to halt the tide.
Another strange consequence of the British collapse has been the expansion of Portuguese India from their former enclave in Goa to seize much of the former British province of Bombay, including the great city itself – after it had declared independence from Britain. Whether this will prove a stable long term gain for the Portuguese Crown is yet to be determined, but the constant war on the subcontinent is sure to attract the attention of the British Crown for a good while longer, unless they are truly forced to withdraw from the Raj entirely.
Meanwhile in East Asia, the Chinese Civil War saw the former Qing Empire broken up into a series of minor “Warlord” states. The central government, led by the Beiyang Army, has however recently succeeded in defeating a number of these Warlord States, along with the so-called “National Government” of the Kuomintang in South China; and it appears that the Beiyang Army may yet reunify China under central rule – aside of course from the new Japanese puppet state in Manchuria. The Republic of Japan itself recently overthrew the Emperor in a socialist revolution, to the shock of much of the world, and Japanese politics is now dominated by the socialist party and their communist allies.
Finally, in Southeast Asia and the East Indies, the colonial powers continue to dominate. French Indochina takes up much of the land formerly belonging to Dai Nam and Cambodia, and the French are also at war with Siam due to the Siamese alliance with the United States – A slightly strange set of circumstances given that Siam also overthrew its monarch in a communist revolution and declared itself to be the world’s first Proletarian Dictatorship (though it has since been joined by the Indian states of Kutch and Bhopal there).
Indonesia itself is mostly made up of the Dutch East Indies, although British Malaya is one of the few British colonies that have so far not made any notable attempts to secede from London’s control. The Spanish continue to control the Philippines, and the Portuguese maintain their control of East Timor; while the French control Eastern New Guinea following their victory in the New Guinea Crisis. The rest of Indonesia is made up of various independent kingdoms and sultanates, including the Sultanate of Atjeh that we have recently incorporated into our economic sphere of influence.
And last of all to the south of the East Indies are the British Dominions of Australia and New Zealand, which remain extremely sparsely populated and of little relevance to global affairs. And then there are the Pacific Island colonies which are divided up between the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch – although most of these exist solely for coaling stations, unless they have useful reserves of guano of course.
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Chapter Fifty-Three: The American Question (1924-1928)
The Alaskan Conflict of 1924 did not escalate into the global war that many had feared
The outbreak of the Alaskan Conflict was to become one of a series of events that had begun with the signing of the Treaty of Washington at the end of the Second Great War which reoriented global attention away from Europe and toward the rest of the world in the 1920s. While Germany launched a series of offensives against the French in support of their American allies, their failure to break through the French lines in Alsace-Lorraine saw their war effort quickly peter out, and the left bank of the Rhine was soon occupied by French forces for the third time in twenty years. The German military had once again proven itself inferior to the French military machine – although the impressive performance of the Luftwaffe had taken the French by surprise, and caused more than a few bloody noses in political circles in Paris after the French air force suffered huge losses in the opening weeks of the war.
Meanwhile in America, the Canadian forces launched invasions of the United States on both the east and the west coast, and defeated their American counterparts in major battles in the states of New York and Washington. With the French Navy once again blockading the American coastline, the outcome of the war was in little doubt after the German offensives failed in July 1924. The United States held out until October before President Davis capitulated to the Canadian demands and allowed Alaska to secede from the Union. While Canada did not annex Alaska – with international opinion having grown increasingly hostile toward blatant land grabs in the years since the end of the Third Great War – the Alaskan economy was closely linked with the Canadian, and by extension with the French economy.
The end of the Alaskan Conflict failed to end what was becoming known as the “American Question” in international affairs however, with the Republic of Mexico responding to the American defeat by restating its historical claim to the "Mexican Territories" lost in the Mexican-American War over half a century previously. Mexican belligerence had grown following its annexation of Texas and the Rio Grande in recent years; and while British intervention had ended a Mexican attempt to conquer the Californian Republic, the conservative Mexican government had continued its irredentist orientation.
The Ottoman Military holds a series of parades celebrating secularisation in December 1924
The increasing power of the conservative right in North America was in sharp contrast to the rest of the world however. While France, Austria-Hungary, and Italy all had conservative governments in Europe only in Italy did they enjoy a strong majority, and the triumph of liberal constitutionalists throughout Europe had relegated almost all of the European monarchies to figurehead roles. Nowhere was this truer than in the Sublime Porte, where Mustafa Kemal’s victory in the Secularisation Debate had almost entirely broken the power of the conservatives at a local government level – while they had of course been exiled from national government for 24 years now. Even the Ottoman Military – once a bastion of reaction and conservatism – was now a staunch supporter of secular liberalism, and a series of Military Parades were held in Ottoman cities in December 1924 to showcase the multicultural forces, where Muslims, Jews, and Christians marched together as one in front of huge cheering crowds.
1925 was an election year in the Ottoman Empire, and all political pundits were forecasting a huge victory for Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Mustafa himself was wary of falling into the trap of complacency that his predecessor Pertev Pasha had slipped into however, and continued to use the Ottoman Foreign Office to further his personal prestige. Pertev Pasha had authorised a number of expeditions into the Andes Mountains following the discovery of Machu Picchu a decade previously, but while they had failed to make discoveries on the same level, the increasingly scientific approach had seen a number of smaller expeditions succeed. In May 1925 Mustafa Kemal met with the Peruvian President Augusto Leguia to arrange a joint exhibition team and make the Ottoman Museum the sole international leader of exhibitions in the Peruvian Andes. Coming hot on the heels of the latest Ottoman Colonial Exposition, this saw the Sublime Porte increasingly challenge the global view of Austria-Hungary being the cultural capital of the world, and cosmopolitan Constantinople was increasingly seen as a serious rival to Vienna as a result.
The Ottoman Colonial Exposition of April 1925 once more drew international attention to the triumphs of Ottoman Culture
The Ottoman Empire signs a deal with Peru for a joint archaeological expedition in the Andes (May 2nd 1925)
Mustafa Kemal’s National Arts Endowment had been extremely popular with the Ottoman populace, and his 1925 electoral campaign had leant heavily on championing Ottoman culture, while operas, plays, and radio shows with strong pro-government messages were regularly shown and broadcast. Radio was a recent technological breakthrough that had first come to widespread use in France, but which had now spread to a number of Ottoman cities. While all radios currently had to be imported from foreign companies (usually French or Austrian), there was little doubt that this medium would be of increasing importance both culturally and politically in the future.
The 1925 Election also saw the use of the Telephone taken into political consideration for the first time. Invented in the United States in the 19th century, it had only become commonplace to own one in the Ottoman Empire in the past couple of decades, and Sosyal Demokrat Interior Minister Rauf Bey had sponsored a national program linking telephone lines across the Empire after the 1921 election. The old medium of the telegram was increasingly challenged as people delighted in calling their relatives from hundreds – or even thousands – of miles away and being able to hear the voices of their loved ones. And in the electoral campaign, political parties regularly utilised this to phone party supporters and encourage them to vote.
Of course, telephones were more likely to be owned by the upper and middle classes than the working class; and thus they were of less use to the socialists than the liberals at this juncture - Naturally both the Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi and the Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi were fully aware of this. The socialist Osmanli Ahali Firkasi were therefore restricted to more traditional campaign methods, much to socialist leader Husseyin Bey’s chagrin. The conservatives meanwhile, under their elderly leader Ali Riza Pasha, were increasingly out of touch and refused to countenance modifying their campaign methods to the new mediums at all. The Osmanli Demokrat Firkasi had seemed a beaten force after their defeat in the Secularisation Debate, and Riza Pasha spent most of his campaign calling for a return of the Millet System despite there being little to no popular enthusiasm for this policy.
The libertarian Ahrar Firkasi under Nurettin Ferruh Bey had been allied to the conservatives during the Secularisation Debate, but Ferruh Bey had recognised that the public were in no mood for a reversal here, and in 1925 the Ahrar Firkasi therefore backed the secularisation process, while continuing to campaign in opposition to the ‘welfare state’. Meanwhile in the rest of the opposition, Enver Pasha’s Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti were struggling to gain the traction they had in previous years since the crushing of the recent Young Turk revolt, and both the fascists and the communists were heavily on the backfoot heading into the polls.
The 1925 Ottoman General Election Results (July 3rd 1925)
Nonetheless as results came in on July 3rd 1925, the Ottoman electorate had once again delivered a veritable earthquake in Ottoman politics. Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi saw triumph on a massive scale as the telephone campaign seemingly worked wonders in flipping a huge number of conservative constituencies to the liberals – giving the liberals their highest vote share since the 1906 election in the midst of the First Great War. The Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi had gained a massive 96 seats for 373 MP’s out of 850 in a decisive victory. Husseyin Bey’s Osmanli Ahali Firkasi had seemingly suffered from entering government and while they remained the second largest party, they lost 41 seats to hold just 196. The other big gainers had been the Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi – with their leader Rauf Bey having been the first to see the opportunity the telephone gave – as his party gained an impressive 59 seats for their best ever performance, netting them 171 in total.
For the opposition parties however, it was a night of utter devastation. The conservative Osmanli Demokrat Firkasi suffered their worst ever result – by some margin – as they retained just 25 MP’s; a loss of 83 seats. They had in the process slumped to sixth place overall, below both the Ahrar Firkasi and the Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti – although in truth neither of those could be pleased with their performances either, as the libertarians gained just four seats for a total of 43 and the Young Turks suffered the significant loss of twenty-one constituencies for a total of 32. The reactionary Teceddüt Firkasi – hamstrung by their inability to campaign on an openly Islamist platform anymore – lost sixteen seats to return just 7 MP’s, while the communists failed to return to their old strength and gained just two new MP’s alongside their usual MP from Salonika.
The obliteration of the right in the 1925 Election ended any remaining doubts over the success of Secularisation, and Mustafa Kemal was delighted by this triumph. There were mixed feelings in the government itself though, as the socialist losses saw the resignation of leader Husseyin Bey, and the Osmanli Ahali Firkasi announced that they would return to opposition as a result. The Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi therefore went back into coalition with the Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi, with the latter rewarded with a number of additional briefs such as Health, Defence, Pensions, and the Naval Ministry. Rauf Bey himself stood down from his brief as Interior Minister to take up the position of Defence Minister, overseeing all three branches of the Ottoman Military (the Osmanli Tayyare Kuvvetleri, or Ottoman Airplane Force, had been officially designated its own branch in 1923), while also being promoted to Deputy Vizier.
The Ottoman election had also once again coincided with a huge fascist uprising in neighbouring Romania, and the Ottoman military was required to intervene again – though such was the strength of the rebellion there that three full armies were sent to pacify the region, and the Ottoman Army suffered an international embarrassment when 5th Army General Cevad Pasha was killed in an ambush by fascist forces in Balti in October 1925. The Romanian rebellion eventually took a full year to completely pacify; with resistance proving highly stubborn in the mountains of Moldavia. An explosion at a fuel refinery in Silistre in January 1926 which killed seven workers saw the owners initially blame government safety inspectors, before the disaster was later blamed on Romanian sympathisers, too.
Cevad Pasha became the most senior Ottoman officer to die in action in decades during the Romanian Revolt (October 24th 1925)
An explosion at a fuel refinery is blamed on Fascist Terrorists in January 1926
1926 however was dominated once more by the “American Question”, which once again threatened to disrupt global peace. American President Davis of the Democrats had been involved in any increasingly confrontational war of words with Mexican President Leon de la Barra over the rights of descendants of Mexican settlers in the formerly Mexican states of Nevada and Utah, with Davis (correctly) surmising that the Mexicans were looking for an excuse for a war. Davis himself was already deeply unpopular for his perceived mishandling of the Alaskan Conflict, and when Mexico finally declared war on January 6th 1926 the weary American populace took to the streets in a series of anti-war protests in American cities on the East Coast. The US Army was a shadow of its former self and after suffering defeats in Louisiana and Colorado, the Americans quickly found the frontiers overrun yet again.
The Mexican successes were relatively well received in the Sublime Porte – Relations with the Americans had dropped significantly since the end of the First Great War, and the instability in the United States saw the international markets in many ways prefer the stability of Canada, Mexico, and New England. Ottoman archaeologists were also operating in Mexico, and in September 1926 discovered an impressive Mayan Pyramid in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula. The Porte therefore provided tacit support to the Mexicans in their war efforts in the form of both arms and loans, with the ultimate aim of wresting Mexico out of the French Sphere of Influence and into our own.
The Second Mexican-American War breaks out with huge early success for the Mexicans (February 1926)
Ottoman Archaeologists discover a great Mayan pyramid deep in the jungles of the Yucatan (September 1926)
The East Borneo Crisis briefly threatened to spiral into a global conflict before the Habsburg's backed down (January - July 1927)
International attention was once more diverted in early 1927 however with the outbreak of the East Borneo Crisis, where the Habsburg Empire had made the decision to support Bornean rebels against their Dutch overlords, before the French came in to back the Dutch position. The Sublime Porte was quick to declare support for the French, and the British too backed the French. The Italian government then made the surprise decision to back their arch-rivals in Austria-Hungary - with the Italian government looking to end its self-imposed isolation of the past two decades - and the Italians now harbouring fresh irredentist claims against both France in Savoy & Corsica and the Ottoman Empire over the Dalmatian Coastline. Fears that the East Borneo Crisis might lead to another general European war ended in July 1927 with the backing down of the Habsburg government after the Russians had made it clear they would not support them, though.
And so with this crisis averted, the Sublime Porte once more focused on domestic affairs in 1927. The Ottoman shipyards had launched the steamer SS Azam in February 1927 which was the largest passenger ship ever built: Quickly being dubbed the “Titanic” by the international media. Azam could take over 3000 passengers on transatlantic journeys from Constantinople to Sao Paulo, and was a symbol of the rapidly growing Ottoman shipyards. The Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi running the naval ministry had finally ordered the first Ottoman dreadnoughts in the aftermath of the 1921 election, and the first – the Turgut Reis – had been launched in 1925, as the Ottoman Navy’s long awaited modernisation program was finally completed. Alongside the new dreadnoughts, a number of battlecruisers and heavy cruisers were also ordered in 1925 and began entering service in 1927.
Ottoman Shipyards launch the largest passenger ship in history: The SS Azam (February 10th 1927)
Meanwhile history was made in the Ottoman Empire on September 11th 1927 as Mustafa Kemal Pasha gave the first live-to-radio political speech in the Empire's history, following the death of the legendary former Grand Vizier Pertev Pasha. Mustafa Kemal’s speech evoked many of the greatest moments of Pertev’s career and declared a national day of mourning the following week, as Pertev received a full state funeral – the largest and most elaborate ever given to someone outside the royal family in the Ottoman Empire. Dignitaries from all over the world attended – including former French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré and the new French King Jean III, German Chancellor Gustav Stresemann (and also the deposed German Kaiser Wilhelm II, though the two studiously avoided each other), Brazilian Emperor Pedro III, King Albert I of Belgium, King Jaime III of Spain, and even the foreign ministers from Russia and Austria-Hungary.
The Sublime Porte also passed a law banning the practice of “Union Busting” in September 1927 after a series of businesses in the vilayet of Transjordan had succeeded in infiltrating unions and disrupting strike plans there. But industrial problems aside, the mid 1920s had become very much a golden age in the Ottoman Empire, with the continuingly booming economy matching the continual growth of Ottoman prestige and culture on the international arena. The Ottoman Colonial Museum of Natural History was opened in Baliksehir in May 1928, looking to rival those of London and Paris with its collection of flora and fauna. Mustafa Kemal Pasha personally opened the museum, and the Grand Vizier was extremely proud of the vast collection it contained – vindication, he believed, for his strong support for the arts throughout his time in the Porte. The future therefore looked bright, both for the Empire and for the Grand Vizier himself.
The Ottoman Natural History Museum is founded in Balikesir (May 24th 1928)
In the years since the end of the end of the Third Great War and the Ottoman annexations of Georgia and Tabriz, global opinion had swung heavily against blatant unjustified land grabs, as people and politicians the world-over looked to avoid further unnecessary bloodshed. The outbreak of a colonial border war in 1928 was, therefore, a huge surprise both to the Sublime Porte and to commentators all over the globe. While such things had been commonplace in the 18th and 19th centuries, the progressive claim that they had been consigned to history was proven wrong after a series of unexpected events spiralled out of control in Southern Africa.
Portuguese Mozambique had had stable borders for over half a century; as the Portuguese government had maintained its colonies in Angola and Mozambique throughout the Scramble for Africa - focusing on defending what it had already got rather than risking provoking a stronger power over unclaimed territories. The Habsburg Empire on the other hand had been deeply unsatisfied with its lot after the end of the Scramble – With the small colony of Habsburg Biafra in West Africa, and the larger colony of Habsburg Africa in the south sandwiched between the Republics of South Africa and Botswana, Spanish Zululand, the British Dominion of Southern Rhodesia, and Portuguese Mozambique.
The Habsburg’s had therefore been eyeing up Spanish Zululand for some time – the minor Spanish colony was administered from Madagascar and strategically difficult for the Spaniards to defend, and so the Spanish government had been open to the possibility of selling it to the Austro-Hungarian government. Colonial officers in Habsburg Africa were therefore invited to tour the colony and send a report back to Vienna on what they believed it was worth. An error from their guide however saw the delegation unknowingly cross the border into Portuguese Mozambique and begin conducting an impromptu census in a village there. When Portuguese soldiers arrived, there were no speakers of a mutually intelligible language, and the minor mistake quickly spiralled out of control. Shots were fired; two Habsburg bureaucrats were killed, and an international crisis developed.
Border Tensions in Portuguese Mozambique led to an outbreak of war in 1928
Austria-Hungary was outraged by the Portuguese behaviour and when reports reached Vienna, they demanded an immediate apology from the Portuguese government. The Portuguese however blamed the Habsburg’s entirely – pointing out that the event had taken place on Portuguese soil, and fearing that backing down would paint the Portuguese governments as easy picking for stronger powers. With Portugal refusing to apologise and Lisbon's stance being backed by its British allies, the Austro-Hungarian government was expected to bury the issue. But fearing the hit to prestige this could cause, Habsburg Chancellor Dr Ignaz Seipel instead decided that the affront could not be ignored: And on July 24th 1928, Austria-Hungary declared war on Portugal.
The Portuguese promptly triggered the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance – the oldest alliance in the world still in legal force, and Britain agreed to come to their aid. The Habsburg’s called in their own French allies, along with the Danes, Swedes, and other minor allies as another major war broke out - albeit one that would be fought entirely in Africa and on the High Seas. In the Sublime Porte, Grand Vizier Mustafa Kemal Pasha was disappointed by this strengthening of ties between Paris and Vienna, but happy to declare neutrality in the conflict and allow the European powers to send more of each other’s navies to the bottom of the sea: The great Ottoman naval re-armament was still proceeding at a rapid rate, and British, French, or Austrian losses would only hasten the speed at which the Porte achieved parity in terms of the number of active Dreadnoughts.
The Republic of Iraq is annexed by the Sublime Porte (December 3rd 1928)
It was also amongst this general global chaos that the neighbouring Republic of Iraq saw a military coup d’etat overthrow the pro-German government in August 1928, as a fascist dictatorship came to power. The Iraqi Fascists made bold and ambitious claims of a future Iraqi state stretching up the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers through the entirety of Mesopotamia – land that was very much part of the heartland of the Ottoman Empire. The Sublime Porte was naturally alarmed – but with the African colonial war in full swing, Mustafa Kemal Pasha also saw an opportunity. The Sublime Porte tolerated fascist neighbours in Greece solely because of its Habsburg protection; and in Oman because the fascists there had the good sense not to claim any Ottoman land as its own. With the Iraqis having no international backer and being openly hostile; Mustafa Kemal made a rapid decision to declare war on the rogue state before the Persians could reabsorb it or it started fermenting unrest in Ottoman cities. The Iraqis were completely unprepared, and by December 3rd 1928 the Iraqi Campaign was over; with the new vilayet of Khuzestan successfully absorbed into the Empire.
Whether Mustafa Kemal Pasha could have got away with such a blatant land grab prior to the madness in Africa breaking out was a matter of wide debate in later years, but as it was the world’s attention rapidly shifted to far larger territorial exchanges, following the end of the Second Mexican-American War. The Republic of Mexico successfully annexed the American states of Nevada and Utah, as the United States began to descend into utter chaos. In the 1928 Presidential election, the deeply unpopular Democrat President Davis did not run again, but the Democrats were nonetheless obliterated in the public vote. The American public however still remembered the failures of the Socialist Party President Debs and the humiliation of the Treaty of Washington at the end of the Second Great War, and so despite huge socialist protests and spontaneous civil unrest in many major cities, the election instead saw the surprise success of Republican candidate Herbert H. Hoover, who became the first Republican President for more than thirty years. President Hoover promptly ended the war with Mexico in January 1929, whilst blaming the failure on his Democrat predecessor - the long-term effects of which would not become clear for some time.
Newly elected President Hoover cedes Nevada and Utah to Mexico (January 9th 1929)
In the meantime however, the huge African colonial war also came to an end in January 1929 with the Habsburgs seizing much of Southern Mozambique and the French making minor gains from the British in West Africa. The British Royal Navy had once again been humiliated by its French counterparts, and despite some brutal fighting in British Nigeria and French West Africa, the Anglo-Portuguese forces were clearly fighting a losing battle. It was not the French blockade which triggered the rapid peace negotiations however. In winter 1928 African native anger at the constant imperialist fighting over their homelands suddenly erupted into a series of huge rebellions that began in French Senegal and then spread through French West Africa into the British and Habsurg West African colonies and from there even into neutral colonies under Spanish and Ottoman rule. ‘The Great African Rebellion’ as it was later called rapidly overwhelmed local garrisons – particularly those already weakened by the ongoing war. The British had to choose between trying to seize French colonies or defending their own from the rebellions, and they quickly decided on the latter.
The Habsburg's successfully annex Southern Mozambique following the Austro-Portuguese Colonial War (January 1929)
The Ethiopian Rebellion was one of a series of huge native rebellions that began in Africa in late 1928 and early 1929
French West Africa had borne the brunt of the war effort and it was there that the most shocking events of the rebellion occurred when an entire French colonial army at Timbuktu was trapped and surrendered to native forces in December 1928, with the loss of over 60,000 men – many from the French homeland itself. By the end of the month the rebels in French Mali had declared independence, and with the French forces desperately defending Senegal and the Ivory Coast, they turned to the Sublime Porte for help. Ottoman forces were themselves putting down significant rebellions in Ethiopia and Algeria, but Mustafa Kemal feared that should the Porte allow this rogue native state to put down roots, it would only inspire revolutionaries in Ottoman colonies and perhaps even see them unite together. So Ottoman forces were sent against the rogue ‘Toucouleur’ natives in January 1929; crushing the rebel forces at Gao. Gao and Timbuktu were then annexed to Ottoman Mali, and 1929 saw European forces struggle to regain control of their colonies.
The Ethiopian rebellion was not put down until late June, while the Grand Vizier passed further reforms to attempt to lower popular resentment lest the rebellion spread to the rest of the Empire, and so for the first time Limited Health & Safety Regulations were passed into law on January 12th 1929. Even despite this sporadic violence continued to break out, and in the Ottoman Army itself the conscripted forces were seen as increasingly unreliable by Ottoman central command due to heavy agitation against the two years of mandatory military service. In August 1929 series of mutinies occurred while the Grand Vizier was abroad; affecting almost every single Ottoman army. Despite the failure of the mutineers' plan to launch an outright coup d’etat in the capital, the Sublime Porte was heavily shaken by the events. On August 20th 1929 Mustafa Kemal Pasha returned and promptly bowed to one of the main conscript demands and lowered the draft to a One Year term of service; cutting it in half. The measure successfully calmed matters, and the later trials of mutiny leaders failed to trigger the further violence that many had feared as a result. The Porte also developed plans to increase internal migration to Ottoman colonies to dilute the influence of natives there following the Ethiopian uprising, which entered into force in September.
The Health & Safety Act of 1929 forced Ottoman businesses to institute basic safety policies to protect workers (January 12th 1929)
The Ottoman Mutinies of August 1929 forced the Sublime Porte to lower the draft duration (August 20th 1920)
The Ottoman Empire institutes a renewed drive to entice families to migrate to Ottoman colonies (September 30th 1929)
But even this internal turmoil in 1929, the Grand Vizier had his eyes fixed on a huge prize in Ottoman foreign policy. Mustafa Kemal had been a young up-and-comer during the period of Ottoman isolationism under his predecessor Pertev Pasha, and he had watched with admiration the old Vizier’s relationship building with former French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré that led to the signing of the Franco-Ottoman Alliance in 1916. That diplomatic masterstroke had changed the face of international relations and led directly to the huge Ottoman success in the Third Great War. A diplomatic success of that magnitude was by now the only thing missing from Mustafa Kemal’s career - and Mustafa himself was extremely wary of the way that Russia had removed itself from international affairs in the years since the Third Great War. That war had been won by the Porte after a period of isolationism focusing on reforming and rebuilding the Ottoman military; and the Russians themselves had now been undergoing a very similar program for the past decade.
And so while the Franco-Ottoman Alliance remained the bedrock of Ottoman Foreign Policy, Mustafa Kemal had therefore begun to look for other allies against any resurgent Russian threat. With the Habsburgs and Italians both maintaining irredentist claims on Ottoman territory, and renewing the old alliance with Germany being out of the question due to the constant hostilities between France and Germany, the obvious target for Mustafa Kemal would have been the British Empire. The outbreak of the African colonial war however had further poisoned relations between London and Paris, and Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald had adopted a strongly Francophobic stance since the end of the war. As a result the Sublime Porte had initially drawn a blank on this search for new allies: The Franco-Ottoman Alliance would have to suffice – bolstered of course by the old alliances with the Empire of Brazil and with Japan.
President Duan Qirui of China
... Or would it? That latter alliance with Japan had been weakened heavily in the aftermath of the Japanese Revolution, and the leftist Japanese governments that had ruled since the overthrowing of the Emperor had proven utterly inept. The Japanese Puppet Emperor Puyi of Manchukuo had been overthrown by a rebellion in 1928 and the Chinese Beiyang Army had then quickly moved in to re-establish control over the entirety of Manchuria. If Japan couldn’t even defeat a warlord rebellion, what use would it be against the Russians? China on the other hand had finally ended its long civil war and come out of it with a strong central government under President Duan Qirui; himself a former ‘warlord’ and member of the Beiyang Elite.
Duan Qirui was born in 1865, and his grandfather had been an officer in the Qing forces during the Taiping Rebellion. Duan entered the Tianjin Military Academy at age 20 and graduated top of his class; before later studying military service in Germany – the premier military power of the world at the time. After returning to China he gained the sponsorship of General Yuan Shikai and supported his attempts to modernise the failing Qing state – also seeing active service when putting down the Boxer Rebellion. When the Qing reforms failed and Yuan Shikai turned against the Qing Emperor, Duan supported his mentor through the Xinhai Revolution of 1917 and was rewarded with the post of Minister of War in Yuan’s government. After Yuan’s disastrous attempt to crown himself Emperor triggered the outbreak of the ‘Warlord Era’ and the secession of a large number of Chinese states under their Beiyang Commanders, Duan Qirui had remained in Beijing and attempted to mediate.
Initially supported by the democracy supporting Sun Yat-Sen and his Kuomintang, Duan later alienated them by refusing to institute public elections when he took full power following Yuan Shikai’s death in 1920 - supported by his own Anhui Clique - and by 1923 he was ready to launch a series of offensives in the Chinese Civil War against both the Kuomintang ‘National Government’ in the South, and against the warlord states in the west. Following the death of Sun Yat-Sen and the collapse of the Kuomintang forces during Duan's "Southern Campaign", the Beiyang Army defeated the so-called ‘Ma Clique’ in Western China, and then restored control in Xinjiang to finally end the Chinese Civil War in 1927 – with only Japanese-ruled Formosa and Manchukuo remaining outside of Chinese rule; and Duan had since rectified the latter.
With China now unified under Duan’s authority and the institutional failures of the Qing Era eliminated, it had also been rapidly industrialising and had become recognised as a Great Power of the world (at the expense of the declining Kingdom of Italy). Despite this however, China remained without any allies on the global stage – as the outside world had watched the chaos of the Civil War and preferred to instead deal with the Japanese, prior to the Revolution there. Tensions between China and the British Empire were high over British meddling in Tibet and rule in the former Chinese lands of Yunnan, but tensions with Russia were also high over Russian control of former Qing lands in Outer Manchuria and Mongolia. It was these latter tensions that had drawn the attention of Mustafa Kemal, and in August 1929 (even as the Ottoman mutinies took place), the Grand Vizier had travelled to Beijing to meet with Duan Qirui. The two leaders got on well with Duan keen to receive Western Recognition and bolster China's Great Power Credentials; and on August 10th the great triumph of Mustafa’s Foreign Policy was therefore signed: The Sino-Ottoman Alliance. Any future Russian aggression against the Porte would now have a far more serious problem on its hands in the East…
The signing of the Sino-Ottoman Alliance (August 10th 1929)
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Chapter Fifty-Five: The Ottoman Golden Age (1930-1934)
The signing of the Sino-Ottoman Alliance was a huge triumph for Mustafa Kemal Pasha on the international stage, but domestically it did not resolve the ongoing turmoil that the Empire had experienced during 1929. The Great African Rebellion in Ethiopia may have been distant and of little relevance to the majority of people in the Ottoman heartlands; but the Ottoman mutinies had damaged the Grand Vizier far more in the eyes of the people than first realised. The fact that Mustafa Kemal had been out of the country in China at the time meant that the crisis had been handled by Deputy Vizier & Defence Minister Rauf Bey, and his firm stance against the mutineers had gained him much respect and popularity. So when the country went to the polls for the 1930 Ottoman Election on January 3rd, Rauf Bey’s Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi found itself soaring in the polls.
Deputy Vizier and Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi Leader Rauf Bey led the Porte's reaction to the 1929 Mutinies
Meanwhile the socialist Osmanli Ahali Firkasi (Ottoman People’s Party) had, since its return to opposition, been championing a program of comprehensive land reform under their new leader Mustafa Ismet Pasha. The socialists had veered away from their more heavy-handed Marxist ideals during their stint in government; instead embracing more Social Democratic positions on a mixed economy and a slower build toward socialism. Whilst Mustafa Ismet had not rejected these ideals, the Osmanli Ahali Firkasi were promising a much more significant program of the nationalisation of private property and the targeting of wealthy landowners than in the recent past – as he believed that Mustafa Kemal had been making the “welfare state” as much of a liberal achievement as it was socialist, and therefore the working class needed to be won back to the socialist project.
Elsewhere in the opposition, the mutinies had received a mixed reaction. Whilst naturally decried by the communists, and by the libertarians under Nurettin Ferruh Bey, the conservatives had been slower to denounce the mutineers. This proved to be the final death knell in conservative leader Ali Riza Pasha’s political career, as polls suggested his slow reaction had been abhorred by the general public. He was pushed aside within the Osmanli Demokrat Firkasi and replaced by the young Kazim Pasha, a former friend of Mustafa Kemal from their military days – although given the fact the election campaign was already underway, there was little chance for Kazim Pasha to rescue the conservatives.
The Young Turks, on the other hand, had openly supported the mutineers during the initial coup attempt; and while they later distanced themselves from this, they did so only very reluctantly. Enver Pasha then used the trials of the leading mutineers to call for leniency, and position the Young Turks as the party of the conscripted people (despite the Young Turks actually supporting mandatory military service). While the Ottoman military had been a bastion of liberalism for many years now, the mutinies had revealed an undercurrent of tension amongst draftees in particular, and some had been tempted over to the Young Turk position. The reduction in the duration of National Service had calmed some of these tensions, but the Young Turks were confident these views would help them seize control of the disparate Ottoman Right.
The results of the 1930 Ottoman Election (January 3rd 1930)
As the election results came in, this proved correct – to a point. The Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Committee of Union and Progress) had indeed secured their position as the largest party of the Ottoman Right by a clear margin over their conservative and ultra-religious rivals, but the much hoped for big electoral breakthrough continued to elude them. They gained 19 seats for a total of 51 of the 850 available, including gains in a significant number of cities with military barracks nearby (including the capital). But the mere fact that 51 seats was enough to dominate the Right showed just how desperate the electoral situation had become for the once-dominant Conservatives. The Osmanli Demokrat Firkasi achieved yet another nadir, worse than ever before: Losing 12 more seats to hold just 13. Even more embarrassingly, this dropped them below the Ultra-Religious Teceddüt Firkasi (Renewal Party), who had managed to gain 8 seats for a total of 15 – despite them being the only major party to still call for a return to the Millet System (a stance which had, interestingly, actually seen them pick up a constituency in Palestine that had a disproportionately high representation of Haredi Jews).
The big news from the election though was the heavy losses suffered by the ruling liberal Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi (Freedom and Accord Party), who scored their worst results since the 1895 elections: Back before the liberals had won a single election. Though they remained the largest party, their tally of 258 seats was a net-loss of 115, as Mustafa Kemal’s absence during the mutinies hit the party hard. On the flip side, Rauf Bey’s huge personal popularity saw the Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi make massive gains to get their best ever result, with an impressive 66 seats gained for a total of 237 – which also saw them become the second largest party for the first time. The socialists, despite their radical plans for land reform, only managed to gain 17 seats for a total of 213 – which many saw as an opportunity missed when it came to leading a government for the first time.
Elsewhere the libertarian Ahrar Firkasi (Freedom Party) saw their best result since the halcyon days of Hilmi Pasha’s three-party coalitions – picking up 15 seats for a total of 58. Nurettin Ferruh Bey had firmly opposed the mutineers the previous year and abhorred the political opportunism of the militant Young Turk movement, but the party platform of abolishing the draft entirely had naturally appealed to some of the mutineer sympathisers regardless. The communists also gained another couple of seats to increase their total to 5 – but they remained a forgotten fringe of Ottoman electoral politics.
The outcome of the election left many potential options for a government on the table – with the near-tie between the leading three parties seeing serious discussions about a government being formed between Rauf Bey’s Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi and Mustafa Ismet’s socialists. In the end they could not agree on the proposals for land reform, and Mustafa Kemal was able to once more form a government with the support of Rauf Bey. The Sosyal Demokrat made serious gains in the Cabinet however: taking the Welfare Ministry for the first time to add to the Health, Defence, Pensions, and Naval ministries they already held; as well as adding the Transport brief to hold almost as many positions as the liberals did. Within the ruling liberal party, Mustafa Kemal Pasha was able to withstand a leadership challenge and maintain his grip on the Grand Vizierdom – but his authority had been weakened significantly – something which would later come to haunt him.
"The Fall of the Eagle" saw the ending of democracy in the United States of America in a bloody coup d'etat (October 5th 1929)
In the short term however, the new government had one chief foreign policy concern to deal with: The return of the American Question. Republican President Hoover had ended the Second Mexican-American War with the ceding of the states of Nevada and Utah soon after his inauguration in January 1929, but the American streets had remained teeming with mass unrest throughout the year. American industry was constantly paralysed by general strikes organised by the narrowly defeated Socialist Party, who had hoped to return to power for the first time since the end of the Second Great War. The Democratic Party meanwhile had been infuriated by President Hoover’s apportioning of the calamitous war defeat entirely on them, and they were also bitterly opposed to the President as a result.
Matters then came to a head in America during a two week strike at the end of September 1929, when a two week strike saw the Socialist Party openly ally with the American Communist Party in a frenzy of riots, rebellion, and unrest across the East Coast of America. Aghast at the gains being made by the communist party and fearing a potential workers revolution, recently promoted American Chief of Staff of the Army Douglas MacArthur – in alignment with a group of Southern Democrats – launched a coup d’etat on October 5th 1929. The bitterly divided Congress was dissolved; and President Hoover was arrested in the White House and charged with treason. In his place came Southern Democratic Senator Theodore G. Bilbo, who was sworn in as President on a live radio address later that week.
President Bilbo gave the coup a legitimate democratic (and Democratic) face, and despite the declaration of martial law and the suspension of the Constitution being extremely illegal; anyone who opposed it was swiftly arrested. The Communist, Socialist, and Republican Parties were all banned; while the Democratic Party was purged of all who opposed Bilbo and his openly racist & segregationist cabal. The strikes and rebellions were then put down with extreme force across the country as the new dictatorship took hold. Fears that the new government may even permit a return of Slavery were unrealised however; with the army for now opposing any attempts to bring back that institution. Regardless though; Afro-Americans became heavily persecuted once more, as groups like the Ku Klax Klan were openly courted and recognised by the new Presidency – and public lynchings of blacks were not uncommon as a result.
President Theodore G. Bilbo was installed in the aftermath of the coup that overthrew Herbert H. Hoover
This extreme right wing government in America shocked the world; with the vast majority of Europe being led by liberal regimes ideologically opposed to this new Dictatorship – whether it technically be Reactionary or Fascist in nature. Mustafa Kemal Pasha had, like many other heads of state and of government in Europe, broken ties with the new American government as a result. This was a costly affair though; with American industry remaining one of the Four Titans of the global economy – and whilst official ties remained extremely unfriendly; once it became clear that the American dictatorship was here to stay, trade was slowly resumed over the coming months. Whispers of potential secession by Northern states horrified by the turn of events were often fanned by other Great Powers during this period however; not least by the Kingdom of France and their allies in the Kingdom of Canada.
The Fall of America aside however, the early 1930s were a positive period for the Sublime Porte. The 1929 Mutinies were not repeated despite the Young Turks continuing to spread their Soup Kitchens across the Empire, and the Sosyal Demokrat’s used their new control of the Transport Ministry to greatly expand the public railways across the Ottoman Empire. The more left-wing slant of the new government was also illustrated by the institution of tighter Pollution Controls in 1931, soon after an expansion of the government Arts Endowment. Furthermore when an archaeological dig in the Ethiopian vilayet of Hararghe uncovered a significant find of paleolithic artefacts, the government intervened to prevent the Istanbul Museum of History from removing them and taking them to the capital; and instead saw them placed in a local museum – with both ruling parties keen to placate the Ethiopians after the rebellion of 1928.
An increase to the Arts Endowment and tighter pollution standards are instituted by the Sublime Porte in 1931
The Ottoman public railways saw significant expansion via government funding in the early 1930s
The Ethiopian Museum of History greatly expanded its collection on the back of successful Ottoman excavations in 1931
Then on January 6th 1931, the elderly Sultan Mehmed VI passed away. The last surviving son of the former sultan Abdulmejid ‘the Great’, Mehmed’s 11 year rule had restored stability to the Topkapi Palace – whilst also seeing the final erosion of its powers when the abolition of the Millet System had seen the political functions of the Caliphate abolished. Had Mehmed opposed Mustafa Kemal Pasha during that process, the secularisation process would have no-doubt been a much more fraught period of Ottoman politics – but his quiet acceptance had won him much respect across the political spectrum. Mehmed was succeeded by the 63 year old Abdulmejid II, a son of the former Sultan Abdulaziz known for his love of the arts. This succession; combined with the new Sultan's first grandson being born in August 1931, also saw the opportunity for the Sublime Porte to abolish the seniority succession that had put it so out-of-kilter with the rest of the European monarchies; as primogeniture succession was instituted in the Ottoman Empire for the first time - a sensible and widely welcomed change given the increasingly large royal family that had built up in recent decades.
Sultan Abdulmejid II succeeds Mehmed VI to the throne of the Topkapi Palace (January 6th 1931)
The birth of Sultan Abdulmejid II's first grandson triggered a change in royal inheritance law in the Ottoman Empire (August 17th 1931)
Discoveries in the Valley of the Kings preceded a much bigger archaeological success for the Porte (April 12th 1932)
Meanwhile the archaeological successes were continued in 1932, as the discovery of a hidden chamber in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt in April filled with ancient artefacts saw much celebration in the capital; and these were indeed removed to the capital. This success foreshadowed an even greater one however. The ancient ruins of Babylon had seen ongoing excavations in Mesopotamia for some time, and on October 23rd 1932 a startling and historic discovery was made: The biblical Tower of Babel was discovered. Once believed to have been nothing more than a fable, the ruins of a gigantic building seemed to provide clear evidence that the story was rooted in truth. An exhibition was quickly arranged which invited all the Great Powers of the world (aside from the Americans), as this great triumph of Ottoman archaeology was celebrated.
Ottoman archaeologists make an astounding discovery of the potential ruins of the Tower of Babel (October 23rd 1932)
The world is invited to an exhibition on the discovery of the Tower of Babel
The headline figures of the 1933 Ottoman Census
These archaeological discoveries only added to the cultural pre-eminence of the Empire, and the early 1930s are often seen as a golden age in Ottoman history as a result. The further successful expansion of the National Arts program, along with the first institution of Unemployment Subsidies to help the jobless get by in life only increased the general standards of living – particularly in the capital. The 1933 Ottoman Census also once again illustrated the multicultural makeup of the Empire, despite the proportion of ethnic Turks having somewhat increased to 30.1% of the 25.83M households following a baby boom in the years since the Third Great War – while it also showcased the much increased literacy rate, which had hit an impressive 93.7%. And even a minor international crisis in the Matabele in Austro-Hungarian Africa, where German attempts to support their independence saw a strange collaboration between colonial powers where the Sublime Porte gave official backing to the Habsburg position, along with support from the British and Russian governments, failed to break the international peace as the Germans quickly backed down. Of course, no golden age can last forever, and the domestic bliss was soon to be ruptured. But for the first four years at least; the 1930s were among the very best the Sublime Porte had ever presided over.
Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire experience a true Golden Age in the early 1930s
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Chapter Fifty-Six: Scandal and Conflict (1934-1937)
Sedad Hakkim Bey became one of the first modern 'celebrities' in the Ottoman Empire in 1934
Even as the Ottoman Empire had enjoyed its period of cultural bliss and rapidly increasing standards of living in the early 1930s, the seeds for its later troubles had been being sewn. And yet as 1934 began, absolutely none of this was apparent to the world, and the Porte was continuing to bask in the success of its archaeological excavations in Ethiopia, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. Sedad Hakkim Bey, the leading archaeologist on the Tower of Babel excavation project, had achieved worldwide renown for his work, and with the Propaganda Ministry keen to cash in, Hakkim Bey soon became one of the first ‘celebrities’ in Ottoman history – with his weekly talks on Ottoman radio fascinating the nation, and the Ottoman press following him everywhere he went. Archaeology was all the rage in 1934, and it would take something dramatic to seize its mantle as the main news story. Of course, eventually that story would appear.
Sedad Hakkim Bey begins his weekly radio show that further catapults him into his position of global fame
Whilst not apparent at the time, Grand Vizier Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s humbling in the 1930 election had caused two long-term effects which together culminated in a severe shock for the Sublime Porte, political upheaval in the Ottoman Empire, and an international incident with tragic consequences. The first, and the more immediately noticeable, was that Mustafa Kemal himself had turned to alcohol more than ever as a clutch to his low moods. He had always been fond of a drink – and perhaps always a bit too much so – but after the 1930 election this had become an almost nightly occurrence. For the most part this was hidden from public view, but he became somewhat notorious in Cabinet for it, and this only helped to further erode his political authority. While the political situation was calm, no one was willing to rock the boat over it. But when the storm came, the Grand Vizier was not in the shape to respond that he once had been.
And yet still as the campaigning season for the 1934 Ottoman election had got underway, there was no sign of what was to come. Yes, Kazim Pasha’s leadership had seen the conservative Osmanli Demokrat Firkasi restored to something of a fighting force instead of the political joke it had become after its 1930 horror show. And yes, socialist leader Mustafa Ismet Pasha’s leadership of the opposition had won him much respect whilst successfully bringing the question of land reform to the forefront of Ottoman politics – so much so that Deputy Vizier & Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi leader Rauf Bey had shown signs of backing it himself – But the ruling Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi were nonetheless expected to coast to another comfortable electoral victory in 1934. Why rock the boat during a period of such prosperity? Until, of course, the Census Affair broke.
Talaat Pasha, friend and loyalist of Murat Pasha, triggered national notoriety during the Census Affair
Murat Pasha had once been the chosen heir of former Grand Vizier Pertev Pasha. A military general with an exemplary reputation forged in the Third Great War, Pertev had chosen him to lead the Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi when he planned to stand down. Murat’s lacklustre oratory performances and dull personality failed to connect with the public however, and poor results in the 1921 elections saw Mustafa Kemal Pasha snatch his chance at the top job. Murat had thereafter been relegated to a series of minor Cabinet roles and then the parliamentary backbenches, and was due to retire from politics entirely at the age of 68 in 1934. He had however always maintained a loyal cadre within the ruling party, and when Mustafa Kemal Pasha had been briefly threatened as leader after the 1930 election, Murat had been one of the suggested candidates who could have stepped in to steady the ship. This had eventually fizzled out as Mustafa Kemal clung on, but Murat's restoration to public attention did see his allies take over a number of minor committee positions – including the ministry in charge of the Ottoman Census.
Whether Murat himself was involved in what followed is a matter of historical debate, but in May 1934 an investigation by a leading Ottoman newspaper uncovered a trail of corruption relating to census data being misused to buy votes with government funds. The reports quickly led to the arrest of Talaat Pasha, the Murat loyalist in charge of the Census office, but further damaging reports linking ruling liberal party members to smuggling operations – including historical artefacts from the booming archaeological industry – led to a series of extremely damaging headlines throughout May and June of 1934. Other arrests followed, and the result was that Deputy Vizier Rauf Bey publicly broke with Mustafa Kemal Pasha and took his Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi out of the ruling coalition, decrying the Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi as corrupt and publicly stating that the Grand Vizier was too drunk to notice what was going on in his own party.
The Census Affair is brought to national attention, severely damaging the reputation of the ruling party (May 12th 1934)
Had Mustafa Kemal Pasha not lost so much authority after 1930, perhaps the stain of corruption would never have seeped into his party. Equally, had Murat Pasha kept a closer eye on his associates, maybe he too could have prevented what occurred. But with both of the biggest names in the party being torn to shreds by the media in the month leading up to the 1934 election, the results were as predictable as they were devastating for the liberals. The Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi had been the leading party of government for 34 straight years since the 1900 election that had broken the previous conservative dominance of Ottoman politics. For many younger people, the Freedom and Accord Party was the only ruling party they had ever known, and the modern democracy in the Ottoman Empire was intrinsically tied to them. But the Census Affair had destroyed trust in them, and when the country went to the polls, the ruling party was on the brink of disaster.
The results of the 1934 Ottoman election (July 1st 1934)
As it turned out, that residual respect kept them from total annihilation on Election Day. The Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi still won a respectable 216 seats from the available 850; a loss of just 42, and enough to make them the joint second largest party. However, as the months after the election wore on and further allegations continued to come to light, this would actually prove the fact that the election came so soon after the Census Affair breaking was an advantage for them. And by the time the further allegations broke, the liberals were out of the Sublime Porte.
The big winners of the election were Rauf Bey’s Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi. His decision to turn on his coalition partners and seize control of the narrative against them stole the thunder from the opposition socialists and saw the Social Liberals make a significant gain of 27 seats for a total of 264; leaving them clearly the largest party. The socialist Osmanli Ahali Firkasi (Ottoman People’s Party) on the other hand had a disappointing election and gained just 3 seats for 216; equal second with the liberals. This disappointment was however tempered by the sweetness of a return to government: Rauf Bey’s burning of bridges with the liberals had made the socialists the only plausible coalition partner. Mustafa Ismet Pasha was able to take the Deputy Vizier position, and the socialists also found themselves in control of the Interior Ministry, the Housing Ministry, and both the Air and the Transport briefs. Rauf Bey also agreed to many of Mustafa Ismet’s land reform proposals as part of the coalition negotiations; and an agreement was soon signed between the two parties to form a government.
Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi leader Rauf Bey becomes the first social liberal Grand Vizier (July 3rd 1934)
Elsewhere in the opposition, the conservative Osmanli Demokrat Firkasi made significant gains of 33 seats for a total of 46: Their best result since the 1921 election, though still a long way short of their former dominance. They also failed to take the mantle of the largest party of the right from Young Turk affiliated Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, who gained 9 seats for a total of 60 – another new record. The other big losers however were the libertarian Ahrar Firkasi (Freedom Party); which suffered greatly following the retirement of their popular and well-known leader Nurettin Ferruh Bey and failed to find a replacement with any recognition whatsoever. Their return of just 5 seats was a loss of 53 and saw them sink from fourth largest party in the Ottoman parliament down to the smallest of all represented parties.
The Islamist Teceddüt Firkasi (Renewal Party) also gained a single seat in the vilayet of Sudd in the Sudan (a full voting vilayet for the first time) for a total of 16, but the other big story was the long-feared (or long-awaited, depending your view) electoral breakthrough of the communist Ihtilalci Avam Firkasi (Revolutionary Commoners Party), who gained 22 seats for a total of 27: Their best ever results by some margin. The fact that the communists and the fascists had both scored record results was met with dismay by many moderates, but given the damaging allegations that had come to light it also surprised very few. The quick formation of the new government ensured both radical fringes were kept very much in the opposition; but the communist breakthrough also ensured that the new government would face challenging opposition from both flanks – and indeed much stronger opposition than was provided by the Hürriyet ve Itilâf Firkasi, which fell into a period of infighting and factional civil war following the resignation of Mustafa Kemal Pasha.
Mustafa Kemal Pasha's thirteen year tenure as Grand Vizier steered the Porte through a period of great change
Mustafa Kemal had been the longest serving Grand Vizier for centuries; and his achievements in abolishing the Millet System had reshaped the very foundations of the Ottoman state; but his premiership had ended under a cloud, and his legacy was damaged as a result – whilst still highly respected, he would not achieve the universal acclaim of his predecessor Pertev Pasha – something he may have managed to match had he stood down after the 1930 election. Mustafa Kemal was also in poor health by 1934, and while he retired to write his memoirs, he would not live to see the end of the decade – though he would live long enough to see the great era of peace he had presided over end, and the unleashing of the dogs of war once more.
As it was, newly promoted Grand Vizier Rauf Bey had fully intended to steer a foreign policy course which was uncontroversial and followed the same course as Mustafa Kemal had. The alliance with the Kingdom of France would remain the bedrock of Ottoman foreign policy; and while the alliance with China had undergone some challenges following the death of President Duan Qirui and his replacement by Chiang Kai-Shek of the Kuomintang Faction, it too remained strong. The socialists were heavily opposed to foreign adventuring in general, and it was anticipated that the new government would be focused entirely on domestic matters. Land reform was of course high on the agenda; although the most immediate legislation saw a tightening of Health and Safety regulations and a further expansion of the National Arts Endowment. But as 1935 approached, Mustafa Ismet Pasha’s land reform proposals were finally greenlit by Rauf Bey, and the program thus began.
Health and Safety Regulations are tightened swiftly after the new government takes power (July 23rd 1934)
The National Arts Endowment receives further expansion (July 22nd 1935)
The Land Reform program of Mustafa Ismet Pasha saw the Ottoman state take up huge swathes of private land; and by the end of 1935 almost 80% of land in the Empire was directly owned by the state. The great landowners of the aristocracy found their lands increasingly taken over by the nationalisations; though the Interior Ministry generally allowed former landowners to remain as tenants on low rents, and they resisted the policies of collectivisation touted by the communists. The massive expansion of state land most notably helped usher in a period of huge housing expansion; as families who were previously crowded together with multiple generations under the same roof were now able to move into their own properties under the social housing policy. Though they did not own the properties, the rents required by the state were far below the market average and helped ensure that the social housing was occupied not only by the working class but also by large portions of the middle classes too; avoiding the stigma that the previous forms of Social Housing had often carried. Economically, the new government took a much more interventionist approach than the laissez-faire approach touted by the liberals; with key military industries often receiving subsidies when going through difficult spells, and state funds also being used to expand fledgling industries with perceived high potential.
Unfortunately for the new government; the period of peace that had followed the end of the Third Great War was soon to end. While the Porte had fought in some minor engagements since then in Iraq and Africa; the Ottoman Empire had not been involved in a major conflict with another Great Power for almost 20 years prior to the Bushire Incident. The Sublime Porte had been pleased to see other social liberal parties win the elections in both Russia and Persia in recent years, and hopes of a general détente with the old enemies were shared by all three governments. So when the Ottoman military steamer the SS Istanbul exploded in Bushire Harbour in Persia on June 7th 1936, the Sublime Porte was initially slow to react while a military investigation took place.
The explosion and sinking of the SS Istanbul in Bushire Harbour triggers an international incident (June 7th 1936)
The Ottoman press, on the other hand, was quick to denounce the Persian government as having sabotaged the vessel in an act of blatant aggression. By the time the military investigation had concluded that an overheated boiler was most likely to blame, the damage was already done. The Ottoman populace; stirred up first by the press and then even more so by the Young Turks, was soon baying for blood. The conservatives and the liberals also capitalised on the crisis by pouring doubt on the official explanation, and by July the Sublime Porte was forced to bow to the opposition and issue a demand to the Persian government to allow an Ottoman investigation team with authority to interview any Persian citizen it deemed necessary entrance into Persia. The Persian government, backed by the Russians, refused to accept this insult to their sovereignty, and anti-Ottoman articles soon began to appear in the Persian and Russian presses too. As 1936 wore on, numerous border incidents occurred on both the Ottoman-Russian borders and on the Ottoman-Persian border too.
Whilst the Sublime Porte had initially sought a peaceful escape from the conflict, the ruling Sosyal Demokrat Firkasi were increasingly incensed by the Persian responses and provocations – so much so that by the start of 1937 the Grand Vizier himself was now in favour of war. The only thing preventing him was the opposition of his socialist coalition partners; but following a campaign of factory sabotage across the Empire that the factory owners had initially blamed upon militant socialist trade unionists, the socialists began to suspect that the Russians may be behind these, too. Worried that this would only drive workers who were blamed unfairly into the arms of the communists, the socialists began to signal that they too would accept a war. Rauf Bey signalled the Ottoman high command to begin preparations for war, and following further border incidents in the spring of 1937 he issued an ultimatum to the Persian government: Either they accepted the Ottoman investigation proposal within 24 hours, or the Sublime Porte would have no choice but to declare war. The 24 hour deadline came and passed without reply. War was upon us once again.
The Persian refusal of the Ottoman ultimatum forces the Sublime Porte to declare war (May 14th 1937)
The war which broke out upon on the Sublime Porte’s declaration of war on May 14th 1937 has a number of names by which it is known. The Bushire War, The Russo-Perso-Ottoman War, and The Caucasian War are just some of those by which it has been called. What it was not, however, was a Fourth Great War. While by no means a minor conflict, with much devastation meted out by the belligerent nations, it was definitely not a global conflict – The fighting took place entirely in Eurasia – and the Russian Empire was the only Great Power on the opposing side, where they were supported by the Persian Empire, the fascist Sikh nation of Khalistan, and the Indian nation of Sindh. The Ottoman Empire was in turn supported by its allies in the Kingdom of France, the Kingdom of Belgium, the Republic of South Africa, the Sultanate of Atjeh, the Dominican Republic, the Empire of Brazil, the Republic of China, and of course, the Principality of Romania.
The Ottomans were not however supported by the Republic of Japan, which blamed the Porte for the war and broke its alliance with us to declare official neutrality. Relations between Constantinople and Tokyo had in fact been cooling for a number of years since the signing of the Sino-Ottoman Alliance however, and the Japanese decision neither surprised nor deterred Grand Vizier Rauf Bey. The Grand Vizier had used the past year of preparations well, ensuring that our armies were positioned to take the war to our foes immediately, as well as make use of the huge technological advances that had taken place since the Third Great War. As such, the Caucasian War was defined neither by the Trench Warfare and desert skirmishing that characterised much of the First Great War, nor by the creeping artillery barrages that had characterised our victories over Russia in the Third Great War.
The aluminium monoplane had revolutionised air warfare by the late 1930s
Instead, the Caucasian War was a war of movement, of motorisation, and above all else: A war in the skies. The aeroplane had taken part in previous wars, but the 1930s had seen the development of new aluminium monoplanes to replace the wooden biplanes of the first generations of fighter planes, which provided greater velocity and had larger fuel tanks for much higher ranges. This had also led to the development of specialist bomber aircraft which were capable of inflicting massive damage upon ground industry. The Ottoman Air Force was primarily made up of Basak Savasci fighter planes, Basak Sahin divebombers for close air support, and the Kartal bomber plane. These formed the backbone of the allied Air Forces in the Caucasian War, although the French Dewoitine D.510 fighters and Amiot 143 bombers were also in common use with the French utilising Ottoman air bases to support the French Expeditionary Force.
The other great military invention of the past two decades had been the tank. First envisioned during the First Great War, they were too slow to be developed to take part in that, and had only appeared in combat in small numbers in the late 1910s when they had primarily been used as a form of mobile artillery or a way to cross enemy trenches. By the 1930s however advances in automotive technology had led to the development of full armoured divisions in the Ottoman army, utilising the new Sipahi tank. The Ottoman 4th Army and 8th Army had in fact transitioned entirely to the new technologies by the time of the outbreak of the war, with both of them consisting solely of Motorised Guards Infantry, Armoured Tank, and Close Air Support divisions in order to maximise their mobility and utilise a new theoretical military doctrine that had been developed in France known as La Guerre éclair, or the "lightning war" – where armoured units would achieve breakthroughs and then rapidly encircle and destroy enemy armies – though this doctrine had yet to be tested in a real war. The Ottoman 11th Army was also in the process of being raised and equipped at the outbreak of the war, and would likewise be fully armoured with air support; although every Ottoman army had some armoured and air divisions attached.
Upon the outbreak of the war, the Ottoman army had both the 1st Army and also Ferid Pasha’s 7th Army in Romania and Dobrudja ready to invade Bessarabia, with Namik Pasha’s 5th Army in reserve in Europe, which were all under the overall command of 1st Army General Celaleddin Bey. In the Caucasus, Omar Pasha’s 4th Army was aiming to use its armoured formations to inflict devastation upon the Russian and Persian forces in the plains of Azerbaijan; much like had been achieved during the Third Great War. Halil Bey’s more traditional 9th Army was meanwhile planning to fight in the mountains themselves before an invasion of Circassia could begin. Meanwhile the armoured 8th Army under Sabaheddin Bey would be focused on crossing the mountains into Persia and then destroying the Persian forces on the Persian Central Plateau, and the 6th Army under Cevad Bey would be leading the fighting in Southern Persia, with Lutfi Bey’s colonial 2nd Army acting as a general reserve in Mesopotamia. The 11th Army under Suleyman Bey was in the process of completing its formation and would then be sent to whichever front required it most; while the 2nd and 10th Armies remained on garrison duty in Africa. All Ottoman forces were primed to invade, and attacked immediately upon the declaration of war.
The Ottomans enjoyed early success after the declaration of war despite heavy casualties being suffered at the First Battle of Izmail (May 1937)
The Russians, even with the ultimatum providing them with at least a day’s notice, were caught by surprise by such a swift Ottoman attack, and in Bessarabia a Russian corps under Valery Denikin was obliterated immediately by the 1st Army at Balti. At Izmail however, Russian General Vasily Kuropatkin, with the benefit of significant air support, was able to put up fierce resistance and inflict huge casualties upon Ferid Pasha’s 7th Army despite his eventual forced retreat. The 7th Army was therefore brought to the rear for refitting and recovery with Namik Pasha’s 5th Army being brought up to replace it in the frontlines. The heavy casualties suffered by the 7th Army in the opening battles did therefore force the Sublime Porte to delay the planned invasion of the Ukraine and instead move to a defensive position on the Bessarabian Front in June 1937, with much of the focus being on the ongoing battle for air supremacy; where the Ottoman air force was inflicting heavy damage on its Russian counterparts.
Meanwhile in the Caucasian Theatre, Omar Pasha’s 4th Army had begun with an attack on an unprepared Russian army at Derbent; and while his tanks took heavy casualties in the mountainous terrain he was still able to force the Russians back. With the opening salvos having seen a string of Russian defeats, Grand Vizier Rauf Bey quickly moved to announce plans to seize the Persian region of Luristan in addition to Bushire. In fact, summer 1937 eventually gave way to a series of massive Ottoman victories, with quickfire successes coming at Novorossiysk and Ekaterinodar in the Caucasian Theatre and leading to plans for a much larger scale invasion of Circassia to be drawn up. The extremely outdated Persian navy was also destroyed by the Ottoman Indian Ocean Fleet in the Persian Gulf on June 2nd 1937, with the Ottomans not even requiring dreadnoughts to defeat the predominantly ironclad Persian fleet. This was followed up by Cevad Bey’s 6th Army defeating the Persian forces at the Battle of Dezful in the Zagros Mountains on June 20th, and the invasion of Persia was consequently able to begin in earnest.
The Persian Navy is obliterated by the Ottoman Indian Ocean Fleet (June 2nd 1937)
The Bessarabian and Caucasian Fronts at the time of the arrival of the Belgian Expeditionary Force in summer 1937
The Russians appeared to have focused the vast majority of their forces on the Bessarabian Front, and therefore were able to begin an invasion of Romania, while they remained on the defensive in the other theatres. Russian armies were faring extremely poorly in battle in Romania though; and after one corps was annihilated at Iasi and another Russian army driven back by combined Ottoman & Romanian forces at Chisinau, the Bessarabian Front began to return to the picture envisioned by the original Ottoman battle plan. The arrival of the Belgian Expeditionary Force in late June also helped to rectify the numerical balance in the Theatre, with the French Expeditionary Force being sent to the Caucasian Front. An attempted Persian invasion of Arabia was then defeated by Lutfi Bey’s 2nd Army in the Battle of Dubai at the end of June, and the 2nd Army thereafter counter-attacked across the Strait of Hormuz to begin an invasion of Persian Balochistan.
July saw another string of Ottoman victories as the military juggernaut really kicked into gear; with Russian forces being all but obliterated at Galati and Braila, and an entire Persian army surrendering to Cevad Bey at the Battle of Isfahan. By the end of the month a further Russian army had been destroyed when Kuropatkin was defeated at the second battle of Iasi, and a retreating Russian army under Denikin had also been surrounded and obliterated at Cernauti. This left only one Russian army in Romania; and Namik Pasha’s 5th Army drove back that last Russian force under Lev Golivin at Botosani on August 4th 1937 to end the Russian invasion once and for all. This led to such a feeling of confidence in the Sublime Porte that Grand Vizier Rauf Bey made another intervention; this time staking an Ottoman claim to the entire Russian region of North Caucasia.
The Russians are driven completely out of Romania following the Ottoman victory at the Battle of Botosani (August 1937)
Ottoman public support may not have been wholeheartedly behind the war at the start; but the massive success enjoyed during the summer of 1937 certainly ensured that the public was swelling as time went on. The battle in the air had been decisively won by the Ottoman Air Force in the first month; with Russian planes in Bessarabia and Ukraine destroyed on the ground in many cases, and the Ottoman air force now began a strategic bombing campaign aiming at Russian industrial centres in Crimea, Kiev, and the Donbass region; where the Russian air force was suffering a huge shortage of trained pilots after the initial battles. Russian tanks had performed better than the airforce, with their main medium tank – the Tsar Tank 24 – capable of inflicting significant damage in an equal fight against our slightly less powerful but faster and more numerous Sipahi’s. The Russian tanks were however often being deployed in much smaller units and therefore were unable to change the course of the war despite their occasional localised successes - A clear error in the Russian battle plan that the Sublime Porte was doing an excellent job of capitalising on.
And so, with the remnants of the Russian invasion force continuing to be mopped up in Bessarabia in August, confidence was therefore growing that the war would soon end in a decisive Ottoman victory. The Persian army had all but collapsed in the opening two months; and with the Russians retreating on all fronts, it seemed a matter of time until Moscow capitulated. That is; until a Russian counter-offensive led by the talented general Yedor Yudenich attacked Halil Bey’s 9th Army at Novorossiysk in September 1937. For the first time in the war, Russian tanks had been massed together in a large force; and they inflicted a crushing defeat on the numerically superior Ottoman forces. The Battle of Novorossiysk clearly illustrated the tactical error that the Russians had made by not concentrating their armoured forces sooner, and they certainly learnt their belated lesson. Two weeks later, the Russians inflicted further extremely heavy casualties at Izmail on the Bessarabian Front where they again utilised their new tactics, although they were forced to withdraw due to being massively outnumbered. The question now was whether the new Russian doctrine would be enough to make a decisive swing in the momentum of the war.
Russian tanks in action at the Battle of Novorossiysk (August 1937)
The largest tank battle in history ended in a significant Russian victory at Novorossiysk (September 1937)
Ottoman forces suffer very heavy losses despite breaking through at the Second Battle of Izmail (September 1937)
As it turned out, the answer was a qualified no. Through Autumn 1937, the Russians were continually driven back further on the Bessarabian Front as Ottoman forces crossed the Dnieper and began an invasion of the Ukraine, while their forces were also driven back by French & Ottoman forces in the Caucasus. However, the crushing victories of the opening weeks of the war were now coming at a much higher cost for the Ottoman forces as the Russian tactical shift stiffened their resolve. Fortunately, this belated improvement in Russian military performance had proven far too little too late for their allies. The Persian Army had been almost utterly destroyed after their disastrous defeat at Isfahan in July, and Autumn had seen our troops cross the Zagros Mountains in force and enter an almost undefended Persian homeland. With French troops supporting our rear and mopping up any remaining resistance, the “Lightning War” doctrine was put to brutal use as Cevad Bey’s 6th Army swept through Northern Persia to the capital of Tehran. Token resistance was put up, but Tehran surrendered to the triumphant Cevad on October 22nd 1937.
The Persian Front as Tehran surrenders to Ottoman forces (October 22nd 1937)
Crucial victories over enemy forces are scored on both fronts in November 1937
The Fall of Tehran dealt a crushing blow to the morale of the enemy forces, and the Russian and Indian forces fighting in Europe were inflicted with defeat after defeat through the winter of 1937 as a result. The Sindhi Expeditionary Force was destroyed by Namik Pasha’s 5th Army at the Battle of Balti in November, and after further Russian defeats at Nikolaev and at Tbilisi, the Russian offensive in Georgia was brought to a shuddering halt when General Yudenich’s tank forces were heavily mauled by Halil Bey’s 9th Army at the Battle of Poti later in the month. With this victory the last Russian threat to Ottoman territory withdrew, and the fighting would take place entirely on enemy soil for the rest of the winter, with the Sublime Porte celebrating success after success. Any premature thoughts that the Russians were out for the count by the end of the year were soon shut down though, when news of the chaos in China began filtering through to the rest of the world…
The Chinese Theatre has taken a turn for the worse for the Chinese in January 1938
Chiang Kai-Shek had come to power in China following the death of President Duan Qirui in early 1934, with Chiang’s Kuomintang Faction retaining strong influence there despite the defeat of their military forces whilst under the leadership of Sun Yat-Sen during the early stages of the Warlord Era in China. Duan’s victory in the long civil war had resulted in the destruction and exile or death of most of his rival warlords from within the Beiyang Army, and meant that Chiang’s ascension to power had received little opposition at the time - However, that did not mean that he was especially loved by those in the Chinese military who were suspicious of the Kuomintang’s past support of liberal democracy, and his position had been vulnerable ever since he first took power as a result. This meant that there was already an opposition movement to Chiang forming in China when the Caucasian War had broken out – A movement which was greatly strengthened after an early Chinese offensive into Outer Manchuria met with catastrophic failure at the Battle of Vladivostok in summer 1937. By autumn it was clear the Russian military was vastly outperforming the Chinese forces despite their huge modernisation drives in recent decades, and Chiang’s position therefore began to look more vulnerable as the year went on and the fighting moved onto Chinese soil.
What the Chinese opposition could not necessarily agree on was on who should replace Chiang as leader of China. Nobody wished for a return to the disastrous years of the Warlord Era with different military cliques facing off against one another and renewing the devastation caused by the civil war, so another general seizing power was quickly ruled out. Instead, royalist forces found themselves gaining significant favour from the military as time went by and the military position continued to worsen. The last Qing Emperor, Puyi, had destroyed his reputation during his brief spell as a Japanese puppet emperor in Manchuria before Duan had successfully reannexed the north-eastern province, and though the fact Manchuria was now being invaded by Russian forces could perhaps have earned the Manchu people some sympathy from the rest of China and made a Qing restoration plausible, such a controversial appointment had far too high a risk of backfiring and triggering a period of instability that the army was keen to avoid. The Beiyang generals were also deeply suspicious of Puyi and his family connections with Japan, and so an even more unlikely scenario began to be floated: The restoration of a Han Chinese Emperor for the first time in almost three hundred years.
Zhao Yuxun, the Marquis of Extended Grace and descendant of the Ming Dynasty
There were two plausible candidates for the position: The senior descendant of Confucius, known as the Duke of Yansheng… And the last descendant of the last Ming Emperor, who held the title of the Marquis of Extended Grace. The Marquis’ had continued to diligently offer sacrifices at the graves of their ancestors throughout the Qing era in China, and this had not been interrupted during the revolution and the civil war, with their title never being abolished. In winter 1937 this position was held by the forty-five year old Zhu Yuxun, who was the twelfth holder of the office since the fall of the Ming Dynasty. Although Zhu Yuxun had been educated alongside the exiled and discredited Puyi, he had remained in Beijing during the latter’s Japanese escapade in Manchukuo, and had managed to win himself some high placed friends during the regime of Duan Qirui. And so in December 1937, with Russian forces occupying swathes of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia and occasional air raids taking place over Beijing itself, the royalist uprising began – Declaring a restoration of the Ming Empire and crowning Zhu Yuxun as the 'Hongxian Emperor'.
The royalists rapidly seized control of Beijing and much of Northern China and took President Chiang into custody, but forces loyal to the Kuomintang continued to fight on across much of the South under the leadership of Chiang’s deputy Zhang Qun. Meanwhile the frontline against the Russians completely imploded through spring 1938 as the Russians were able to march unopposed into Xinjiang, Qinghai, and much of Northern & Western China while the battle for supremacy continued throughout China. The very instability that the army had hoped to avoid was coming to pass, even if Chiang himself had lacked the popularity to engender much support in the north, and Zhang Qun even less so. The royalist forces were clearly winning the war, but it was certainly coming at great cost due to the Russian advance.
The Ottoman Spring Offensive in Ukraine and Circassia (Spring 1938)
For the Sublime Porte, the Chinese descent into chaos was an unwelcome stream of bad news, but despite the massive Russian victories in the east, it was not one which could fundamentally change the balance of the war. The Russians had been driven out of Ottoman territory in the winter of 1937, and a desperate Russian attempt to defend the city of Odessa led by General Sergei Badanov was crushed by Namik Pasha’s 5th Army in January 1938, leaving the Bessarabian Front wide open to Ottoman forces by February, as the Porte began planning a huge spring offensive to knock the Russians out of the war. In the Caucasian Theatre too, the Russians found themselves being driven back across the front – With the Ottoman armoured formations in Circassia able to cut the Russian supply lines to the mountains, and the French Expeditionary Forces then rounding the remaining Russians units up and forcing them to surrender. Indeed after a Russian counter-attack was repulsed at Chisinau in early February there were almost no Russian forces left against our troops, and the whole of European Russia appeared open and vulnerable to allied forces...
And so the great Ottoman Spring Offensive of 1938 began with the Porte in an upbeat mood, but even the most optimistic of ministers could not have predicted how it would turn out. Russian resistance was crushed in Ukraine in March 1931 and by the end of the month the city of Rostov on the coast of the Sea of Azov had fallen as lightning warfare came to Southern Russia. Grand Vizier Rauf Bey used the occasion to demand the entirety of Circassia, or the Russian state of Ekaterinodar, be ceded to the Porte in any peace deal – enraging the Russian Duma who had sent out peace feelers in the week before this pronouncement. Were the Russians counting on our forces becoming over-extended and allowing them to counter-attack though then they were soon to find themselves extremely disappointed. City after city fell through April and May as Ottoman forces pushed into regions of Russia they hadn’t reached in centuries – and then regions of Russia they had never reached in history at all. Luhansk, Tambov, Ryazan, Voronets, and Tula fell in quick succession as spring went by. The first warning the Russian people would get would be the buzzing of our aircraft as the Basak Sahin divebombers obliterated what little defences they could muster together on the highways, and almost as soon as the air raids were over, Sipahi tanks would roll in and mop up anything that was left over, before the motorised infantry arrived to secure the area. Lightning Warfare had truly arrived, and the Tsar could muster no response to it.
The Persian Government surrenders to the Sublime Porte (June 10th 1938)
The Russian counter-attack at Novo Uzensk is defeated (June 1938)
The situation was no different in Persia, where the opposition forces had already been all but eliminated by the end of 1937 and where Ottoman and French forces had seized control of almost the entire country by June 1938. When the Persian government had fled to Russia they had initially refused to surrender, hoping that a Russian counter-attack could yet salvage something from the war, and taking heart from the Russian advances into China. This hope would wear away through 1938 as more and more Russian territory fell into Ottoman hands, and the Persians realised that there would be no escape for them this time. On June 10th 1938, with the writing on the wall for the Russian war-effort – let alone the Persian – the Persian government officially surrendered, signing the Treaty of Tehran while surrounded by Ottoman tanks in the Persian capital itself, and ceding the city of Bushire and the western state of Luristan to the Ottoman Empire, as well as giving an official apology for Persian secret service agents causing the explosion at Bushire Harbour that had triggered the conflict in the first place.
Humiliating though the treaty and the circumstances of its signing had been for the Persians, it was nothing compared to what was facing the Russians. The Great Retreat in Russia had continued apace despite the Duma scraping together what remaining forces it could find to try and stop the Ottoman advance. A last desperate counter-attack by the Russian forces was destroyed at the Battle of Novo Uzensk in early June, and on June 20th 1938 the unthinkable happened: The Ottoman Flag was seen flying over the Kremlin, as Omar Pasha’s 4th Army rolled into Moscow almost without opposition. The Tsar and the government had already fled to Petrograd, but the symbolic moment was unmistakeable nonetheless. Thirty years since Russian forces had briefly occupied Constantinople at the end of the catastrophic First Great War, our great foe had been vanquished and vengeance had been achieved. One week later the Russian surrender was officially accepted (Again taking place in Moscow itself), with Tsar Nikolai III and Prime Minister Noe Zhordiana signing the document in the presence of Sultan Abdulmejid II, Grand Vizier Rauf Bey, Deputy Vizier Mustafa Ismet Pasha, and French War Minister Pierre-Etienne Flandin. The Caucasian War had lasted just over thirteen months, and the allied victory was absolute.
Russian defences at the Battle of Moscow (June 1938)
The Fall of Moscow leads to the Russian Surrender (June 20th 1938)
When it came to the spoils, many in the Ottoman Parliament had demanded nothing less than the total dismantling of the Russian Empire, with the Young Turks calling for Ottoman control of the entirety of Central Asia and the final achievement of their Pan-Turkic ideals - Something which had never seemed more plausible than now. Sosyal Demokrat Grand Vizier Rauf Bey was however constrained by his coalition with the socialists, who had always been lukewarm about the prospect of the war and for whom continued fighting to enforce such a harsh peace treaty was a completely unacceptable proposal. With the opposition Liberals also opposed to such a gigantic rewriting of the map, and more importantly the French also signalling an opposition to such a drastic change of borders, a more acceptable peace offer was made. In the end, the Porte demanded only the Russian states of Ekaterinodar and North Caucasia as they had previously announced, along with demanding the total withdrawal of Russian forces from occupied China. Circassia was to be Ottoman for the first time in over a century, since the Treaty of Adrianople at the end of the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-29. Victory was ours.
Circassia is restored to Ottoman rule following the Russian Surrender (June 21st 1938)
The Sublime Porte increases the healthcare budget following our victory in the Caucasian War (June 30th 1938)
The withdrawal of the Russians from China had also cleared the war for the royalist forces to secure complete control of the country and international recognition for the restored Ming Empire swiftly followed - led by the Sublime Porte; as Grand Vizier Rauf Bey was keen to continue and strengthen the Sino-Ottoman Alliance - despite the poor Chinese military performance in the war. Rauf Bey knew that despite the military defeats they had suffered, China had forced the Russians to commit significant numbers to the Far East even as Ottoman forces had approached Moscow, and that without the Chinese sacrifices it would have been many more Ottoman soldiers who would have had to die to make the capture of Moscow and the scale of our victory achievable. Grand Vizier Rauf Bey met with the Hongxian Emperor in Beijing in August 1938 after his coronation to officially renew the friendship between our nations, thanking the Chinese people for their sacrifices in the war and pledging an unprecedented level of Ottoman investment to help China recover from the scars of the war and continue its march toward modernisation. The Emperor himself was very keen to see Ottoman money aid the Chinese recovery after the economic damage inflicted during the Russian occupation and the brief civil war against the Kuomintang Faction, and he was able to strike a strong rapport with the Grand Vizier on a personal level too. Far from the puppet Emperor that the military had initially envisioned, the Hongxian Emperor had quickly gained popularity with the Chinese people at large by dismissing the generals responsible for the poor war effort and instituting a series of laws to increase the size of the Chinese welfare state, with the restored Ming Dynasty centralising power in the bureaucracy in a way that almost suggested the years of revolution had never happened. The Chinese Dragon may have stumbled during this conflict, but its upward trend had surely not been halted.
Meanwhile back in the Empire, the Sublime Porte also passed a new law greatly expanding the Ottoman health service in the aftermath of the war amid jubilations in the street, and 1938 became a year of great celebration across the Empire – With even a brief South German rebellion in Slavonia unable to quell the mood of the populace - or to prevent its swift annihilation by the Ottoman military. Street parties following the Russian surrender had continued throughout the summer and the Porte would be pleased to note a resulting baby boom in the coming months, as victorious soldiers were welcomed home as heroes and lavish ceremonies honouring men both living and dead were carried out. Formation flights over cities struck such popularity that the modern air shows were born in the Empire in the Autumn of 1938 as 'The Magnificent Men' who had so daringly destroyed the Russian air force became people of legend. And so, with both Grand Vizier Rauf Bey and Deputy Vizier Mustafa Ismet Pasha enjoying levels of popularity not seen since the era of Pertev Pasha and the end of the Third Great War, surely nothing could stop these twin political forces from romping to victory in the upcoming elections…
The Osmanli Ahali Firkasi becomes engulfed in a political scandal during the election campaign (November 18th 1938)
