The Fall of the Ottomans

Over the decades, I gained a basic outline of World War I, beginning with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that created a pretense for a war of conquest by Austria-Hungary and her ally Germany, the grinding trench warfare in France with poison gas, the transformative entry of the US on the side of France and England, the ultimate defeat of the Central Powers and the imposition of draconian war reparations in the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler and the Nazis exploited the view that Germany didn’t lose the war, but were stabbed in the back (“Dolchstoßlegende”) by revolutionary socialists and Jews. Many historians consider that World War II was a continuation of World War I. For that reason, I wanted a better understanding of WWI.

The other major player among the Central Powers in WWI was the Ottoman Empire, which by then was known as “the sick man of Europe.” I chose Eugene Rogan’s “The Fall of the Ottomans” because it is a dimension of WWI history I was less familiar with, since America fought mostly on the western front. Rogan’s history emphasizes the Ottoman (and Arab) side of the conflict.

I had previously read Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” and “The Zimmermann Telegram.” I was familiar with the story of the Gallipoli campaign mostly from the film by that name, and the Eric Bogle song “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” which both tell the story from the British/ANZAC side. Rogan shows us that the violence was just as horrific on the Turkish side. Although the magnitude of killing was larger on the western front, the barbarity was at least commensurate. As a sidelight, Rogan notes that Churchill gets a lot of the blame for the failure, but Churchill was only Lord of the Admiralty, and was fired before it became a land campaign—the blame on the British side belongs to Lord Kitchener.

Another gruesome episode on the Ottoman side was the Armenian genocide. Estimates range from 700,000-1.5 million Armenians who were murdered by the Ottoman Turks in the 20th century’s first major case of ethnic cleansing that presaged the Nazi extermination of European and Slavic Jewry. Arguably, Germany has been more contrite about the Holocaust than Turkey has been about the Armenian genocide.

Extensive fighting also took place in the Middle East, in lands controlled by the Ottomans but peopled by Arabs. As Rogan describes in detail, Arabs in the Middle East chafed under Ottoman rule even though both the Turks and Arabs were Muslim. The Central Powers and the Triple Entente both imagined they could exploit Islam for their political purposes, but most of the tricks and strategies came to naught because they were too ignorant and/or lazy to understand the needs and culture of Arab tribes. T.E. Lawrence did an impressive job of yoking Arab tribes to the British war effort in the Middle East, but that was because he was fluent in Arabic and had lived among the Arabs for years.

For a brief time, the tide turned in favor of the Ottomans when, as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia pulled out of the Triple Entente and quit the war in Anatolia, ceding back territory it had won earlier at great cost. But in the end, the Ottoman Empire was a paper tiger, and when Austria and Germany were defeated, there was nothing left for Turkey but to sue for peace.

The world still suffers from the hubris of the Entente victors, who carved up eastern Europe, Anatolia and the Middle East without due regard for the people on the ground. The fall of Yugoslavia is but one example. The secret Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration created an enduring legacy of violence. In a relatively short book, Rogan ties together the events and military transactions of WWI while maintaining a focus on the human costs to each side. The narrative is rich in detail without getting bogged down in numerology. There are several maps at the beginning that are essential in appreciating the relationship between actions and strategy. One beef I have with ebooks like this is that I can’t figure out how to toggle between the text and the maps. But I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in 20th century history.