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| Turkish Soldiers Learning the Machine Gun |
The events of August 1914 would reveal the mobilization and war plans of the major combatants of the First World War to be extremely aggressive. Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and France fielded huge armies capable of offensive action at the strategic and the operational levels of war. Even Great Britain, with its "contemptible little army," was able to deploy a six division expeditionary force for immediate combat operations in France. Serbia as well proved capable of rapid action. At the other end of the spectrum, however, the Ottoman Empire was unwilling to enter the war until November and its army was incapable of combat operations until December 1914.
The reasons the Ottoman Empire entered the Great War at all are complex, and a case can be made that their German partners unwillingly manipulated the Turks into the war. The empire had no clearly defined war aims, nor did peacetime Turkish war plans in 1914 call for any offensive operations against neighboring countries. Indeed, absent the presence of the German naval squadron of Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, the Turks might have remained neutral. There were many reasons for Turkey's lack of enthusiasm for war, but most Important was the condition of its army. For the Turks, 1914 was not a year of cheering crowds sending off troop trains of patriotic soldiers to the front. Instead, 1914 was year of respite and recovery from the disastrous Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. For the Turkish General Staff and for the Turkish Army, 1914 was supposed to be year devoted to the rebuilding of an army shattered by war.
What was the condition of the Turkish army in the summer of 1914'? Why was it unready for immediate combat operations and what were its priorities? This article will address these questions by outlining the massive reorganization and re-stationing effort in which the Turks were engaged in 1914.
In terms of human resources, the Turkish General Staff believed that the empire had a mobilization potential of about 2,000,000 men. However, this ambitious figure was, in fact, never achieved during the course of the war. In the summer of 1914, the classes of 1893 and 1894 (each age cohort was about 90,000 men) had been called to the colors and the Turkish Army enjoyed a peacetime operating strength of about 200,000 men and 8,000 officers. Unlike other European powers, Turkey did not employ first-line formations in peacetime at war establishment, preferring instead to field a higher number of reduced establishment formations. This policy was systematically carried out by reducing all units below division level—every Turkish infantry regiment was short a battalion and every battalion was short a company. The average strength of a Turkish infantry division, in the summer of 1914, was 4,000 men out of a war establishment of 10,000 personnel. In order to bring the field army to war establishment the Turkish Army required a total of 477,868 men and 12,469 officers to completely fill out its divisions. This use of a reduced establishment or cadre structure (a lean and under strength organizational framework designed to be heavily augmented) was intentional and reflected a deliberate decision taken by the army after the Balkan Wars. There were no reserve artillery or reserve technical formations. In any case, the Turkish general staff believed that approximately 1,000,000 men and 210,000 animals were easily available for recall and that, immediately upon full mobilization, the field army would have an effective strength of 460,000 men, 14,500 officers, and 160,000 animals."' To this must be added the heavily armed and trained Jandarma of 42,000 men (25,000 gendarmes, 12,000 frontier guards, and 6,000 mule-mobile troops). Altogether, Turkey planned to field about 500,000 men in mobile operational units, the remainder serving in fortress commands, coastal defenses, garrisons, and in lines of communications duties.
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| A Skoda Artillery Battery Passing Through Constantinople |
In material terms, the army was ill equipped to fight a modern war. Most divisions had only 21 75mm field howitzers out of an establishment of 24. This artillery force was a mixed bag of French Schneider, German Krupp, and Austro-Hungarian Škoda pieces and numbered about 1,000 field pieces. At corps level, most of the 12 105mm howitzers required for the 3 batteries of corps artillery were available. Overall, the army needed 280 field artillery pieces to bring itself up to war establishment. Additionally, in the fortresses of Adrianople, Erzurum, and Qatalca, there were numerous fixed 120mm artillery pieces, which were ill placed for immediate use.
The machine gun situation was worse. Each Turkish infantry regiment was authorized four machine guns. Some regiments were short and the army needed 200 to equip the regimental force to standard. At battalion and company level, there simply were no machine guns and the army estimated that it needed 200,000 more to fill all requirements. At 1,500,000, rifles were a less critical shortage but the army still needed 200,000.
Ammunition stockage was low and the Turks were unable to meet anticipated wartime demands. There were 150 cartridges available per rifleman, a further 190 available in corps depots, and for the entire army there were 200,000,000 cartridges in reserve. For the Turkish artillery, there were about 588 shells available per gun.
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| Typical Turkish Conscripts |
In service support, the Turkish Army suffered terribly. Each division was authorized a field medical unit, and each corps was authorized four field hospitals, however, these were never filled at established strengths. This deficiency was compounded by chronic shortages of doctors, medicine, and medical supplies. The total Turkish hospital capacity was 37,000 beds, of which 14,000 were located in the city of Constantinople. Transportation was a critical weakness; especially short were supply wagons and draft animals. Motorization and aviation were almost nonexistent in the Turkish Army.
Upon the advice of the German advisor General von der Goltz, mobilization planning was based on peacetime conscription, which provided a flow of trained individuals into the reserve forces. Active service in the peacetime Turkish Army was for a period of three years for the infantry and four years for the artillery and technical services. Likewise, animals served for a period of four years and, in turn, were returned to civilian use carrying a lifelong obligation for national service. Non-Muslims were excluded from military service and were forced to pay a special military tax instead. By 1914, the period of active obligatory service was reduced to two years for infantry and cavalry, and to three years for the artillery. Although under this scheme, the active army was maintained a lower strength, the staff thought that a 50 percent biannual turnover was superior to a 33 percent turnover every three years. This was partly due to the huge losses in trained leaders suffered during the Balkan wars and reflected an inability of the forces to adequately train replacements. It was also partly due to the necessity to normalize the empire's economy.
All men were liable for military service and were drafted according to their chronological age as a class or cohort. Liability for service began at age 20 and ended 25 years later. The Turkish military was divided into an active force (Nizamiye), a reserve force (Redif), and a territorial force (Mustahfiz). The two youngest classes provided the manpower for the active army, the next 16 classes provided the trained manpower for the reserve, and the oldest seven classes comprised the territorial forces. Most reservists and territorials were organized into units of battalion size or smaller and had local depots designated as mobilization stations. Unlike all other major European powers, Turkey did not have a large-unit reserve system, which could field intact reserve corps composed of reserve divisions. Consequently, there was no major increase in the raw number of formations available to the Turkish Army upon mobilization. There were several exceptions, those being the XII Corps (Independent), the 38th Infantry Division (Independent), and 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Reserve Cavalry Divisions.
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| Enver Pasha |
Between July 1913 and August 1914 the Turkish Army was undergoing an enormous reorganization and reconstruction effort as a result of the devastating losses suffered in the Balkan Wars. Compounding this huge task was Enver Pasha's determination to rid the army of older and less active officers, which he felt were an obstruction to modernization. Over 1,100 officers were involuntarily retired during this period. The scale of this effort to rebuild the army must be explained in some detail because this reorganization of the Turkish forces provides the basis for understanding both the offensive failures of 1914 and the defensive successes of 1915.
Prior to the beginning of the Balkan War of 1912, the Turkish Army enjoyed a fair degree of stability based on a garrison system extending throughout the empire A German military assistance group under General von der Goltz had restructured the Turkish Army and standardized the organization of Turkish corps at a strength of three infantry divisions. In a prescient decision, von der Goltz also standardized the organization of the Turkish infantry division at a strength of three infantry regiments—all European armies during the First World War would later adopt this triangular structure. In the Balkans, the 12 infantry division strong Turkish second army provided security for Turkey's remaining possessions in the Vardar Valley and Albania. The equally powerful Turkish first army (12 infantry divisions) provided security for Adrianople and Constantinople. The smaller 3rd and 4th Armies provided protection for Caucasia and Mesopotamia, and independent corps garrisoned Syria, Palestine, and Arabia. This powerful regular establishment was backed up by a reserve system, which fielded infantry divisions in all major cities of the empire.
However, in less than a year, both the 1st and 2nd Armies had been destroyed. The Turkish Army had lost 12 infantry divisions out of a beginning total of 43 infantry divisions and the corps-sized fortress garrison of Adrianople was also lost. Additionally, eight regular infantry divisions and 15 newly raised infantry divisions of reservists and territorials had been redeployed to Thrace to serve in the newly formed Qatalca and Gallipoli Armies. Several infantry divisions and a corps headquarters had been dissolved to provide replacements. Only six of the infantry divisions of the pre-Balkan War regular Turkish Army were spared the trauma of combat. In another context, 90 percent of Turkish infantry divisions mobilized participated in the Balkan Wars. Casualties from the wars exceeded 250,000 men. This was a military disaster of unprecedented magnitude for the empire, which all but destroyed the regular Turkish Army as an effective fighting force.
At the conclusion of the Balkan Wars, the condition of the Turkish Army demanded attention. Complete armies had been shattered, corps had been deliberately dissolved, and there were huge disparities in the fighting strengths of infantry divisions. There was a large number of ad hoc divisional formations (named after their city of origin) composed of older reservists and territorials Training was at a standstill, as was weapons procurement. Finally, and not the least worrisome, almost the entire Turkish Army was deployed in the Turkish Thrace. These strategic and operational imperatives forced Turkey to immediately engage itself in a massive military reorganization effort in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars.
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| Typical Turkish Officers |
The reorganization of Turkish forces in 1914 was comprehensive and was designed to redeploy the army into its pre-Balkan War garrison locations and also to rebuild the divisional and corps base of the army. This was a gigantic undertaking and was incomplete on the eve of the First World War. In the reconstituted 1st Army, only the III Corps survived the war intact and retained its original organic pre-Balkan War divisions. The II Corps and I Corps lost a division each and each were rebuilding a new division. It is significant, and no surprise, that the combat hardened and intact III Corps was selected to defend the strategic Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915. Facing the Russians in Caucasia, of the 3rd Army's nine infantry divisions, three were being rebuilt from scratch and four were redeployed from Thrace that year. This hastily assembled and cobbled-together army was hurled against the Russians in December 1914 with predictably disastrous results. The 2nd Army was reconstituted in Syria and Palestine and was rebuilding two divisions while absorbing two more which had been transferred there from Thrace. Altogether, 14 of 36 Turkish infantry divisions organized in August 1914 were in the process of being rebuilt from scratch, and eight divisions of the 36 had conducted a major redeployment within the year. The overall effectiveness of these 22 new or redeployed infantry divisions was low and would inevitably take years to remedy. However, events overcame preparation time and 12 of these divisions were involved in the early Turkish offensive disasters of 1914. Reciprocally, the single organizationally intact corps—the III corps with its organic 7th, 8th, and 9th infantry divisions—successfully defended the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915. It could be argued that defeat in the Balkan Wars, and subsequent Turkish reconstitution and re-stationing efforts, set the stage for Turkish success or failure in the initial phases of the First World War.
The emergent picture of the condition of the Turkish Army on the eve of the Great War portrays a condition of great weakness. Serious deficiencies in material and readiness were in abundance. "Snapshot" comparisons of the army's dispositions in 1912, in July 1913, and in August 1914 reveal an incredible pattern of unit movements as the disaster of the Balkan Wars overtook the empire. Finally, the magnitude of the losses of both trained manpower and the destruction of almost half of the empire's combat infantry divisions defies understanding. Under these conditions, that Turkey entered the war at all seems incredible. That the Turkish Army fought magnificently for four years and was still on its feet in the fall of 1918 is more incredible still and is a story yet to be told.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2000 issue of RELEVANCE, the Quarterly Journal of the Great War Society. Images from Tony Langley's collection
Great reminder about the Balkan Wars' impact.
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