When the War Came Home: The Ottomans’ Great War and the Devastation of an Empire

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By Yigit Akin 
Stanford University Press, 2018
Reviewed by Michael P. Kihntopf

Yigit Akin, a professor of history at Ohio State University, has given historians another level of knowledge regarding the Great War. This work, the winner of the 2019 Tomlinson Book Prize and 2018 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, makes a detailed survey of the effects World War I had on the people of the Ottoman Empire. His sources range from published accounts to oral histories to local songs and poetry to newspapers. The book’s bibliography is like opening a treasure chest of never-seen gems among which there were very few familiar authors.  

     

Akin opens his book by recounting the Ottoman Empire’s exploits before the war. I found the survey of the Balkan Wars very revealing and thought provoking. It was a basis that was needed to understand just how unprepared the empire was in preparing their people for a longer war. The author states that the empire endured 50,000 soldiers killed in battle coupled with 75, 000 dead to diseases in two wars that lasted less than two years. He then relates the analysis carried out by governmental leaders to ascertain what went wrong in strategic and tactical planning in the Balkans.  

Daily Street Life During the War

The first concern was that the soldiers were not sufficiently motivated to carry out the war nor were there enough of them to counter the enemies’ (Serbian, Montenegrin, Bulgarian, and Greek) forces. The second concern was that non-Muslim soldiers were unreliable despite a commonly shared ethno-history. Finally, support on the home front for the soldiers was greatly lacking. Solutions to dealing with these problems carry the reader through the rest of the book.

    

One of the key solutions in dealing with the failure during the Balkan Wars was to expand conscription laws to call up all the male population from 20-45 years old, without allowing exceptions that had been traditional such as paying one’s way out or claiming to be the sole male support of the family. Conscription began on 3 August 1914 as a result of the outbreak of war in western Europe. The Ottoman Empire entered a phase called armed neutrality. The mobilization greatly increased the size of the army but seriously crippled an agricultural dominant society by taking the men from the fields at the time of harvest.  

The new conscription laws were like throwing a stone into a puddle and watching the ripples spread across the surface. Akin delves into many factors of cultural and society disruption, including the effect on women. An entire chapter is dedicated to women; they were not accustomed to working outside family parameters. Ethnic groups such as the Greeks and Armenians, who were displaced from the Eastern Aegean coast and the Eastern Caucasus, were seen by the government as a threat.

A Turkish Artillery Column Passes Thru Istanbul

     

The Ottoman Empire entered the Great War in October 1914 on the Central Powers’ side with a naval bombardment of Russian ports on the Black Sea. The empire came under immediate and continued attack on many fronts. As a result, the army needed more and more soldiers to defend against invasion. Thus, conscription continued unabated as men came of age.  Institutions within the Empire deteriorated at an alarming rate. Police, for example, were not exempted from conscription, resulting in a breakdown of law enforcement in the countryside.  The army took over the administration of supplying its soldiers with food, clothing, and equipment. Their methods were to requisition without regard to the populations’ needs. Akin provides a minutely detailed description of these requisitioning practices.

          

When the War Came Home is a book manifesting an unparalleled knowledge of war’s impact on a people. It is meticulously researched, and the results are expertly laid out in ways that draw a reader into a new world of experience.  It is an excellent supplement to Ordered to Die, A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (Edward J. Erickson, 2000), and I strongly recommend both. 

 Michael P. Kihntopf