A Neo-Atomic Tango Thru a World of Dreams

In August 1943, Turkey's 'National Chief' Konya Uşak İnönü finally succumbed to Nazi Germany's incessant pressure to expand the Treaty of Friendship signed by the two nations in June 1941. The first order of business was the formation of the 1st Khanjar Mountain Brigade. This photo dated August 1944 shows the brigade's imam bestowing a blessing prior to Operation Hackfleisch - an anti-partisan campaign centred on the hill country of the NDH (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska trans. Independent State of Croatia). For all the lavish matériel support provided by the Germans, the unit's vague status as 'co-belligerents' rather than allies, the cultural and language barriers hampering co-ordination with their Wehrmacht counterparts and the adoption of the battle cry "The Turks have returned!" by both the Partisans and Chetniks meant that, unfortunately for the Khanjars, Operation Hackfleisch was bloodily and aptly named.

This highly pixilated 1928 image shows British soldiers of the Black Watch assembled on an Istanbul side street during the First Ottoman War of 1919-1921.

While the Entente attempted to partition Turkey, the Kemalist revolutionaries took advantage of the disorder to stage a coup. In order to prop up the failing Sultanate long enough to legitimize the partition, Entente troops actually entered the war on the Turkish side.

In the end, their plan backfired; the newly strengthened Turkish government quickly pushed the Entente out, conquered Armenia, and terrorized Greece.

When a British citizen was murdered in Turkey in 1956, the Allies invaded with full force, dismembering the Sultanate and establishing the first of several unstable puppet regimes.

Interesting fact: the officer in the black tam is Sir Joseph Willoughby, who later went on to write "A Bloody Disaster": the Oral History of the Ottoman Wars.

I guess I'm on a bit of a Middle East kick today...at any rate, here's the Cumhuriyet headline from 1938 showing that Kemalist Turkey had thrown their lot in with the Fascists.

Perhaps hoping to relive the glory days of Gallipoli, and maybe get their empire back in the bargain, the Turks proved themselves notoriously bad at picking the winning side in yet another war.