The Evasive Neutral

PREFACE

The foreign policy of Turkey during the Second World War ought to have been determined by the alliance treaty the Turkish government signed with the British and the French in the autumn of 1939. Instead, the Turks did not live up to their pledge and followed an unforeseen course perplexing and infuriating to their allies. Only in 1944 did the Turks sever relations with Germany; a few months later, they timorously issued a declaration of war. But at no time were they active combatants for the allied coalition. Britain and later the United States scored Turkish diplomacy as one of unremitting bad faith. Turkish historians, and some foreign scholars, on the other hand, have defended it as the only reasonable course for a country with a small military establishment and a weak economy.

The Turkish archives are still closed to scholars, but official German and British correspondence that has been opened since the war suggests that Turkey’s defenders are only partly correct. In 1938, the Turks would have preferred an alliance with Germany to the one they were to negotiate a year later with Britain and France. But at that time the Berlin foreign ministry was unwilling to accept a partnership with them. Some German statesmen valued an arrangement with the Arabs over an alliance with the Turks, while others strove for an untroubled relationship with Russia that would postpone the threat of war on the eastern front when fighting broke out in the West. They did not want to conspire with Turkey, Russia’s ancient foe. Accordingly, Germany rebuffed the Turks and drove them to compound terms with Britain. When they finally sat down at the conference table, the Turks, whatever reservations they might have had, parleyed with keenness and enthusiasm. The Turkish negotiators said little about their country’s military and economic debilities —the very debilities that some historians have cited as the justification for Turkish foreign policy decisions.

The Germans soon recognized that they had been wrong in rejecting Turkish help. As their relations with Whitehall and the Kremlin deteriorated in turn, the strategical attraction of a Turkish alliance grew proportionately. The Turks could have manned one arm of a giant German pincers. Moving up from the south, they could have helped to snare and annihilate the Red Army; descending from the north, they might have rolled over Britain’s undermanned outposts in the Middle East. When, however, the blitzkrieg failed to subjugate the British, the Turks were no less eager for intervention but began to raise its price. They pressed the Germans to invade Iraq so that Turkey could acquire the oil of Mosul. In return for the prospect of an overland route to the Levant and Egypt, the Germans entered on this Iraqi gambit, though it was not part of their original timetable. Their preparations were skimpy, their plan of action unclear, and their defeat at Baghdad ignominious.

Germany’s ejection from Iraq in 1941 cost her the trust of her Arab partisans and made her more vulnerable than ever to Turkish extortion. The Turks alone held the key to the overland route to the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf, in short to those areas where Germany might best beat the British quickly and decisively. London had good reason to be grateful for Turkey’s neutrality, which blocked Hitler’s access to the Middle East. But, on the whole, the British government still considered the Anglo-Turkish alliance an unfruitful and humiliating relationship. Churchill wanted to open a Second Front in the Balkans, but Turkey’s refusal to participate helped to frustrate his goal. He wanted to funnel more materiel to beleaguered Russia, but the Turks barred the Straits to this traffic. Lastly, the Turks threatened the integrity of the British Empire itself. They offered to come into the war in return for the cession of the Dodecanese islands, taken from the Turkish sultan by Italy in 1911. The Foreign Office might have conceded this demand had it not been aware that Turkey was ready to couple it with a claim to the British Crown Colony of Cyprus. Cyprus was legally Turkish until 1914, and a sizable Turkish minority still lived on the island. But no British government led by an imperialist like Churchill was prepared to negotiate on this basis, and in the end Whitehall, like the Wilhelmstrasse, was unable to bring Turkey into the war.

In this book, then, I investigate the diplomacy that kept Turkey intact and out of the fighting. But I also examine the aggressive alternatives that were considered by Ismet Inonu and his ministers. Rejection of these alternatives was often the outcome not of shrewd deliberation or fidelity to democratic principles, but rather of mere chance. Finally, the evidence suggests that Turkey was more responsible for Hitler’s failure to win a stake in the Middle East than is generally realized. The Italians and the Vichy French were handicaps to the Fuhrer, but it was the Turks who turned German diplomacy in the area limp, sterile, and sour.

I am happy to acknowledge the help of Mr. Robert Wolfe of the National Archives and Records Service. He gave me excellent advice for using the microfilmed German Foreign Ministry documents and furnished me with an inventory of the German Embassy Files, Ankara, before it was made generally available to scholars. Drs. Weinandy and Booms, directors respectively of the Politisches Archiv of the Foreign Ministry, Bonn, and the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, kindly allowed me to transcribe additional German papers. Throughout two summers of research in London, J. R. Ede and his staff at the Public Record Office patiently delivered to me the British correspondence on Turkey and, in several cases, alerted me to other Middle Eastern material that elucidated the turns of Turkish diplomacy. They also introduced me to Mary Z. Pain, a seasoned research assistant without whom the work of transcription and abstraction would have taken much longer. Temple University gave me a generous research award, a semester’s leave with salary, and the expert assistance of Edith Hampel and George Libbey, research librarians without peer in my experience. I was denied permission to use the Turkish archives, but Bulent Ogzuc of the University of Pennsylvania translated a number of useful Turkish political biographies. Finally, Louisa Barnes and Gertrude Jacobs typed the manuscript; I thank them both for their skill and forbearance.

F.G.W.
Philadelphia, Pa.
8 September 1978