WWI: Earlier Ottoman Surrender?
- Thread starter Zelc
- Start date
A landing there would be against far fewer Turkish soldiers in a worse defensive position, and it would cut the sole line of supply for Turkish forces in modern-day Palestine, Iraq, and Arabia.
Alexandretta was suggested....
Barr, James (2011-10-27). A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the struggle that shaped the Middle East (Kindle Location 265). Simon & Schuster UK. Kindle Edition.
Alexandretta, in the crook of the Mediterranean where modern-day Turkey joins Syria, lay near the railway connecting Constantinople to Baghdad and Damascus, the main administrative centres in the Ottomans’ Arab empire. Sykes was certain that this plan had war-winning potential. In a typically energetic letter to Churchill, who had moved into politics and was by now First Lord of the Admiralty, Sykes argued that once the Ottomans surrendered the Germans would be far more vulnerable.
Addressing his letter to ‘the only man I know who will take risks’, he wondered: ‘Could you by June be fighting towards Vienna, you would have got your knife somewhere near the monster’s vitals’, enticing Churchill to throw his weight behind the plan. But longer-term considerations drew others to this scheme. ‘The only place from which a fleet can operate against Egypt is Alexandretta,’ explained a junior intelligence officer based in Cairo at that time. ‘It is a splendid natural naval base (which we don’t want but which no one else can have without detriment to us).’ The name of this young strategist? It was T. E. Lawrence.
The Alexandretta scheme alarmed the French ambassador in Cairo. Suspecting that the British were reneging on their 1912 commitment about Syria, he warned his government of their ally’s likely motives.
On 8 February 1915 the French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, reminded Grey of their two-year-old agreement and forcefully asked him to stop his officials plotting. Tall, thin and tired, and perpetually torn between the lure of power in Westminster and the solitary pleasures of fly-fishing on the chalk streams of southern England, Grey was the man who had warned France not to trespass on the Nile two decades earlier.
But in the intervening period his attitude towards the French had changed completely. By the time he became Britain’s foreign secretary in 1905, he had reached the conclusion that the Germans were now the greater threat and that a pact with France was necessary to defeat them. That conviction, and exhaustion after ten years’ trying to avert war through intricate and often rather secretive diplomacy, now shaped his decision to concede to Delcassé. ‘I think it is important to let the French have what they want,’ Grey wrote soon after Delcassé had complained. ‘It will be fatal to cordial cooperation in the Mediterranean and perhaps everywhere if we arouse their suspicions as to anything in the region of Syria.’
He then ordered British officials in Egypt to stop pressing for the Alexandretta plan. ‘It would mean a break with France,’ he repeated a few days later, ‘if we put forward any claims in Syria and Lebanon.’ French pressure had forced the British to drop a brilliant plan. As the German field marshal, von Hindenburg, admitted afterwards, ‘Perhaps not the whole course of the war, but certainly the fate of our Ottoman Ally, could have been settled out of hand, if England had secured a decision in that region, or even seriously attempted it.
Possession of the country south of the Taurus [mountains] would have been lost to Turkey at a blow if the English had succeeded in landing in the Gulf of Alexandretta.’
Instead, as a consequence of French concerns, six weeks later an ill-fated, predominantly British force landed in the Dardanelles. It was 25 April 1915. Constantinople, and victory, were just one hundred and fifty miles away.
My text....Given the subsequent events both at Gallipoli and in the region after WW1, its a shame we didn't tell the French where to go.....
LordKalvert
Banned
With total command of the sea, the Allies should have been able to make landings all over the coast, constantly cutting off the Turks from resupply and quickly occupying large areas of their territory. It should have been a replay of the Peninsular War with the Turks running hither and tither trying to deal with the allies only to find out that they had moved three hundred miles
It wouldn't take much other than a decision to do it
It wouldn't take much other than a decision to do it
Paul V McNutt
Banned
If in 1916, the Allies were able to supply Russia there would be no Russian Revolution. Russia would stay in the war. As the US forces come into the war, Germany is fighting a two front war. The defeat is more obvious. So obvious that even Corporal Hitler recognizes it, so no World War II.
This. An early Ottoman defeat or a neutral Ottoman Empire will save Russia from a near total blockade and will help butterfly the revolution.
The Brusilov Offensive might smash the Austro-Hungarians so much that the Central Powers are very much doomed in a domino effect.
Whilst a landing in the Iskenderun region certainly has a lot to recommend it would it force the Ottomans to surrender? Assuming it happens in mid-1915 or so with the war having not dragged on so long what would be to stop them deciding to pull their forces back north-eastwards and then northwards into the Anatolian peninsula where the terrain is tailor-made for defensive fighting and gambling on a German victory to hopefully regain their territory? They'd still control the Turkish heartlands, maintain the Balkan front, and most importantly for their allies control the Bosphorus strait.