"Who Today Remembers the Jews?"
The naval disaster at Souda asides, the Royal Navy performed brilliantly in launching simultaneous amphibious attacks all across Crete, quickly causing South Greek command to fall into chaos. It was upon that moment that the most opportunistic actor of the entire Mediterranean War began to act. The ultranationalist regime of Turkey under Alparslan Turkes, which had long cooperated with its mortal enemy in Moscow to fund its other mortal enemy in Athens, befuddled international observers. Why on earth was it helping out all kind of nations that it well, hated? Ultranationalist Turkey even went as far as to help ferry British troops from Cyprus to Iraq and Jordan (to fight the Syrians and their Nationalist Iraqi proxies). Despite the intense anti-communism of Turkes, it seemed to actually have a vaguely acceptable working relationship with nearby Communist Turkey (which admittedly was only much of Turkish Kurdistan). In particular, the Ultranationalist Turks should have been outraged at the Soviet Union for annexing significant territories in Eastern Turkey to the Georgia SSR (under the orders of Georgian Laventry Beria), largely consisting of territories annexed by Russia in 1878 and returned to Turkey in 1918, essentially comprising what was then Atvin and Kars Province. Indeed, the Communist Turks had protested more streneously (largely because those regions had been promised to the Communist Turks during the Three Years War until they weren't after the war).
British authorities were blindsided by the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, both in its well-executed speed as well as its brutality. Greek militias were weak and often in prison due to the rebellion with the British authorities. During the Greek Cypriot uprising, Turkish Cypriots were often attacked and murdered on the streets under accusations of being "British collaborators." Now, Turkish militias, nurtured by British authorities as a tool to wield against Greek rebels, ceased taking orders from British authorities, who largely had evacuated the island of regular British troops as part of the invasion of Crete. Instead, they took orders directly from the Turkish Army landing on the shores of Cyprus. Hundreds, possibly thousands of Greek militias were executed in their jail cells, as the Turks defeated massively outnumbered British troops. Britain had 1,800 troops in all of Cyprus, compared to 40,000 Turkish army soldiers and 10,000 Turkish militiamen (became 20,000 as more mobilized).
The Turkish Army had specific orders. Upon landing, act brutally to murder some number of Greek Cypriots in public in order to spark a mass panic and exodus. Turkes took a very specific lesson from Ottoman history, namely a belief that multiethnic states could not survive. As he also wanted Turkey to regain many heavily Turkish regions abroad, this necessitated something he openly admitted in a meeting was obviously ethnic cleansing. In a speech to the Turkish General Staff, in an explicit reference to one of Hitler's supposed speeches (historical record is not clear on whether he said it) where he may have said "Who Today Remembers the Armenians", Turkes cited the world letting (the ironically Jewish) Beria get away with the ethnic cleansing of Soviet Jews less than a decade after the Holocaust and proclaimed "Who Today Remembers the Jews?", also citing the Beria's deportation of the Crimean Tatars (a fellow Turkic group, so more relevant to the ideology of ultra-nationalist Turkey and also more relevant to their plans, since their goal was ethnic cleansing as opposed to extermination for the Hitlerian sake of extermination). Indeed, in a series of well-publicized war crimes, handpicked Turkish troops (namely, the nastiest because most soldiers did not want to engage in this) hacked hundreds of captured Cypriot families to death with sabres. This was intentionally broadcasted to the world, sparking Greek Cypriots to flee the Turkish Army, but also garnering Ultranationalist Turkey overwhelming condemnation. However, this was expected by Turkes. Part of the goal of abetting the outbreak of wars in the Middle East was to simply make sure that most nearby powers were too distracted to stop him.
President John F. Kennedy, aware that Greek voters in large American cities (such as Chicago) were outraged by the massacres decided to act. Cutting off all arms shipments to Ultranationalist Turkey, he asked how quickly a US force could be assembled to retake Cyprus from the Ultranationalist Turks. Unfortunately for Kennedy, as the Italians had famously denied American naval access during the Three Years War and the Americans retaliated by cutting off economic and military aid to Italy, the Americans were never able to successfully establish a naval base in Italy, as was originally planned. Negotiations for a naval base in Francoist Spain had stalled due to Congressional Democrats not liking Franco. Yugoslavia, having just revolted against the Soviet bloc, refused to allow the Americans a naval base. As a result, the only nation in Europe willing to give America a naval base...was Ultranationalist Turkey. Needless to say, the Ultranationalist Turks had impounded the American naval base in Turkey quite easily, essentially threatening to sink the American navy if it sailed out. Sailing from America would take too long - Cyprus was expected to fall within the week. Kennedy contacted Prime Minister Brown, who expressed his sympathies and volunteered using the Royal Navy to courier American troops from West Germany, as soon as Crete fell, which seemed imminent. However, with South Greek command completely destroyed by British forces, most South Greek soldiers didn't have proper communication with the rest of the world, and spent the better half of a week valiantly resisting overwhelmingly superior British troops, seemingly blaring out "strange propaganda", who wanted to do nothing but finish the battle as soon as possible to go and rescue Greeks.
Several nations however, saw it fit to side with Ultranationalist Turkey. The Soviets were just gleeful to see the Western world tearing itself apart, so they at least did not openly oppose Ultranationalist Turkey. The Turkes government, outraged that America was planning some sort of expedition against Cyprus, ended the American naval base lease unilaterally. Instead, they awarded it to another power that was just waiting for the opportunity. One of Charles de Gaulle's last acts before the coup that removed him was to sign a defense treaty with Ultranationalist Turkey, turning over the American naval base into a French naval base. This sparked mass revulsion among many of the civilian politicians who were "opportunistic Gaullists" against De Gaulle himself, another crucial antecedent into the coup. The Turkish pact convinced most civilian French politicians that De Gaulle was a diplomatic madman, even though it was undeniable that this was in a sense a diplomatic coup for France, just one that deeply impugned its values. With around 450,000 Greeks in Cyprus, the Turkish expulsions were a logistical nightmare. Few ships were willing to aid in the deportations until the French merchant marine argued that if there were no ships waiting for them, the Turkish Army might just force-march them into the sea. Packed jam-tight like animals in crowded, unsanitary cargo ships, the survivors were brought into crowded refugee camps across Europe. Horrifyingly, a similar action also took place in Western Thrace, then an outpost of South Greece essentially guarded by Turkish troops in the aftermath of the Greek Civil War. Turkish troops simply repeated the same action, inflicting various war crimes on to deport almost the entire Greek population, consisting of around 300,000 people, in hopes of driving them out through terror.
The Anglo-American expedition to liberate Cyprus was stopped by one man in particular - Charles De Gaulle issued a statement to the British embassy that an attack on Turkey would be viewed as an attack on France itself. This actually only further encouraged the British public, which was in favor of war with Turkey even if it meant war with France by a 61-39 margin. The Americans were similarly undeterred. The Labour government in Britain however, viewed this as a potential catastrophe and viewed De Gaulle as a madman, an impression De Gaulle intentionally gave off to the British. Britain backed down, informing a furious President Kennedy that British ships would no longer be able to participate. Furious, Kennedy called for the harshest sanctions on Ultranationalist Turkey imaginable, sanctions that passed Congress in an overwhelming bipartisan vote. The Turkes gambit was succeeding.
However, Turkes was not the only man with a plan. One other nation, although greatly outraged by this, decided to turn lemons into lemonade. Almost immediately as Turkish troops landed in Cyprus, the Tito-aligned government of the Democratic Republic of Greece stormed across the border. With its navy and most of its air force destroyed (alongside many army units tied up in Cyprus), the South Greeks were simply outgunned by the North Greeks. South Greek resistance was ferocious, calling the North Greeks national traitors for attacking South Greece when Greeks across Western Thrace and Cyprus were facing what most of the world had concluded was a genocide. Perhaps, but they were still taking the opportunity. North Greek artillery, ironically mostly American in origin (as intense American military aid to Yugoslavia was shipped down to North Greece after the Three Years War) essentially leveled Athens to the ground in hopes of trying to reunify Greece before any other power could intervene. Although the ethnic cleansings in Thrace and Cyprus horrified the world, the North Greece invasion of the South probably killed even more people. Another coup in South Greece took place, as the government fled to the Peloponnese (as Crete was under British occupation, albeit one that was transitioning to a rival Greek government under the now-liberated King), putting Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos in charge of a desperate government. Calling for aid from the West, their pleas went largely unheard by the Americans, British, French, and even Soviets (who saw their situation as unsalvageable). Only one, highly unexpected country responded.
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