| August 10 |  |
Editor says, what if Ottoman Turkey had remained neutral during the Great War? Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s). This story was published in the August 2011 edition of Changing the Times Magazine.
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In 1914, on this day Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill sent a telegram congratulating Rear Admiral Ernest Troubridge for sparing "untold misery and suffering for the peoples of the East" by sinking the German Battle Cruisers Goeben and Breslau within sight of the harbor at the Golden Horn in Constantinople.
Golden HornAs usual the high drama was a problem of Churchill's own botched decision-making. At the outbreak of war, two Dreadnoughts were being built for Turkish order in British Shipyards, but he hot-headedly decided to seize them for the Royal Navy without even offering compensation. In the event, the two ships made little impact on the course of the war. But Turkish Minister of War Ismail Enver was appalled and outraged. No stranger to bad calls himself, Enver had led the Young Turks into no less than three disastrous wars since the abdication Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1908.
Even through the British Empire had supported Turkey for the previous century, this catastrophic set of misjudgements threatened to bring Turkey into the Great War on the side of the Central Powers when the Imperial German Government offered two replacements, the Goeben and Breslau.
In the event, Turkish anger was subdued by the demonstration of British mastery in the Mediterranean and diplomats rushed to Constantinople to offer compensation that would ensure Turkish neutrality for the duration of the war.
Churchill entertained hopes of saving Imperial Russia by supplying her from the south, but within months she had lost millions dead on the Eastern Front and her collapse was inevitable. Nevertheless, in his self-congratulatory biopic "The World Crisis, 1911-1918" he claimed the credit for preventing a belligerent Ottoman Turkey from bringing the same kind of nationalist pressures to the Middle East that war had brought to the Balkans.
Entry posted by Todayinah Editor
© Alternate Historian, 2004-.Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Generals Source: Wikipedia Labels: Goeben, Breslau, Turkey, Britain, World War 1. Editor says, in reality war with Turkey had catastrophic long-term consequences for the stability of the Middle East.
~ Would have been smarter to not seize the boats in the first place, or at least offer money and abject apologies, but this would be an improvement....
~ If Russia had been able to be supplied via the Black Sea, she would almost certainly have done better---a lot of Russia's problems were due to lack of munitions and supplies.
~ Russia should have been able to supply itself, but under the Tsars industrial development had lagged, which also affected food production (Russia came late and slowly to widespread use of farm machinery).
Awareness of this history helps explain the Soviet regime's fixation on industrialization. Unfortunately, the Soviets focused on heavy industry, leaving light industry to continue to lag--and of course their system had other inefficiencies as well, many of them related to centralized control. Ironically, in that respect the Soviets replicated pre-revolutionary Russia, which itself had been a savagely repressive autocracy complete with a brutal secret police, the Okhrana.
~ Without WWI to collapse it, the Ottomans would still gradually fall apart. Middle East is going to be problematic in just about every TL.
~ Even if Turkey were to remain neutral in the war against the Central Powers, the Bulgarians and the Greeks, though recently at odds in the Second Balkan War, would have started a Third, if they could. An alliance with Egypt, and poof, no more Ottoman Empire. Let's say this happens in 1920.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
