İsmail Enver
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| İsmail Enver | |
|---|---|
| 22 November 1881 - 4 August 1922 | |
 Ismail Enver |
|
| Nickname | Enver Pasha |
| Place of birth | Istanbul |
| Place of death | Çeğen, Tajikistan |
| Allegiance | Ottoman Empire |
| Rank | General, Minister of War |
| Unit | Third Army |
| Battles/wars | Italo-Turkish War, Balkan Wars, Battle of Sarikamish, Basmachi Revolt |
| Other work | Revolutionary |
İsmail Enver (Ottoman Turkish: اسماعيل انور) (November 22, 1881 in Istanbul - August 4, 1922), known to Europeans during his political career as Enver Pasha (Turkish: Enver Paşa) or Enver Bey was a Turkish military officer and a leader of the Young Turk revolution. He was the main leader of the Ottoman Empire in both Balkan Wars and World War I.
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[edit] Early life and career
Enver Bey was born to a wealthy family in Istanbul. He studied in different degrees of military schools in the empire and finally he graduated from the Harp Akademisi in 1903. He became a Major in 1906. He was sent to the Third Army which was stationed in Salonica. During his service in the city, he became a member of the Committee of Union and Progress.
[edit] Rise to power
- See also: Young Turk Revolution, Italo-Turkish War, and Balkan Wars
In 1908, the Young Turk Revolution broke out in Salonica, and the young Enver quickly became one of its military leaders. The successful revolt brought the Committee of Union and Progress to power, ushering the so-called "Second Constitutional Era" of the Ottoman Empire. During the course of the next year, a reactionary conspiracy to organize a countercoup culminated in the "31 March Incident", which was put down. Enver Bey took an active role in the suppression of the uprising. Afterwards, he was sent to Berlin as a military attaché, where he grew to admire the German military culture, and strengthened the military ties between Germany and the Ottoman Empire, inviting German officers to reform the Ottoman Army.
In 1911, Italy launched an invasion of the Ottoman province of Trablusgarp (modern Libya, starting the Italo-Turkish War. Enver decided to join the defense of the province and left Berlin for Libya. There he assumed the overall command, but in the end Italy took control of Libya and Enver Bey had to return to Istanbul. In 1912, thanks to his active role in the war, he was made Lieutenant Colonel in 1912. However, the defeat cost the CUP in popularity, and it fell from government, to be replaced by the Liberal Union. In October 1912, the First Balkan War broke out, where the Ottoman armies suffered severe defeats at the hands of the Balkan League. These military reversals weakened the government, and gave Enver his chance to grab for power. In a coup in January 1913, the Young Turks took power, with Enver as War Minister, and left the peace negotiations then under way in London. The renewed hostilities only worsened the Empire's situation, however, as the two major remaining strongholds of Adrianople (Edirne) and Yannina fell to the Bulgarians and the Greeks, respectively, forcing the Ottomans to concede defeat at the Treaty of London.
In June 1913 however, the Second Balkan War broke out between the Balkan Allies. Enver Bey took advantage of the situation and led an army into Eastern Thrace, recovering Adrianople from the Bulgarians, who had concentrated their forces against the Serbs and Greeks. After this success, Enver Bey became a Pasha.
After these political and military achievements, he introduced a military dictatorship that came to be called the Three Pashas (Enver Pasha, Talat Pasha, and Cemal Pasha). In 1914, he was again Minister of War in the cabinet of Sait Halim Pasha, and married the daughter of Prince Süleyman, thus entering the royal family. His power grew steadily while Europe marched towards total war.
[edit] World War One
- Further information: Middle Eastern theatre of World War I
Enver Paşa was an architect of the Ottoman-German Alliance, and expected a quick victory in the war that would benefit the Ottoman Empire. Without informing the other members of the Cabinet, he allowed the two German warships SMS Goeben and SMS Breslau to enter the Dardanelles, thus enabling them to escape British pursuit; the subsequent "donation" of the ships to the neutral Ottomans worked powerfully in Germany's favor, despite French and Russian diplomacy to keep Ottoman Empire out of the war. Finally on 29 October, the point of no return was reached when Admiral Souchon took Goeben, Breslau and a squadron of Ottoman warships into the Black Sea and raided the Russian ports of Odessa, Sevastopol and Theodosia. Russia declared war on Ottoman Empire on 2 November and Britain followed suit on 5 November. Most of the Turkish cabinet members and CUP leaders were against such a rushed entry to the war, but Enver Paşa thought that it was the right thing to do.
As soon as the war started, October 31, 1914, Enver ordered that all men of military age report to army recruiting offices. The offices were unable to handle the vast flood of men and long delays occurred. This had the effect of ruining the crop harvest for that year.
[edit] War Minister
Enver proved ineffective as War Minister, and frequently over the next four years the Germans would have to support the Ottoman government with generals such as Otto Liman von Sanders, Erich von Falkenhayn, Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, and Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein. The Germans also gave the Ottoman government military supplies, soldiers, and even fuel.
Enver Pasha’s message to the army and the people was “war until final victory”. During the war, living conditions deteriorated rapidlly and discontent grew. The government of Committee of Union and Progress spent much more money than it took in, and the inflation rate over the four years of war was greater than 1600%.
[edit] Defeat at Sarıkamış, 1914
Enver Pasha assumed command of the Ottoman forces arrayed against the Russians in the Caucasus theatre. He wanted to encircle the Russians, force them out of Ottoman territory and take back Kars and Batumi, which had been ceded after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. Enver thought of himself as a great military leader, while the German military adviser, Liman von Sanders, thought of him as a military buffoon.[1] Enver ordered a complex attack on the Russians, placed himself in personal control of the Third Army, and was utterly defeated at the Battle of Sarıkamış in December-January 1914-1915. His strategy seemed feasible on paper, but he had ignored the external conditions such as the terrain and the weather. Enver's army (90,000 men) was defeated by the Russian force (100,000 men) and in the subsequent retreat, tens of thousands of Turkish soldiers died. This was the single worst defeat of an Ottoman army in all of World War I.
[edit] Commanding the forces of the capital 1915 – 1918
After his defeat at Sarıkamış, Enver returned to Istanbul and took command of the Turkish forces around the capital. The British and French were planning on forcing the approaches to Istanbul in the hope of knocking the Ottomans out of the war. A large Allied fleet, largely composed of older battleships unfit for duty against the German High Seas Fleet, assembled and staged an attack on the Dardanelles on March 18, 1915. The attack (the forerunner to the failed Gallipoli campaign) left the Turks - and Enver - demoralized. As a result, Enver turned over command to Liman von Sanders, who commanded the successful defense of Gallipoli.
[edit] Army of Islam
During 1917, due to the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War, the Russian army in the Caucasus had ceased to exist. At the same time, the Committee of Union and Progress managed to win the friendship of the Bolsheviks with the signing of the Ottoman-Russian friendship treaty (January 1, 1918). Enver looked for victory when Russia withdrew from the Caucasus region. When Enver discussed his plans for taking over southern Russia, the Germans told him to keep out. Undeterred, Enver ordered the creation of a new military force called the Army of Islam which would have no German officers. Enver's Army of Islam avoided Georgia and marched through Azerbaijan. Third Army was also moving forward to pre-war borders.
The Third Army, moved towards the Democratic Republic of Armenia, which formed the frontline in the Caucasus. General Tovmas Nazarbekian was the commander on the Caucasus front and Andranik Toros Ozanian took the command of Armenia within the Ottoman Empire. Vehib Pasha forced Armenians to retreat and then captured Trabzon, where the Russians had left huge quantities of supplies. Then the army turned towards Georgia.
The Army of Islam, under the control of Nuri Pasha, moved forward and attacked with General Lionel Charles Dunsterville at Baku. General Dunsterville ordered the evacuation of the city on September 14, after six weeks of occupation, and withdrew to Iran; most of the Armenian population escaped with British forces. Ottomans and theirs Azeri allies, after the Battle of Baku, entered the city on September 15.
However, after the Armistice of Mudros between Great Britain and Ottoman Empire on October 30, Ottoman troops were replaced by the Triple Entente. These conquests in the Caucasus counted for very little in the war as a whole.
[edit] Armistice and exile
Faced with defeat, the Sultan dismissed Enver from his post as War Minister on 4 October 1918, while the rest Talat Pasha's government resigned on 14 October 1918. On October 30, 1918, the Ottoman Empire capitulated by signing the Armistice of Mudros. Two days later the "Three Pashas" all fled into exile. On 1 January 1919, the new government expelled Enver Pasha from the army. He was tried in absentia in the Turkish Courts-Martial of 1919-20 for crimes of “plunging the country into war without a legitimate reason, forced deportation of Armenians and leaving the country without permission” and condemned to death.[2]
Enver first went to Germany in October 1918 where he communicated and worked with German Communist figures like Karl Radek. He envisioned a cooperation between the new Soviet Russian government against the British, and went to Moscow. There he was received well, and established contacts with representatives from Central Asia and other exiled Committee of Union and Progress members. He also met with Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin. He tried to support the Turkish national movement and corresponded with Mustafa Kemal, giving him the guarantee that he didn't intend to intervene in the movement in Anatolia. Enver Paşa went to Baku between 1-8 September 1920 to take part in the failed "Congress of Eastern Peoples", representing Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. He later returned to Berlin where he tried to establish a secret organization that would transfer Russian military assistance to Turkey, an attempt that eventually failed.
[edit] Pan-Turkism and death, 1921-22
On 30 July 1921, with the Turkish War of Independence in full swing, Enver decided to return to Anatolia. He went to Batum to be close to the new border. However, Mustafa Kemal didn't want him among the Turkish revolutionaries. Mustafa Kemal had stopped all friendly ties with Enver Pasha and the CUP as early as 1914, and he explicitly rejected the pan-Turkic ideas and what Mustafa Kemal perceived as Enver Pasha's utopian goals (see: Kemalism). Enver Pasha changed his plans and traveled to the Russian Turkestan to realize his pan-Turkish dreams. There the local Muslims had risen up against the pro-Moscow Bolshevik regimes in what became known as the "Basmachi Revolt". Soon he managed to establish himself as the rebels' supreme commander, and turned their disparate forces into a small but well-drilled army.
On 4 August 1922 however, as he allowed his troops to celebrate the Idi Qurbon holiday and kept a guard of 30 men at his headquarters near the village of Ab-ı Derya near Dushanbe, the Red Army detachment of Bashkir cavalry under the command of Yakov Melkumov (Agop Melkumian) launched a surprise attack, during which he was killed.
In 1996, his remains were brought to Republic of Turkey and reburied in Istanbul.
[edit] References
- ^ Fromkin, David (2001). A peace to end all peace: the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East. New York: H. Holt, 119. ISBN 0-8050-6884-8.
- ^ Refuting Genocide
[edit] Sources
- Fromkin, David (1989). A Peace to End All Peace, Avon Books.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Enver's biography
- Enver Pasha in 1911 Britannica
- Enver's declaration at the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East 1920
- Interview with Enver Pasha by Henry Morgenthau - American Ambassador to Constantinople 1915
