İsmail Enver
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İsmail Enver (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. Due to his contributions for the revolution, he was given the nickname "The Hero of Liberty"(Hürriyet Kahramanı). He was the main leader of the Ottoman Empire in both Balkan Wars and World War I.
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[edit] Background
Born to a wealthy family in Istanbul, he studied in Germany and became interested in German theories of military organization and strategy. (dubious; discuss) He rose rapidly in the Ottoman army upon his return, becoming a Pasha by 1913 at the age of thirty-two. Enver was a vocal advocate of the idea of pan-Turkism. In practice this meant that all Turkic people were to be united, either in a single state ruled by the Ottoman Dynasty or into a federal political union.
In April 1912 the Young Turks (officially the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)) won an overwhelming majority in an election, but the loss of the province of Libya to Italy and other setbacks eroded its support to the point that in July the CUP was forced to yield to a political coalition called the Liberal Union.
[edit] The Three Pashas
In a coup on January 23, 1913, the CUP overthrew the Liberal Union coalition and introduced a military dictatorship headed, within a few months, by the "Three Pashas": Enver Pasha, Talat Pasha, and Djemal Pasha. While Enver's portfolio was only Minister of War, the other two Pashas usually defered to Enver.
One week before the Ottoman government declared war on Russia by shelling Odessa, Enver gave himself a new position Vice-Generalissimo, making him the near dictator of the Ottoman government at the age of 34. 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] Defeat at Sarikamis
Enver thought of himself as a great military leader while the German military advisor, Liman von Sanders, thought of him as a military buffoon. The reality was, 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 Sarikamis in December-January 1914-1915. 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 a Turkish army in all of World War I.
After his defeat at Sarikamis, 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 defence of Gallipoli.
Enver proved to be ineffective as War Minister and frequently over the next four years the Germans would have to support the Ottoman government with generals such as Liman von Sanders, Falkenhayn, Baron von der Goltz, and Kress von Kressenstein. The Germans also gave the Ottoman government military supplies, soldiers, and even fuel. Enver's government spent much more than it took in and the inflation rate over the four years of war was greater than 1600%.
[edit] The Last Year
In 1918, with Ottoman forces defeated in Palestine and Mesopotamia, Enver looked for victory in Russia. During 1917, due to the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War, the Russian army in the Caucasus had ceased to exist. 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. Early in 1918, the Ottoman army attacked Armenia, destroying most of the forces of the new Republic of Armenia. The Army of Islam marched into Russia, eventually reaching Baku in September of 1918.
These conquests in the Caucasus counted for very little in the war as a whole. With the collapse of Bulgaria and the loss of Mesopotamia, and the utter defeat at the Battle of Megiddo (1918), the war was lost. First to go was Talat Pasha, who resigned days before the empire capitulated by signing an armistice on October 30. Enver resigned with the rest of CUP Cabinet two days later, and the "Three Pashas" all fled into exile. Enver first went to Germany in October 1918 where he communicated and worked with German Communist figures like Karl Radek. According to Misplaced Credulity: Contemporary Turkish Attempts to Refute the Armenian Genocide by Dennis R. Papazian [1] at page 202, a postwar tribunal in Istanbul tried Enver in absentia for crimes related to the Armenian Genocide and condemned him to death.
Enver then fled to Russian Turkestan where he hoped to unite the Turkic groups of that region and oppose the spread of Bolshevism. There, he was killed in a failed last-ditch cavalry charge on August 4, 1922, near Baldzhuan in Turkestan (present-day Tajikistan).
[edit] See also
[edit] Sources
- Fromkin, David (1989). A Peace to End All Peace, Avon Books.
