Evaluation of the National Struggle from the Perspective of Greece

The National Struggle began after the Armistice of Mudros signed on October 30, 1918, when the lands of the Ottoman Empire that were not occupied during World War I began to be shared by the Entente States, Greece, Armenia, Georgia and some minority groups, and the Republic of Turkey. It is the name we give to the process that resulted in the establishment of the State.

In this process, the fiercest and longest struggle was with the Greeks. Because the most undamaged state trying to invade Turkish lands is Greece and the strongest army is the Greek army. Other invading states and armies have many weaknesses. For example, newly established Armenia and Georgia are very weak states. Their armies are also newly formed and their professional staff is quite weak.

Moreover, they are in tension created by the Bolshevik armies that are coming against them and they are in conflict among themselves. For this reason, Armenia was crushed by the Turkish army in a short time, and Georgia had to evacuate the Anatolian lands it occupied with coercive measures.

The Allies have other problems. For example, at the Paris Peace Conference, Italy fell out with its partners and started to act like a little boy who was a whistleblower at the conference. Because the project of England, France and the USA to create a great Yugoslavia caused the places in the Adriatic not to be given to him.

Moreover, a large part of Western Anatolia, which was promised to him through secret agreements during the First World War, was given to Greece. Not only does he not want a great Greece that will be the plaything of the British next to him, but the possibility of the establishment of a great Yugoslavia state bothers the Italians badly.

Italy, which is incomparably weaker than England, France and the USA, is incapable of expressing this distress by showing strength, since it came out with great losses from the wars with Austria during the First World War. This weakness can also be understood from his failure to show any success during the war, the fact that he was on the verge of surrender during the German-Austrian offensive in 1917, and even that he could not establish a complete dominance in Tripoli even though he occupied it in 1911.

However, Italy cannot tolerate that the promises made to it are not kept. For this purpose, he started to take some initiatives before the ink of the signatures of the Armistice of Mudros dried. He resisted in Paris not to give the Aegean region to Greece, but when he saw that it did not work, he left the conference. Immediately after, it started to occupy the settlements close to the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts of Western Anatolia, which were outside the region given to the Greeks, without using weapons. He even sent soldiers to Konya.

The aim of the Italians is to gain economic advantage rather than territorial annexation and to prevent the excessive expansion of Greece by leaning south. In the areas they occupied, they generally approached the people with soft power elements, including providing health aid and loans, and specifically avoided entering into a conflict. Because, they learned by experience how an effective form of struggle was the irregular war they encountered in Tripoli and the foundations of which were laid by the Turkish army in 1911. That's why they did everything they could to prevent a resistance movement from emerging in the regions they occupied in Anatolia.

The Italians also thought of using their Tripoli experience to hurt the Greeks. For this purpose, Italian High Commissioner Count Sforza sent some of the people he met in Istanbul to Izmir with his military ships to organize a resistance against the Greeks and took them to the shore. Sforza also met with officers such as Ali Fethi (Okyar) and Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), who had rooted them out in Tripoli in 1911, and promised to protect and support them.

Meanwhile, France and England, who are trying to share the world, and America, who are trying to be big brother to them, act like the rulers of the world. But they also have some important problems. These problems show that no matter how strong they appear from the outside, they are not strong enough to order the world in the way they want.

Since the USA entered the war very late, it suffered very few casualties compared to other states. As soon as World War I started, exports to England and France for war needs started to increase, industrial production increased, so British and French gold reserves flowed to the USA in exchange for imported goods. In fact, for the first time in its history (total of 10 billion dollars), the USA gave foreign loans (to England and France) during the First World War and started to become the new financial center of the world. In other words, the USA seems to be a candidate to become the new imperial superpower.

However, there are some different facts behind this image. U.S. public opinion rejects entry into the war He does not support much, but also wants the soldiers to return to the country as soon as the war ends. Moreover, the Senate also thinks like the people and puts pressure on the government to give up the USA's European affairs and focus on the Americas. In the USA, which is a democratic country, it is not possible (at least at that time) to determine international policy without the support of the people and the Senate. For this reason, after a while, the USA stopped being interested in the affairs of Europe and turned to itself.

France, on the other hand, is the country with the most problems among the Allied Powers. The battles of the European Western Front took place on French soil, industrial facilities and agricultural areas were destroyed. Moreover, the French economy, which was under a huge external debt burden during the war, came to the brink of collapse.

The country with the highest human casualties in terms of dead and injured is France. Considering that the casualties consisted of young men, these losses added war capacity and caused France to face serious problems in economic and social issues. Due to this heavy casualty, problems began to be experienced even during the war. Revolts broke out in almost all divisions of the French army, and these revolts were suppressed by force, with thousands of soldiers on trial and some being shot.

On the other hand, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia were devastating for France. Because most of the foreign debt of the Ottoman Empire consists of debts to France. Most of the foreign investments in the Ottoman Empire belong to the French. If the Ottoman Empire is destroyed or very weak, it is not possible to collect this debt.

The same is true for Russia. Russia embarked on a major industrialization move at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. Russia, which did not have sufficient capital, took a large amount of debt from the French capital for these industrial investments. The French also have large investments in the Russian financial sector. After the Bolshevik revolution, since Russia cut off its relations with the Entente Powers, the repayment of this money does not seem likely.

In addition, the ideology of socialism that came to power in Russia began to affect the French people and especially the French soldiers who were deployed to the Crimea. As a result, when the soldiers in Crimea did not fight with the Bolsheviks and rebelled, the soldiers here had to withdraw hastily. Demobilization activities were accelerated as the long war and military service caused the concern that it might cause a nationwide revolt, and thus the army began to lose power.

For this reason, the French, who occupied Southern Anatolia, were able to allocate only six battalions there. A significant part of the soldiers of these battalions consists of North African Muslim soldiers and soldiers of Armenian origin. When resistance movements emerged in Syria, Lebanon and Southern Anatolia and started to gain strength, France, which had difficulty in dominating the region with weak forces, fell into a helpless situation.

Although England had to send and borrow all its gold reserves to America during the war, it still seems to be the largest and most powerful state in the world. However, this image is actually the reason for the weakness of England. Because the British, although they have a very large army, have captured such large lands that it has become impossible for them to hold these lands with their current forces. For this reason, the British were unable to provide enough relative combat power superiority to defeat the resistance against them anywhere. On top of that, resistance started to emerge everywhere, especially in Afghanistan.

When the British soldiers in Russia, like the French soldiers, were under the influence of Bolshevik propagandists and did not go to battles, the government feared a revolt and quickly began to demobilize the army. In this, even in London the soldiers "Demobilization!" The marches with their slogans and the emergence of socialist organizations all over the country like mushrooms were also effective.

Only Greece is still tidy and strong. Because Greece entered the First World War very late and suffered very few casualties in the battles. The reason for this is that King Constantine wanted to remain neutral when World War I began. However, Prime Minister Venizelos is in favor of entering the war. Born in Crete, Venizelos is an extremist Greek nationalist and his dream is to turn Greece into a powerful state like the Eastern Roman Empire. The slogan he came up with for this was "We will turn Greece into a palace with four windows overlooking the four seas." consists of a sentence.

The administrative center of the palace in this slogan of Venizelos will be established in Istanbul, that is, Istanbul will be the capital of Greece. Greek lands, on the other hand, will spread over a wide region including Thrace and the Aegean Region. Thus, the four windows of the palace, namely its borders; It will open to the Black Sea, the Marmara Sea, the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean. Venizelos doubled the territory of the country in the Balkan War and made the army do it.

It has come one step closer to this goal by reducing the Turkish population in these regions with the massacres.

If the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War I; Greece, which will take a part of the Aegean, Thrace and Marmara, will double its territory again and the dream of Venizelos will come true. That's why Venizelos wanted to go to war and fight on the same side with the Allies. However, when he could not come to an agreement with the King, he established an independent government in Thessaloniki, French and British soldiers landed in Greece and the king had to flee the country. Thus, Venizelos became the sole ruler of the country and immediately joined the war.

When the Armistice of Mudros was signed, Venizelos, who thought that all his calculations were kept, immediately set up camp in Paris and received permission and authority to land troops in Izmir from the US president and French and British prime ministers, who came to Paris for the Peace Conference. When he received this authority, he sent a telegram to his country in haste, so that the Italians would not invade Izmir and its surroundings before the Greeks, and he announced that the forces that could be recovered should be immediately landed in Izmir. Upon this telegram, the Greeks landed only one division in İzmir.

After that, the process that the Greeks call the "Asia Minor Campaign" and we call the "Western Front Battles in the National Struggle" started and this process, which started on May 15, 1919, ended with the Armistice of Mudanya on October 11, 1922. In this process, although some military operations took place in Thrace, the war mainly took place in Western Anatolia.

This war took place in two different stages for both the Turkish side and the Greek side. The first of these stages is the battles of the Venizelos period for the Greeks; For us, it can be expressed as the battles of the Kuvayi Milliye period. As we mentioned above, the battles of the Venizelos period started with the Greek troops landing in Izmir by telegram from Paris. But this beginning is like a harbinger of how the end will be. Because the Greek troops, who landed in the port of Izmir without encountering any military or civil resistance, proved that they were unprepared to carry out this invasion from the very first day.

While the Greek troops were advancing in the city, after a bullet fired, they started a great massacre against the people by acting like a herd of marauders rather than a military unit. This situation caused the whole Turkish people to be outraged, and the Defense of the Law Associations were established everywhere, protest marches were held, and thousands of telegrams were sent to the representatives of the Entente States.

The first phase of the Greek occupation, which started during the Venizelos period, did not end with the occupation of Izmir. Because the Greek army, despite its insufficient strength, started to move towards the interior of Anatolia in order to seize as much land as possible. Upon this progress, the Ottoman War Ministry and the General Staff, encouraged by the atmosphere created by the reactions in the country, sent Colonel Bekir Sami (Günsav) Bey to the Aegean region to gather the troops scattered during the Greek occupation and to command the 17th Corps, whose headquarters was captured by the Greeks.

The order given to Bekir Sami Bey by the Minister of War did not stop there. He was given the implicit authority to use force against the Greeks when necessary and to organize the people as well as the military units for this. Upon this, Bekir Sami Bey started to call the people to resistance wherever he stopped. Although it was difficult in the beginning, it started to form a national force and to form a front with this force, thanks to the sometimes covert and sometimes open support of the General Staff and the Ministry of War.

The support Bekir Sami received from the public increased over time with the involvement of local administrators. But the biggest reason why the people showed more interest in the struggle was the Greeks. Because the Greek army carried out robberies and massacres wherever it occupied. Seeing this, the people understood that the only way out was resistance. Meanwhile, when Ali (Çetinkaya) Bey in Ayvalık resisted the Greeks with guns with his volunteers and his regiment, the General Staff issued a message praising this and setting an example for everyone. After this message, which means that the army supports the Kuvayi Milliye, new Kuvayi Milliye units started to be established everywhere and a front was formed against the Greek army with increasing participation every day.

The Greek advance stopped as soon as the attacks of the Kuvayi Milliye units began, as the Greek forces were insufficient to dominate this area and suppress the resistances compared to the extent of the area it occupied. Meanwhile, the Entente Powers assigned a delegation to examine the massacre in İzmir, and the Greeks were in a difficult situation when this delegation saw the dimensions of the massacre on site. British General Milne was sent to the region upon the report given by the investigation team. This General determined a line that would be called the Milne Line and it was stated that the Greeks should not cross to the east of this line.

ir. Thus, the first phase of the invasion operation in the Venizelos period came to an end.

After that, although there were some clashes between the Greek army and the elements of the Kuvayi Milliye, the front became generally stagnant. This period, which lasted for about a year, provided the necessary preparation time for the organization of the National Struggle. Because Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who went to Samsun on May 19, 1919, determined the purpose, target and strategy of the National Struggle within this year and established the organizational structure that would carry out the struggle.

After completing the organization, he made good use of the opportunity created by the conflict-free environment, embarked on a political struggle with Istanbul and succeeded in making Istanbul accept the organization he founded in Anatolia and the goals of this organization. When Istanbul was occupied by the British, he convened a new parliament in Ankara and established a new government. Thus, the foundations of the National Struggle were firmly laid.

These events in Anatolia and other developments in the world caused the Allies to worry. Thereupon, work was started for a peace agreement to be signed with the Ottoman Empire, and as a result, the Treaty of Sevres was prepared. However, the Istanbul Government, relying on the stopping of the Greek army and the strengthening of the Kuvayi Milliye day by day, was reluctant to sign this agreement, which had very severe conditions. Thereupon, the British allowed the Greeks to start an advanced operation in order to disband the Kuvayi Milliye, which they trusted, and thus to persuade the Istanbul Government.

Since the Damat Ferit Government, which was established at this time, started to do whatever the British said, rebellions started in many places against the Ankara Government with the support and provocation of this government. In addition, Kuvayi Inzibatiye units were established to disperse the Kuvayi Milliye. Taking advantage of this favorable environment, the Greek army started the second phase of the Venizelos period invasion operation. The Greek army, which attacked on June 22, 1920, dispersed the Kuvayi Milliye troops and advanced rapidly and reached the line of Bursa-Uşak extension.

When the Greek army stopped on this line, the invasion operation of the Venizelos period came to an end. This situation caused the end of the Kuvayi Milliye period for the Turkish side. When the GNAT government saw that the regular Greek army could not be resisted with the Kuvayi Milliye units, it quickly started to establish a regular army.

Venizelos seems to have achieved a great success since the Istanbul Government, who was frightened after this offensive, signed the Treaty of Sevres. However, it will soon become clear that this is misleading. Because the Turkish Grand National Assembly continued its activities despite this defeat and declared that it did not recognize the Treaty of Sèvres and considered those who signed the treaty as traitors. This showed that there was no point in the Istanbul Government's signing of the treaty.

After that, some developments began to occur in Greece that would change the course of the war. As a coincidence of fate, the current Greek King was bitten by a monkey while playing with a monkey he loved very much, and when the wound caused by this bite became infected, the king died. Thereupon, the supporters of King Constantine, whom Venizelos had forced to flee abroad, took action and began to gain the support of the people.

The parliamentary elections held at this time were concluded against Venizelos by the votes of the Greek people who were tired of the long war and wanted peace. Thereupon, the Venizelos government fell and while Constantine was returning to the country, Venizelos had to flee abroad. After that, the battles of the King Constantine period began for the Greek army.

This period can be divided into two phases. The first phase is the period between January 1921 and September 1921, when the Greek army was on the offensive. This period is also the period when General Papulas was the army commander in the Greek army. The second phase is the period of defense of the Greek army and the withdrawal (expulsion) from Anatolia. During this period, the commander of the Greek army was General Hacıanesti. Although, after the Battle of the Commander-in-Chief, Hacıanesti was dismissed and General Trikopis was appointed, but he could not begin his duty as the army commander. Because he learned this assignment from the command committee of the Turkish army to which he surrendered.

This period is also a new period for the Turkish army. Because while Venizelos was fighting with the Kuvayi Milliye elements, who were not against the Ottoman government and were only trying to stop the Greek advance, all of the battles in this period were carried out by the regular army affiliated to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, which did not recognize the Istanbul government and formed a new government in Ankara. In the first phase of this period, the Turkish army carried out defensive, distraction and retreat operations. In the second phase, the offensive, exploitation and follow-up operations were carried out. While the commander of the Greek army was different people in two stages, İsmet (İnönü) Pasha was initially in the northern part of the front, I. and I.

After the First İnönü Battles, he commanded the Western Front without interruption until the end of the war.

As a result of the Great Attack by the Turkish army at the end of the Constantine period, a large part of the Greek army was destroyed, and those who survived fled to Greece. When the officers who returned to their country seized power with a military coup, Constantine fled again, while Venizelos returned as a savior. After that, the officers and generals who were brought to the army command cadres during the Constantine period were tried as responsible for the heavy defeat.

Some of them were executed, some were sentenced to prison and a few were acquitted. Thus, the entire responsibility for the defeat, which the Greeks called the Asia Minor Expedition or the Asia Minor Catastrophe, was attributed to King Constantine and his cadres. Even today, it is written and drawn that Venizelos said that "the forward operation of the Greek army in 1921 was a big mistake, he would not allow it if he was in power" and the responsibility is still seen with Konstantin and his team.

However, in my personal opinion, this is not true. Because the advanced operation of the Greek army during the reign of Constantine did not occur as a result of a plan made during his time. While Venizelos was still in power, a plan was prepared and presented to Venizelos by the Commander of the Asia Minor Army appointed by him to destroy the Turkish army and force it to accept the peace treaty.

This plan is the same as the plan of the operation carried out by Papulas. In the plan of the Venizelos period, two options are suggested for the Greek army, either advancing in the direction of Konya and uniting with the French, or advancing in the direction of Ankara. Papulas advanced in the direction of Ankara, not in the direction of Konya. There are good reasons for that too. Because the French moved away from the Greeks after Constantine came to power and after a while they started negotiations with the TBMM. In this case, the only way out is to move towards Ankara. Papulas did just that.

On the other hand, although the battles of the Venizelos period seem like successful battles, these battles are completely different from the battles of the Constantine period. Because Venizelos' army won easy victories by fighting irregular and weak Kuvayi Milliye elements. But Constantine's army fought the Turkish army, which was regular and getting stronger day by day. For this reason, the Greek army had to pay a huge price for even a small success. Moreover, although the Ottoman government in the period of Venizelos sat at the table in fear even after the slightest military failure, the government of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey under Constantine never sat down and did not accept defeat, even though it suffered heavy defeats.

The paving stones of the roads that led the Greek army to disaster were also laid during the Venizelos period. Because it was Venizelos who ordered a landing in Izmir with inadequate and untrained troops, caused the emergence of resistance movements as a result of the massacre of these troops, and pushed the army into Anatolia, that is, prepared the infrastructure of the disaster.