Abstract
The newly created Ottoman irregular forces, and the revived and remilitarized Armenian committees, saw advantages in making preparations for operations in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus. Both Ottomans and Armenians recognized that the coming of war would place the Ottoman Empire in a position of grave weakness thereby creating a window of opportunity for a successful insurrection by the Armenian committees. In August 1914, the Armenian committees convened the Eighth World Congress in Erzurum, which the Ottomans viewed as a threshold event that presaged an Armenian insurrection in eastern Anatolia. While there is no question that some members of the Armenian committees wanted to rebel against the Ottomans, it is equally true that other committeemen were opposed to such action. As the Ottoman army deployed to its wartime concentration areas along the frontiers in the fall of 1914, a power vacuum appeared in the fabric of Ottoman control of eastern Anatolia. This encouraged members of the Armenian committees, as well as the Ottoman SO, to commence irregular war before hostilities formally began.
It is not in the nature of things for Turkey to proceed on an even and progressive path; debts, massacres, rebellions, and revolutions will provoke crises in the future as in the past, and once again when the moment is ripe the question of partition will arise.
—Report of the Committee in Asiatic Turkey, April 8, 19151
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Notes
Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 154.
Ibid. See also, e.g., facsimile of Araklyan’s editorial in Mshak, September 20, 1914, which encouraged Ottoman Armenians to seek independence. Mehmet Perinçek, Rus Devlet Arşivlerinden 100 Belgede Ermeni Meselesi (Istanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2007), Document 20.
McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War, 156. See also Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 132. Aksakal cites correspondence between Sazonov and Goremykin.
This story is outside the framework of this book. See Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires, The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires 1908–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 117–19; and McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War, 148–53.
G. Korganoff, La Participation Des Arméniens à la Guerre Mondiale— sur le front du Caucase (1914–1918) (Paris: Massis Editions, 1927), 10. The number of ARF druzhiny would grow later when Ishkhan Arghutian and Grigor Avsharian apparently organized another legion.
Antranig Chalabian, General Andranik and the Armenian Revolutionary Movement (USA: First Edition, 1988), 228.
Justin McCarthy, Esat Arslan, Cemalettin Taşkıran, and Ömer Turan, The Armenian Rebellion at Van (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2006), 185. McCarthy cites reports in the Turkish military archives as the source of this information.
Muammer Demirel, Birinci Dünya Harbinde Erzurum ve Çevresinde Ermeni Hareketleri (1914–1918) (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1996), 17.
The most comprehensive summary of the activities of the SO in the Caucasus during this period is found in Shaw’s chapter on the Teşkilat- ı Mahsusa in Stanford J. Shaw, The Ottoman Empire in World War I, Volume 1 Prelude to War (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurum Basımevi, 2006), 353–456.
See Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010) for the most readable and comprehensive work on these remarkable Ottoman-German expeditions.
Fevzi Çakmak, Birinci Dünya Sava şı’ nda Doğu Cephesi (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 2005), 27.
David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors; Muslim-Christian Relation in Eastern Anatolia during World Warı (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006), 94–100.
Aziz Samih İlter, Birinci Dünya Savaşı’nda Kafkas Cephesi Hatıraları (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 2007), 1–3. About 13,000 were Kurdish reserve tribal cavalrymen and the remainder were Ottoman regular army cavalrymen.
Hakkı Altınbilek and Naci Kır, Birinci Dünya Harbi’nde Türk Harbi, Kafkas Cephesi 3ncüOrdu Harekâtı, Cilt II Birinci Kitap (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1993), 122–323.
In English, see W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields: A History of the Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 1828–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 240–50.
İsmet Görgülü, On Yıllık Harbin Kadrosu 1912–1922, Balkan-Birinci Dünya ve İstiklâl Harbi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurum Basımevi, 1993), 109, 111.
Demirel, Erzurum ve Çevresinde Ermeni Hareketleri, 41–45; and Vahakn Dadrian, “The Role of the Special Organization in the Armenian Genocide during the First World War,” Panikos Panayi (ed.), Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia in Two World Wars (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 62.
See, e.g., Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris,, 176–79; and Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act, The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 125–27. These assertions appear to originate in the 1916 work of British wartime propagandist Arnold Toynbee.
G. Korganoff, La Participation Des Arméniens à la Guerre Mondiale—sur le front du Caucase (1914–1918) (Paris: Massis Editions, 1927), 15–17.
Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide; Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 80.
See also Vice Admiral Cecil Vivian Usborne, Smoke on the Horizon: Mediterranean Fighting 1914–1918 (London: 1933), 20–40.
George H. Cassar, Kitchener’s War, British Strategy from 1914 to 1916 (Washington, DC: Brassey’s Inc, 2004), see 120–24, for a particularly readable discussion of the War Council’s deliberations and decisions regarding these events.
Memorandum Cheetham to Edward Grey, October 14, 1914, TNA, FO 438/4, 70404. Nubar continued to press the allies for an invasion of the Levantine coast (Cilicia) throughout the spring of 1915 and promised that they would be supported by a “unified rebellion of Armenians against Turkish authorities wherever possible.” See Boghos Nubar to Sahag Catholicos of Cilicia, Heliopolis, Egypt, April 17, 1915, document 5 in V. Ghazarian (ed.), Boghos Nubar’s Papers and the Armenian Question, 1915–1918 (Waltham, 1996), 203. Nubar later led the Armenian delegation at Versailles in 1919.
Yigal Sheffy, British Military Intelligence in the Palestine Campaign 1914–1918 (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 48–83. Sheffy noted that the activities of January 1915 were among the most successful and that in 1915, 13 agents were successfully landed on the Levantine coast, but that at least 3 were intercepted by the Turks.
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© 2013 Edward J. Erickson
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Erickson, E.J. (2013). Irregular War in Caucasia and in the Levant. In: Ottomans and Armenians. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362216_8
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