Discover

(Redirected from Enver Pasha)

'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. 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.
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 Thessaloniki. During his service in the city, he became a member of the Committee of Union and Progress. He made important contributions to the proclamation of the Ottoman Constitution (this was the second attempt after Abdul-Hamid II abolished the first constitution in 1878). He went to Berlin, Germany as a military diplomat and there he was affected by the rising military power of Germans and studied on German military doctrine (which he would later use in the Ottoman Army).

Contents

Initial career

The Coup

World War One

War Minister

Defeat at Sarikamis, 1914

Commanding the forces of the capital 1915 – 1918

Army of Islam

Armistice and exile

Pan-Turkism, 1919 - 1920

Aftermath

References

See also

Sources

External links

Initial career

In a Countercoup (1909), the CUP overthrew the coalition of the Liberal Union (Ottoman Empire) and the Committee of Union and Progress, which resulted in the 31 March Incident. Rebels wanted to close the parliament and return to the old system. Enver Bey took an active role in putting the uprising down.
In 1911, the newly unified Italy attacked to the province of ''Trablusgarp'' (Libya). Enver decided to join the defense of the province and went to Libya but, in the end Italy took control of Libya and Enver Bey had to return to Istanbul. He was made lieutenant colonel in 1912 thanks to his active role in the war.
In 1913, Enver Bey ordered the army to march to Edirne, which was invaded by Bulgaria during the Balkan Wars. The Ottoman Army regained control of the city relatively easily because of the war going on between Bulgaria and other Balkan nations at that time. After this success, Enver Bey became a Pasha.

The Coup

After these political and military achievements, he introduced a military dictatorship that came to be called the Three Pashas (Enver Pasha, Talat Pasha, and Djemal Pasha).
In 1914, he became 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 toward total war.

World War One

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. British pursuit of Goeben and Breslau was unsuccessful; the 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 rush 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.

War Minister

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 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 Paşa’s message to the army and the people was “war until final victory”. During the war the living conditions were deteriorated rapidly. The empire had growing discontent. The government of Committee of Union and Progress spent much more than it took in and the inflation rate over the four years of war was greater than 1600%.

Defeat at Sarikamis, 1914

Main articles: Battle of Sarikamis

Enver Paşa commanded an army only once, that was Battle of Sarıkamış. In the Caucasus Campaign, he wanted to encircle the Russians, force them out of Ottoman territory and take back Kars and Batumi. Enver thought of himself as a great military leader while the German military advisor, Liman von Sanders, thought of him as a military buffoon. 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 a Ottoman army in all of World War I.

Commanding the forces of the capital 1915 – 1918

Main articles: Battle of Gallipoli

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.

Army of Islam

Main articles: Democratic Republic of Armenia, 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.

Armistice and exile

Enver resigned days before the empire capitulated by signing an Armistice of Mudros on October 30. Enver resigned with the rest of CUP Cabinet two days later, and the "Three Pashas" all fled into exile. On January 1 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.

Pan-Turkism, 1919 - 1920

Enver first went to Germany in October 1918 where he communicated and worked with German Communist figures like Karl Radek. On August 1920, was successful. He was received well in Moscow where he had established contacts with representatives from Central Asia and other Committee of Union and Progress members. He also met with Bolshevik leaders including Vladimir Ilyich 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 (not produce the desired outcome) "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.
On 30 July 1921, with the Turkish War of Independence reaching its goals, Enver decided to return to Anatolia. He went to Batumi to be close to the new border. However, Mustafa Kemal didn't want him among the Turkish revolutionaries. Mustafa Kemal had broken with Enver Pasha and the Committee of Union and Progress as early as 1914 (beginning of the WWI), he had 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 Central Asia to realize his pan-Turkish dreams. Enver then fled to Russian Turkestan where he hoped to unite the Turkic peoples of that region and oppose the spread of Bolshevism. There, he took part in the Basmachi Revolt and he was killed in a failed last-ditch cavalry charge on August 4, 1922, near Baldzhuan in Turkestan (present-day Tajikistan).

Aftermath

A postwar tribunal in Istanbul tried Enver ''in absentia'' for crimes related to the Armenian Genocide and condemned him to death.^[1]
On 4 August 1922, as he was celebrating the Ramadan at his headquarters near the village of Ab-ı Derya, Russians attacked. He was killed in that attack. Enver Paşa was buried in the village of Ab-ı Derya in current-day Tajikistan. In 1996, his remains were brought to Republic of Turkey and reburied in Istanbul.

References

1. See link

See also

★ Caucasus Campaign

★ Battle of Gallipoli

Sources

★ Fromkin, David (1989). ''A Peace to End All Peace'', Avon Books.

External links

★ Enver's biography

★ Enver's declaration at the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East