Mustafa Kemal
Born in 1881 in Salonika (modern-day Thessaloniki), Kemal joined the military at a very early age: attending military school aged 12 and graduating from Istanbul’s military academy aged 24. He was politically radicalized as a young man, participating in the Young Turk Revolution against the ineffectual Ottoman government in 1908, which stripped the Sultan of his autocratic powers and brought the country under a parliamentary government. He served in two campaigns before the Great War: in 1912 against the Italians in Libya and then in the Balkan Wars (1912 – 1913). But it was on the Gallipoli Peninsula at the Dardanelles where Mustafa Kemal really made a name for himself.
The British, under the leadership of Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, wanted to bring the war to a swift conclusion by circumventing the stalemate on the Western Front. Bringing the might of the British Navy up against the fledging Ottoman Empire (the “sick man of Europe”), the plan was to pass through the narrow Dardanelles and open up access to the Black Sea. To do this, though, they had to clear the devastating Ottoman artillery that was decimating the navy from the heights of the Gallipoli Peninsula. Assigned to do this were Britain’s Indian colonials and Australian and New Zealanders ANZAC forces.
Mustafa Kemal had been in the right place at the right time. As soon as he heard the naval bombardment he directed his 19th Division to take the critical crest of Sari Blair: the ANZAC target. En route, he encountered retreating Turkish soldiers who complained that they were out of ammunition. His response: “lie down and fix bayonets!” They did exactly this. And at the exact moment when decisive allied action was needed, the British—under the incompetent command of Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Stopford—stopped and did the same. This fatal decision guaranteed that the next nine months would be spent fighting costly, attritional trench warfare.
By the end of the fighting, Kemal had become commander of the entire northern sector. The casualties were enormous on both sides. By the end of the campaign, the Turks had suffered around 300,000 casualties and the Allies around 265,000. Kemal’s victory was nothing if not Pyrrhic. However, it was also vital for the Central Powers. For if the Allies had succeeded in establishing a route through the Dardanelles, joining up with the Russians and outflanking Austrian and German forces, that would have spelled the end of the war.
Mustafa Kemal served as Turkey’s first President from 1923 until his death on November 10, 1938. From the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, he established a secular nation-state, instituting a series of radical social, cultural and political reforms including: equal civil and political rights for women, free and compulsory primary education, the institution of Western legal codes the cultural process of secular “Turkification”. The esteem in which he was held was enough to earn him the title “Atatürk”—father of the Turks.