by Unknown
Those involved in the coming coup were still plotting, however, when Operation Blue opened with a tremendous crash of artillery at 0215 on June 28. As the Wehrmacht armored columns raced across the steppes, fruitlessly endeavoring to repeat their dramatic kesselschlacht (“encirclement”) triumphs of the previous year, the Germans and their Turkish coconspirators in Ankara were favored with an enormous piece of luck when Prime Minister Refik Saydam died on July 9. Although Saydam had been a figurehead in the government, the pro-German faction cleverly used the temporary disruption to put Erkilet, an ardent pan-Turkist, in his place. Saracoglu was forced into retirement ten days later under the pretext that his hesitant stance would invite German wrath and deny Turkey its share in the spoils of war. The lure of Berlin’s blandishments, the evident success of Operation Blue, Rommel’s capture of Tobruk, and Hitler’s dark threat that “Constantinople could share the fate of Birmingham and Coventry,” pushed Inönü toward allegiance with Germany, but Allied appeals and his recognition that his country was not ready for war held him back.12 Although von Papen assured Hitler that “we can definitely and also very quickly find a treaty instrument preparing the transition of Turkey into our camp,” tension dominated Ankara through that hot, dusty July as Inönü’s decision hung in the balance.13
In the end, the decision was taken out of the president’s hands. On July 23, Rostov fell to the advancing Germans. Over the next several days, the Wehrmacht’s Army Group A poured south in a seemingly unstoppable drive toward the Caucasus. Erden, Erkilet, Menemencioglu—now Foreign Minister in Saracoglu’s stead—and even Cakmak, attempted to sway the president, but “Inönü did not appear at all convinced.”14 In a desperate atmosphere of mingled hope and fear, the generals and the foreign minister eased Inönü from power on July 30 and had him respectfully escorted to a coastal villa to “recover his health.” The following day they signed a secret treaty with Germany and prepared to take their country into the war.
“Not a War but a Crusade”
Foreign Minister Menemencioglu was exultant on signing the alliance agreement. “This is not a war but a crusade,” he told Papen at the small, tense reception held after the ceremony.15 Others among the coup plotters had their doubts. Indeed, Turkey was not in a position to enter the fray immediately. Nor, for that matter, was Germany prepared to provide the support Hitler and Papen had lavishly promised. Both sides thus agreed to delay announcing their agreement until military preparations could be completed.
The Turkish armed forces in 1942 were both an asset and a liability to the Axis cause. The army in particular was large and enjoyed a proven reputation for ferocity and endurance in combat. After several weeks of mobilization, the Turks could plan on fielding at least 41 infantry or mountain divisions, three cavalry divisions, and a weak armored division, as well as fortress garrisons and headquarters units for a total of more than one million men in arms. The Germans assessed this formidable force as capable of putting up tenacious resistance in defensive missions, especially in the rugged terrain of their homeland.
Wehrmacht officers, however, were much less sanguine about the ability of their new Turkish allies to conduct effective offensive operations. They had good reason to be concerned. Bravery aside, the army suffered from numerous shortfalls in modern training and equipment. “A new era had dawned in warfare, but we were still teaching the rules of the First World War,” one Turkish officer ruefully recalled. “Our arms, tactics, and techniques dated from that time.” Another lamented that, “we had guns which had served at Verdun in the First War: naturally these were not arms to be proud of compared to the Panzers.”16 Logistical support was especially weak. With inadequate fuel for its limited pool of motor vehicles, the army relied almost exclusively on animal transport trains loosely organized in caravan fashion. The lack of vehicles and the poor roads also restricted strategic mobility, a situation compounded by the huge deficiencies in the nation’s rail system.
The air force and navy had even greater problems. Of the 300 available aircraft, only half could be considered modern, and the pilots to fly them “could at best only be rated as moderately skilled and with little ability to fly in bad weather,” according to the British air attaché. British observers had similar comments about the navy: “Judged by the standards of modern navies, however small, the condition of the fleet is far from satisfactory.”17 Despite its five submarines, the Turkish Navy, therefore, would do little to bolster Axis maritime strength in the Mediterranean. Much worse, from the German perspective, were the deficiencies in the air force, as these could only be overcome by a substantial commitment of scarce Luftwaffe assets to this remote and primitive theater of operations.
Indeed, the Luftwaffe had posed the greatest objections to providing support to the Turks. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, however, promised that all difficulties would be overcome and expressed his confidence that most of the Luftwaffe’s problems would melt away once the Wehrmacht’s final push secured the oil of the Caucasus. His subordinates were appalled, but scrambled and scraped to find a few combat squadrons to deploy to Turkey. However, support to Rommel, the bombardment of Malta, and the defense of the Reich against growing RAF raids, not to mention the colossal war in the East, left little for this new task. Despite the Reichsmarschall’s promise, his staff ultimately failed to meet their goal and had to resort to the dubious assertion that Luftwaffe planes operating out of Russia with Army Group A would provide air support to the offensive from Turkey.
Wehrmacht assistance to the southern thrust into the Caucasus, now named Operation Dessau, was more substantial. This took the form of the 97th and 101st Jäger Divisions under General Maximilian de Angelis’s XLIV Corps from Army Group A. Though not true mountain formations, these two divisions had been especially prepared for operations in difficult terrain with limited logistical support. They had both “proved their mettle in heavy fighting” on the Eastern Front, and as Hitler had already committed the only available mountain divisions to the German arm of the offensive into the Caucasus, the 97th and 101st were assigned to the expeditionary force for Turkey.18 Based on Papen’s optimistic reportage following Saydam’s death, the corps was withdrawn from Operation Blue in mid-July and transported to the Crimea as Training Command South (Lehrkommando Süd). Army Group A’s commander, Field Marshal Wilhelm List, protested bitterly over the loss, but his pleas were unavailing. OKH opined that the pressure XLIV Corps and the Turks would create from the south would more than compensate for the absence of the two divisions from List’s command. Furthermore, OKH promised that List would receive the three divisions of the Italian Alpini Corps by mid-August, when his army group was expected to reach the mountains. List was hardly mollified, but while he argued in vain, the trains carrying the thinly disguised XLIV Corps rattled south. The divisions had only a few days to refit and train for their new mission—including distribution of the newly reprinted Türkisches Soldaten-Wörterbuch für den Feldgebrauch—before boarding ships for transit to Samsun on the Turkish coast.
As the XLIV Corps was steaming across the Black Sea, the Turks were mobilizing, consulting with an OKW staff delegation on plans, and bombarding Papen with requests for equipment, ammunition, and fuel. The mobilization process, though hampered by innumerable obstacles, proved relatively successful. By the end of August most of the army’s regular and reserve divisions were up to strength and fairly well organized. There were serious deficiencies, however, in equipment and training. The paucity of useful field artillery caused the gravest concern among the Turkish officers and their increasingly skeptical German partner, but some units still lacked rifles, mortars, and other basic gear as they headed for the frontier. The Germans delivered some arms, but most were captured French or Soviet weapons that only provided marginal increases in Turkish combat capability. Their poor state of repair did little to foster Turkish—German amity. Fuel was one of the most significant problems, but in this area too the Germans, facing major fuel shortfalls themselves, could provide
little immediate assistance. Ammunition was also in short supply. Compounding all of these difficulties was the miserable state of the logistic and transportation system. Even in cases where the material was on hand, it often proved impossible to distribute it in a timely and efficient manner to the units in need. The priority attached to movement of the XLIV Corps and its supplies only exacerbated the transportation challenge for the Turks.
While commanders, logisticians, and railway officials wrestled with the raising, deployment, and supply of the Turkish Army and the German expeditionary corps, Marshal Cakmak and his German counterparts outlined the strategy for the coming offensive. Both sides agreed that the main thrust would be launched from northeastern Turkey into the southern Caucasus. Two Turkish armies (2nd and 3rd with twenty-one divisions) and the XLIV Corps would attack on this front. The Turkish 4th and 5th Armies were assembling fifteen divisions on the country’s southern and eastern borders to keep the British from interfering in the main effort and to occupy key pieces of territory scheduled to fall under Ankara’s control. To the annoyance of the Germans, the Turks insisted on retaining their 1st Army, including their fledgling armored division, in the west. Though willing to ally with the Germans, the Turks were viscerally suspicious of the Italians and Bulgarians. They had no intention of denuding the Thracian frontier or the Aegean coast. Similarly, Cakmak issued secret oral orders to the commanders of the 4th and 5th Armies to refrain from overly aggressive action against the British. The shrewdly cautious marshal wanted to avoid unnecessarily provocative action against the Western Allies in case Erden’s and Erkilet’s faith in the inevitable future triumphs of Germany proved unfounded.
The Allies Assemble
Midsummer 1942 was a grim time for the Allies. Among other worries, threats to Middle Eastern oil and the tenuous link to Russia through Iran seemed to grow worse just when German air and sea attacks forced the closing of the convoy route to Murmansk. In the Western Desert, Rommel had reached the El Alamein position on June 30, and costly British attacks through late July failed to dislodge him, while German forces driving south from Rostov reached the northern fringes of the Caucasus and raised the Nazi banner on the highest peak in the range, 18, 481-foot Mt. Elbrus, on August 21. Though Hitler railed against the “stupid mountaineers who should have been court-martialed,” the extent of the German advance caused grave concern in London, Washington, and Moscow. News of Turkey’s actions added to the gloom. Although intelligence had yet to confirm Ankara’s entry into the Axis, Turkish mobilization could not be hidden entirely, and the transfer of ten divisions from Thrace to the east was a clear indicator of looming peril to “the northern bastion of our position in the Middle East.”19
British intelligence had become convinced of the German “concern to reach the Caucasus” as early as the autumn of 1941. This fear abated during the winter, but “by August 1942, Whitehall’s anxiety about the German danger to the Middle East,” this time with active Turkish support, “was again acute.”20 Having occupied Syria, Iraq, and, in conjunction with the Russians, most of Iran in 1941, the British should have been well-positioned to assist their Soviet allies and repulse any thrust toward the Suez Canal or Abadan. Combat troops, however, were in short supply. Some could be released from homeland defense as the threat of a German invasion receded, but the demands of the Egypt and India fronts could not be ignored. Nonetheless, by late summer 1942, Great Britain had assembled a force of eight British, Indian, and Polish divisions under the 10th Army, with headquarters in Baghdad. The United States, constrained by its commitments to Operation Torch, was reluctant to offer ground troops, but did provide several desperately needed fighter and bomber squadrons as well as crucial logistical help. Judging that a German drive through Baku into Iran posed the greatest danger, British and American leaders decided to concentrate their true strength in the 10th Army, leaving Syria covered by a thin screen of real units and a welter of false formations under the imposing title of the 9th Army.21
The Russians were no less concerned than the Western Allies. With the Red Army crumbling before the Wehrmacht, Stalin issued a draconian order declaring “Not one step back!” in an effort to stem the German onslaught before it reached the Caucasus. This order, combined with command changes and a wealth of reinforcements, bolstered Soviet resistance, and the German advance slowed. The Panzers continued to press, however, and the imminent entry of Turkey into the war created a tremendous strain on Soviet forces. The Turkish Army was clearly massing for an offensive and Russian border troops were already reporting that “black partisans” were slipping over the mountainous frontier to foment unrest among Stalin’s Turkic subjects and to conduct “diversionary terrorist operations on USSR territory.”22 Faced with this growing crisis, Stalin had no choice but to release additional formations from the General Staff (Stavka) Reserve and to redeploy units from the occupation force in Iran. By late August the Soviets were in the awkward situation of having the eight armies of the North Caucasus Front facing north against the depredations of the Germans, while the Transcaucasus Front was gathering its five armies only 75 or eighty miles to the south to face the anticipated Turkish onslaught.
The Roads to Baku
While the Allies scrambled and scraped to find troops to defend the vital oil fields, the Germans were encountering problems of their own in the drive south from Rostov. Lead elements of the 17th Army were pressing toward Novorossiysk, and the 1st Panzer Army’s spearheads were slowly approaching Groznyy, but critical fuel shortages and stiffening resistance retarded the offensive. Moreover, there simply were not enough combat units to cover Army Group A’s expanding sector. By late August its twenty divisions were advancing across a 500-mile front with its two main axes of attack separated by more than 200 miles. Indeed, instead of gaming reinforcements, the army group was losing troops. The 4th Panzer Army and almost all of Army Group A’s air support had already been drawn north toward Stalingrad, and much to Field Marshal List’s disgust, the three Italian Alpini divisions that were to replace XLIV Corps were likewise diverted to support the effort against Stalingrad. As early as August 21 the OKW staff noted that “the Führer is angry because of the slow progress made in the crossing of the Caucasus,” but Stalingrad remained Hitler’s priority and he increasingly looked to Operation Dessau as the solution that “would kick open the door to Allied oil.”23 Anxious veterans of the previous Russian winter noticed, however, that snow was already falling in the upper reaches of the mountains at the end of August.
The plan for Dessau was straightforward. The Axis main effort would be in the center, where the German XLIV Corps and Turkish III Corps were concentrated under General de Angelis. In the first phase of the operation, the two Jager divisions were to break through along the line of the railroad from Erzurum and capture Tiflis (Tbilisi), thereby severing the rail and pipeline connection from Baku to the Black Sea. If the fall of Tiflis did not suffice to cause a complete collapse of the Soviet position in the Caucasus, XLIV Corps would leave a Turkish garrison in the city and march east toward Baku in conjunction with the 1st Panzer Army’s push from the north. On XLIV Corps’ left, Turkish III and IV Corps of General Orbay’s 3rd Army were to pry back the Russian defenders and head for the rail line to seal off the Soviet forces on the Black Sea coast. As a secondary mission, the 3rd Army was to capture the important port of Batumi. Orbay assigned this task to his X and XI Corps, but hoped that this city would fall into Axis hands without major fighting once Tiflis was taken. The Turkish 2nd Army under General Gürman was to protect the right flank of XLIV Corps’ attack with one corps (VIII), while two others (XII and XIII Corps) advanced on Baku along the Russian—Iranian border. Gürman’s XVII Corps had a defensive mission east of Lake Van where it tied in with VII Corps of the 5th Army. Though constrained by Cakmak’s instructions, the 5th Army was directed to seize Mosul in Iraq, and the 4th Army had orders to take Aleppo. The Turkish General Staff recognized that it was beyond their power to conquer Iraq or Syria, and they had
selected these objectives in the hopes of controlling the Baghdad-Beirut railway and influencing postwar territorial arrangements.
Orders written and briefed, Operation Dessau opened with a short, carefully planned artillery barrage just before sunrise on September 2. With few heavy guns and limited ammunition, the Turks and Germans could not afford the sort of massive bombardment that had become the norm on the Eastern Front. Instead they used willing local agents to pinpoint Soviet positions for sharp initial shellings to demoralize the green Russian troops and to cover the advance of their own infantry. In the center, XLIV Corps and the Turkish III Corps were generally successful, pushing through often disorganized Russian defenders to gain several key terrain features in the first few days. Near the Black Sea coast, the Turkish 3rd Army also achieved most of its initial objectives, infiltrating the Soviet lines with the help of sympathetic locals and overwhelming several critical defensive positions. The Turkish 2nd Army on the far right, however, was less imaginative in its tactics and made little progress at first. Similarly, the attacks of the weaker 4th and 5th Armies were tentative and slow against light British resistance on the Syrian and Iraqi fronts.