Gallipoli: The Turkish perspective

Mesut Uyar was a young Turkish army officer on a tour of duty in his country’s east when a Kalashnikov bullet fired by a Kurdish rebel pierced his upper thigh. 

 

“My hip bones were fractured. And I spent a month in hospital with a kind of paralysis with my right leg. But I survived,” he says.

 

A leading expert on Turkey’s role in WWI, Uyar retired from the army as a colonel in 2012 to devote more time to his research. He became UNSW Canberra’s Ottoman Fellow last year.

 

As a former curator of the Turkish Military Academy’s Archives and Museum Division, Associate Professor Uyar is one of the few historians who can read both the Ottoman script and the unique abbreviations, phrases and codes of the Ottoman military.

 

Those accounts provide many insights into the events of WWI, Uyar says, but rarely have Western scholars made use of them.

 

“The bureaucrats of that period produced the documents for their own use, so they have a peculiar style and their own acronyms. If you are not able to put yourself into their skin, you will have difficulty,” he says.

 

The records became personal for Uyar when he discovered during recent research that his own great-grandfather and a great uncle were killed at Gallipoli, fighting the Australians at Lone Pine.

 

The records also shed light on contentious issues around the Gallipoli landing. Popular accounts say the Anzacs were set ashore at the wrong place and thousands were mown down by Turkish machine guns.

 

But the machine guns at Anzac Cove on that first day are a fiction, Uyar says. In fact, a single platoon of Turkish infantry armed with rifles was in place that morning.

 

“In modern terms that would be 20 or 30 soldiers,” Uyar says. “But an Ottoman platoon had 83 soldiers. That’s 83 experienced soldiers, with Mauser rifles, able to fire 10 bullets per minute – if you think about the effect on the Anzacs below, of course they would think they were facing machine guns.”

 

Another inaccuracy is the belief that the Turkish army took no prisoners. “Because the Allied forces at Gallipoli had this policy themselves, historians automatically assumed the Turks did too,” Uyar says.

 

The archives report around 200 Anzac prisoners, but the real figure is likely to be much higher.

 

“Many of the heavily wounded prisoners passed away in field hospitals during the initial phases of their capture – often due to bombardment from their own side – so they never made it to the mainland to be listed as prisoners of war,” Uyar explains.

 

The no-prisoner myth was fuelled by beliefs the Ottomans were an unruly rabble. But the records show their military was organised and well commanded in 1915.

 

As a former officer, Uyar says he understands the feelings of the soldiers and commanders on the ground.

 

“I passed through that process also. But I try to put a safe ground between my research and my previous experiences.

 

“I am not trying to whitewash the Ottomans. I want to help a younger generation of scholars get into the records, and bring Ottoman military history into the mainstream.”