Through the Adana period Maisky delivered notes to and from Churchill and Stalin. Churchill noted on 3 February in his own handwriting that:
I feel most strongly that this is a fine opportunity . . . I cannot conceal my desire for a warm renewal of friendship between Russia and Turkey similar to that achieved by Mustapha Kemal. Thus Turkey, while increasing her own defences will stand between two victorious friends . . . In all this I am thinking not only of the war but of the postwar period. Tell me if there is anything I can do.
Dixon minuted: ‘We want Turkey strong and ready to play her part’ and Clutton commented:
It would be moonshine to imagine that in a couple of months distrust that goes back centuries can be dispelled. It will probably always remain. But there is no reason why this distrust should not be kept in control and indeed so exploited that the Turks come to realise that their best means of protection is collaboration and participation in the war.63
He also minuted that:
Turkey has a strictly controlled democracy, and the way it performs its functions are both mysterious and Gilbertian. The system, however, works, and that is the important thing.64
On the diplomatic front the Southern Department read from intercepts that Menemencioğlu told Vinogradov to say to Moscow that the Turkish government was willing to improve Turco-Russian relations, and cautious steps towards a rapprochement were instituted.
On 17 February Churchill, back with his BJs after his pneumonia, told Eden to get Hugessen ‘to impress upon the Turks that they miss their opportunity altogether with Russia and that now is the time to reach favourable agreement’. Cadogan expressed caution about bombing the oil installations at Ploesti, refuelling at Turkish bases: ‘Wouldn’t it be rather dangerous to tell the Turks that we and the Yanks want use of bases but that we don’t ask for them for the Russians?’ Hugessen replied about Turkish views on Russia. Distrust ‘remains as great as ever, not through fear of communism but of imperialism.’ Clutton commented that ‘we seem to have steered the Turks successfully off the Balkans’, and Dixon noted that we knew from other sources [BJs] that ‘the Turkish government had sent very reasonable instructions’ to the Turkish ambassador in Moscow.65 The Turkish consul in Moscow observed to Ankara, ‘I respectfully submit my opinion that this year the lands which the Germans have destined for their living space will become their dying space.’ On 20 February the Portuguese ambassador in Stockholm reported that the only way into Europe for the Allies was via Turkey.
Consequences: The Foreign Office and the Record
What has been attempted in the foregoing pages is to use the FO intercepts, which the Southern Department and Churchill read, to trace the cause, course and consequence of Churchill’s Turkey visit in January, to answer questions raised by the differing perceptions both within the FO and between that body and the prime minister as to the advantages or otherwise of playing an aggressive Turkey hand. While this enterprising move produced no immediate consequences of any significance, it revealed a lack both of vigour and rigour in the Southern Department’s policy recommendations in regard to its prize client, Turkey, at a time when a bold reassertion of traditional British involvement in Balkan affairs might possibly have materially affected the timing and the outcome of the Italian campaign and the early preparations of D-Day, as well as the rise and fall of the South of France option (‘Husky’) for a second front in the west.
Churchill’s concentrated study of diplomatic messages during the period autumn 1941 to spring 1943 guided him towards a view of Turkish neutrality which, while at odds with the Americans, the COS and often the Southern Department, shows him to have been still an instinctively imperialist maker of British foreign policy, capable of maintaining valuable if precarious relationships with both the real power brokers, Roosevelt and Stalin, and with new potentially useful friends like I·nönü.
In Ankara Ambassador Sho Kurihara reported ‘tactical bankruptcy’ in Allied war planning, with most action concentrated on the Eastern Front and with German and Italian U-boats taking a dreadful and growing toll on neutral as well as Allied shipping. Kurihara continued that there were eighty divisions of Asiatics [non-Russian communists] in the Russian army:
. . . they have forgotten [their aim of] making the world red, and are burning with desire to defend their fatherland . . . The Allies’ talk of a second front may be via Turkey and the Balkans. The Anglo-Saxons relied on saturation bombing and were no match militarily for the Axis.66
But no one seriously expected the Anglo-Saxons to invade the Balkan heartlands and beat the large and well-equipped armies who would then be defending their fatherland. Something short of this, and something involving Turkey.67 But what? Hugessen suggested on l March a three-phased de-neutralising of Turkey:
1) Defensive – make Turkey strong.
2) Turkey lends US/UK air bases.
3) Turkey joins the war.68
But The Times argued for postwar planning which would exclude Turkey – Russia would keep the peace in eastern Europe. The New York Times disagreed, as did Ankara. British foreign policy, led at different speeds by Churchill and Eden, now involved a strongly pro-Soviet stance while German forces were still strong, but others were beginning to anticipate the Cold War. On 15 March the Portuguese ambassador in Bucharest reported on Churchill’s demands on the Turks at Adana, while from Ankara Kurihara reported to Tokyo that after their North African successes the Allies would begin operations in the Balkans.69 Churchill had pressed for a new Balkan entente, and for Turkey to have a strong and well-equipped army. I·nönü’s comment that Churchill was not making up to Turkey ‘pour nos beaux yeux’ was given wide circulation.
In Whitehall it was unclear who had offered what to whom at Adana. Lord Leathers, the Minister of Supply and one of the few Labour politicians Churchill liked, on 27 March told Churchill that he ‘asked the WO and COS what Turkish commitments amounted to but could get no answer.’ Ralph Assheton of the Treasury supplied Churchill with fortnightly reports of what was going to Turkey but the whole subject remained a bone of contention throughout the next nine months. Churchill was grateful to Ted Leathers for offering to sort out the mess he had himself created, and added: ‘I will telegraph I·nönü so as to market our wares as effectively as possible.’70 Churchill did not join the anti-Bolshevik chorus because of the Anglo-Russian alliance and because to be anti-Bolshevik could imply Fascist leanings, but the Turkish ambassador assumed that the proposed new Balkan entente would be anti-communist. The next day Kurihara reported: ‘Not only is the outcome of the fighting on the Eastern front important to Turkey but it will decide the fate of the war. So Turkey is watching very carefully.’ The next day his daily telegram reported Britain’s failure post-Adana to deliver aid as promised: ‘Since Feb 10 no more weapons had arrived as Turkey will not let Britons train Turks on Turkish soil’ – this being an infringement of sovereignty and a continual cause of mutual irritation.71
The rest of the war in the eastern Mediterranean can be seen as the aftermath to Adana. But the war itself moved into another gear by the spring of 1943, and even in the eastern Mediterranean, for Russia and America something of a backwater, if not for Germany, Italy and Great Britain, Adana faded into the British disaster in the Dodecanese that autumn – the subject of the next chapter.
After Adana, Turkey was temporarily on the back burner at Berkeley Street. During April the BJ telegrams Churchill read concerned alleged separate peace proposals between Russia and Germany, a perennial nightmare quite enough to drive Turkish involvement out of his mind. The Japanese ambassador in Sofia reported fictitious Axis confidence and Churchill annotated to ‘C’: ‘I presume the President is kept informed of all this rubbish, which none the less [sic] tells its tale of despair.’ The next diplomatic intercepts to be circulated came from Kabul where the Italian ambassador reported to Rome that ‘nationalist and imperialistic sentiments are completely replacing the communist idea’; and the Japanese ambassador there ‘watches with p
leasure while the European powers break each other’s heads’.72 On 15 April listeners learnt that a deterioration in his condition had made Mussolini become temporarily incontinent. The Bulgarian army was good and well-equipped and would strike back at any US/UK offensive in the Balkans. Hungary was fearful of an Allied offensive in the Balkans according to the Turkish ambassador in Budapest, while the Afghan minister in Rome reported there would be no separate peace for Italy.
The neutrals began to wonder what the Allies would do next, when they realised that the initiative had passed from the Wehrmacht to the Allied high command. But the second front in the Balkans which was so widely canvassed was never a real starter, because Russia would suspect a postwar agenda in any such Anglo-American initiatives while the Americans had no wish to divert any more forces away from North Africa and the beginning of the build-up to the invasion of Sicily and D-Day.73
Turkey had been temporarily sidelined by a spasm of massive indecision by all the belligerents, but the FO continued to play what was left of the Turkey hand. Eden thanked Hugessen for his ‘admirable summary’ of current negotiations: Orme Sargent minuted: ‘great importance attached to chrome not only from the point of view of Anglo-Turkish relations but because it is also a touchstone of German/Turkish relations.’ Fortnightly reports on the supply situation were requested using the unbreakable OTP procedure. A chrome control officer was appointed at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, which was a regular customer for the commercial as well as the diplomatic section of Berkeley Street BJs. The commercial counsellor in Ankara was given discretion to agree the price which Turkey would propose to demand from the Germans in their contract. Price was ‘not to be the determining factor . . . but we and the Germans are going to pay heavily for the chrome because it will be the Turks who will fix the price.’74 The non-arrival of the equipment promised by Churchill at Adana exacerbated relations. The doyen of Turkish journalism wrote about the ‘bad Briton’, who ‘adopts all sorts of disguises, resorts to all sorts of intrigues . . . Nazism and Fascism have merely become jealous of the English imperialist’. Referring to the non-arrival of war supplies the journalist asserted that Britain was ‘now asking the Turks to throw themselves into the fire’.75
A British military mission arrived in Ankara under Gen Sir Henry Maitland Wilson in April but achieved none of its set objectives – permission for British officers and troops to train the Turkish soldiery in the weapons, and to develop the runways and harbours. Kurihara reported Wilson’s huge, alarming presence, and added Wilson was openly critical of I·nönü and would cut short his visit to Turkey.76 The Brazilian ambassador also reported Wilson’s visit: ‘finishing touches were being put to the Allies’ offensive against Greece and the Balkans.’ Kurihara reported Wilson was too boastful and, wrongly, that I·nönü had been taken in by Allied propaganda.77
In London the Southern Department was concerned that control over Turkish affairs was being wrested from it. For a start Adm Kelly would not report through the correct channels (the ambassador to the FO) though none could deny that he had the ear of the senior Turkish military and served a useful purpose. Besides he was the PM’s personal appointee. But when GHQ ME sent Wilson, and later ACM Sir Sholto Douglas, Chief of the Air Staff, ME, on ill-defined and open-ended quasi-military missions to Ankara the FO tried to put its collective foot down, though Dixon observed: ‘if it is a fact that [all the visitors from Cairo] are frightening the Germans and even leading them to pull their punches on the Eastern front, that is an argument in favour of maintaining such visits.’ Sargent, Cadogan and Eden concurred. In fact Wilson’s visit concluded with his agreement with Wavell’s remark in 1941 that the Turkish army on the Allied side ‘would be more a liability than an asset’. Wilson’s view of Turkey was perhaps influenced by his having presided over the disastrous 1941 Greek campaign.78
And any diplomat who could seriously think that the titanic battles being then waged between the Russians and Germans in south Russia would be affected by the presence of British military missions in Ankara were seriously out of touch with reality. This is illustrated by Cadogan’s draft for a Turkish policy to Hugessen, amended by Eden, who rightly deleted a sublime statement of the obvious: ‘it is a problem of steering a course between being too pressing and not being pressing enough.’ GHQ ME, reproved by Eden for the presence of its representatives on Turkish territory, said it ‘had no intention of short-circuiting the Ambassador’.79 Cadogan wrote again on 15 April:
The Turks want to eat their cake and have it – to keep out of the war and to have a hand in arranging the peace. We hinted enough to them at Adana that if they wanted a place at the conference table they must book it (and earn it) in good time. I think we ought to let them see that they are not in the inner circle until they have established the right to be there.80
But the truth was it was not part of Turkish foreign policy to accept Allied matériel, codenamed ‘Hardihood’, if this entailed alienating not only Germany but Russia as well. Clutton fumed in London that ‘the Turks will be taught the lesson which exists in the Christian bible and doubtless in the Koran – that you cannot serve two masters’. In June Hugessen reported, ‘I have pretty well given these people up’. Eden felt the FO’s implementation of Churchill’s Turkey policy should be reviewed. Churchill thought the FO were spoiling his Turkish plans and suspected that not all the foot-dragging was Turkish – some might be British diplomatic and military incompetence. The FO had the same doubts and instructed Sterndale-Bennett in Ankara to insist to Numan Menemencioğlu that ‘maximum cooperation with the Turkish government was required’. Menemencioğlu replied ‘we were in effect asking for Turkey to abandon her neutrality. Such a request could not be reconciled with what Churchill said at Adana. There were more than one ways of killing a dog than hanging it.’ He was not prepared to provoke German antagonism ‘before we are ready to’, so the proposed new policy would be difficult.81 Sargent commented that ‘Numan, like every Turk, is convinced the Russians will pour over the Balkans and Persia postwar and envelop Turkey.’82
The unstoppable Kurihara submitted:
. . . the following observations, prolix though they be . . . Turkey unflinchingly and unchangingly leaned towards none of the belligerents, but after Adana leaned towards the Allies . . . This does not mean that it is to be feared that Turkey will enter the war . . . no change in radical policy of continuing to preserve neutrality to the last.
Turkey doubted the possibility of a German victory in the east (Churchill sidelined). But the western Allies would not beat the Germans. Turkish neutrality was based on a possible threat from Soviet Russia. Turkey was merely borrowing the power of Britain, using it as a cat’s-paw to guard against the danger of Bolshevism after the war. British talk of occupying Turkish air bases to attack the Balkans was propaganda. The British failed to get Turkey in and settled ‘for second best’. The Axis think the Turks may offer nominal resistance and may be drawn in by the enemy. If Germany is defeated on the Eastern front ‘Russo/Japanese relations will be important.’83
Kurihara may have been prolix but he had got close to the heart of the Turkish leadership. His colleague the Japanese ambassador in London was less reliable when he reported: ‘Churchill will be driven out by leftwing elements, legally or illegally’. This ‘C’ forwarded to Churchill commenting, ‘This is an amusing example of the nonsense which the Japanese forward to Tokyo.’ Churchill ticked the comment.84
On 12 May, the day of the main Axis surrender in Tunisia, Churchill realised that Italy had ceased to be a potential danger to Turkey and played the Turkey hand, commenting that ‘Turkey . . . had always measured herself with Italy in the Mediterranean’ and should now ‘enter the war . . . The moment had come when a . . . request might be made to Turkey for permission to use bases in her territory’ which ‘could hardly fail to be successful if Italy was out of the war’. What had Churchill in mind? Controversy has continued: what is clear is that Turkey loomed as large as Italy in his war strateg
y. On 17 May The Times made sweeping postwar plans for the total emasculation of Germany which the Turks found offensive; even the pro-Soviet Turkish paper Van wrote on 20 May describing the proposals as ‘another Versailles’. However the Americans declined to join the pressurising of Turkey, and thought their bombers were better used in Italy than in Turkey. The British were left to play their hand without American support. This led later in the year to the debacle in the Dodecanese and extended Turkish suspicions of the Allies when apparently acting in concert. The fall of Mussolini, then Russian ambitions in the Balkans and Aegean, together with American withdrawal of interest in that part of the world, led Turkey in 1943 to hope for the defeat of the Allied powers with particular vehemence and she strengthened her ties with Germany. Other neutrals reflected on ‘how small a guarantee British protection can give and that in general it cannot be trusted’.85
BJs had now become Churchill’s most important source of information. Some seventeen of them were sent to Washington for him, as well as daily summaries of their content.86 In the intercepts of early May, Balkan leaders showed themselves restlessly waiting for the invasion of Turkey. Antonescu thought there was no alternative.87 The Japanese foreign ministry thought Germany should withdraw from the east and go for the western Allies; otherwise these would build their strength to defeat Japan. The Greek ambassador in Ankara reported more of Saraçoğlu’s indiscretion. The Japanese ambassador in Rome reported that Turkey was preparing for a joint assault on the Dodecanese with the British and told his colleague in Kuibyshev of Saraçoğlu’s latest indiscretions.88
The Japanese ambassador in Rome reported a talk with a Turkish colleague: ‘Turkey had no territorial ambition and would maintain neutrality.’ But the Turkish general staff was gearing up towards a joint landing with the British on ‘two or three of the Dodecanese . . . sufficient to safeguard navigation in the Mediterranean’. On 10 June the Japanese foreign ministry circulated a directive reporting ‘efforts made to get Turkey into the war by the Anglo-Saxons’. The next day Raphael, the long-serving Greek ambassador in Turkey, reported to London that Berlin thought the Allies would push towards the Balkans through Turkey, while in Moscow (whither he had returned from Kuibyshev, now the Soviets were winning) the Turkish ambassador, Acikalin, reported that the Germans were profiting by the time they had ‘before the opening of the European front by the Turks, British and Americans. The Russians were expecting the opening of the Second Front by the Turks; the Germans would cope with the Eastern Front first, by peace overtures or victory.’89
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