Excerpts from Devin Synder’s Blood, Steel and Sand: The West Asian Conflicts, 1914-1946 (Georgetown Publishing, DeLeon DC, 1970)
(AN: Contribution and editing by@vilani99 )
A history book detailing the military history of the Arab, Turkish, and Persian worlds, dating from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the World Revolutionary War or World War II. The excerpt, in particular, details the campaigns in Soviet Armenia and the Armenian Genocide.
The Tides of Sand
By the beginning of 1942, Turkey had gotten its war machine running, and the HTP was poised to be the Axis’ spear in West Asia. With a friendly Iraq in the south and promised assistance from Italy in the form of the North African and Egyptian campaigns driving up the south, Ankara had reason to believe the campaigns of the coming months would be fruitful.
On Valentine’s Day of 1942, Turkey invaded Mandatory Kurdistan and the French client Assyrian Republic, officially signing the Stahlpakt after the British declaration of war. A week later, Aleppo fell. It became the administrative center for the Suriye Turanlaştırma Komisyonu(Syrian Turanization Commission), a de facto colonial apparatus modeled after the Reichskommisariats in the occupied Soviet Union. The Syrian TK and its Chairman Ziya Gökalp, a prominent writer and luminary of the HTP, were tasked with “eliminating the linguistic deviation and false national consciousness imposed on the Syrian Turks by the Arab and French occupations. ” In practice, in no small part due to Atsız’s rising star in the Party, this entailed the massacre of Arabic-speaking villages and their replacement with Turkish settlers and the beginnings of cultural-linguistic genocide against the Assyrian and Kurdish populations of the area through the Turanization Academies. These monstrous activities were readily assisted by seconded Einzatsgruppen and Squadristi. These were, in the view of the Triumvirs, the first steps towards restoring the sundered Turkish nation and eventually unifying all the Turanic peoples.
But the crossings into Syria remained annoyingly stubborn. French units throughout the de facto protectorate had been moved up to the border and managed to hold against the numerically superior Turkish army for weeks. Additionally, the mountainous terrain on the Turko-Kurdish border, and the activities of raiding peshmerga bands, slowed the advance into Kurdistan to a crawl.
Nur was irked at this delay to the timetable. After the fall of Aleppo, he expected the French Levantine client republics to fall like so many dominos, but their resistance was taking up too much time. Especially as Axis diplomats from Berlin and Rome pressed Ankara about their offensive plans against the Soviets. Nur was hesitant. Last year, the Army Staff had informed him that, with Turkey’s pre-war resource, industrial, and population base, a stand-up fight with the RKKA would be, at best, a pyrrhic victory. Even with Assyria secured, Nur knew that opening another front in the rugged terrain of the Armenian highlands without closing the Levantine front would be disastrous. Nur did not think it could be in the cards for a few months at a minimum.
Atsız thought differently. The leader of the pro-German camp, he was in constant contact with many German diplomats and officials, and the message was clear: Hitler wanted Turkish support on the Soviet front. The failure to capture Moscow had given the Reich a bloody nose and proved that German victory wasn’t assured. If Turkey was indeed an ally of the Reich, attacking Soviet Armenia would be an ideal demonstration of this comradery. So Atsız swallowed his pride and devised a plan to ease the war burden: Iraq.
Even Nur was surprised by Atsız. The latter held a well-known disdain for Arabs and was even kept in the dark about the lukewarm alliance made by Togan, as everyone in the cabinet and the upper echelons of the HTP knew that he would throw a tantrum if he were to find out (which he infamously proceeded to after learning of this). But Atsız, self-admittedly reluctant, put forward the idea of calling on Iraq to help in breaking the Southern stalemate. An apocryphal quote attributed to him was: “What is the point of housing dogs if you never let them loose? ”
But Atsz wanted something in return for the “Iraq Compromise,” as he put it. When war with the Soviets occurred, he suggested that he should be in charge of policy decisions regarding the occupied Armenian lands. Togan, of course, dissented, seeing this as Atsız attempting to accumulate more power for himself within the Triumvirate. Nur, who wanted to avoid his subordinates stalling the cabinet’s decision, conceded some administrative power to Atsız regarding the Armenian question. Nur was weak, cancer gnawing at his insides, but he was still the man at the top. As a reassurance to not fracture the government during wartime, Togan would be placed in charge of negotiating the terms with Iraq on the details of the partition of Syria and Kurdistan, while Atsız would reassure Germany of Turkish commitments to the Stahlpakt, as well as influence Germany to assist in an offensive in the Caucasus.
And so, by May 18th, Ankara joined the Stahlpakt offensive against the Soviets and began their push on Armenia. Their offensive, backed by Legion Kondor and German arms, was also backed by reassurances from Hitler that a German offensive in the coming weeks would aid them soon enough….
Baghdad’s Gamble
Iraq entered 1942 with an aura of uncertainty. Abdul Ilah, uncle of the child king Faisal II and regent, had fled to Jordan the previous year after he was overthrown by his own prime minister, Rashid Ali al-Gaylani. In part due to support from Germany and Turkey, Gaylani ascended as the new regent. The alliance with Turkey cemented his newfound power, which allowed him to play on fears from the East to further consolidate his rule and that of the Golden Square into a fascist dictatorship right under the nose of British suzerainty. Iran’s shah had been overthrown, and a communist republic placed in Tehran, as he told it, by the agents of International Communism. Iraq’s panic was immediate. If a red tide were to come across the Middle East from Tehran, Iraq would be the next domino to fall. Baghdad, although already falling out of the British orbit and into that of Fascist Europe, sought even closer ties with Turkey and the Stahlpakt. By 1942, war was on Iraq’s doorstep, with the Turks pushing south into the Levant, followed by a declaration of war against the Soviets. Gaylani was keen on backing the Stalhpakt, but with Turkish woes in Kurdistan and Syria, the prospect of joining what was still very much a contested theater did not seem enticing. Despite Gaylani’s insistence, much of the military didn’t consider joining the Stahlpakt a guaranteed victory.
But then, a few weeks after the Turkish declaration of war, Germany commenced Fall Blau with immediate results. Italy’s declaration of war against the nascent Franco-British Union was followed by a lighting campaign that reached the Suez in four months. Fascist Spain ran through Barcelona with Petainist assistance. Even Turkey was making small but consistent breakthroughs along the Syrian front. For Baghdad, the message was clear: the Axis juggernaut could not be stopped, and the victory train was leaving the station. Gaylani, now firmly at the apex of a fascist autocracy, was determined to not be left behind and decided to engage in talks with the Turks.
That summer, Gaylani met with Foreign Minister Togan to discuss the previous year’s pact. Gaylani wanted to cement the terms of dividing the Allied mandates. Togan, who wished to secure Iraqi assistance, gave Gaylani assurances: If Iraq were to join Turkey, Syria and Kurdistan would be divided, and together they could face the red menace of Tehran, Moscow, and DeLeon as well as the forces of Franco-British imperialism. Gaylani, seeing the path forward as leading to a world bestrided by the victorious Axis, told Togan that Baghdad would join the winning side. Damascus would fall to the Turks by November, with Iraqi forces attacking from the east, while Erbil fell to Iraqi forces. With the war in the Levant no longer a pressing concern, Turkey could open a second front focused on Armenia, where it looked to rewrite the wrongs of the previous world war.
Iraq, on the other hand, seemed content with the current territory they had. Directly annexing their captured territories, they were tasked with pushing Entente forces out of Kuwait and into the Persian Gulf. Gaylani’s decision appeared to have paid off, especially as the army marched to victory after victory in the autumn of 1942. Although news of Iranian mobilization and INTREV retaliation trickled back to Baghdad, Gaylani did not worry. After all, with Stahlpakt backing, they could hold off anything the Iranians or their international backers threw at them. For Gaylani, it seemed his gamble had paid off.
Bone-filled Sands
Nihâl Atsız was one of those specific figures of history that seems to embody modern, industrial, and political monstrosity. There is no other word that can adequately describe the deeds committed by him, his deputies, and the troops under his strategic direction during his administration of occupied Armenia. Documents and testimony, as well as the HTPs policy of maintaining stringent minutes and transcripts of every meeting, were extremely useful to the prosecution during the post-war trials of the National Unity Government. Almost universally, they attest to the brutal conditions and daily horrors that Turanist Turkey committed against anyone who fell outside of their bizarre and arbitrary linguistic herrenvolk categorization and was within the occupied territories. None felt this more than the “traitor-nations,” the Greeks, Armenians, and Arabs, with Nur (with Arabs as a close second) and Atsız both viewing the Armenians as the arch-traitors. The THP’s leadership had always planned to resolve the “Armenian Question” in some shape or form, and they had two potential schemes to pursue. Atsız suggested invoking the decrees and actions used by the Ottoman government during the First World War and their attempt to “remove” the western Armenian population. However, this time on a grander scale. Atsız had heard about the labor/death camps implemented in Occupied Europe through his German contacts and suggested that Turkey should implement a similar system targeting the traitor-nations, with the Armenians being the “trial run.” Atsız claimed that they should be a priority in the first place, being “contaminated by the stench of Bolshevism.”
Togan, though equally as racist as his counterparts, questioned the need to eliminate the Armenian population when pushing them into servitude would benefit the war effort. The Ottoman Empire and the “Turanic Empires” [1] that preceded it had been diverse, and the Turkish economy could thrive if the non-Turanic population was forced to work for low or no wages as part of the “Turanization” process. Togan even suggested that sterilization would be a far more efficient solution than extermination, as in the long-term, a larger industrial labor pool would be needed, as well as concerns that extermination could “martyrize the Armenians.” Sterilizations in Canada and the old United States went with barely a cry from other nations. Togan argued that they could “acknowledge them as a member of our species, but prevent them from doing damage to Great Turan.”
At this, Atsız fled into a rage. He tore into Togan, accusing him of harboring sympathy for foreign enemies. In Atsız’s mind, the Armenians were traitors: fifth columnists who sought to drag Turkey down in the depths. Why should Turkey and the Turanic Peoples risk the presence of such a threat when they cost them victory in the Great War? He finished his angry tirade with a definitive line, slamming his fist down on the table as he did so,
“To get rid of a cancer, you must cut the rotten tumor out before it can spread. There are no exceptions!”
Perhaps that line was a jab at Nur’s declining health. Maybe Atsız was so caught up in his rage that the thought did not even occur to him. Historians don’t know for sure, but they do know that Nur reiterated to the cabinet that since the Armenian matter fell into Atsız’s jurisdiction. Until he changed that, Atsız’s jurisdiction would remain. Nur, for his part, mostly agreed with Atsız’s plans of “cleansing the desert,” as he shared Atsız’s exterminationist views, especially towards the Armenians. Through the year, as Nur’s health declined, his decisions started to lean towards Atsız’s position more and more. This fact was not lost on Atsız, who began to accumulate more power internally as the year went on.
As the heat of summer began, Atsız’s propaganda machine went to work. Welding his power as Information Minister and taking pages from Goebbels’ book, he portrayed the war against the Soviets as a great “war of survival.” Playing into historical narratives of the past, he declared that Russia had always been “an eternal enemy” to Turkey and that now they must stand against the “red devil at their gates.”
Despite the majority of in-theater INTREV forces being oriented toward the advance of Germany and its European Allies to the north, the Turkish advance was frustratingly slow in what was becoming a running theme for the Turanists. This was primarily due to two factors: partisans and terrain. The Armenian Plateau is some of the worst terrains on the planet to fight in, and consequently, the Turkish advance was limited to the two highways running west-east through Western Armenia. The route running along the Black Sea coast was the main focus of the INTREV units stationed in Armenia, and the Turks failed to achieve a breakthrough on the border. In the south, on the route running through the center of the SSR, the Turkish Army found more success. The freshly mobilized Soviet troops seemed to melt before the experienced mountain divisions deployed on this axis of advance. However, this was not the victory the Turanists thought it was.
The staff of the Transcaucasian Front in Yerevan had devised a strategy built around partisan action to delay the Turkish advance while second-echelon units prepared. Only really controlling a narrow corridor around the highway, the countryside and mountains of Western Armenia gave the partisans more than enough shelter to savage the Turkish rear, attacking convoys and supply depots almost at will. As a further blow to the Turanists, up to half of these partisans were themselves ethnic Turks. A sizeable percentage of the western SSRs population were Turks, and many signed on with the Red Army and the partisans, whether out of hatred for the government in Ankara, ideological loyalty to the Soviet Union, or simply a desire to fight those that would massacre their friends and neighbors. Many Turkish soldiers hesitated a second too long after hearing the guerillas shout taunts at them in Turkish, and their ability to speak the enemy’s language made infiltrating the rear relatively easy. This, combined with the issues inherent to moving an entire Army Corps along a single road that narrows to one lane in some places, slowed the advance of the Turkish army to a crawl. It was not, however, enough to stop the Turks from taking the SSRs “second city” of Karin.
Subjected to a months-long siege and brutal artillery bombardment, Karin fell on November 2nd. After months of near-starvation conditions and the harsh highland winter setting in, along with fuel shortages, the withered garrison and militia of the city failed to stop the Turanists from entering the city. What resulted was a nightmarish charnel house. Turkish soldiers roamed the streets, looting, killing, and raping, without regard for whether their victim was Turkish, Armenian, or Russian. Atsız, upon hearing of the massacre, is rumored to have dismissed all the victims as bolsheviks. The Armenians that survived the initial sack of the city were force-marched to camps on the other side of the pre-war border. Non-Armenians, mostly Turks, were forced out of their homes and into cramped impromptu barracks and inducted into a “Turanization Program.” This consisted of political indoctrination interspersed with forced labor, as the city was forced to produce a forward supply of clothing, food, and other finished goods for the Turkish Army. The excess deaths from both of these events were unconscionable, and when Soviet troops returned to the city in 1944, they found a shell of what had been a vibrant, multicultural city. This act of fascist barbarism, however, was just a herald of what awaited Soviet Armenia if the Turanists managed to take the population centers in the east.
Atsız, for his part, found himself the second-most powerful man in the nation behind the sickly Nur. As Nur grew weaker and weaker, he began to delegate more power to Atsız. Atsız attached himself more to the Pact of Steel than to Concordist Japan, which he argued was too far to coordinate and establish close ties towards. With Fall Blau reaching Stalingrad, Italy marching up through Palestine, and the Caucasus offensive yielding results, Turkey could focus on a long-growing concern: Iran.
The young republic had been becoming more closely aligned with the Allies, even forging ties with the Entente after Iraq’s entry into the war. Iran had announced that it would be mobilizing against Iraq. For Turkey, that would spell disaster; Iraqi oil and southern troop commitments were some of the main reasons they could even push against the Soviets. Baghdad falling could cause a breakdown and reversal of Stahlpakt gains in the Levant. A plan to delay or halt the Iranian Army was needed. At least long enough for the Germans to capture Stalingrad and fully kettle INTREV forces in the Caucasus. Atsız decided on a preemptive attack. Iran would take a while to fully prepare for an offensive against Iraq and Turkey. And if the drive into Armenia was losing steam, why not attack Iranian Azerbaijan? Atsız also suggested that this offensive could swing north against troops dug into Armenia and catch them in a massive encirclement.
Togan, irked at becoming more sidelined throughout the year, opposed the plan. He argued that launching the Army into another offensive operation without sufficient manpower to maintain it would be a losing strategy. He and his erstwhile allies in the CHP and OL argued that Turkey couldn’t rely on Stahlpakt aid forever and that devoting plans to coordinate with Stalhpakt forces north of the Caucasus was the best chance to close that front before turning their gaze towards Iran.
Nur was absent during this meeting. His illness had worsened to the point where he was contained in his home. He asked his cabinet to put it to a vote and said he would cast a tiebreaking vote if the cabinet could not come to a decision. It was a subtle gesture: his tenure would be ending sooner rather than later.
By this time, Atsız had grown his faction with the government, either by appointing loyal members of the HTP into positions of power or by convincing the more neutral members to align with him. The vote swung decisively in Atsız’s favor. His plan would be followed by the army in the following campaigns. Togan, on the other hand, saw the writing on the wall. His allies were growing fewer, and his sphere of influence was shrinking. Only his reputation and history in the party kept him from being ousted like many before him. And so, Togan fell in line with the majority and supported Atsız’s plan.
By the spring of 1943, Nur would finally succumb to his illness, allowing Atsız to take control of the republic as Prime Minister, retaining Togan as a deputy, and officially tying Turkey to Nazi Germany. The Triumvirate was now composed of President İnönü (still effectively Atsız’s puppet), Prime Minister Atsız, and Foreign Minister Togan. Turkey had become Germany’s deputy in West Asia, securing territory almost equivalent to the Ottoman Empire before the Great War.
The decision to invade Iranian Azerbaijan and the counterfactuals around it has been used by many Turkish nationalists as an attempt at historical revisionism. If Togan had been in charge, he would have guided Turkey through the war and perhaps come out unscathed, or so they claim. In actuality, it wouldn’t have changed things in the long run. The Iranian-Azerbaijan offensive was simply an act that accelerated what was to be an inevitable result. Iran was mobilizing for war already, and while Turkey attempted to get in a decisive blow to knock them out quickly, other events would supersede that.
The defeat at Stalingrad and the retreat of Army Group Caucasus would leave Turkey at the mercy of INTREV divisions, freed up from the fighting in the Soviet Union. Atsız had finally taken control, but there would be no scapegoat to cover for him as the red tide approached.
[1] Togan TTL ascribes to a crank pseudohistorical theory that the empires controlling Anatolia and West Asia from the Hittites through to the Achaemenids were ruled by proto-Turans that were driven up into the steppe by Alexander. This is, of course, absolute horseshit. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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