Excerpt from WHAT ABIDES: WEST POINT IN AFTERTHOUGHT
Peace at home, Peace in the world. —Mustafa Kemal Ataturk At its beginnings in 315 BC, the great city was named Thessalonike for the sister of Alexander the Great. She was born on the same day as a momentous Macedonian victory. Let her be known as “Victory in Thessaly,” proclaimed the double-proud King Philip of Macedon. And quickly conjoining two Greek words, Thessalos and nike, the infant princess became Thessalonike. The Greeks now call their city Thessaloniki. The attenuating Turks opt for the terser form, Salonika. If there ever was a real-life epic about a young man born of stringent means, endowed with earth-shaking ideas, boundless energy, and mental faculties of astonishing depth and range, he was born in late nineteenth-century Salonika. He was aptly named Mustafa, meaning “chosen one.” Some say he came like the glow of a comet, a warning that his genius might never last. “One of the greatest men of the twentieth century,” said President John F. Kennedy of Mustafa on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death on November 10, 1938. Delivered twelve days before his own murder, Kennedy’s praiseworthy statement would prove an enormous understatement. *** In the late nineteenth century, Salonika was a thriving seaport visited by a steady stream of visitors from different lands with different ideas and different languages. In the fast-fading Ottoman Empire, Salonika boiled with conspiracies. On the western fringe of the floundering empire, with large concentrations of Christians and Jews, its Turkish population took easily to European dress. Still, the Empire- wide medreses (Islamic religious schools) strove tirelessly to retrieve and maintain the good old days of rule by Islamic law. Enlightened military officers stationed in the western Empire, particularly in Salonika, felt this religious tension. And the palace in Istanbul felt pressure to adopt a new, secular constitution. Overthrow was in the air and thoughts. The times are indeed a-changing. Kings and sultans now sat on shaky thrones. Slowly, inevitably, religion seemed to be losing its glorified grip. In Istanbul, a witless series of rulers have controlled a largely illiterate, religion-drenched population. And well-connected toadies control the government. Foreign powers continue to exploit the waning assets of the Empire by negotiating unfair and onerous business concessions with an indolent sultan. The noted Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote in his 1927 poem “Sailing to Byzantium” of the meaningless opulence “of hammered gold and gold enamelling/To keep a drowsy Emperor awake.” *** Surrounded by turbulence, our young hero sought an education beyond the religious. Beaten by a teacher at the Koranic middle school, Mustafa craved its counterpart, the military academy at Monastir. The cut of the cadet uniform was of particular allure. He excelled academically, especially in mathematics. With brimming confidence, he believed himself superior to not only his fellow students, but his own mathematics teacher, who was also named Mustafa. One day, Mustafa the teacher conferred with Mustafa his student. (There were no surnames in those distant days.) “My boy,” he said, “there must be some distinction between us. From now on you’ll be called Mustafa Kemal.” (Kemal means “perfection” in Turkish.) It goes well with “Mustafa.” He graduated from Monastir military high school in November 1898 ranked second in his class. He read voraciously, particularly history. He learned well one lesson in power politics. It seemed to Mustafa that the so-called “great powers” tended to intervene when the Ottomans won wars, but turned blind eyes when the Empire was defeated. “meddlesome” was a take-away word. The words “trustworthy” and “treacherous” surely entered Kemal’s mind. On March 13, 1899, he entered the War College (harbiye) in Istanbul, the Turkish military equivalent to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Two years above him at the War College was a cadet named Ismail Enver. They would clash in history. The War College had commanding views of the Bosphorus below. Even first-year cadets noted the military significance of gaining and holding the high ground in battle. Mustafa’s enthusiasm for mathematics continued. His concern for his country grew. His Staff Officer class introduced him to aspects of guerilla warfare. He hypothesized a rebellion against the government. What could the army do? Spies from the sultan’s palace had already infiltrated the War College. He and a few close friends produced a handwritten magazine. Plotting remedial action against the internal and external powers became their secret conversation topic. Mustafa thought of a future modernized government where he and his friends would hold ministerial positions. They asked him his position. “The man who appoints ministers,” he said. His strategic vision and social life expanded. He believed that all staff officers should learn to dance. On home-leave to Salonika, he learned to waltz. He and his cadet friend Ali Fuad Cebesoy picnicked on Buyukada, one of a group of islands offshore from Istanbul. There, having never imbibed anything stronger than beer, Mustafa had his first glass of raki, a drink as traditional to Turks as bourbon to Kentuckians. He enjoyed it. He had also learned French, asserting that “a staff officer simply must know a foreign language.” History fascinated him. He had particular interest in the causes of the defeats of Ottoman forces by the Russians, Germans, and Slavs. He would graduate from the War College as a staff captain, ranked fifth in a class of forty-three. He was at the top of his class in his last year. He longed for an assignment in the Balkans, the center of the subversive activity. Instead, in the paranoia of the time, he and his friends were briefly jailed. Released, he was posted as far as possible from the Balkan hotbed: to Syria for cavalry training. Thus began his ferocious struggle to be at the center of things, be they in war, peace, or revolution. He would get his wish. *** Now a lieutenant-colonel, he was stifled in promotion and assignments by the fading sultanic regime and the ambitiously inept Enver. His fame would soon rise like a rocket. His prescient tactical and strategic decision-making coupled with fearless front-line leadership stalemated the British and Anzac invasion at Gallipoli in 1915. These enemies eventually withdrew, but the living nightmare of Enver’s decision to back the Germans and enter the war continued. Twice, Mustafa Kemal saved the future secular democratic country he had imagined as a young cadet. First, by seizing and holding the high ground at Gallipoli, he prevented the passage of the enemy through the Dardanelles, a direct passage to Constantinople and an early defeat. Instead, the Army lived to fight again, primarily in Syria, where the British strove to protect the trade routes with Asia. It was there, three years later, that the Battle of Megiddo witnessed the destruction of the Ottoman Army, at least according to the British. Except it didn’t, entirely. For now in full command, Mustaf Kemal disregarded his German superior order to stand and fight at Aleppo. Instead, he executed a brilliant retrograde movement and withdrew deep into southern Turkey. Saving the arms and soldiers of the future army of revolution. The man named “Perfection” seemed to see beyond the scope of others. Nothing was simply tactical. For Kemal, even an ordinary skirmish could hold strategic consequences. His decisiveness at the beginning of the Gallipoli campaign remains a shining example. He could see the unseen, the proverbial other side of the mountain. He knew the border of southern Turkey would prove a perilous passage for his tired enemy. This thinking saved his army for another day, a future day vital to the survival of his country. He would now reorganize and secure his forces. His command structure would comprise the same trusted friends from military academy days. While others saw defeat, Mustafa Kemal prepared for victory. And he now had a battle-hardened Army of Revolution to prove it. *** So what about Mustafa Kemal and West Point? Well, we met in the Cadet Bookstore on a freezing late January afternoon in 1962. Having studied Napoleon in the fall semester course of Military Art, we were now slogging through the early mire of World War I. A few weeks of study about the early battles along the Marne and Ypres rivers had convinced us that so-called “modern” warfare would not reveal anything like the dashing genius of Napoleonic maneuver. Both sides had dug in and seemed hopelessly hunkered down. The War-To- End-All-Wars quickly became about barbed wire, artillery, machine guns, poison gas, trenches, and immobility. For five years no one could stand up straight. The dogs of war—The Triple Entente and the Central Powers—had slipped loose, fulfilling yet again Mark Antony’s war- prophesy of “carrion men groaning for burial.” In the summer of 1914, Istanbul was still called Constantinople. Foreign embassies lined the Bosphorus. Accordingly, intrigue was everywhere. The Ottoman sultan, Mehmed V, lived in the Yildiz Palace, but the “Three Pashas” were the real power. Mehmed Talaat, Grand Vizier (prime minister), Ismail Enver, Minister of War, and Ahmed Djamal, Minister of the Navy, made all the decisions, most of them disastrous. The Turks had not yet decided to go to war or against whom. Such was the chaotic level of decision-making under Enver’s incompetent leadership. But there was no need for the Turks to again go to war. The Balkan War had been a disaster. The Ottoman Empire was melting away, and Bulgaria, Italy, and Greece were salivating. What to do? The Three Pashas hemmed, hawed, then hemmed some more. Self- possessed, they knew little of the wider world except that it had always brought them defeat. Should we back Britain? Germany? They concluded that to be a major foe, they would need battleships. Hence came more dinner parties. *** What propelled me to the bookstore was the desire to read Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger’s new novel. It was easy to find. But another book ambushed me with one big, bloodred word on its cover: GALLIPOLI. Our Military Art class had quickly mentioned the declining years of the Ottoman Empire, its one triumph being the British defeat in the Dardanelles. No details were examined. It was just a mistake. Churchill had just been wrong. So let’s get back to glorious Europe and the living dead in the trenches. But not so fast. The bloodred book had caught me. The cover showed the disaster. The ANZAC troops clogged on the beach without cover, the cliffs overhead. I picked up a copy for a browse, starting at page one. “Committee of Union and Progress...ruthless party machine...corruption.” German Military Mission. Russia...Allies...friendly neutral government.”... “Sir Harold Nicholson remembers them all coming to the dinner at his house.” “Enver... little hairdresser face... reckless bravery... vanity... cruelty.” “Constantinople...married a princess...behind his desk... wall... portraits... Frederick the Great... Napoleon.” I quickly concluded that dinner party chatter seemed to guide Ottoman foreign policy. On page nine I met Mustafa Kemal and not by name either but by his complete absence. The sentence went like this: “There was one name, more important than all the rest, that is missing from the list of guests at Harold Nicholson’s dinner party.” Who is this? I wondered. I continued to read—“Indeed, it could hardly have occurred to the British Embassy to have invited Mustafa Kemal, for he was still unknown in Turkey.” Mustafa Kemal! A stranger in his own land. Who could fail to buy this book? Not me. That night, after taps blew, I read by flashlight. I reached page ninety, but Kemal had disappeared from the narrative. I read on. Page 129, the ANZACs had landed. The troops were climbing toward the high ground. Eight thousand men had come ashore. The thin Turkish defense was running away in great confusion. Only one more ridge line to climb and the strategic and commanding high ground would be theirs...just one more organized push... And then he came, like a deus ex machina lowers a god from the sky to rescue the hero in a Euripides drama: “It was at this point that Mustafa Kemal arrived.” And I read the author’s conclusion: From the Allies’ point of view, it was one of the cruelest accidents of the campaign that this one junior Turkish commander of genius should have been at this particular spot at this moment, for otherwise the Australians and New Zealanders might very well have been decided then and there.1 Mustafa Kemal, in his mind never really a “junior Turkish commander,” would have agreed. The ridge line overlooking the straits of the Dardanelles was vital. An in-depth advance that included surveillance of the straits would have dealt a fatal blow to the Turkish defense. Mustafa Kemal saw what no one, including the German commanding general, Liman von Sanders, had seen or, worse, ignored. The high ground of Chunuk Bair and Sari Bair controlled the entire southern peninsula of Gallipoli, both sea and straits. It was the key for the entire defense, providing vital enfilading fire against the enemy. And Kemal instinctively knew it. He had entered the war a lieutenant-colonel without a command. Stifled by an incompetent sultan and Enver, the military chief of General Staff. Kemal had cobbled together a division, the 19th. It was held in reserve, five miles from the ANZAC landing. Upon learning of the attack, he immediately headed to the front with a reconnaissance squad. The enemy beachhead attaching force had sent the forward defensive outpost of Turks on the run. Panicked, without ammunition, Kemal managed to stop them. Ordered them to fix bayonets and lie down. Expecting to receive immediate fire, the enemy attackers did likewise. Kemal’s actions had halted the leading contingent of the invading forces. He knew the importance. He later told Falih Atay: “When our men lay down, so did the enemy, and it was at that moment that the campaign was won.”2 Use of the word “campaign” in its military meaning suggests that Kemal, a stickler for precise language, saw at that moment the end of the entire British/ANZAC combined sea-land invasion scheme. Ataturk biographer Andrew Mango cites Kemal as saying, “We had won time.”3 Certainly true, but not as strategically compelling a word. What surely could have been true follows. If there had been but one commanding officer at the front, and Mustafa Kemal had been that one commanding officer, the enemy would have been pushed back into the sea in perhaps a matter of weeks, even days. Instead, it took eight bloody months. *** Old World/New World Women of the Ottoman Empire had lived under the restrictive yoke of Sharia for 623 years. Mustafa Kemal had been thinking about this since his cadet days. Why should women be captive for centuries? In 1922, President Mustafa Kemal ended it with one stroke of his powerful pen. Women were free! That same year, Ireland became free of the British after 764 years of occupation. He did not deliver it on a silver platter, but that phrase has been widely applied. Women were free at last. And the energy of the Ataturk Revolution had just doubled in intensity. Before the coming of Mustafa Kemal and his Kemalists, law was based on Islamic Sharia Law, in turn based on interpretations of the Koran. Interpretations of God’s will make the rules. And men and only men would be in charge of rendering these interpretations. As for women’s rights, women could only work in the fields with their husbands. Women who lived in cities could not work with men, which meant they stayed home. They were encouraged to hide themselves. They were covered in veils and head scarves. Just be happy to be married, they were told, and, of course, have children. Being a wife and mother was enough. As for women’s rights? Illiteracy is one of them. They had the right to not be able to read or write. The majority of the society was illiterate, but stay-at-home women were particularly victimized. And so they remained. Kemal took care of that too. He converted the Arabic-based Ottoman script into the far easier western alphabet. Educational classes were launched. He was relentless in his effort to elevate the new Republic of Turkey to the level of the civilized world. There would at long last be a Constitution. It came in 1921. The nation would become a secular republic. Religion would not be a political instrument. The will of the people would determine, not God. Polygamy was abolished. As a grace note, he cancelled the embarrassingly ridiculous divorce process that enabled men to get divorced by just saying “Divorce!” The sultanate and the caliphate were no more. Sharia courts were closed. So were the medreses, the religious schools. Church and state would be separate. By 1934, Turkish women could vote, fourteen years after those in the United States, decades before Switzerland (in 1971). Women could also run for elective office. In the election of 1934, eighteen women were elected to the Grand National Assembly. As a sterling example of a liberated woman, consider Sabiha Gokcen, Mustafa Kemal’s adopted daughter. She became Turkey’s first female fighter pilot. An Istanbul airport bears her name. The Usual Suspects The current immoderately Islamic government now in power for two decades has been not-so-secretly disassembling many of Ataturk’s reforms. Women increasingly cover themselves. Honor killings have increased. The ever-punctual police deny women their right to assemble on Women’s Rights Day. Gas and hair-pulling are featured attractions. Looting of the public treasure has become a trademark of the ruling political party. Sultan-esque spending on grotesquely oversized extraneous palaces, mosques, airports, and bridges defile the remaining natural landscape. The trees are disappearing from Istanbul. Turkish military forces have been purged after one of the weirdest coups in the history of military coups. Vital military academies have been shuttered. Where will this lead? Turkey is no longer a secular democracy. The president rules with impunity. The parliament is a rubber-stamp charade. Secular, democratic Turkey seems hurtling toward oblivion. However the pull toward democracy still lives among the adherents of Ataturk. As does the spirit and thinking of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Yet some people fret about all this, willing to dance with the devil in collaboration with the right-wing ruling religious zealots. Like it or not, the thinking of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk still abides. A national election is less than a year away. The Ataturk flags are ubiquitous. Ever since I met him in the Cadet Bookstore at West Point so long ago, I have wondered why the United States Military Academy never used this great historical figure as an exemplar of the soldier/statesman. The Comet Returns Strangers to Turkey and enemies of Turkish democracy, both foreign and domestic, wonder why the photos, flags, and statues of Mustafa Kemal, who died in 1938, are so widely displayed. Here are some possible reasons. Has there ever been such a man as this man, a man of early and extensive military background, who transcended that intensely formative experience to become such a revolutionary figure, educational leader, politician, and humanist? Has such a man as this man ever arisen in Europe? If so, name him. A military hero and tactical genius in a losing cause (World War I), a military hero and strategic genius in a winning one (the Turkish War of Independence). Soon thereafter a political genius who rescued the remnants of his war-devastated nation from the suffocating, repressive grip of almost 700 years of religious rule. Has there ever been such a man? Has such a man ever arisen in Europe? Has there ever been such a man of unquestioned honesty, integrity of character, nobility of purpose, a warrior, a statesman, an intellectual, a visionary political thinker and indefatigable doer? Has such a man as this man ever arisen in Europe? If so, name him. Has there ever been such a man to lead a nation, a man who experienced such torment from the pains of human experience, that is, the suffering of the battlefield, the pain of exile, the fear of being hunted by the occupying powers and the collaborationist sultan, the anxiety engendered by the slow implementation of political reforms, the suppression of personal and family life due to the preoccupation with the health and security of his country? Has such a man as this man ever arisen in Europe? Or on the planet? If so, name him. Has there ever been such a man to rally a defeated nation with such force and effectiveness, to turn to the west, to Europe if necessary, but to the west in terms of enlightened thinking? A man who led by such powerful example, in terms of language and alphabet reforms, in personal dress and public behavior and discourse, and in the treatment and emancipation of women? Has such a man as this man ever arisen in Europe? Or in this world? Or in this universe? His education did not cease after his fourteen years spent at military academies and the Staff College. Like Napoleon, also voracious reader and writer, he continued his exploration of science, arts, and philosophy as an habitual way of living. His library on display at Anitkabir in Ankara held 3,111 different books which he had read, underlined sentences, and made notations on numerous pages.4 He led and taught by setting the example. Later in his shortened life, he explained his legacy to the Turkish people by saying: “To see me does not necessarily mean to see my face. To understand my thoughts is to have seen me.” Which explains the ubiquitous immortality of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, child of Salonika, father of Turkey. 1 Alan Morehead, Gallipoli, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1956, page 130. 2 Falih Rifki Altay, The Ataturk I Knew, Yapi ve Kredi Bankasi, Istanbul, 1968, page 72. 3 Andrew Mango, Ataturk, The Overlook Press, Woodstock, New York, 1999, page 146. 4 Gürbüz D. Tüfekçi, Universality Of Atatürk’s Philosophy, Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ankara, 1981.
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