The Struggle for the Dardanelles: The Memoirs of a German Staff Officer in Ottoman Service

By Erich Prigge and Philip Rance

This is a detailed eye-witness account of the Dardanelles/Gallipoli campaign from the perspective of the Turks, through the eyes of Major Erich Prigge an adjutant to Marshal Liman von Sanders, the German commander-in-chief of the Ottoman forces in the Dardanelles. The focus is overwhelmingly on combat but includes related matters such as reconnaissance and logistics. Packed with specific information and technical detail as well as action, it should be of great interest to historians and enthusiasts. Prigge actually wrote two accounts of the campaign. The first, published in January 1916 while the fighting continued, revealed so much information that the Ottoman government asked the German authorities to suppress it. The other, published later that year, included coverage of the British evacuation. Although Prigge had removed many of the sensitive details of unit names, casualties etc., he had substantially rewritten and augmented many passages with lively descriptive material. Philip Rance here presents the first English translations of both versions, which together form one of the most complete and valuable accounts of this campaign available from the Turkish perspective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781473890138

Book preview

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE

DARDANELLES

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE

DARDANELLES

THE MEMOIRS OF A GERMAN STAFF OFFICER IN OTTOMAN SERVICE

an English translation of

Major Erich R. PRIGGE, Der Kampf um die Dardanellen (Veriag Gustav Kiepenheuer: Weimar 1916)

and

Anonymous [Erich PRIGGE], Gallipoli, Der Kampf um den Orient.

Von einem Offizier aus dem Stabe des Marschalls Liman von Sanders

(Verlag August Scherl: Berlin 1916)

Translated with Introduction and Notes by

Philip Rance

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

PEN & SWORD MILITARY

an imprint of

Pen and Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire S70 2AS

Copyright © Philip Rance, 2017

ISBN 978 1 78303 045 3

eISBN 978 1 47389 014 5

Mobi ISBN 978 1 47389 013 8

The right of Philip Rance to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the imprints of Pen & Sword Archaeology, Atlas, Aviation, Battleground, Discovery, Family History, History, Maritime, Military, Naval, Politics, Railways, Select, Social History, Transport, True Crime, and Claymore Press, Frontline Books, Leo Cooper, Praetorian Press, Remember When, Seaforth Publishing and Wharncliffe.

For a complete list of Pen and Sword titles please contact

Pen and Sword Books Limited

47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England

E-mail: [e-mail]

Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements

Glossary and Abbreviations

Introduction

German Military Missions to the Ottoman Empire

German Accounts of the Dardanelles Campaign

Erich Prigge: The Author

Prigge’s Writings

Background

Form and Content

Sources

Recognition and Influence

Notes

Note on the Translation

The Struggle for the Dardanelles

Foreword

The Theatre of War

Historical Survey

Events up to 25 March

Turkish Preparations on Land

25 April

The Landing at Kumkale

The Landings on the Gallipoli Peninsula

Continuation of the Fighting

Positional Warfare

The New Landing at Suvla Bay

Notes

Gallipoli, the Struggle for the Orient

The Departure

In the Dardanelles

Hellespont

The Preparations for Receiving the Enemy

The Landing at Kumkale

The Fighting on Gallipoli

Positional Warfare

Suvla Bay and Anafarta

Low-Intensity Warfare

Towards the End

Notes

Bibliography

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A translator’s first debt is to the original author, an obligation that should be repaid by endeavouring not only to render the wording and substance of his text as closely as possible but also to appreciate his authorial motivation, choices and objectives, and the circumstances in which he wrote. Erich Prigge (1878–1955) was a long-serving cavalry officer in the German Imperial Army, who in early 1914 joined the recently inaugurated German Military Mission to the Ottoman Empire, an advisory delegation dispatched at the request of the Ottoman government to assist in the reform and modernization of the Ottoman army. Upon the outbreak of the First World War, when the terms of a German-Ottoman alliance and the exigencies of war obliged the personnel of the Military Mission to remain in Ottoman service, Major Prigge was reassigned as adjutant to the head of the Military Mission, Marshal Otto Liman von Sanders, a post Prigge would occupy until the end of the conflict. Accordingly, when in March 1915 Liman von Sanders was appointed commander-in-chief of the Ottoman Fifth Army, charged with orchestrating the defence of the Dardanelles against a looming Anglo-French invasion, Prigge became a well-placed eyewitness to the momentous and bitterly fought campaign waged for eight-and-a-half months on and around the Gallipoli peninsula (25 April 1915 to 9 January 1916). In September 1915, when the failure of the Allied expedition already seemed assured, Prigge was instructed to write an account of the battle that would counter the false hopes still peddled by British propaganda and alert the German-speaking public to the triumphant success achieved by the German-Ottoman military partnership. Over the following weeks, he compiled the manuscript on the battlefield, as the foreword explains, ‘in the midst of the thundering of guns and the jangling of telephones at headquarters’ – Prigge leaves his readers in little doubt as to which he found more irksome. The fruit of his efforts, Der Kampf um die Dardanellen (The Struggle for the Dardanelles), combining memoir, reportage and patriotic polemic, was on sale in Germany for only a few months at the beginning of 1916 before a complaint from the Ottoman General Headquarters induced the German authorities to order the book’s withdrawal from the market. Later the same year, a substantially revised, censored and extended version of Prigge’s text was published as Gallipoli, der Kampf um den Orient (Gallipoli, the Struggle for the Orient), anonymously ascribed to ‘an officer of the staff of Marshal Liman von Sanders’. The textual relationship between the two volumes has largely eluded subsequent historical scholarship and their common authorship is now rarely recognised or acknowledged. This is not an environment in which many authors would choose to write, nor a fate any author would wish for his work. In retrospect, Prigge’s achievement, for all its limitations, is more remarkable inasmuch as it was an exceptionally early, perhaps the earliest, published account of the Dardanelles campaign written by a combatant in any language. Composed without a direct literary model or antecedent, it became the foundational document of German-language memoirs and historical literature of the campaign.

A hundred years later, in contrast, this translator, in choosing to undertake the less onerous and purely academic exercise of introducing, translating and annotating the two versions of Prigge’s text for a modern anglophone readership, enjoyed security from conflict, freedom from censorship (if not from historical controversy) and the advantages of the immense Gallipoli-related bibliography –, official, academic and popular – that has accrued in the intervening century. A decade of academic nomadism within and between Germany and former Ottoman territories is neither a common nor obvious route to this extremely well-trodden field, but perhaps one that affords an opportunity to investigate some of its less-explored byways. The translation was completed while living in Istanbul in 2013-14, and the introduction and annotations written while living in Berlin in 2015. The parallelism with the career of Erich Prigge – intermittently based in Istanbul in 1914–19 and resident in Berlin in 1919–40 – was unintended but auspicious (even providential). In both metropolises, I was privileged to enjoy a congenial academic environment and generous financial support: a Residential Senior Research Fellowship from Koç University, Istanbul (2013–14), and a Renewed Senior Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, hosted by the Freie Universität, Berlin (2015). In both cases, my engagement with Prigge’s memoir was a ‘Nebenprojekt’, which at different times informed and relieved my primary research in Greco-Roman military literature. In this respect, the Homeric associations evoked by Prigge and other memoirists, poets and correspondents of the fighting ‘on the plains of Troy’ in 1915 offered eloquent testimony to the Western tradition and enduring cultural continuities of ‘man-destroying war’.

The project benefited from access to major archives and assistance from their staff: Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg im Breisgau; Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußicher Kulturbesitz, Berlin; Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amt, Berlin; The National Archives, Kew, London, and Thüringisches Staatsarchiv Gotha. The staff of other archives and repositories provided information and/ or copies of documents: Centre des Archives diplomatiques, La Courneuve, Paris; Circondario dello Stato Civile di Locarno, Locarno; Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg (Staatsarchiv Freiburg), Freiburg im Breisgau; Landesarchiv Berlin, Berlin; Landeshauptarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt (Abteilung Magdeburg); Samtgemeindearchiv Harsefeld, Niedersachsen; Stadtarchiv Magdeburg, Sachsen-Anhalt, and Thüringisches Staatsarchiv Meiningen. The staff and holdings of several libraries proved indispensable: British Library, London; Universitätsbibliothek der Freien Universität Berlin; Universitätsbibliothek der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Koç University Library, Istanbul, and Staatsbibliothek Berlin.

I am grateful to Philip Sidnell for his original invitation to publish with Pen & Sword Books, for accepting a proposal perversely different to his initial proposition, and for his patience and confidence. I am obliged to scholars of the Ottoman Empire, language and army and to specialists in the Gallipoli campaign who kindly answered my questions, large and small: Mustafa Aksakal, Harvey Broadbent, Edward Erickson, Hedda Reindl-Kiel and Mesut Uyar. Any remaining errors are my own.

I am, as always, indebted to my parents, family, friends and colleagues for their support and consideration. Above all, I thank Kathleen Hogarth, my Lebensgefährtin, for reading and improving the translation with her intuitive feeling for the German language, and for her interest, encouragement and faith in what would otherwise have been a solitary labour.

November 2016

Berlin

GLOSSARY AND ABBREVIATIONS

Note that difficulties arise in attempting to devise a comprehensive system of rank equivalence between the German-British-Ottoman armies above the rank of Oberst/Colonel/Miralay owing to divergence between their titular and functional correspondence. For example, German and Ottoman sources treat the Ottoman rank of Mirliva as equivalent to German Generalmajor, clearly a titular correspondent to the English term Major General. However, whereas a Generalmajor in the German Army typically commanded a brigade, a Major General in the British Army typically commanded a division, while the command of a brigade was held by a Brigadier General, for which the German Army then possessed no terminological parallel. Correspondingly, Ottoman Ferik was deemed equivalent to German Generalleutnant, a titular correspondent to the English term Lieutenant General, but functionally a Generalleutnant commanded a division, whereas a British Lieutenant General usually commanded a corps. Some anglophone scholars choose to render the terms Generalmajor/Mirliva and Generalleutnant/Ferik according to their functional equivalents in the British (or United States) Army, respectively Brigadier General and Major General. In translating a German text concerning the German-Ottoman military partnership, I have preferred to retain the titular correspondence of Generalmajor/Major General and Generalleutnant/Lieutenant General, rather than impose the foreign rank-structural framework of the British Army onto the German Army.

Selected Officer Ranks in the German Imperial Navy

Other Terminology and Abbreviations

Personal and Proper Names

In the introduction and translations, the spelling of Ottoman personal names, formerly written in a modified Perso-Arabic script, generally follows modern Turkish orthography, with the exception that some names terminating -t and -p in modem Turkish are respectively rendered with terminal -d and -b as more closely resembling Ottoman usage (thus Esad and Vehib rather than Esat and Vehip). Prior to legislation in 1934, Ottoman subjects/Turkish citizens did not possess an exact equivalent of a heritable surname typical in most western European societies. Post-1934 Turkish surnames are indicated in parentheses after the first mention of an individual. In accordance with the conventions of German nomenclature, for surnames with a nobiliary particle (von, von der), the particle is omitted whenever it is not directly preceded by a first name, rank or title. Surnames with a nobiliary suffix (e.g. Otto Liman von Sanders, Friedrich Kreß von Kressenstein) are correctly abbreviated using the first component (thus Liman and not, as commonly in English-language scholarship, von Sanders or Sanders). If the abbreviated form is preceded by a rank or title, the nobiliary particle correctly shifts to the first component (e.g. General von Liman). For the sake of consistency, the capital of the Ottoman Empire is termed Istanbul, except where called Constantinople/Konstantinopel in quotations from contemporary sources.

INTRODUCTION

‘This war is indeed in essence the war for Constantinople ... This war comes out of the Orient: out of the collision between Russia’s oriental policy, guided by Britain, and German achievement. And the war is about the Orient: about the opening up and joining together of the landmass from Heligoland to Baghdad, against the maritime closure and separatist tendencies that the Entente’s encirclement desired. And this war will, for that reason, also end in the Orient!’

The foreword to Erich Prigge’s Der Kampf um die Dardanellen (1916) was written towards the end of 1915 by Dr Ernst Jäckh, the journalist, academic and propagandist who had originally proposed the volume and arranged for its publication. As one of the foremost champions of ‘German-Turkish friendship’, Jäckh identified the rival imperial ambitions of the Great Powers in the Near and Middle East as a primary cause of the current global conflict and indulged his particular obsession with the German-Ottoman alliance as a crucial factor in Germany’s ultimate victory and longer-term imperial aspirations from the North Sea to Mesopotamia. While both contentions are, to different degrees, rhetorically overstated, Jäckh nevertheless captured some of the intoxicating geostrategic calculations whereby the Entente – Great Britain, France and Russia – sought to detach the Ottoman Empire from its alliance with the Central Powers – the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires – and transform the dynamics of the war. The Dardanelles campaign of 1915 was a boldly conceived attempt by an Anglo-French expedition, originally in a purely naval operation, later by a series of amphibious assaults, to break through the Dardanelles straits, defeat the Ottoman forces on land and sea, and coerce or seize the imperial capital at Istanbul. With this single strategic masterstroke, the Entente would circumvent the stalemate of the Western Front by knocking the Ottoman Empire out of the war, reopening an all-season maritime supply route to hard-pressed Russia and inducing still-wavering neutral Balkan states to side with the Entente and open a new front against the Central Powers. The potential spoils were enormous and the very existence of empires seemed at stake. Insofar as the Great Powers had for decades circled the ‘Sick Man of the Bosphorus’ like vultures, an Anglo-French victory would seal the Ottoman Empire’s final dismemberment and colonial partition to the primary advantage of Great Britain and France (a fate postponed until 1920). Correspondingly, some in British military and political circles feared, while others in Germany hoped, that a British defeat on the Dardanelles by a non-European foe would entail a devastating loss of prestige from which British global hegemony would struggle to recover.

Following the failure of the Anglo-French fleet’s stage-by-stage attempt to penetrate the Dardanelles between 19 February and 18 March 1915, and the consequent recourse to large-scale amphibious landings to secure the straits, the armies that confronted one another on the Gallipoli peninsula from 25 April to 8 January were, in different respects, multinational, polyglot and multi-ethnic imperial forces, in large part reflecting the character and composition of the competing empires engaged in this contest. The Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, hastily cobbled together by the Entente in March and successively reinforced during the campaign, predominantly comprised troops from the United Kingdom, which supplied around two-thirds of the c.489,000 men ultimately committed to the enterprise. France provided approximately one sixth, mostly colonial units raised in Algeria, Tunisia and Senegal. The remaining sixth was drawn from the British Empire, most prominently the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), with smaller contingents from the Indian Army and Newfoundland. The protection of the Dardanelles against this invasion was assigned to the Ottoman Fifth Army, a command created as late as 24 March but originally incorporating some of the best-trained, most cohesive and better-officered Ottoman formations, operating in concert with a separate coastal fortification command and a special naval command. The Ottoman forces were recruited almost exclusively from the sultan’s Muslim subjects, primarily ethnic-linguistic Turks from Anatolia and Thrace, but including also units and personnel drawn from predominantly Arab-inhabited provinces, while the complexities of national identity in the late Ottoman Empire subsumed other ethno-cultural elements – Albanian, Kurdish, Circassian and Lazi. Assisting the Ottoman forces in the defence of the straits, as on other fronts in the Caucasus, Palestine and later Mesopotamia, was a small contingent of German military personnel, which included the commander-in-chief of the Fifth Army, Marshal Otto Liman von Sanders.

The original core of this German contingent belonged to the German Military Mission to the Ottoman Empire, launched in December 1913 and partly assimilating the residual staff of earlier such initiatives. Continuing a long if intermittent tradition of Prussian/German-Ottoman military cooperation, the remit of the Military Mission was to provide advisors and instructors to a programme of reform and modernization devised by the Ottoman General Staff. After formally retiring from active duty in the German Army and entering Ottoman service, the members of the Military Mission were mostly allocated to staff, training or technical posts. With the outbreak of war in Europe on 1 August 1914, the by then seventy-one German officers and NCOs were obliged to remain in the Ottoman Empire, which initially sought to pursue a policy of armed neutrality. When the Ottoman government hesitantly joined the hostilities on the side of the Central Powers in late October, the members of the Military Mission found themselves combatants in the Ottoman Army. In the meantime, the German military presence in the Ottoman Empire had been increased, first on 11 August by the arrival of the battleships Goeben and Breslau, which together with their crews were formally transferred to the Ottoman Navy, then in late August by a multi-stage overland transportation of c.700 German naval personnel, particularly specialists in marine and coastal defence, who were to assist in refurbishing and augmenting the fortifications of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus.

During the combat operations in the Dardanelles, German officers, eventually rising in number to around ninety-four, occupied command, staff, logistical and medical posts in the Ottoman Fifth Army, most prominently the commander-in-chief and varying divisional, corps, group or detachment commands. At the same time, an uncertain number of German naval personnel were assigned to coastal installations and supporting Ottoman vessels. In addition, the German commitment was gradually supplemented by diverse contingents and armaments. A machine-gun shore detachment from the Goeben and Breslau joined the fighting in early May, initially comprising forty-four sailors but ultimately numbering more than 150 men. In late June, a c.200-strong unit of German pioneers arrived from the Western Front, bringing experience in trench warfare. A steady increase in German aircraft, pilots and ground crews enhanced aerial reconnaissance and combat capabilities, while the arrival of German submarines in late May briefly compelled Anglo-French battleships to redeploy to safer waters. By the last month of the campaign, in December 1915, an estimated 700 German military and naval officers, NCOs and men were deployed in the Dardanelles. Even so, as a proportion of the Ottoman Fifth Army, which reached its highest strength in October with c.5,500 officers and c.310,000 men, the German contingent was exiguous in the extreme.¹ The troops who successfully repelled the Anglo-French assault on the Dardanelles were overwhelmingly Ottoman, even if German officers occupied a few influential positions and the superior experience, technical expertise or tactical and operational leadership of some Germans may have rendered their contribution disproportionately greater than numbers alone imply.

One of these German officers was responsible for perhaps the earliest published account of the campaign written by a combatant. In September 1915, Major Erich Prigge, adjutant to Liman von Sanders, was charged with compiling a record of the fighting that would expose and refute fraudulent reports then circulating in the British press regarding an actual or imminent Anglo-French victory, and thereby also demonstrate the value and vitality of the German-Ottoman ‘brotherhood in arms’ (Waffenbrüderschaft). Prigge completed the manuscript by mid-November, before combat operations had come to an end, and his text was published in Germany in January 1916 as Der Kampf um die Dardanellen (The Struggle for the Dardanelles), while a paperbound version bore the variant title Dardanellen: Kriegstagebuch (Dardanelles: War Diary). By March, the Ottoman General Headquarters had objected to the content of Prigge’s slim volume, ostensibly on security grounds, and the German authorities deemed it expedient to order the confiscation of all copies. Later the same year, a similar book appeared entitled Gallipoli, der Kampf um den Orient (Gallipoli, the Struggle for the Orient), anonymously ascribed to ‘an officer of the staff of Marshal Liman von Sanders’. Some of the earliest academic studies of the campaign recognized that the second work is a revised and extended version of the first, and correctly inferred their common authorship, but subsequent scholarship has largely failed to appreciate the textual relationship or the identity of the unnamed staff officer. The present volume provides annotated English translations of the two versions of Prigge’s work and seeks to locate their composition both within the institutional context of the German Military Mission and in relation to the German-language literature and historiography of the Dardanelles campaign. The inception and objectives of Prigge’s first book, together with the story, interesting in itself, of how it came to be withdrawn from sale and supplanted by an anonymous partly expurgated version, exemplify the character and motivations of contemporary war reportage and illustrate the dynamics of German-Ottoman relations. Both texts combine first-hand testimony with second-hand information derived from official documentation and oral reports of other, named and unnamed witnesses. The eyewitness component understandably reflects the viewpoint, duties and interests of a staff officer at the headquarters of the Ottoman Fifth Army, in close attendance upon its commander-in-chief. Written and published during or immediately after the events they describe, Prigge’s Der Kampf um die Dardanellen and its revision Gallipoli, der Kampf um den Orient abound in individual insights and circumstantial detail and possess a descriptive immediacy indicative of personal involvement, but the date and circumstances of their production naturally raise interpretive challenges. Part memoir, part propaganda – or at least ‘public relations’ – they must now be read critically, with regard to their restricted perspectives and the constraints of wartime publication, as well as in light of ‘Western’ historiographic perceptions of the Gallipoli campaign specifically and the Ottoman Empire generally. Prigge himself later seemed to acknowledge that his first book (and by implication the second) should be judged as a product of its time and place: some years after the war, in 1922, when invited to contribute a chapter about Ottoman combat operations to a general history of the World War, Prigge quoted a passage from his own Der Kampf um die Dardanellen describing the British landings on 25 April 1915, but he chose to cite his earlier work anonymously as ‘a report of this memorable morning, as it was set down at the time under the fresh impression of the events’.²

The difficulties of accurately portraying and assessing the significance of German involvement in the defence of the Dardanelles were acknowledged in German historical literature soon after the war, partly in reaction to more overtly polemical wartime publications, partly owing to Ottoman/Turkish ownership of the victory, both as a national achievement and in terms of the historical documentation. When Liman von Sanders came to write his memoir Fünf Jahre Türkei (Five Years in Turkey), published in 1920, he conceded that his own account of the Dardanelles campaign was merely ‘an overview ... from the standpoint of the commander-in-chief’, intended to remedy public ignorance or misconceptions in Germany, while ‘a detailed description of the individual combat operations must be left to the reports of the Turkish General Staff’.³ In 1927, a historical account of the campaign written by another German participant, Carl Mühlmann’s Der Kampf um die Dardanellen 1915 (The Struggle for the Dardanelles 1915), appeared as the sixteenth volume in the series Schlachten des Weltkrieges (Battles of the World War). Published under the auspices of the Reichsarchiv, the series comprised monographic treatments of selected battles originally aimed at a non-specialist readership, though its ultimately thirty-six volumes soon acquired a semi-official status.⁴ In the foreword to Mühlmann’s volume, the series editor, George Soldan, a retired major and now consultant archivist, deemed it necessary to justify the inclusion of the Dardanelles campaign within the project:

‘The struggle for the Dardanelles is primarily a Turkish feat of arms, even if German officers and soldiers attained significant influence over events. It may therefore be striking that a description of it should occur within the scope of the book series Battles of the World War, whose mission has been to investigate the most important and most characteristic German battles. The coverage of the series would, however, display a gap if it did not include at least one account that also has as its subject matter our cooperation with our former Turkish allies. For this purpose the choice of investigating the battle of the Dardanelles seemed obvious, as this struggle not only attained particular significance for the general course of the World War, but also, with its unusual difficulties and in its diversity, arouses particular interest.’⁵

Of course, national perspectives inevitably cast a different light on conflicts observed from the alternative viewpoints of both allies and enemies. Accounts of the Dardanelles campaign written by German witnesses tend, whether unconsciously or by design, to accentuate the positions and roles of German colleagues, even if they accredit the victory chiefly to the dogged courage of the Ottoman soldiery. Accordingly, the two versions of Prigge’s text, respectively 112 and 117 pages in length, together mention thirty-one German officers by name, and draw attention to other German army and naval personnel and contingents, in comparison tojust eighteen named Ottoman officers.⁶ In contrast, the Turkish official history of the campaign, compiled by the Turkish General Staff (TC Genelkurmay Başkanlığı) largely on the basis of Ottoman archival sources, and comprising over 1,200 pages plus appendices and documents, supplies the names of twenty German officers who were involved in combat operations (sometimes awkwardly transliterated from the Perso-Arabic script of the original Ottoman documentation), around half of whom are mentioned only briefly and/or incidentally.⁷ Clearly this disparity reflects more than partisan sentiment: the German and Turkish publications differ substantially in date, scope, genre, purpose and source material. In particular, the top-down focus of the Turkish official history typically extends only to more senior officers, Ottoman and German, at the level of divisional command or higher, whereas many of the individuals named by Prigge occupy more junior positions. Nevertheless, it is also the case that the ‘Young Turk’ wartime regime, sensitive to Western assessments of Ottoman weakness, had begun to counterclaim any suggestion of German credit for a victory as early as March 1915, while official Turkish historiography of the battle embodies emphatic criticism of Liman von Sanders’ defensive planning and generalship, particularly where they might impinge upon the testimony or reputation of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), as well as a general belittlement of the collective and individual contribution of German officers.⁸

No writer or reader can approach the Dardanelles campaign without awareness of starkly differing national attitudes, as variously reflected in academic scholarship, popular culture, military heritage and public commemoration. Among the Allies, the extremes of historical memory and emotional response are easily observed: for Australians, Gallipoli is a (or the) foundational event in the evolution of national consciousness and identity; in France, which provided the second largest Allied contingent, the Dardanelles are largely forgotten, at least in comparison to the greater carnage of the Western Front. Correspondingly, within the German-Ottoman military partnership, historical perspectives have followed different trajectories. Naturally, the Ottoman government vigorously exploited the long-dreamed-of victory over the Great Powers as proof of Turkish national rebirth on the global stage and a psychological stimulus to the domestic war effort, but the triumph was soon overshadowed by the empire’s humiliating defeat in 1918 and subsequent dismemberment. In the Republic of Turkey, the heroic sacrifice of Gallipoli has evolved into an object of national(istic) and military pride, and an important component of Turkish historical identity in both official and popular spheres. National commemoration and memorialization, however, were belated and gradual developments that began to gain momentum only from the 1950s, largely prompted by veterans, their families and historically minded army officers, but to some extent constrained by the negative stance of the republican regime towards the Ottoman past in general. Today, the historic importance of and communal interest in the fighting on the Dardanelles in 1915 are undisputed, even if divergent views as to its precise significance – whether a victory of the nascent Turkish nation over Western imperial aggressors in defence of its homeland or a victory of Muslims over infidels in defence of Islam – reflect shades of political, cultural and religious opinion in Turkey, then and now.⁹ In Germany, the triumph of a German-led and partly German-officered Ottoman army on the Dardanelles was similarly eclipsed by defeat and imperial collapse.¹⁰ Thereafter, public awareness was possibly sustained by the intermittent publication of accounts by German participants, but it is difficult to quantify their actual readership comparative to the post-war deluge of combatants’ memoirs, regimental histories, letter collections and commemorative volumes. Interest was undoubtedly keenest among veteran, military or specialist readers, specifically the Bund der Asienkämpfer (League of Asia-Fighters), a nationwide association for German military personnel who had served in Ottoman and neighbouring territories. Popular historical interest in the campaign peaked in a spate of publications from the mid-1930s to early 1940s, especially semi-dramatized accounts reflective of the heightened nationalistic sentiment and militarism of the era. In accordance with general trends of German historical scholarship after 1945, however, while the broader dimensions of German-Ottoman/Turkish relations became a significant field of enquiry, the purely military aspects of the Dardanelles campaign have elicited almost negligible academic attention and find little, if any, resonance in German historical memory. Some recent German-language research on German participation at Gallipoli and on other Ottoman fronts has been partly motivated by issues of commemoration and heritage, and particularly the location and fate of German war graves.¹¹ It is interesting to observe that this overdue German historical re-engagement with German-Ottoman military cooperation illustrates how far national perspectives can diverge: while a detailed study by Klaus Wolf (2008) is able to narrate combat operations on the Dardanelles almost entirely on the basis of German eyewitness accounts and official documentation, Edward Erickson’s (2010) magisterial reconstruction of the battle from an Ottoman viewpoint largely reproduces the narrative and analysis of the Turkish official history, in which the contribution of German military and naval personnel is generally minimalized, when not explicitly criticized or discounted.

This is not the place for a comprehensive examination of the historiographic complexities of the Dardanelles campaign, but some observations will serve to contextualize the current project. Even a limited engagement with the vast, mostly English-language historical literature draws attention to controversies and interpretive disputes, primarily reflecting the concerns of anglophone scholars, notably the political priorities and geostrategic objectives underlying the expedition; the planning, coordination and execution of Allied naval and amphibious operations; the particular role played by ANZAC troops, especially in relation to emergent national self-awareness in Australia and New Zealand; and an abiding preoccupation with allocating responsibility – individual, collective or institutional – for so costly a defeat.¹² In the ‘Western’ historiography of the Dardanelles campaign, the profile of the German contingent in the Ottoman forces has been enhanced by two factors.

First, from the outset, Anglo-French strategic calculations were based on perceptions of Ottoman military weakness, partly justified by the calamitous defeats recently suffered by Ottoman armies, especially in the Balkan Wars (1912–13), but also rooted in long-standing cultural and racial prejudices and orientalizing perspectives. Even if forcing the Dardanelles were to entail substantial losses in men and materiel, few British or French strategists seriously contemplated the prospect of the sultan’s notoriously ill-led, poorly trained and technologically backward army defeating a major military-naval expedition of the two predominant colonial superpowers.¹³ The high expectations of releasing the deadlock of the Western Front and the romance of a setting heavy with Homeric resonance soon starkly contrasted with the nightmarish realities of combat on the Gallipoli peninsula and embittered the disillusionment at the expedition’s ultimate failure. Nevertheless, in the wake of the Allied withdrawal, an ingrained prior assumption of Anglo-French victory and persistent underestimation of Ottoman defensive capabilities profoundly influenced historical analysis over subsequent decades. As soon as (or even before) the campaign had concluded, the primary question for Allied historians, predominantly British and Australian, became why the Allied expeditionary force had lost rather than how the Ottoman defenders had won. In consequence, anglophone and anglocentric historiography, by prioritizing the apportionment of blame among Allied political and/or military leaders, fostered two variant interpretations of the campaign: eitherthe expedition was ill-conceived and doomed to fail from its very inception, or, conversely, the expedition was feasible but poorly executed and unsuccessful largely on account of fateful decisions or missed opportunities at key episodes when victory was within the Allies’ grasp. Within this historiographic framework, the German contingent on the Dardanelles acquired special significance as an intrusive ‘Western’ element in the successful Ottoman defence. Even though during eight months of combat on the Gallipoli peninsula Allied troops learned to respect or fear the courage and tenacity of the ordinary Ottoman soldier, the generally low regard in which the Allied command held the Ottoman Army as an institution promoted the view that the more effective aspects of defensive planning and execution were attributable to German military advisors, a colonial attitude that long coloured historical literature and mirrored broader misconceptions concerning the extent of German influence or control over Ottoman armed forces and military policy immediately before and during the war.

Second, this unbalanced approach is in large part explicable in terms of the provenance and availability of primary sources. Until about fifteen years ago, the Dardanelles campaign had been researched, narrated and analyzed by mostly anglophone historians, from overwhelmingly British and Allied perspectives, and almost exclusively on the basis of English-language (primarily British and ANZAC) published accounts and archival resources. Even the best of these studies, though outstanding in other respects, were almost entirely lacking in evidence or perspectives from the Ottoman side. The obstacles posed by the Ottoman source material combine problems of language, identification and access. Comparatively few memoirs by Ottoman veterans of Gallipoli have been published, and even fewer translated, a situation that largely reflects Ottoman historiographic and cultural traditions, rather than lack of public interest or commercial impetus in modern Turkey.¹⁴ Similarly, again until very recently, the Ottoman operational documentation of the campaign has remained for the most part unavailable, even to Turkish researchers, insofar as it is written mostly in Ottoman Turkish, requiring specialist linguistic training, and preserved in collections that were largely uncatalogued and/or subject to restricted access. Consequently, in older anglophone scholarship on Gallipoli, the Ottoman Army, beyond the enigmatic figure of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), is typically a distant and faceless enemy or ‘other’, while any assessment of the role of the defenders and the quality of the defence in defeating the Allied invasion was partly based on unsubstantiated assumptions or national stereotypes, which themselves contain a residue of wartime propaganda. In these circumstances, those historians who sought an alternative ‘Ottoman’ viewpoint had few options but to rely on German memoirists, or at least those whose published works were later translated into English, notably Otto Liman von Sanders (1920 [1927]) and Hans Kannengiesser (1927 [1928]). This dependence on the testimony of German witnesses tended to reinforce the impression that the most effective aspects of the defence were to be credited to German officers.

Although there were earlier isolated attempts to redress this perspectival imbalance, it is only in the past fifteen years that scholarship has begun to unlock Ottoman archival collections and view events from ‘the other side of the hill’. Pioneering research by Tim Travers (2001) and Harvey Broadbent (2005) examined aspects of the campaign using selected Ottoman primary sources.¹⁵ A series of ground-breaking publications by Edward Erickson (2001, 2007, 2010) has presented English-language readers with a detailed analysis of