This memoir recalls Yervant Alexanian's death-defying experiences in the center of the Armenian Genocide. Like other Armenians of his generation, he was an eyewitness to the massacre and dislocation of his family and fellow countrymen in Ottoman Turkey during World War I. Alexanian was conscripted into the Turkish army--but unlike others so conscripted, he survived. Alexanian was forced to become an onlooker while he watched the atrocities unfold. His story of resourceful action and fateful turns is a suspenseful "insider's account" of a Genocide survivor. From his singular position, Alexanian was able to document the tragedy of his people in his journals and diaries, but he also offers us a behind-the-scenes look into the motivations and actions of Turkish military officials as they committed the atrocities. His story continues after the war as we follow the trail of his journey through Europe and finally to America, where he found solace and was able to start anew with fellow survivors. No comparable account exists in the literature of the Armenian Genocide. This edition, translated from Alexanian's hand-written Armenian-language chronicle, includes never-before-seen documents and photos that the author preserved. Through his eyes we relive the astonishing cruelty of the Genocide's perpetrators--but also rare, unexpected acts of humanity between victim and oppressor.

During war time, the everyday experiences of ordinary people - and especially women - are frequently obscured by elite military and social analysis. In this pioneering study, Elif Mahir Metinsoy focuses on the lives of ordinary Muslim women living in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. It reveals not only their wartime problems, but also those of everyday life on the Ottoman home front. It questions the existing literature's excessive focus on the Ottoman middle-class, using new archive sources such as women's petitions to extend the scope of Ottoman-Turkish women's history. Free from academic jargon, and supported by original illustrations and maps, it will appeal to researchers of gender history, Middle Eastern and social history. By showing women's resistance to war mobilization, wartime work life and the everyday struggles which shaped state politics, Mahir Metinsoy allows readers to draw intriguing comparisons between the past and the current events of today's Middle East.

The First World War quickly escalated from a European war into a global conflict that would cause fundamental changes in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Its end signalled the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, which had controlled most of the Arab Middle East. Over the wartime period, millions of people across the Empire died as a result of warfare, epidemics, famines and massacres. However, for the Ottoman leaders their entry into the war was not just a response to a life-or-death struggle, but rather presented them with an opportunity to transform the empire into a new type of state. Syria in World War I brings together leading scholars working with original Turkish, Arabic, Armenian and German sources, to present a comprehensive examination of this key period in Syria's history. Together, the chapters demonstrate how the war represented a radical break from the past for the Syrian lands, which underwent crucial political, economic, social and cultural transformations. It contextualises various facets of the then Unionist ruler of Syria, Djemal Pasha, as well as exploring the impact of the Ottoman leaders' divergent policies on the Syrian lands and people, which would undergo a series of political, economic and ecological catastrophes whose traces are still evident in the region's collective memory. Introducing a significant body of new information and considerably expanding the parameters of current debates, Syria in World War I is of key interest to students and scholars of Middle East History, as well as History of the Late Ottoman Empire and World War I History.

During the First World War, Cemal Pasha attempted to establish direct control over Syrian and thereby reaffirm Ottoman authority there through various policies of control, including the abolishment of local intermediaries. Elaborating on these Ottoman policies of control, this book assesses Cemal Pasha's policies towards different political groups in Syrian society, including; Arabists, Zionists, Christian clergymen and Armenian immigrants. The author then goes on to analyse Pasha's educational activities, the conscription of Syrians- both Muslim and Christian, and the reconstruction of the major Syrian cities, assessing how these policies contributed to his attempt to create ideal Ottoman citizens. An important addition to existing literature on the social and political history of World War I, and contributing a new understanding of Ottoman Syria, and its transformation into a nation-state, this book will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in state formation, Politics and History.

The history of Jerusalem as traditionally depicted is the quintessential history of conflict and strife, of ethnic tension, and of incompatible national narratives and visions. It is also a history of dramatic changes and moments, one of the most radical ones being the replacement of the Ottoman regime with British rule in December 1917. From Empire to Empire challenges these two major dichotomies, ethnic and temporal, which shaped the history of Jerusalem and its inhabitants. It links the experiences of two ethnic communities living in Palestine, Jews and Arabs, as well as bridging two historical periods, the Ottoman and British administrations. Drawing upon a variety of sources, Jacobson demonstrates how political and social alliances are dynamic, context-dependent, and purpose-driven. She also highlights the critical role of foreign intervention, governmental and nongovernmental, in forming local political alliances and in shaping the political reality of Palestine during the crisis of World War I and the transition between regimes. From Empire to Empire offers a vital new perspective on the way World War I has been traditionally studied in the Palestinian context. It also examines the effects of war on the socioeconomic sphere of a mixed city in crisis and looks into the ways the war, as well as Ottoman policies and administrators, affected the ways people perceived the Ottoman Empire and their location within it. From Empire to Empire illuminates the complex and delicate relations between ethnic and national groups and offers a different lens through which the history of Jerusalem can be seen: it proposes not only a story of conflict but also of intercommunal contacts and cooperation.

Year of the Locust captures in page-turning detail the end of the Ottoman world and a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. In the diaries of Ihsan Hasan al-Turjman (1893-1917), the first ordinary recruit to describe World War I from the Arab side, we follow the misadventures of an Ottoman soldier stationed in Jerusalem. There he occupied himself by dreaming about his future and using family connections to avoid being sent to the Suez. His diaries draw a unique picture of daily life in the besieged city, bringing into sharp focus its communitarian alleys and obliterated neighborhoods, the ongoing political debates, and, most vividly, the voices from its streets--soldiers, peddlers, prostitutes, and vagabonds. Salim Tamari's indispensable introduction places the diary in its local, regional, and imperial contexts while deftly revising conventional wisdom on the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

One hundred years after the deportations and mass murder of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and other peoples in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the history of the Armenian genocide is a victim of historical distortion, state-sponsored falsification, and deep divisions between Armeniansand Turks. Working together for the first time, Turkish, Armenian, and other scholars present here a compelling reconstruction of what happened and why.This volume gathers the most up-to-date scholarship on Armenian genocide, looking at how the event has been written about in Western and Turkish historiographies; what was happening on the eve of the catastrophe; portraits of the perpetrators; detailed accounts of the massacres; how the event hasbeen perceived in both local and international contexts, including World War I; and reflections on the broader implications of what happened then. The result is a comprehensive work that moves beyond nationalist master narratives and offers a more complete understanding of this tragic event.

Mehmet Arif was an officer in a Turkish unit captured early on in World War I by Russian forces. His memoirs describe the hardships of the war in a remote Russian town, the life of the ordinary people in the last years of Czarist Russia and the chaos caused by the Bolshevik Revolution.

Described by historians as a ?total war,? World War I was the first conflict that required a comprehensive mobilization of all members of society, regardless of profession, age, or gender. Just as women became heads of households and joined the workforce in unprecedented numbers, children also became actively engaged in the war effort. Adding a new dimension to the historiography of World War I, Maksudyan explores the variegated experiences and involvement of Ottoman children and youth in the war. Rather than simply passive victims, children became essential participants as soldiers, wage earners, farmers, and artisans. They also contributed to the propaganda and mobilization effort as symbolic heroes and orphans of martyrs. Rebelling against their orphanage directors or trade masters, marching and singing proudly with their scouting companies, making long-distance journeys to receive vocational training or simply to find their families, they acquired new identities and discovered new forms of agency. Maksudyan focuses on four different groups of children: thousands of orphans in state orphanages (Darüleytam), apprentice boys who were sent to Germany, children and youth in urban centers who reproduced rivaling nationalist ideologies, and Armenian children who survived the genocide. With each group, the author sheds light on how the war dramatically impacted their lives and, in turn, how these self-empowered children, sometimes described as ?precocious adults,? actively shaped history.

War and Collapse is the third and final volume in a series that covers the last years of the Ottoman Empire. This book stems from a three-day international conference held in May 2012 at which scholars examined the causes and consequences of World War I, with a distinctive focus on how these events pertained to the Ottoman state and society. Fifty-three scholars--both new and established--contributed to this collection, with the goal of explaining what happened within the Ottoman Empire before and during WWI and how ethnic and national groups constructed these events to enhance their identities, promote their interests, and situate their collective selves in the international system. The chapters provide insight into the mindset and experiences of Ottoman peoples from the end of the Balkan Wars through the end of World War I, showing how earlier events set in motion the Ottoman response to the war and how continued engagement in conflict had devastating, irreversible effects on Ottoman society. The articles in this volume include a wide variety of ideas and points of view, thus presenting a comprehensive picture of the events. 

The First World War in the Middle East is an accessibly written military and social history of the clash of world empires in the Dardanelles, Egypt and Palestine, Mesopotamia, Persia and the Caucasus. Coates Ulrichsen demonstrates how wartime exigencies shaped the parameters of the modern Middle East, and describes and assesses the major campaigns against the Ottoman Empire and Germany involving British and imperial troops from the French and Russian Empires, as well as their Arab and Armenian allies. Also documented are the enormous logistical demands placed on host societies by the Great Powers' conduct of industrialised warfare in hostile terrain. The resulting deepening of imperial penetration, and the extension of state controls across a heterogeneous sprawl of territories, generated a powerful backlash both during and immediately after the war, which played a pivotal role in shaping national identities as the Ottoman Empire was dismembered. This is a multidimensional account of the many seemingly discrete yet interlinked campaigns that resulted in one to one and a half million casualties.It details not just their military outcome but relates them to intelligence-gathering, industrial organisation, authoritarianism and the political economy of empires at war.

The Great War transformed the Middle East, bringing to an end four hundred years of Ottoman rule in Arab lands while giving rise to the Middle East as we know it today. A century later, the experiences of ordinary men and women during those calamitous years have faded from memory. A Land of Aching Hearts traverses ethnic, class, and national borders to recover the personal stories of the civilians and soldiers who endured this cataclysmic event. Among those who suffered were the people of Greater Syria-comprising modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine-as well as the people of Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt. Beyond the shifting fortunes of the battlefield, the region was devastated by a British and French naval blockade made worse by Ottoman war measures. Famine, disease, inflation, and an influx of refugees were everyday realities. But the local populations were not passive victims. Fawaz chronicles the initiative and resilience of civilian émigrés, entrepreneurs, draft-dodgers, soldiers, villagers, and townsmen determined to survive the war as best they could. The right mix of ingenuity and practicality often meant the difference between life and death. The war's aftermath proved bitter for many survivors. Nationalist aspirations were quashed as Britain and France divided the Middle East along artificial borders that still cause resentment. The misery of the Great War, and a profound sense of huge sacrifices made in vain, would color people's views of politics and the West for the century to come.

During World War One, the Ottoman Empire, one of the largest and longest-lasting empires in history, faced severe challenges to its structure and existence, which eventually resulted in its dissolution. "Among The Ottomans" introduces two unique diary accounts written by two generations of the same family in the declining years of the Ottoman Empire. Written in the heart of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, Marie Lyster's World War One diaries describe the political and social climate of Constantinople as Allied troops swept through Turkey, wreaking havoc on the country's infrastructure and forcing residents, regardless of their national affiliations, to endure the hardships of war. Just 200 miles away in the Dardanelles, her son Henry was fighting with the Allies against the Turks. Following the Allied retreat in 1915, he was posted to Salonika in northern Greece, where he worked with the 'Comitajis' as they fought the Bulgarians. Later, as the Military Governor of Eastern Thrace, he witnessed the rise of Turkish Nationalism and the struggle for control of the fragmented pieces of the fallen empire.Published for the first time, these two diaries provide an unprecedented account of the Great War's impact across generations and geographical borders and a unique insight into the final years of the Ottoman Empire.

This military history follows the 5th Battalion of the Suffolk regiment from England to Syria and the end of World War I. Among the previously untapped primary source materials used are the author's father's correspondence and photographs from his 1913-1919 service with the 5th Suffolk in England, Gallipoli, Egypt, Palestine and Syria. It follows chronologically the frustrating failures, and the final victory, of the campaigns in North Africa and the Middle East and refutes the widely held misconception that cavalry played no major role in the conflict.

Why did the Ottoman Empire enter the First World War in late October 1914, months after the war's devastations had become clear? Were its leaders 'simple-minded,' 'below-average' individuals, as the doyen of Turkish diplomatic history has argued? Or, as others have claimed, did the Ottomans enter the war because War Minister Enver Pasha, dictating Ottoman decisions, was in thrall to the Germans and to his own expansionist dreams? Based on previously untapped Ottoman and European sources, Mustafa Aksakal's dramatic study challenges this consensus. It demonstrates that responsibility went far beyond Enver, that the road to war was paved by the demands of a politically interested public, and that the Ottoman leadership sought the German alliance as the only way out of a web of international threats and domestic insecurities, opting for an escape whose catastrophic consequences for the empire and seismic impact on the Middle East are felt even today.

A docu-drama about the battle between the Ottoman Empire and Great Britain and its allies, one of the fiercest and most controversial battles of World War I. Includes newly uncovered diaries, photos, and interviews, computer animations and dramatic re-enactments.

Originally published in 1918, this is the memoir of Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire who not only documented but also tried to stop the genocide of the Armenian people.
Earlier version available online via HathiTrust Digital Library,
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/1173400.html

The Great War is still seen as a mostly European war. The Middle Eastern theater is, at best, considered a sideshow written from the western perspective. This book fills an important gap in the literature by giving an insight through annotated translations from five Ottoman memoirs, previously not available in English, of actors who witnessed the last few years of Turkish presence in the Arab lands. It provides the historical background to many of the crises in the Middle East today, such as the Arab-Israeli confrontation, the conflict-ridden emergence of Syria and Lebanon, the struggle over the holy places of Islam in the Hejaz, and the mutual prejudices of Arabs and Turks about each other.

From the bestselling author of Gallipoli- The Fatal Shore comes this original, dramatic and eye-opening account of the infamous Gallipoli campaign, told through 'enemy eyes'. Based on exclusive access to Turkish archives, Defending Gallipoli reveals how the Turks reacted and defended Gallipoli. Author and Turkish-language expert Harvey Broadbent spent five years translating everything, from official records to soldiers' personal diaries and letters, to unearth the Turkish story. It is chilling and revealing to see this famous battle in Australian history through the 'enemy' lens. The book commences with a jihad, which sees the soldiers fighting for country and God together. But it also humanises the Turkish soldiers, naming them, revealing their emotions, and ultimately shows how the Allies totally misunderstood and underestimated them. Defending Gallipoli fills a huge gap in the history of the Gallipoli campaign.

When World War I began, Karnig Panian was only five years old, living among his fellow Armenians in the Anatolian village of Gurin. Four years later, American aid workers found him at an orphanage in Antoura, Lebanon. He was among nearly 1,000 Armenian and 400 Kurdish children who had been abandoned by the Turkish administrators, left to survive at the orphanage without adult care. This memoir offers the extraordinary story of what he endured in those years--as his people were deported from their Armenian community, as his family died in a refugee camp in the deserts of Syria, as he survived hunger and mistreatment in the orphanage. The Antoura orphanage was another project of the Armenian genocide: its administrators, some benign and some cruel, sought to transform the children into Turks by changing their Armenian names, forcing them to speak Turkish, and erasing their history. Panian's memoir is a full-throated story of loss, resistance, and survival, but told without bitterness or sentimentality. His story shows us how even young children recognize injustice and can organize against it, how they can form a sense of identity that they will fight to maintain. He paints a painfully rich and detailed picture of the lives and agency of Armenian orphans during the darkest days of World War I. Ultimately, Karnig Panian survived the Armenian genocide and the deprivations that followed. Goodbye, Antoura assures us of how humanity, once denied, can be again reclaimed.

The thrilling and definitive history of World War I in the Middle East By 1914 the powers of Europe were sliding inexorably toward war, and they pulled the Middle East along with them into one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. In The Fall of the Ottomans, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story of the region's crucial role in the conflict. Unlike the static killing fields of the Western Front, the war in the Middle East was fast-moving and unpredictable, with the Turks inflicting decisive defeats on the Entente in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Gaza before the tide of battle turned in the Allies' favor. The postwar settlement led to the partition of Ottoman lands, laying the groundwork for the ongoing conflicts that continue to plague the modern Arab world. A sweeping narrative of battles and political intrigue from Gallipoli to Arabia, The Fall of the Ottomans is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the Great War and the making of the modern Middle East.

This volume examines how the Ottoman Army was able to evolve and maintain a high level of overall combat effectiveness despite the primitive nature of the Ottoman State during the First World War. Structured around four case studies, at the operational and tactical level, of campaigns involving the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire: Gallipoli in 1915, Kut in 1916, Third Gaza-Beersheba in 1917, and Megiddo in 1918. For each of these campaigns, particular emphasis is placed on examining specific elements of combat effectiveness and how they affected that particular battle. The prevalent historiography attributes Ottoman battlefield success primarily to external factors - such as the presence of German generals and staff officers; climate, weather and terrain that adversely affected allied operations; allied bumbling and amateurish operations; and inadequate allied intelligence. By contrast, Edward J. Erickson argues that the Ottoman Army was successful due to internal factors, such as its organizational architecture, a hardened cadre of experienced combat leaders, its ability to organize itself for combat, and its application of the German style of war. Ottoman Army Effectiveness in World War I will be of great interest to students of the First World War, military history and strategic studies in general.

The Great War was the first example of a total war in history, reflected in the cultures and literatures of Europe in the shape of propaganda. What began as civic patriotism developed into a weapon of war, programmed and organized by the state to devastating effect. In almost all countries, writers of different ideological hues were ready to undertake the job of representing the war, in accordance with the state's guidance. War propaganda in the Ottoman Empire, the most anachronistic belligerent of the war according to historians, was condemned to failure. In the underdeveloped and multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman-Turkish intelligentsia could not produce adequate propaganda to support the battlefronts and the home front. Why did propaganda efforts die after 1915? Can this be explained with the laziness or cosmopolitanism of the cultural agents? Or did the lack of propaganda derive from reasons that are more material?Erol Koroglu seeks to address these questions in a unique interdisciplinary assessment of Turkish literature and propaganda, interpreting literary texts written by the representative writers of the period. These interpretations follow a literary cultural history method and give an analysis of the complex interaction between literary texts and the historical context. Koroglu discusses the subjects of First World War propaganda, Turkish nationalism and national identity construction. He concludes that the unfavourable conditions in the Ottoman-Turkish cultural sphere, the literature of the years 1914-1918, even if superficially full of propaganda aims, was essentially the continuation of a project to build a national culture, inherited from the pre-war years and never completed. Turkish literature therefore did not reflect powerful propaganda, but was more a difficult attempt to create 'national identity'.

Born in Iraq in 1885, Jafar Pasha Al-Askari played a colourful part in the events that led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, and in the foundation of modern Iraq in the 1920s and 1930s. These memoirs, published in English for the first time, shed a vivid light on the creation of modern Iraq as experienced by one of its prime movers, and provide a timely reminder of the obstacles to building an open Iraqi state. Large and courageous, with a sharp intellect, a talent for languages, and a jovial and commanding personality, he was sent by the Turks for military training in Germany before the 1914-18 War. He was however strongly drawn to the Arab nationalist ideas then current, and his intense Arab patriotism is the consistent theme in his career.As a general in the Ottoman Army, he led the Sanusi regular forces in Cyrenaica in 1915-16. Imprisoned by the British in Cairo, he realized the Arab cause might best be served by Sharif Hussain of Makkah's revolt against Ottoman rule, then getting under way with British support. He was released in March 1917 to take command of the Arab regular forces fighting under the Amir Faisal bin Hussain (later King Faisal I of Iraq) in the Hijaz. After the First World War, he joined the new Iraqi government under the British Mandate, and spent the remainder of his life serving Iraq as Prime Minister (twice), Minister of Defence (five times), and Iraqi Minister in London, even finding time to be called to the Bar (at Gray's Inn). In 1936 he was assassinated outside Baghdad, in a doomed bid to forestall Iraq's first military coup.

Yehuda Amon and Haim Nahmias were middle-class Jerusalem Jews who were conscripted into the Ottoman army and transported to Western Anatolia with the labor battalions during World War I. They kept detailed notes of their dreadful experiences which they later extended into complete narratives. Both diaries were discovered only recently and both appear here for the first time in this English translation. In addition to the translation of the diaries, the book includes a detailed introduction which describes life in the Jewish settlement in Palestine during the war under the autocratic rule of Jemal Pasha, the Governor of Syria and Palestine. It provides insight into the Ottoman army in the Middle East and the declining years of the Ottoman Empire, as seen through the two diaries and also through unpublished letters of Yehuda Burla, another Palestinian Jewish conscript who later became a well-known Hebrew author. The book also contains a detailed description of the Yishuv during the early years of the war, including the devastating locust plague of 1915. *** "The study of the Great War has traditionally focused on the grand strategies of leaders and generals while little attention was given to the simple soldier. In this book, Glenda Abramson uncovers two war diaries by Jewish soldiers who served in the Ottoman army during the war, thus providing invaluable insights into the thoughts and experiences of those who paid the price." -- Michael Keren, Professor and Canada Research Chair, U. of Calgary *** "...Amon's and Nahmias' stories are punctuated as well by flashes of erudition and even humor (mostly irony), and valuably provides insight into sorely neglected areas of the Great War, namely the lives of lowly Amele soldiers in Western Anatolia, of Jews certainly, but also their companions in misfortune, Turks, Arabs, Kurds and Christians." -- Mark L. Blackman, The NYMAS Review, StrategyPage, October 2015 [Subject: History, World War I, Jewish Studies, Ottoman Studies]Ã?Ã?

The Great War was so devastating - eight million lives were lost globally - that in its aftermath a horrified world expected it to be the final chapter in armed conflict. Mapping The First World War provides a uniquely different perspective on the 'war to end all wars'. An introduction details the causes and progress of the war and is followed by over a hundred maps and charts that show the broad sweep of events, from Germany's 1914 war goals to the final positions of the troops. There are maps depicting movements and battles as well as related documents, such as those on levels of conscription and numbers of weapons. As in all wars, maps were vital to the military organization of allsides during World War I. Before each military event there was the planning, the reconnaissance, and the conjecture as to enemy positions. After the event there would be debriefing, analysis of success and failure, and a redrawing of maps to show new troop positions and boundaries. All of the maps featured in this book have been drawn from the extensive collection held by the National Archives at Kew in west London. Providing a fascinating and unique insight into the planning and organization of military campaigns,Mapping The First World War is essential for anyone interested in military history.

This rich history of Palestine in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire reveals the nation emerging as a cultural entity engaged in a vibrant intellectual, political, and social exchange of ideas and initiatives. Employing nuanced ethnography, rare autobiographies, and unpublished maps and photos, The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine discerns a self-consciously modern and secular Palestinian public sphere. New urban sensibilities, schools, monuments, public parks, railways, and roads catalyzed by the Great War and described in detail by Salim Tamari show a world that challenges the politically driven denial of the existence of Palestine as a geographic, cultural, political, and economic space.

Examines how the Ottoman Empire tried to cope with the challenges of permanent mobilization and how this process reshaped state-society relations in 1914-1918, focusing mainly on Anatolia and the Muslim population.