In his introduction to the New Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War Sir Hew Strachan noted that warfare didn’t end neatly because an armistice was agreed with Germany on 11 November 1918, as many peripheral conflicts began or continued. This excellent booklet in the Osprey Men-at-Arms series covers one of these conflicts, the GreekTurkish War of 1919 to ... Read more1922 that led to the establishment of the modern Turkish state. Philip Jowett has packed in a great deal of information, while remaining eminently readable. He recounts the support that the Entente/Allied nations gave to Greece for its invasion of Anatolia and the parlous state of Turkish resistance. Once Allied support was reduced in 1921, on the return of Constantine to the Greek throne, it was only a matter of time before the Turkish Nationalists triumphed, under the leadership of Gallipoli hero Mustapha Kemal. British soldiers were sent to Thrace and Constantinople in late 1922 to help oversee the armistice and the peace treaty, including the resulting massive population movements that were a feature of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, such as the ‘Armenian Genocide’. Jowett doesn’t ignore the widespread civilian atrocities but space doesn’t allow him to dwell on them. This is part of a series of Osprey booklets on near-eastern armies of the period, including one on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk by Edward Erikson, the American historian who has done much to open up later Ottoman archives.
Ted Green
The Historian
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