Turkey and Bulgaria stay neutral

On 11 September 1939 the Turkish prime minister, Refik Saydam, told deputies that Turkey would for the time being stay out of the war that had been raging in Europe for a week. Four days later, on 15 September, neighbouring Bulgaria formally declared its neutrality. The two declarations sounded alike but meant entirely different things. Since the spring Turkey had been bound to Britain and France by declarations of mutual assistance and was negotiating a treaty of alliance with them; its neutrality was a transitional state, behind which lay sympathy for the Allies and fear of the Soviet Union. Bulgaria was the only state defeated in the First World War that by 1939 had recovered none of its lost territory, and it was waiting for a chance to change that without risking war.

Both declarations were part of a wider wave: in the first days of September many states in Europe and around the world had declared neutrality, and on 6 September Romania, Turkey’s ally in the Balkan Entente, had decided to do the same.

Turkey between the West and Moscow

Since the death of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in November 1938, Turkish foreign policy had been directed by President İsmet İnönü, and carried out by Prime Minister Saydam and the foreign minister, Şükrü Saracoğlu. Turkey, which had been fighting almost without a break from 1911 to 1922, wanted above all to avoid a new war. Its greatest worry was Italy, which had for years spoken of dominating the Mediterranean, held the Dodecanese islands off the Turkish coast, and on 7 April 1939 invaded Albania. Ankara reacted quickly. On 12 May Turkey and Britain issued a joint declaration in which they undertook to co-operate and to assist each other should aggression lead to war in the Mediterranean area. On 23 June Turkey signed a similar declaration with France, and on the same day France agreed to hand over to Turkey the former sanjak of Alexandretta, which since 1938 had existed as the Hatay State. This was the price of Turkish friendship.

The second pillar of Turkish policy was friendship with the Soviet Union, which had supported the Kemalists in their war of independence in 1920–1922 and had been bound to Turkey since 1925 by a treaty of friendship and neutrality. Ankara imagined that Britain, France and the USSR would stand on the same side, with Turkey acting as intermediary. These calculations were destroyed on 23 August by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Turkey suddenly found itself between two camps: it was drawing closer to the Allies, while its most powerful neighbour had come to terms with Germany.

Saydam’s declaration

When war broke out, Turkey did not follow Britain and France. The declarations of May and June concerned a war in the Mediterranean, and Italy had proclaimed its “non-belligerence” and had not joined the fighting. On 11 September, according to contemporary reports, Saydam told deputies that Turkey would remain neutral for the time being, although it was not breaking off talks with the Allies. The available sources do not make it possible to establish with certainty whether this was a formal address to the Grand National Assembly or, as with later important statements that autumn, a meeting of the parliamentary group of the ruling Republican People’s Party. The meaning of the words, however, was clear: Turkey did not intend to fight unless the war touched it directly, and it made its decision dependent on settling its relations with the Soviet Union.

Germany did everything it could to keep it that way. The Reich’s ambassador in Ankara since April 1939 was Franz von Papen, a former chancellor, who argued to the Turks that tying themselves to Britain and France would expose them to Moscow’s anger. Germany was also Turkey’s main trading partner and bought, among other things, its chromium, a raw material essential to the arms industry.

The talks in Moscow

To clarify the Soviet position, Saracoğlu went to Moscow. He left on 25 September and spent more than three weeks there, although the visit had been planned to last a few days. Vyacheslav Molotov and Joseph Stalin himself, who appeared at the talks twice, set out conditions that Turkey could not accept. They demanded that the Montreux Convention of 1936 be changed so that the passage of warships of non-Black Sea powers through the Turkish Straits would be decided jointly by Turkey and the USSR, and also a reservation that the Turkish–Allied treaty would not bind Turkey to anything against the Soviet Union and, as it turned out, against Germany either. In practice this would have meant that Turkey could not help Britain and France. Saracoğlu refused. On 17 October Saydam informed the parliamentary group of the ruling party that the talks with Moscow had been broken off, because the Soviet proposals could not be reconciled with Turkey’s other obligations.

Bulgaria

Bulgaria emerged from the First World War humiliated. The Treaty of Neuilly had taken from it Western Thrace, with its access to the Aegean Sea, and scraps of land in the west, while Romania kept Southern Dobruja, won in 1913. Bulgarians also dreamed of Macedonia, divided between Yugoslavia and Greece. The country’s ruler, Tsar Boris III, and his prime minister, Georgi Kyoseivanov, nevertheless pursued a cautious policy. Bulgaria did not join the Balkan Entente, which guaranteed its neighbours’ borders, but it concluded a pact of friendship with Yugoslavia and in 1938 obtained the Entente’s consent to rearm despite the restrictions of the Treaty of Neuilly. In the spring of 1939 Kyoseivanov sent a secret instruction to Bulgaria’s diplomatic missions naming the recovery of Southern Dobruja as the most realistic goal.

Economically Bulgaria was dependent on Germany, which in 1939 accounted for about two-thirds of its foreign trade and supplied weapons for its army. The officer corps sympathised with the Reich, but society was traditionally well disposed towards Russia, the liberator of 1878. The German–Soviet pact therefore spared Sofia the hardest choice. From the outbreak of war the government kept clear of the fighting, and on 15 September it formally declared neutrality. Bulgarian diplomacy hoped that the war would not reach the country’s borders and that territorial changes could be achieved peacefully, with the support of Berlin and Moscow.

Significance

On 19 October 1939, as Saracoğlu was leaving Soviet territory, the Anglo-French-Turkish Treaty of Mutual Assistance was signed in Ankara. Britain and France undertook to help Turkey if it were attacked by a European power, while Turkey was to support them in the event of war in the Mediterranean area and to help them fulfil their guarantees to Greece and Romania. An attached protocol stated that Turkey’s obligations could not compel it to enter an armed conflict with the USSR. Turkey also received credits for the purchase of arms. When Italy entered the war and France fell in June 1940, Ankara, invoking precisely this protocol and its own unpreparedness, remained neutral. In June 1941 it signed a pact of friendship with Germany, and it declared war on Germany and Japan only on 23 February 1945, in order to become a founding member of the United Nations. The Soviet demands over the Straits rejected in 1939 returned after the war and became one of the causes of the Cold War.

Bulgaria obtained what it had been counting on sooner than it expected. After the fall of France, on 7 September 1940, it recovered Southern Dobruja from Romania under the Treaty of Craiova. In February 1940 Kyoseivanov had been replaced by the pro-German Bogdan Filov, and on 1 March 1941 Bulgaria joined the Tripartite Pact and let German troops onto its territory, from where they advanced on Greece and Yugoslavia. As its reward it occupied Western Thrace and a large part of Macedonia. In December 1941 it declared war on Britain and the United States, but never on the Soviet Union. This did not save it from the Soviet declaration of war in September 1944, the entry of the Red Army and a communist coup.