Turkey and the Greco-Italian War

On 1 November 1940, four days after Italy attacked Greece, the President of Turkey, İsmet İnönü, opened a new session of the Grand National Assembly in Ankara. The annual speech opening the parliamentary year was the most important occasion in Turkey for setting out the state’s line, and this time the whole of Europe was waiting for one thing: would Turkey – Britain’s ally, Greece’s neighbour and her partner in the Balkan Pact – come to her aid? İnönü’s answer was cautious. Turkey did not intend to enter the war, but nor did it proclaim indifference: Greece lay, the President said, within Turkey’s “security zone”, and the government in Ankara was studying the situation together with its British ally.

Popular chronologies state that on this day Turkey declared its neutrality in the Greco-Italian War. That is a simplification. Turkey issued no separate declaration of neutrality, and formally it was not even a neutral state, but a “non-belligerent” ally of Britain. The speech of 1 November confirmed that it would stay out of the war, and at the same time made clear where the limits of that restraint lay.

Commitments that did not apply

On paper Turkey was bound to Greece twice over. In September 1933 the two states had concluded a pact guaranteeing their common border, and in February 1934, together with Yugoslavia and Romania, they signed the Balkan Pact. Its confidential protocol, however, provided for a joint armed response only to aggression by a Balkan state. If the aggressor was a power from outside the peninsula, the signatories were to act only against any Balkan accomplice of the aggressor. Greece itself, moreover, had stipulated in 1934 that it would in no circumstances let itself be drawn into a war with a great power, and its prime minister, Ioannis Metaxas, had reminded others in 1939–1940 that the two states’ obligations under the Entente were not directed against Italy. An attack by Italy, which was not a Balkan state, therefore did not trigger Turkey’s obligations.

The second commitment was the Anglo-French-Turkish treaty of mutual assistance, signed in Ankara on 19 October 1939, a few weeks after Turkey had for the time being stayed out of the war. It bound Turkey to co-operate with Britain and France in the event of war in the Mediterranean area and to help them honour their guarantees to Greece and Romania, given in April 1939 after Italy’s occupation of Albania. When Italy declared war in June 1940, the treaty should in theory have come into force. Ankara, however, invoked three reservations: France, one of the two parties that were to support Turkey, soon withdrew from the war and signed the Armistice of Compiègne; the treaty’s second protocol laid down that Turkey could not be drawn into a conflict with the Soviet Union; and finally, the political obligations were to come fully into effect only once Turkey had received the promised military equipment, which was still lacking. On 26 June 1940 Turkey, governed by the cabinet of Prime Minister Refik Saydam, officially announced that it remained a non-belligerent. Britain, which had neither the forces nor the equipment to defend Turkish Thrace, accepted this without much resistance. Ankara invoked the same arguments, above all the Soviet protocol, when Greece was attacked on 28 October.

The speech of 1 November

İnönü told the Assembly that nothing had changed in Turkey’s policy since the previous year. Of the events of the last few days he said: “Recently hostilities have, for new reasons, taken a noteworthy turn. Our friend and neighbour Greece, which lies within our security zone and whose tranquillity and prosperity are of very great importance to us, has today unfortunately been drawn into the war. We are examining and considering the resulting situation together with the government of our ally, Great Britain.” He defined Turkey’s policy as the defence of “political independence and territorial integrity”, unconnected with “greedy ambitions” that change with the course of events. In the following days the Turkish press highlighted other sentences: national unity was stronger than ever, and the nation was ready for any sacrifice if need be; relations with Soviet Russia had regained their friendly character; the bonds of alliance with England were “strong and unshakeable”, and the army of the republic would be able to fulfil its task.

Each of these sentences was addressed to someone different. London heard an assurance that the alliance held. Moscow, with which relations had soured in the autumn of 1939 after the failure of the visit of the Foreign Minister, Şükrü Saracoğlu, received a signal of reconciliation. Berlin and Rome were to understand that Turkey was not seeking other people’s lands, but was defending its own and would not allow the war to move close to the Straits. The columnist M. Zekeriya Sertel of the daily Tan explained to his readers on 4 November that Turkey would enter the war only when its security and vital interests were attacked, and that the Balkan Pact did not oblige it to help a Greece attacked by Italy, but that a Bulgarian attack would oblige it to do so.

The Bulgarian factor

Herein lay the crux of Turkish policy. Italy was a distant adversary for Turkey; Bulgaria a close one. It was not far from Sofia to Turkish Thrace and to Edirne, and Bulgaria, which in September had recovered Southern Dobruja from Romania, still dreamed of access to the Aegean at Greece’s expense. Had Bulgarian troops, alone or with the Germans, marched into Greek Macedonia and Western Thrace, the war would have stood at the gates of the Straits. That was why Ankara, although it had no intention of fighting Italy, gave Sofia to understand that an attack on Greece would be a matter of direct concern to it. According to Turkish accounts this was a warning to Bulgaria to keep away from Greece. The Balkan Pact, which did not work against Italy, retained its meaning in this one scenario.

Tsar Boris III was in no hurry to go to war in any case. When in October Mussolini proposed a joint attack to him, he declined, pleading his country’s unpreparedness and its encirclement by hostile neighbours. Turkey was one of the reasons he gave. The Italian plan assumed that the mere threat from Bulgaria would tie down most of the Greek army in the north-east. In fact, at the moment of the attack five Greek divisions faced Bulgaria, and the high command in Athens, increasingly confident that Sofia would not move, transferred more and more forces to the Albanian front in the following weeks. Turkey’s attitude was one of the factors that made this possible, though not the only one: what was decisive was Boris’s own caution and the fact that Germany did not yet want a war in the Balkans.

Caution in Ankara, satisfaction in London

Turkey had reasons not to do more. Its army was large but poorly equipped: it lacked tanks, modern artillery, aircraft and anti-aircraft defences, and British deliveries had almost ceased after the fall of France. Istanbul lay within range of bombers from the Dodecanese and, should the Germans enter Bulgaria, from Bulgarian airfields. In the east Turkey bordered on the Soviet Union, whose intentions it did not know; in Ankara the Soviet demands concerning the Straits in the autumn of 1939 had not been forgotten. Germany, which in October had sent its military mission into Romania, was Turkey’s most important trading partner, and in July 1940 the two countries had renewed their trade agreement. The Reich’s ambassador, Franz von Papen, insisted that Germany harboured no ill intentions towards Turkey. The Turkish press noted that on the day of the President’s speech Papen happened to be in Berlin.

The British received the speech well. According to Reuters reports quoted in the Turkish press, London was calling Turkey “the guardian of the Straits and the shield of the Middle East”, and its non-belligerent stance was regarded not as evasion of its obligations but as proof of prudence. Britain, which itself could send nothing to Greece beyond a few air squadrons, had nothing with which to support Turkey should it enter the war and draw the Germans upon itself. London’s chief concern was that Turkey should not go over to the Axis and that a march through Bulgaria should be risky for the Germans. According to some accounts Winston Churchill did want Ankara to declare outright that any hostile move by Bulgaria, or by Germany through Bulgaria, against Greece would mean a Turkish declaration of war, but the Turks made no such far-reaching declaration. The Bulgarian and Romanian press read the speech in its own way: on the one hand as a warning, on the other as proof that Turkey had not yet taken any decision.

Place in the war

The speech of 1 November set the line that Turkey held to for the next four years: alliance with Britain in words, staying out of the war in deeds, and readiness to fight only in defence of its own territory. On 20 November 1940 the government imposed martial law in Istanbul, Thrace and the area of the Straits. When at the beginning of 1941 it became clear that Germany was preparing to march through Bulgaria, Ankara did not decide to block it: on 17 February 1941 it signed a declaration of non-aggression with Bulgaria, and on 25 March it obtained an assurance from the Soviet Union that, in the event of an attack on Turkey, the USSR would remain neutral towards it. On 1 March 1941 Bulgaria joined the Tripartite Pact and let in German troops, and on 6 April Germany attacked Greece and Yugoslavia. Turkey did not move, although British troops were by now fighting in Greece.

In June 1941, a few days before Germany attacked the USSR, Turkey signed a treaty of friendship and non-aggression with the Reich without breaking off its alliance with Britain. In the years that followed both sides courted Turkish support, and above all Turkish chrome. Ankara broke off relations with Germany only in August 1944, and declared war on Germany and Japan on 23 February 1945 in order to become a founding member of the United Nations. Greece, which Turkey’s attitude had indirectly shielded on the Bulgarian side in November 1940, was left on its own in the spring of 1941. İnönü’s policy cost Turkey the trust of its allies, but it spared it the war and occupation that befell all its Balkan partners of 1934.