Turkey declares war on Germany

On 23 February 1945 the Turkish Grand National Assembly met in extraordinary session to hear the Prime Minister, Şükrü Saracoğlu. The head of government proposed a declaration of war on Germany and Japan, and the deputies adopted the motion unanimously; the resolution was published in the official gazette the next day. At the same time Turkey acceded to the Declaration by United Nations. A state that for more than five years of war had consistently avoided being drawn into the fighting formally joined the camp of the victors less than three months before the Reich capitulated.

The decision was almost purely political. No Turkish soldier was any longer fighting the Germans or the Japanese, and the front was by then thousands of kilometres from Turkey’s borders. The point lay elsewhere: at the Yalta Conference the Big Three had decided that the founding conference of the new international organisation in San Francisco would be open to states that had signed the Declaration by United Nations and declared war on the common enemy by 1 March 1945. Ankara therefore had a few days to avoid being left out of the founders of the UN after the war – at a time when the Red Army already stood on its borders and Moscow was pressing ever more openly for a revision of the regime of the Straits.

Neutrality with an alliance in the background

After the death of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1938, Turkey’s policy was directed by President İsmet İnönü. He remembered the catastrophe that entry into the First World War had proved for the Ottoman Empire, and throughout the next war he followed a single rule: not to be drawn into the fighting unless it became absolutely unavoidable. Turkey was not, however, a state without obligations. On 19 October 1939 it signed a treaty of mutual assistance with Britain and France in Ankara, binding it to help its allies in the event of war in the Mediterranean. A protocol attached to the treaty, however, released it from any action that might lead to armed conflict with the Soviet Union – and the USSR was at that time bound to Germany by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

As early as September 1939 the government in Ankara announced that it would stay out of the war for the time being. When Italy entered the war in June 1940 and France fell, Turkey invoked the reservation concerning the USSR and did not honour its alliance obligations. That autumn, in the face of Italy’s aggression against Greece, it confined itself to benevolent neutrality and to warning Bulgaria not to take advantage of the Greeks’ difficulties. In the spring of 1941, when the Wehrmacht occupied the Balkans and reached the Aegean, Ankara found itself surrounded by the Germans to the west and by the British and Soviets to the south and east.

On 18 June 1941, four days before Germany’s attack on the USSR, Turkey signed a treaty of friendship and non-aggression with the Reich. It was negotiated by the German ambassador in Ankara, Franz von Papen, who worked throughout the war to keep Turkey away from the Allied camp. The treaty did not annul the alliance with London, but it protected Turkey against attack by Germany. In the years that followed the Reich pressed Ankara to allow the transit of troops and materiel across its territory to the Caucasus and Iraq – without success.

Chrome, Adana and Cairo

The most valuable thing Turkey could offer the belligerents was chromite – chromium ore, essential for making armour plate and alloys for the armaments industry. In January 1940 Britain and France secured Turkey’s entire output for two years, but in October 1941 Ankara concluded a trade agreement with the Reich under which, from 1943, it was to supply Germany with 90,000 tons of ore in exchange for weapons and equipment. For years the Allies tried to limit these deliveries by buying up the output through pre-emptive purchasing and, in 1944, by increasingly open pressure.

After the victories at Stalingrad and in North Africa, Winston Churchill decided that the time had come to bring Turkey into the war. He hoped that Turkish airfields would allow the bombing of the Romanian oilfields and that the Turkish army would open the way to the Balkans. On 30–31 January 1943 he met İnönü in a railway carriage near Adana, and in December of that year, at the Second Cairo Conference, the Turkish president held talks with Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Each time the Turks gave much the same answer: they would enter the war if they received weapons and air cover capable of defending the country against the Luftwaffe, together with guarantees regarding the Soviet Union. The Americans, moreover, were not convinced by Churchill’s Balkan plans, and to Joseph Stalin Turkey, which had for years refused to help the Allies, remained a state that aroused distrust. At the beginning of 1944 the disappointed British suspended deliveries of military equipment to Turkey.

In the spring of 1944, when the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt, Ankara began to give way. In April it halted chrome exports to Germany. In June, after an affair over German auxiliary vessels allowed through the Straits, which the British regarded as warships, the Foreign Minister Numan Menemencioğlu resigned; the Allies saw him as the embodiment of the policy of concessions to Berlin. On 2 August 1944 Turkey broke off diplomatic and economic relations with the Reich; Papen left for Germany. At the beginning of January 1945 it also broke off relations with Japan.

The Yalta deadline

At the end of 1944 Turkey’s position changed fundamentally. The Wehrmacht withdrew from Greece, and the Red Army entered Bulgaria and reached the border of Turkish Thrace. The Soviet Union, not Germany, was now the main threat to Ankara. At the Yalta Conference Stalin raised the question of the 1936 Montreux Convention, which gave Turkey control of the Turkish Straits; he described it as outdated and unfair to the USSR. The Big Three decided that the Soviet proposals would be considered by the foreign ministers and that Turkey should be informed of this.

Even more important for Ankara was another decision taken at Yalta – the deadline of 1 March 1945. Neutral countries that wanted a seat at the table in San Francisco had to declare war on Germany or Japan by that day. In February a series of states did so, above all in Latin America; Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela and Uruguay, for example, went within a few weeks from neutrality or broken relations to formal war. The Turkish government concluded that staying outside this group would mean political isolation in the face of the USSR at the very moment when the victorious powers were to settle the future order.

The session of 23 February

Saracoğlu, Prime Minister since 1942 and before that the Foreign Minister who had negotiated the 1939 treaty with London and Paris, addressed parliament in a speech of high moral tone. He spoke of men who had emblazoned on their banners “the nonsense of a master race and living space”, subjugated small nations and turned the world into a dark dungeon, and of the great powers that had taken up arms in defence of humanity, civilisation, freedom and democracy. Turkey, he argued, had stood in word and heart on the side of the democratic nations from the first moments of danger, and now wished officially to take its place among the co-belligerents, in keeping with the national interest and the good of the world.

The Assembly, dominated by the sole legal party, the Republican People’s Party, adopted the motion unanimously. The resolution, published on 24 February, made Turkey a party to the war against Germany and Japan and a signatory of the Declaration by United Nations. The declaration entailed no military operations. The Turkish army, largely mobilised throughout the war, went into action against neither the Germans nor the Japanese – Turkey’s war effort was confined to a political decision.

How this step is judged still depends on one’s perspective. For Turkish historians İnönü’s neutrality was a masterpiece that spared the country the fate of Greece, Yugoslavia or Romania. Critics, especially British and Soviet ones, accused Ankara of supplying the Reich with strategic raw materials for years and of joining the victors’ camp only when it cost nothing. Both judgements have a basis in fact: Turkey did indeed refuse to be drawn into the war by either the Germans or the Allies, and at the same time it traded with both sides until 1944.

Place in the war

Formally, the aim was achieved. Turkey took part in the San Francisco Conference and in June 1945 signed the Charter of the United Nations as one of the UN’s founding members. This did not, however, protect it from pressure from Moscow. On 19 March 1945 the Soviet government denounced the Turkish–Soviet treaty of friendship and neutrality of 17 December 1925, and in June Vyacheslav Molotov made a new treaty conditional on the cession of bases in the Straits to the USSR and the return of the districts of Kars and Ardahan, lost by Russia after the First World War. In 1946 the Soviet notes on the Straits developed into one of the first crises of the Cold War.

Ankara responded by turning to the West. In 1947 Turkey, together with Greece, received American aid under the Truman Doctrine, and in 1952 it joined NATO. The declaration of war on Germany in February 1945, a belated and symbolic decision, was thus the last chord of Turkish neutrality and at the same time the first step on the road that led the country into the Western alliance.