Ottoman-British Sinai Battles 1914-1917 - Turkish Perspective & Notes By and About German Sinai Commander Kress von Kressenstein
Jack Snowden retired.academia.edu
Falih Rıfka, who would later be Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk)&#39;s chief writer, was a reserve officer in the Ottoman Army on the Palestine Front, first serving in the northern Sinai Desert in 1915. This is an English translation of his exploits and those
Ali Fuad (Erden) was the Ottoman 4th Army’s Operations Chief during the first Turkish attack on the Suez Canal in February 1915 and he accompanied 4th Army Commander and Ottoman Navy Minister Cemal Paşa all the way to the Canal. He wrote a book about this failed attack that was published in 1920 and another that was published in 1949. The two books are similar but not identical, with some information in the former left out of the latter and vice versa. Both books are entitled “Paris’ten Tih Sahrasına” (From Paris to the Tih (Sinai) Desert). This is the English translation of Ali Fuad's story based on his two books.

A century after the outbreak of the First World War, the authors reevaluate the infrastructure and military logistics of the Ottoman Army in Palestine before and during the war as it affected its ability to successfully wage the military campaign in the Sinai and Palestine. Using primary sources in Ottoman Turkish, Turkish, Arabic, English, German and Hebrew, as well as official war literature, memoirs of commanders and soldiers, general military historical scholarly literature, and material specific to Palestine, coming from both adversaries, the authors show how infrastructure and logistics shaped and limited the Ottoman Army’s operational plans and their execution.

Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) leveled harsh criticism against German commanders on the Palestine Front - Erich von Falkenhayn, in particular, but also Kress von Kressenstein - in September 1917 as the British Army was pressuring the Ottoman Army on the Sinai Front south of Jerusalem. Mustafa Kemal sent two reports containing this criticism to the Ottoman leadership of Enver Paşa, Cemal Paşa and Talât Paşa, dated 20 and 24 September 1917, from Aleppo. In the second report, Mustafa Kemal referred to his successful command at Çanakkale in 1915 as evidence of his readiness to command the Sinai Front. He also railed against Falkenhayn’s and Germany’s aim of making Turkey essentially a German colony. Hikmet Bayur, who was Atatürk’s presidential secretary in the late 1920s and early 1930s, published the second report, evidently for the first time, in 1956, having obtained it from Salih Bozok, Atatürk’s lifelong friend and chief aide in Syria. This is the English translation of Bayur’s related article in Türk Tarih Kurumu’s “Belletin” published in October 1956.

Though forming having taken an active part in the Sinai and Palestine campaigns of the World War I, the Bedouin tribes are rarely mentioned. This is due in part to the scarcity of documentation, especially having none from the Bedouins themselves. This article seeks to fill in some of the gaps in the research on the war in the Sinai Peninsula and southern Palestine, and to examine the contribution of the Bedouin tribes in that area to the Ottoman military campaign. It argues that the Ottoman perception of the Bedouins as a fighting force changed during the war from being seen as force multiplier to being employed only in scout and reconnaissance roles.

Other states were also involved in the First World War, which started as a result of the political struggle between England and Germany, on the axis of their own interests. In this context, the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War within the Alliance Group in order to recapture the lands it lost recently and regain its former power. The Ottoman Army entered the war with 6 active and flying aircraft and 6 pilots to use these aircraft. The Ottoman Commander-in-Chief tried to compensate for the lack of aviation with the aircraft, personnel, and mechanic it procured from Germany. In this context, during the war from Germany; 415 aircraft were recruited and air operations were carried out with 390 German pilots and 1740 German mechanics assigned to the Ottoman fronts. Meanwhile, Pilot Captain Serno was appointed as the head of Ottoman aviation with the permission of the German Commander-in-Chief. Although many studies have been conducted on the land battles of the First World War, ...