well, as far as i remember, Atatürk, the founder and the first President of the Turkish Republic, was born in Salonika in 1881. He was given the name Mustafa. His parents were Ali Riza Effendi and Zübeyde Haným.
Mustafa lost his father, a timber merchant, in early childhood and it was his mother who brought him up. For his primary education he went to the school of Semsi Effendi in Salonika, the first private school in the town to provide a modern education. But when his father died, Mustafa and his mother went to live with his uncle in the country and he had to leave this school.
Mustafa found himself sharing his uncle's country life. He was given jobs to do and had to work as a watchman on the farm as well as sharing in the other work. Life continued like this for a time until his mother began to worry about his lack of schooling. It was finally decided that he should live with his mother's sister in Salonika and go to school there.
He entered the State Preparatory School (Mulkiye Idadisi) in Salonika. One of the masters at the school was a man called Kaymak Hafiz. One day, during one of his lessons, Mustafa had a fight with another boy. Kaymak Hafiz took hold of Mustafa and beat him so hard that he was covered with bruises. His aunt, who was in any case opposed to his going to the school, immediately took him away.
Mustafa wanted to enter a military school. However, the idea of his becoming a soldier frightened his mother, who by this time had returned to Salonika, and she refused to allow him to go. So when the entrance exams were held, he went secretly to the military school and sat the examinations without letting her know. The first his mother knew about it was when he told her he had passed. She was faced with a fait accompli. The year was 1893.
At this new school, Mustafa developed a special interest in mathematics, and he used to attempt problems well in advance of those taught in class. He made a habit of submitting written questions to the teacher, who then replied to them, also in writing. The teacher's name was Mustafa and one day he said to little Mustafa, his pupil: "Look here, my son. Your name is Mustafa and so is mine. There must be something to distinguish between us. Why don't you call yourself 'Mustafa Kemal' from now on?" This suggestion was adopted and little Mustafa became 'Mustafa Kemal'. 'Kemal' means 'perfection'.
In 1895, after finishing at the Military Middle School in Salonika, Mustafa Kemal went on to the Military High School (Askeri Idadisi) in Monastir. There, too, he found the math lessons very easy, but he was behind in French. The French master took a great deal of trouble with him, while often being very critical. This criticism stung Mustafa Kemal and, during his first leave at home, he decided to remedy the situation by attending a private class in a school run by a French religious order in Salonika. After three months at this school, his French was greatly improved.
As a result of his newly-acquired proficiency in French he began to read the works of Voltaire, Rousseau and the French political philosophers. His political awareness was heightened by the fact that Monastir was the most important military centre in Macedonia at a time when Greeks, Serbs and Bulgars were fighting to break away from Ottoman rule. Mustafa Kemal became an ardent patriot and on one occasion he and a friend ran away from school in a short-lived attempt to volunteer for the army which ended when they were recognised and had to return to the school.
In 1899 Mustafa Kemal went to Istanbul to enter the infantry class at the Military Academy. He made friends with a fellow cadet, Ali Fuad, the son of a retired general, and together they explored Istanbul in their spare time.
During this period Mustafa Kemal's political ideas continued to develop. The Sultan, Abdulhamid II, had dissolved the parliament and was ruling as a despot. He saw the forces of modernisation and reform as a threat not only to his power but also to his personal safety. He had shut himself in behind the high walls of his palace, trusting nobody, and set up a huge network of secret agents. The ' Tanzimat' decrees issued during the reigns of the previous two Sultans, which had brought in Western reforms confirming the rights of subjects and the obligations of the sovereign, were abandoned in favour of a policy of ruthless suppression. Among the many banned books were the works of the Turkish nationalist writer Namik Kemal; it was these 'subversive' books that Mustafa Kemal read secretly at night in his dormitory.
When he went on to the Staff College as a lieutenant in 1902, Mustafa Kemal and some of his fellow-cadets formed a secret society and started writing a newspaper by hand in which they attacked the inefficiency and corruption of the Ottoman Empire. The Sultan's spies reported this to the Palace and the director of the college was ordered to take steps to stop this revolutionary activity.
One day while Mustafa Kemal and his friends were writing an issue of their newspaper in the veterinary school, the director walked in. Wishing to avoid trouble and in any case half-sympathetic to their cause, he pretended not to have seen what they were doing.
It was at this time that Mustafa Kemal first became interested in guerilla warfare. One day in class he asked his classmates to consider the tactical problems of a revolt against the capital staged from the Asian side of the Bosphorus.
When he left the Staff College with the rank of captain in 1905, he and a few friends rented a house in the Beyazit district of Istanbul. Here they continued their political discussions and acquired a large library of banned books. These activities came to an end when a cadet who had been expelled from military school and had asked them for a room in the house reported them to the Sultan's secret service.
Mustafa, Ali Fuad and two others were taken to prison and interrogated. They stayed there for some months while the authorities were deciding what to do with them. Eventually it was decided that Mustafa and Ali Fuad should be posted to Syria, where they were to join the Fifth Army at Damascus. It was thought that there they would be less able to cause trouble. And so they sailed for Beirut.
Now a captain in a cavalry regiment, Mustafa Kemal set about the work of passing on the knowledge of modern techniques of warfare he had learned in the military schools. In doing so his professional attitude to soldiering aroused the suspicion of the officers of the old school, who took the view that so long as an officer did what the Sultan required him to do, he was free to exploit his position for personal advantage. One of the duties of the Fifth Army was to control the Druzes, a warlike people who had only recently been brought under Ottoman rule. On one occasion Mustafa Kemal's regiment was ordered to enter their territory; he himself, however, did not receive orders to go with his regiment. Becoming suspicious, he went along unofficially, only to discover that the real purpose of the expedition was to 'collect taxes', or rather to extort money from the Druzes by force; it was the troops' practice on such expeditions to loot the Druze villages if they did not pay up.
Brought face-to-face with such examples of the cynical corruption of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal resolved to take the dangerous step of forming a secret revolutionary society within the ranks of the army. In 1906, he and a few friends founded the 'Vatan' (or 'Fatherland') Society. Syria, however, was too far away from the hub of the Empire for such a movement to be effective. The place he chose to expand his activities was Salonika. Managing to get himself given leave, he sailed for the place of his birth. After four months he had founded a Macedonian branch of his society among his fellow officers. Its name was changed to 'Vatan ve Hürriyet' ('Fatherland and Freedom').
When the military bureaucracy caught up with him and it had become known in Istanbul that Mustafa Kemal had left his post, he left Salonika for Jaffa. The same commandant who had originally arranged his leave now found a suitable excuse for his absence (saying he had been sent on a frontier expedition) and the cover-up was complete. He continued to lie low for a while, and in 1907 the army played into his hands by itself transferring him to the General Staff at Salonika.
Here, Mustafa Kemal found that the revolutionary movement had outgrown him; his absence in Syria had deprived him of the opportunity of becoming one of its leaders. His own 'Fatherland and Freedom' Society had been outstripped by a larger organization, the 'Committee for Union and Progress', with which Kemal's society was forced to merge. The leaders of the Committee disliked him, finding him conceited and opinionated, and found pretexts to give him duties that would keep him out of Salonika.
Law and order had all but broken down in Macedonia by this time. The Bulgars had a strong underground organization of 'komitajis' 'committee men' who were in fact terrorists spreading panic with their bomb outrages. Guerilla bands of Greeks, Serbs and Albanians as well as Bulgars fought with each other and with the Turkish authorities. The Great Powers closed in, hoping to profit from the chaos. Russian and Austrian agents were everywhere in Macedonia.
The Turks themselves, watched over by Abdulhamid's army of spies (the telegraph network he installed in Anatolia to keep the country under close surveillance later proved very useful to Mustafa Kemal), felt that they were a persecuted minority in their own country; the Christian minorities at least had foreign governments to protect them. The young officers of the Committee for Union and Progress seemed to provide the only hope.
Abdulhamid, after sending fruitless commissions of enquiry to Salonika, invited a young major named Enver, a Committee member, to come to Istanbul on a promise of promotion. Enver, ignoring the invitation, took to the hills and began to organize a resistance movement, strengthened by members of the garrison at Monastir. The Committee demanded the restoration of the Constitution of 1876. The troops Abdulhamid sent to deal with the situation fraternized with the rebels. Capitulating to their demands, and intimidated by their threat to march on Istanbul, he agreed to restore the Constitution of 1876 and recalled the parliament. Thus the 'Young Turk Revolution' of 1908 was complete. Enver was now the hero of the hour in Salonika. Mustafa Kemal, however, saw him as an upstart whose rise to prominence was no more than undeserved good fortune.
The following year, 1909, saw a pro-religious counter-revolution in which Abdulhamid broke the power of the Committee for Union and Progress in Istanbul. The Parliament was again dissolved. Mustafa Kemal organized an army in Macedonia (which he called the 'Action Army'). When the military train carrying this army arrived in Istanbul, the Sultan did not put up any resistance. He was forced to abdicate in favour of his brother and sent into exile. Constitutional government was restored.
Mustafa Kemal, who had himself played only a minor part in the events which took place in Istanbul, was posted to Tripoli for a short time. He then returned to Salonika.
In the meantime events in Albania had attracted Mustafa Kemal's interest. An insurrection had broken out there, and Sevket Turgut Pasha was put in charge of the forces sent to deal with it. Failure to suppress the rebellion forced the Minister of War, Mahmut Sevket Pasha, to assume personal command of the operation. He stopped in Salonika on his way to Albania and took Mustafa Kemal into his suite. During the operation against the rebels, Mustafa Kemal acted as Chief of Staff. In Albania he met Colonel Fevzi Bey (later Marshal Fevzi Cakmak) for the first time.
The Inspector of the Third Army in Salonika had by this time grown apprehensive of Mustafa Kemal's standing in the town, and on 13th September 1911 he had him transferred to the General Staff in Istanbul.
Shortly afterwards, on 30th September, the Italians launched their attack on Tripoli. This provided Mustafa Kemal with the perfect opportunity to display his abilities as a commander. Towards the end of the year, Mustafa Kemal travelled secretly to Tobruk via Egypt and assumed charge of the staff of the local Ottoman commander, Ethem Pasha. He carried out a reconnaissance of the Italian positions near Tobruk and persuaded the Turkish troops to launch an attack. The Battle of Tobruk followed on 9th January 1912, and was the first Ottoman success in that field of operations. Mustafa Kemal stayed in Libya for about a year. While he was still in Libya, the Balkan War broke out. As soon as he received the news he tried to secure a posting to the new theatre of war. While in Egypt on his way to Istanbul, he heard that the Ottoman forces had been defeated at Komanova, that Salonika had fallen and that the Bulgarian army was pressing against the Çatalca lines defending Istanbul. After arriving in Istanbul, he was appointed Director of Operations of the Mediterranean Straits Special Forces to defend the Gallipoli Peninsula (25th November 1912). The Chief of Staff of this force was Fethi Bey (later Fethi Okyar, Deputy for Bolu). A little later Mustafa Kemal was appointed Chief of Staff of this force, which became known as the Bolayir Army Corps. Thus he was able to make an on-the-spot study of the problems of defending the Straits in case of need.
At the end of the Balkan War, Mustafa Kemal was appointed Military Attache in Sofia (27th October 1913). He stayed there until the first months of the World War. On 1st March 1914 he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
The First World War started on 28th July 1914, and on 29th October the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria.
Mustafa Kemal believed that Turkey had acted too hastily. He followed operations on all fronts from his office in Sofia, guessing from the very beginning how the war would end. Nevertheless, whether the war was right or wrong, he preferred active service to his duties as military attache in Sofia and applied for a posting to the Office of the Acting Commander-in-Chief, as the Ottoman High Command was known, the Sultan being nominally Commander-in-Chief. Mustafa Kemal was appointed commander of a division which was being formed at Tekirdag (the 19th Division) on 2nd February 1915. It took Mustafa Kemal less than a month to transform this division into a first-class fighting force. On 25th February 1915 the division was moved to Maydos, near Canakkale.
An attack on Gallipoli was yet to come. The Turkish forces were already trying to take measures to defend the Straits. The forces of the Entente launched a sea offensive on 18th March 1915. It was repulsed. On 25th April, just before dawn, the ships of the Entente started landing troops in the neighbourhood of Ariburnu and Seddulbahir. As soon as Mustafa Kemal heard of the landings, he moved his troops against the enemy, who were advancing towards the hill of Conkbayiri. When the enemy reached the hill, Mustafa Kemal found himself nearer to the enemy than he was to his own men. He shouted the order to fix bayonets and made his men lie down. As soon as they lay down, so did the enemy. He thus gained time at the critical moment. As the enemy hesitated, the 57th Regiment reached Conkbayiri. Mustafa Kemal threw it into the attack. The battle raged on through the night and the enemy was thrown back to the last ridges overlooking the sea.
Mustafa Kemal's conduct of these battles proved his greatness as a commander. He continued to fight both offensive and defensive battles until 19th May. Then the two sides at Ariburnu dug themselves in and began to fight from prepared positions.
On 1st June 1915, Mustafa Kemal was promoted to the rank of Colonel.
Seeing the failure of all their efforts at Ariburnu and Seddulbahir, the enemy brought in reinforcements and attacked the Turkish right flank along a line from Conkbayiri to Kocacimen. At the same time they landed forces at Anafartalar, where they tried to establish a base for further operations. Landings to the north of Ariburnu and at Anafartalar started on the night between 6th and 7th August. Twenty thousand of the men who were landed at Anburnu were given the task of capturing Kocacimen. If the enemy had succeeded in establishing himself there, the Anburnu front, and then in turn the whole of the Gallipoli Peninsula, could have been captured. Mustafa Kemal sent his last reserves to Conkbayiri, which he managed to defend throughout the day of 7th August. The next morning the enemy penetrated to the slopes of Conkbayiri overlooking the sea. A battle fought at close quarters with rifles and grenades followed, but the enemy did not succeed in gaining any further ground.
The Turkish Army Commander formed an Anafartalar Army Group, appointing the Commander of the Saros Army Group, Colonel Fevzi, to lead it. Mustafa Kemal, realizing the seriousness of the danger at Conkbayiri, had drawn the Army Commander's attention to the desperate situation there. The Chief of Staff, Colonel Kazim, asked Mustafa Kemal on the telephone what his suggestions were. Mustafa Kemal explained that the situation was critical, recommending that urgent measures should be taken in view of the enemy's continued landings at Anafartalar, and asking that he himself should be appointed Group Commander. At 21.50 hours on 8th August, he was appointed Commander of the Anafartalar Group and ordered to open an immediate offensive. Mustafa Kemal took personal charge of the offensive and managed to 'throw back superior enemy forces. He prepared for the enemy's next attack.
At dawn on 10th August this attack duly came. As the sun rose the enemy began to bombard Conkbayiri from their ships and with their heavy guns on land. Mustafa Kemal was hit by a piece of shrapnel but it was deflected by the watch he carried in his breast pocket. He then led an attack in massed formation by the 8th Division, and forced the enemy out of Conkbayiri. This was the second time he had saved Canakkale.
The enemy started a new thrust towards the village of Küçük Anafartalar on 21st August, but they failed to make any progress. Trench warfare followed. Mustafa Kemal guessed that the enemy was going to withdraw, but failed to convince his superiors. His suggestion for an offensive was turned down and he was told that there were no troops to spare.
Mustafa Kemal announced his resignation from the command on 10th September 1915, but Liman von Sanders Pasha, who had considerable respect for Mustafa Kemal, had his resignation altered to leave. Mustafa Kemal returned sadly to Istanbul, only to learn ten days later, on 19th December 1915, that the enemy had withdrawn from Canakkale, having lost all hope of success.
Mustafa Kemal's heroism at Canakkale and his services to his country soon became known not only to the whole army, but also among the civilian population. It was this reputation which enabled him to carry the entire Turkish nation behind him from the time he landed in Samsun to start the War of Independence until the day of his death.
After returning from Canakkale, Mustafa Kemal stayed for some time in Istanbul, then went to Sofia on leave to put his personal affairs in order. While he was there he was appointed to the command of the 16th Army Corps, which had been withdrawn from Canakkale.
He took over his new command on 14th January 1916 at Karaaðaç, Edirne. Mustafa Kemal remained in Edirne until the end of February, when the Office of the Acting Commander-in-Chief transferred the headquarters of the 16th Army Corps to the region of Diyarbakir so that he should take charge of a corps which was to be formed there for service on the Caucasian Front, where the Turks were fighting the Russians. On 27th February 1916 Mustafa Kemal left Edirne for Re'sulayn. On 1st April, while he was travelling to his new post, he was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General. He took up his new duties at Silvan on 14th April.
During his service on the Caucasian Front as Commander of the 16th Army Corps, Mustafa Kemal saw much fighting and personally led his men in several battles. Towards the end of the year Mustafa Kemal Pasha was appointed Acting Commander of the Second Army and was decorated with the Order of Imtiyaz, with gold swords, for his achievement in recapturing two Turkish towns from the Russian army. It was at the headquarters of the Second Army at Sekerat that Mustafa Kemal first served with Colonel Ismet (Ismet Inönü), who was then this army's Chief of Staff. During this first period of common service they arrived jointly at the belief that the problems of the country could only be solved through radical reforms.
Some time later Mustafa Kemal went to Damascus, where he studied the general situation in the Hejaz and Syria, and then reported to the Acting Commander-in-Chief, Enver Pasha, who was also in Damascus at the time, saying that the whole area was in serious danger and that the Hejaz should be evacuated immediately in order to reinforce the Syrian Front. The High Command rejected this plea. Mustafa Kemal thereupon returned to the Eastern Front, this time as de facto Commander of the Second Army. On 5th July 1917 he was transferred to the command of the new Seventh Army, which was attached to the Lightning Group of Armies massing in Aleppo under the command of General von Falkenhayn for the recapture of Baghdad. Mustafa Kemal was convinced, however, that no good would come of the operations to be undertaken in Iraq.
On 5th September 1917 it was decided to deploy the Seventh Army in Syria for an offensive in Palestine. The front stretched from the desert to the Mediterranean Sea, which was dominated by the British navy. The line held by the British was heavily fortified and they were numerically superior to the Turkish forces. The German general drew up a plan envisaging a frontal attack by the Ottoman Eighth Army. The Seventh Army, under the command of Mustafa Kemal, was to attack from Beer-sheba. The most difficult part of the operation was thus entrusted to Mustafa Kemal Pasha who, however, thought the plan impracticable. He objected to the sacrifice of Turkish soldiers by non-Turkish commanders in the pursuit of a mirage. Mustafa Kemal submitted a report to the High Command on the army's weaknesses and defects, and also on the measures necessary to remedy them. The High Command announced its disagreement with the views presented in the report, whereupon Mustafa Kemal excused himself from the army command, to use his own expression, and left after appointing a deputy. He rejected all overtures made to him to withdraw his resignation and was then reappointed to the command of the Second Army. He rejected this post too, and having been granted leave, returned to Istanbul in October 1917.
Before von Falkenhayn had time to launch his offensive, the British attacked, invaded Palestine and captured Jerusalem. These developments showed how right Mustafa Kemal had been.
During his stay on leave in Istanbul Mustafa Kemal was appointed to the suite of the Ottoman Crown Prince Vahdettin for the latter's state visit to Germany, to return the visit paid by the Kaiser to the Ottoman Sultan in December 1917January 1918. In the company of the Crown Prince, Mustafa Kemal visited the German General Headquarters and the battlefronts, and met Kaiser Wilhelm, Marshal Hindenburg and General Ludendorff.
Mustafa Kemal, who had become ill, returned to Istanbul. A month or two later he went for rest and treatment to Vienna and Carlsbad. The days that Mustafa Kemal spent in Carlsbad were an important turning point in his life. He now found himself in an advanced European city and this gave him the opportunity to look from a distance at the problems of his own country and to try to devise remedies for them.
On 3rd July 1918, Sultan Resad died and was succeeded by Vahdettin. The new Sultan summoned Mustafa Kemal to Istanbul a few days later. On 7th August Mustafa Kemal was for the second time appointed Commander of the Seventh Army.
On 30th October 1918 the Ottoman Empire communicated to its troops the terms of the armistice which it had signed at Mondros. As the armistice stipulated that the Germans should leave Turkey, Mustafa Kemal was appointed Commander of the Lightning Group of Armies on 31st October 1918. The conclusion of the armistice marked the beginning of a new stage in which new conditions prevailed. Mustafa Kemal did not yet know all the terms of the armistice. He tried to get the situation under control and gain the necessary time to save the country from complete collapse, moving with the maximum speed to gather the Lightning Group of Armies under his command. In the afternoon of the day of his appointment he went to Adana, where the headquarters of these armies was situated, and took over the command from Liman von Sanders. In his farewell message to the armies, Liman Pasha said:
"As from today I am handing over the command of the Lightning Group of Armies to His Excellency Mustafa Kemal, who has distinguished himself gloriously in many battles."
On 2nd. November 1918 the terms of the Armistice of Mondros were communicated to the various Turkish armies. The following day, Mustafa Kemal sent a telegram to General Staff Headquarters in Istanbul asking for clarification of certain articles of the armistice, which had been drafted in general terms and was capable of various interpretations. Meanwhile, the English and French moved ahead with the occupation. On 5th November, having failed to receive a satisfactory reply to his first telegram, Mustafa Kemal sent another in which he said that if the Turkish armies were demobilized and all the English demands capitulated to before the possibility of misunderstanding had been removed from the terms of the armistice it would be impossible to bar the way to the enemy's larger ambitions.
On 6th November, Mustafa Kemal informed the Grand Vizier, Izzet Pasha, that he had given his troops the order to fire on the English if they attempted to occupy Iskenderun (Alexandretta). The next day the Sultan gave the order for Mustafa Kemal to be relieved of his command and recalled to Istanbul. Before leaving Adana for Istanbul, Mustafa Kemal informed the Grand Vizier in a telegram that he was temperamentally unsuited to carrying out orders which seemed designed to give the enemy as much help as possible in obtaining everything he wished for.
He arrived at Haydarpasa Station in Istanbul on 13th November 1918, the day the Allies' fleet of sixty-one English, French, Italian and Greek ships passed through the Straits and anchored off Istanbul. Angered by this sight, Mustafa Kemal turned to his ADC and said: "As they have come, so shall they go." To reach his house he had to cross the district of Beyoglu, with its non-Turkish population, who had put out the flags of the various foreign countries whose ships made up the occupying fleet. His first step after arriving home was to go to see Izzet Pasha, the Grand Vizier, explain to him the mistakes which had been made during his one month's tenure of office, and discuss future action.
By now Mustafa Kemal was convinced that he could no longer usefully remain in Istanbul. He therefore decided to move to Anatolia. Basing his activities from there, he would join the ranks of his people and work among them to launch his new movement. In Anatolia he would be free to conduct his 'war of information' against the powers-that-be in Istanbul, spreading the news of the Sultan's collusion with the occupying enemy throughout the whole country.
Once again, Mustafa Kemal's enemies played into his hands. His pugnacious attitude to the Great Powers did not square with the Sultan's policy of appeasement (if not of active co-operation). Unwilling to place him in direct command of an army but wishing to remove him from Istanbul, where he was a thorn in their flesh, the authorities gave him the post of 'Inspector' of the Ninth Army, which was based at Samsun, on the coast of the Black Sea. Once there, he would (hopefully) be out of sight and out of mind. Mustafa Kemal, seeing in this appointment an opportunity to establish for himself a power base in Anatolia, accepted his new post with alacrity and hastened to take it up before the Sultan had had second thoughts.
The newly-appointed Grand Vizier, Damat Ferit Pasha, invited Mustafa Kemal to have dinner with him the night before his departure. After dinner he produced a map of Anatolia and discussed the area which would be under the control of the new 'Inspectorate' and the powers which it would wield. During the conversation the Grand Vizier could not conceal his doubts and hesitations about Mustafa Kemal's mission. Another guest was Cevat Pasha, who had that day been appointed Chief of the General Staff. On their way back from the Grand Vizier's house, he turned to Mustafa Kemal and asked him: "Are you planning to do something, Mustafa Kemal?" Mustafa Kemal replied: "Yes, Pasha, I do intend to do something."
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