The dramatic story of the turbulent birth of modern Turkey, which rose out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire to fight off Allied occupiers, Greek invaders, and internal ethnic groups to proclaim a new republic under Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk).
It is exceedingly rare to run across a major historical event that has no comprehensive English-language history, but such was the case until The Turkish War of Independence brought together all the main strands of the story, including the chaotic ending of World War I in Asia Minor and the numerous military fronts on which the Turks defied odds, fighting off several armies to create their own state from the defeated ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
This important book culminates Erickson’s three-part series on the early 20th-century military history of the Ottomans and Turkey. Making wide use of specialized, hard-to-find Western and Turkish memoirs and military sources, it presents a narrative of the fighting, which eventually brought the Turkish Nationalist armies to victory. Often termed the Greco-Turkish War, an incomplete description that misses its geographic and multinational scope, this war pitted Greek, Armenian, French, British, Italian, and insurgent forces against the Nationalists; the narrative shows these conflicts to have been distinct and separate to Turkey’s opponents, while the Turkish side saw them as an interconnected whole.
Completes a trilogy of books by Edward J. Erickson on the conventional wars of the Ottoman and Turkish armies in the early 20th century, the first two of which are Defeat in Detail: The Ottoman Army in the Balkans, 1912-1913 (2003) and Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (2001).
With no comprehensive English-language military history available, fills a massive gap in our understanding of this important war and Turkey’s founding on the centenary of Turkey’s birth
Contains the first reconciliation of combatant estimates of military and civilian casualties in the Turkish War of Independence
Analyzes the Turkish War of Independence as an early example of modern hybrid-war (combination of differing types of wars-in this case, simultaneously conventional, unconventional, counterinsurgency, and political-economic-information warfare)
