On 30 October 1918, an exhausted Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros and stepped out of the First World War. Within a year, foreign fleets rode at anchor off Istanbul, foreign troops garrisoned the Straits and southeastern Anatolia, and a Greek army had come ashore at İzmir under Allied protection. By every reasonable measure, the six-hundred-year-old empire was finished, and the Turkish homeland itself stood on the edge of partition.
What followed instead was four years of continuous fighting on half a dozen fronts, waged first by scattered militias and disaffected army officers and finally by a rebuilt national army under Mustafa Kemal, that reversed the verdict of 1918 and produced, in 1923, a new and internationally recognized Turkish state.
The Turkish War of Independence (Kurtuluş Savaşı, literally: the War of Liberation) was several wars fought at once: a conventional war against Greece in the west, a short, sharp war against the Republic of Armenia in the east, an irregular war against France in the south, and a long, ugly counterinsurgency against rebellious subjects and separatist movements inside Anatolia itself, all conducted while a rival Ottoman government still sat in occupied Istanbul.
It was fought and won front by front, battle by battle, on the Turkish side of the line.
The collapse of an empire
The armistice negotiations took place aboard the British battleship HMS Agamemnon, anchored in Mudros harbor on the island of Lemnos, over four days at the end of October 1918. The Ottoman delegation was led by the new Minister of Marine, Rauf Bey (later Orbay), who arrived under strict instructions from the sultan to preserve the dynasty above all else. The British delegate, Admiral Sir Arthur Gough-Calthorpe, sensed the weakness of Rauf's position and pressed his advantage; the resulting twenty-five-clause document, signed on 30 October and taking effect at noon the next day, has been fairly described as amounting to a British ultimatum rather than a negotiated peace.
The armistice ordered the immediate opening of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus, occupation of the Straits forts, release of Allied prisoners, and demobilization of the Ottoman Army "except such as is required for the maintenance of order." A deliberately vague clause seven allowed the Allies to occupy any "strategic points" they judged necessary "in case of disorder", a loophole that would soon swallow half of Anatolia. Clause twenty-four reserved the Allies the right to occupy the six eastern Anatolian provinces on the pretext of protecting the Armenian population. Unlike the German armistice signed at Compiègne twelve days later, which stripped the Kaiser's army of its guns and machine guns on the spot, Mudros did not force the immediate surrender of Ottoman weapons; demobilization was to be phased in coordination with the British authorities. That single omission proved decisive as it left the Ottoman officer corps a narrow legal space in which to hide men and matériel from an army that, on paper, no longer existed.
At the moment of the armistice the Ottoman Army still numbered roughly 900,000 men on its rolls, organized in twenty-six divisions, a fraction of the force it had fielded at the war's height but still substantial. British-dictated demobilization proceeded by year-group through the winter of 1918–19; by the end of March 1919 well over 600,000 men had been discharged, leaving barely 61,000 in uniform. Yet behind this collapsing paper strength sat enormous reserve stocks that the British had never bothered (or never managed) to secure: an estimated 791,000 rifles, 2,000 machine guns, 945 artillery pieces and vast quantities of ammunition, much of it stored in magazines scattered across Anatolia, well beyond the reach of the small Allied inspection teams. These stockpiles proved, in the words of one historian of the war, critically important to the resurrection of a national army in 1920 and 1921.
Command of what remained of the army also mattered. In the east, the Ottoman Ninth Army withdrew from the Caucasus in the winter of 1918–19 and was formally inactivated in April 1919, its authority passing to the commander of the region's largest formation, the XV Corps at Erzurum, under Kazım Pasha (later Karabekir), an experienced, resourceful officer who simply declined to fully disarm his four divisions. In the south, Fahrettin Pasha held out at Medina with over 10,000 men for nearly three months after the armistice before finally standing down. And across the whole of the interior, corps and division commanders quietly slow-walked the demobilization orders, hid weapons in mountain depots, and waited to see what the peace would bring.
Allied occupation and the landing at İzmir
The peace brought partition. British, French and Italian forces occupied Istanbul, the Straits forts, and (from December 1918) the Cilician cities of Adana and Mersin; French troops soon pushed into Gaziantep, Maraş and Urfa as well. Italian forces, furious at being excluded from the secret wartime bargains over Anatolia, occupied Antalya and a string of towns along the southern coast in the spring of 1919 in a unilateral land grab that briefly threatened to seize İzmir itself.
It was precisely to forestall the Italians that Britain's Lloyd George pushed through the fateful decision to land Greek troops at İzmir instead. Backed by a combined British and Greek naval squadron, the Greek 1st Division began coming ashore at 7:50 on the morning of 15 May 1919. The Ottoman War Ministry, hoping to avoid provocation, had ordered the city's garrison (the XVII Corps under General Ali Nadir Pasha) to remain in barracks. It made no difference. Violence broke out almost immediately at the customs quay; Turkish and Greek accounts of what happened next differ sharply on numbers and blame, but independent estimates put the dead and wounded at three to four hundred Turks and roughly a hundred Greeks on the first day alone, with atrocities against the Turkish population continuing in the days that followed as the occupying force fanned out. Ali Nadir Pasha and hundreds of his officers and men were taken prisoner and held under brutal conditions aboard a prison ship in the harbor.
The landing at İzmir was, in the memory of the Turkish national movement, the spark. Surviving Ottoman troops and armed irregulars fell back on Aydın and began a guerrilla resistance almost immediately: a Turkish counterattack retook Aydın at the end of June, lost it again to a Greek counterthrust in early July, and by autumn a ragged front line ran through the hills of western Anatolia, held by hastily armed bands of volunteers calling themselves the Kuva-yi Milliye, the National Forces, rather than by the shattered remnants of the Ottoman regular army. By the end of July 1919 the Greek army of occupation in Asia Minor already numbered over 65,000 men. The war for western Anatolia had begun before any Turkish government had declared it.
The birth of national resistance
Amid this collapse, one Ottoman general found an opening. Mustafa Kemal, thirty-eight years old, the victorious defender of Gallipoli in 1915 and the commander who had held the front in Palestine to the last days of the war, had been relieved of command in November 1918 after clashing with his own government over resistance to the armistice terms, and spent the following months in Istanbul without a post, networking with fellow nationalist-minded officers. In April 1919, with disorder spreading across eastern Anatolia, the government appointed him Inspector of the Ninth Army with sweeping authority over both military and civil affairs in the region. His official mission, ironically, was to enforce the very demobilization and disarmament he intended to defy.
Mustafa Kemal sailed from Istanbul aboard the steamer Bandırma on 16 May 1919, one day after the Greek landing at İzmir became known, and came ashore at the Black Sea port of Samsun on 19 May, a date commemorated ever since as the symbolic beginning of the War of Independence. From Samsun he moved inland, and at the town of Havza he took the decisive first practical step: he opened the local army magazines and began distributing rifles to the nationalist committees forming in the countryside. British liaison officers grew suspicious within days; Mustafa Kemal denied leading any resistance movement, but by early June the Istanbul government had ordered him recalled. He refused, resigned his army commission in July, and by doing so forced every officer sympathetic to the national cause to choose a side.
Kuva-yi Milliye and the congresses
The resistance that Mustafa Kemal now set out to organize already existed in embryonic form: local Defense of Rights (Müdâfaa-i Hukuk) societies in Anatolia, and, most importantly, the corps commanders of the old Ottoman Army who quietly refused to comply with Istanbul's orders. Kazım Pasha at Erzurum, Ali Fuat Pasha commanding in central Anatolia, Refet Paşa (later Bele), and others placed their formations, their stockpiled weapons and their loyalty behind Mustafa Kemal rather than the sultan's government. When Istanbul appointed Kazım Pasha to replace the newly resigned Mustafa Kemal specifically in order to reverse his orders, Kazım instead stood by him, a moment historians regard as decisive in removing the one man who might have rivaled Mustafa Kemal for leadership of the movement.
On the night of 21–22 June 1919, Mustafa Kemal issued the Amasya Circular (Amasya Tamimi), an act Which was essentially an act of open rebellion, as it declared that the nation's independence was in danger, that the government in Istanbul could not be relied upon to defend it, and that a national congress must convene (first regionally at Erzurum, then nationally at Sivas) to organize the people's will. The Erzurum Congress opened on 23 July 1919 and produced a set of resolutions rejecting any dismemberment of Muslim Turkish and Kurdish Anatolia and asserting that the army itself bore responsibility for defending the nation's territorial integrity. The Sivas Congress that September, protected against an attempted government crackdown by Nationalist-aligned army units, elected a Representative Committee under Mustafa Kemal's presidency that functioned, in practice, as the movement's first executive government. It was, in the words of one historian, a de facto declaration of war on foreign occupation.
The Representative Committee now moved to convert scattered local resistance into something more like an army. It ordered corps commanders to distribute the hidden Ottoman weapons stockpiles to organized volunteer militias (the Kuva-yi Milliye) and tasked Ali Fuat with knitting these forces into a coherent structure organized around the old Ottoman corps districts. These militias varied enormously in size, discipline and reliability. Some were company-sized detachments of a hundred or two hundred men built around a core of veteran soldiers with a machine gun or two and perhaps a single field piece; others, like the mobile force that would coalesce under a commander known as Çerkez Ethem (Ethem the Circassian), grew into forces of several thousand men with their own artillery. All shared the same fundamental weakness: they could harass, ambush, defend a town or cut a rail line, but they were not, and could never become, a conventional field army capable of standing against organized Greek or French divisions. That transformation would take another full year.
The Grand National Assembly
Matters came to a head in March 1920, when the Allies formally occupied Istanbul itself, arresting nationalist deputies and dissolving the last Ottoman parliament. Mustafa Kemal's response was to summon a new, entirely independent legislature to Ankara. The Grand National Assembly (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi, the TBMM) convened for the first time on 23 April 1920, elected Mustafa Kemal as its president the next day, and named İsmet (later İnönü) as chief of the general staff. Ankara now had, for the first time, something resembling a government to match its army, and a single objective that the Assembly enshrined a year later in its National Pact (Misak-ı Millî): full sovereignty and independence within Anatolia's Turkish and Kurdish-majority frontiers.
Securing the homeland: three fronts at once
Before it could turn its full strength against Greece in the west, the young Ankara government first had to survive threats converging on it from every other direction at once: an Armenian army in the east, a French army in the south, and a series of internal revolts that at times threatened to unravel the movement from within.
The eastern front: Kazım Pasha and the Armenian War
The Republic of Armenia, established in the Caucasus in 1918 and hoping to make good on the Treaty of Sèvres's promise of a "Greater Armenia" carved from eastern Anatolia, pushed troops into the disputed border districts of Oltu and Nakhichevan through the summer of 1920. Kazım Pasha's XV Corps (by now rebuilt through conscription to roughly 18,000 men with 54 artillery pieces) held the line and, with the Grand National Assembly's approval, launched a full offensive on 28 September 1920.
The campaign was short and one-sided. Kazım Pasha's forces achieved complete surprise, advancing up to thirty kilometers on the first day alone; the Armenian defense, thinly spread and outmatched, collapsed almost immediately. Sarıkamış (the same mountain town where an Ottoman army had frozen to death in Enver Pasha's disastrous 1915 offensive) fell without a fight on 29 September. Armenia declared war formally on 4 October, but its army could not hold the line; a spoiling attack in mid-October was repulsed, and by the end of the month Kazım Pasha's divisions had encircled and stormed the fortress city of Kars itself, taking it on the night of 30 October along with more than two thousand prisoners, dozens of artillery pieces, and (welcome for the poorly clad Nationalist troops) thousands of captured British winter uniforms. Nationalist cavalry pushed on to occupy Gümrü (Alexandropol) on 8 November.
Armenia sued for peace. The Treaty of Gümrü, signed 3 December 1920, ceded Kars, Ardahan and Iğdır to the Nationalists and forced Armenia to renounce the dead-letter Treaty of Sèvres. It was the first international agreement any foreign government signed with the Ankara Assembly. The war in the east was episodic, short, and produced comparatively few casualties, but it was strategically decisive all the same. It eliminated Armenia as a threat, secured the eastern frontier, and, most importantly for what followed, freed an entire corps' worth of trained, veteran troops for transfer to the far more dangerous fight against Greece. Through 1921, division after division of Kazım Pasha's command entrained west, arriving just in time to matter at Sakarya.
The southern front: resistance in Cilicia
Unlike every other theater of the war, the southern front against France was never fought by the regular army at all. From beginning to end it was carried by the Kuva-yi Milliye alone, and it was here, in the towns of Cilicia, that the national resistance movement first drew blood.
France had taken over occupation of Cilicia from Britain at the end of 1919, relying heavily on the roughly four thousand men of the Légion Arménienne, a French-officered brigade of Armenian volunteers whose often undisciplined conduct toward the local Muslim population did much to drive recruitment into the resistance. Nationalist forces under locally raised commanders confronted the French in a series of sieges through the winter of 1919–20. At Maraş, French Brigadier General Louis Quérette occupied the city in January 1920 with roughly fifteen hundred men; when talks with local leaders broke down on 21 January, a twenty-two-day siege began, led on the Turkish side by townsmen and irregulars (among them the dairyman-turned-fighter remembered locally as Sütçü İmam) who encircled the French positions street by street. A relief column under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Normand fought its way in on 7 February, but after a fierce debate the French commanders concluded the position was untenable and ordered a withdrawal in the early hours of 11 February, harassed the entire way by Nationalist ambushes. French casualties in the siege and withdrawal totaled some 160 killed, 170 missing, 280 wounded and 300 severely frostbitten; contemporary European newspapers dubbed the episode the Maraş Massacre. It was a clear Nationalist victory, and it broke French confidence in Cilicia for good.
At Urfa, Captain Ali Saip besieged the French garrison for two months beginning in February 1920; the starving defenders eventually surrendered under safe-conduct but were ambushed and destroyed by Kurdish tribesmen on the road out in April. At Gaziantep (still called Antep at the time) the local Defense of Rights organization rose against the French garrison on 1 April 1920 and held out through repeated relief attempts and counterattacks for nearly ten months. By early February 1921 the surrounded defenders were starving and out of ammunition; a breakout attempt on the night of 6 February sent some four hundred men toward the Nationalist lines, and only about fifty made it through before the French sealed the gap. The French commander made his ceremonial entry into the city on 9 February, ending the siege; its population had fallen from eighty thousand to twenty thousand. The Assembly later granted the city the honorific "Gazi" (heroic warrior) in recognition of its resistance; it has been known as Gaziantep ever since, just as Kahramanmaraş and Şanlıurfa carry the honorifics "heroic" and "glorious" bestowed for their own defenses.
Facing mounting cost, a hostile domestic press, and the far greater priority of supporting Poland against the Bolsheviks, Paris began looking for an exit. Diplomat Henri Franklin-Bouillon negotiated directly with Mustafa Kemal, and on 20 October 1921, in the immediate afterglow of the Nationalist victory at Sakarya, the two sides signed the Treaty of Ankara. France agreed to a complete withdrawal from Cilicia, fixed the Turkish-Syrian frontier essentially as it remains today (with the notable exception of İskenderun and Hatay, which France retained), and left behind a substantial quantity of arms and equipment for the Nationalist army, a material boost the army badly needed. It was the first agreement in which any Entente power recognized the National Pact, and it broke the wartime coalition against Ankara for good. The southern front closed; its garrison troops entrained for the western front within months.
The war within: suppressing the insurgencies
All the while, the Ankara government was fighting a second, uglier war against its own population. Turkish official histories count as many as two dozen separate armed rebellions between 1919 and 1923, ranging from Circassian tribal risings around Düzce and Bolu to Kurdish unrest at Koçgiri and repeated revolts by Çapanoğlu clan leaders around Yozgat. Suppressing them consumed troops, time and attention the Nationalists could ill afford, and the campaign against them was, by the government's own later admission, often savage.
Some of these risings were opportunistic and small: bandit clans exploiting the chaos seized weapons and a district capital before being run down by a mobile detachment of a few hundred cavalry. Others were more dangerous because they were encouraged, openly or covertly, by the rival government still sitting in occupied Istanbul, which raised its own so-called Disciplinary Force with British support in the spring of 1920 specifically to fight the Nationalists on Ankara's own doorstep near İzmit; it was defeated and dissolved within two months. The Kurdish rising at Koçgiri in the spring of 1921, inspired by the same promises of autonomy the Allies had dangled at Sèvres, was broken by a converging force of some five thousand troops and cavalry in barely six weeks, helped, Ankara's own commanders believed, by news of the victory at Second İnönü discouraging tribes still weighing which side to join. Each of these campaigns was small on its own terms. Together they meant that the national movement spent nearly its entire existence fighting simultaneously outward, against foreign armies, and inward, against a homeland it had not yet finished persuading, or forcing, to accept its authority.
The most serious and prolonged of these was the uprising of the Pontic Greek community along the Black Sea coast, which simmered from 1919 and flared into open guerrilla war through 1921. Ankara raised a dedicated Central Army under General Nurettin (the same general who had commanded at İzmir in 1919) and gave it a free hand. Independence Tribunals tried and executed rebel leaders and community figures at Amasya; by the Central Army's own report to the Assembly in November 1921, its operations had burned some seven thousand homes, killed roughly five thousand Pontic Greek civilians, wounded three thousand more, and deported over twenty-five thousand into internal exile. Nurettin himself was relieved of command in November 1921 and tried for excessive cruelty; he was acquitted on the grounds that the Assembly had authorized him to use whatever means necessary to crush what it characterized as a savage and bloody rebellion.
The single most dangerous internal threat, though, came from within the resistance movement itself. Çerkez Ethem had been the Nationalists' indispensable fireman through 1919 and 1920, repeatedly deployed to crush rival uprisings with his mobile force of irregular cavalry (by the summer of 1920 grown to some two thousand infantry and over a thousand cavalry with its own artillery, larger than most regular divisions). But as Ankara moved through 1920 to fold all irregular forces into a single conscripted national army under central discipline, Ethem refused integration, proclaimed himself an independent area commander, and by December had broken openly with the government. Mustafa Kemal and his chief of staff Fevzi ordered a large converging force, nearly nine thousand men altogether, against him; Ethem's smaller band, some 2,300 fighters, was driven from Kütahya in the first days of January 1921 and, after a brief counterattack that briefly forced Nationalist troops back into the town, was finally broken and scattered into Greek-held territory by the end of the month. His flight removed the last serious rival center of armed power inside the national movement. In a bitter irony noted by more than one historian, it happened in the very week the newly formed regular army had to turn and fight its first pitched battle against the Greeks at İnönü.
Forging a regular army: the road to İnönü
Mustafa Kemal understood from early on that militias alone could never defeat a conventional Greek army, however useful they were for harassment and internal security. Beginning in the spring of 1920 the Assembly moved deliberately to replace the Kuva-yi Milliye with a genuinely national conscript force: martial law was declared in June, universal conscription introduced later that month, and irregular units were formally absorbed into the Ministry of National Defense as the Kuva-yi Seyyare, subject to military law and central pay rather than local loot. New offensive formations were activated through the second half of 1920: cavalry divisions, a heavy artillery battalion, and assault companies trained in the German stormtrooper tactics veteran Ottoman officers had learned fighting alongside German advisers in the world war. By January 1921 most of the old irregular formations had been absorbed or disbanded outright.
Command of the reborn Western Front passed in November 1920 to Colonel İsmet, a methodical staff officer who would prove to be one of the two or three indispensable men of the war. On 6 January 1921, with barely nineteen thousand men, forty-five guns and ninety heavy machine guns at his disposal (and with a substantial part of his force still tied down chasing Çerkez Ethem), he faced the first real test of the new army.
The Greek high command did not expect much of a fight. Athens's own intelligence assumed that an army built out of demobilized militia in barely six months could not have absorbed serious discipline or firepower, and the reconnaissance-in-force was designed as much to probe that assumption as to seize ground. It was a serious miscalculation. The reorganized Nationalist divisions may have been outnumbered and outgunned (the Greek main effort alone fielded roughly seventy-two artillery pieces to İsmet's twenty-eight), but they were no longer irregulars fighting from ambush: they were conscripted line infantry holding prepared positions and counterattacking on order, in the manner of any conventional army.
The First Battle of İnönü
The Greek high command billed its January offensive as a limited "reconnaissance in force" intended to gauge how much fight remained in the reorganized Nationalist army. Two Greek columns advanced on 6 January 1921, the main effort in the north driving toward the rail junction town of İnönü. The thin Nationalist covering force gave ground for two days; but on 9 January İsmet organized eleven infantry battalions and four artillery batteries of his newly arrived 4th and 11th Divisions into a Left Wing Group on the high ground northwest of the town and, the following morning, launched a series of counterattacks in dense fog that the Greek 7th Division's own records describe as seven separate assaults between noon and two in the afternoon. By nightfall the Greek commander judged he had learned what he needed to know and ordered a withdrawal; his forces were back at their start line within days.
First İnönü was a modest battle in scale, but its consequences were entirely disproportionate to the numbers engaged. It was the new regular army's first victory, fought by conscripted regulars rather than irregular militia, and it landed at the precise moment Ankara most needed proof that the national project could still defend itself. In its immediate aftermath the Assembly adopted the country's first constitution, the Teşkilat-ı Esasiye, and formally adopted the national anthem, the İstiklal Marşı. Both were timed deliberately to follow a demonstrated military success rather than precede it: neither step could credibly announce the birth of a new state without one. Diplomatically, the victory widened the cracks in the Entente: an Allied conference convened in London that February formally received a Nationalist delegation for the first time, and on 16 March 1921 Ankara signed a Treaty of Friendship with Soviet Russia, its first great-power partner and the source of the gold, rifles and artillery that would sustain the army through the following two years. Colonel İsmet was promoted major general and, in time, would take his surname from the town where he first proved himself.
The Second Battle of İnönü
Stung by the setback and unwilling to let it stand, the Greek high command renewed the offensive on 23 March 1921 with a heavier, better-prepared force along the same axis. The fighting was harder and lasted longer than in January (a full week of attritional combat around the same defensive positions), and again it was İsmet's counterattacks, culminating in a decisive Nationalist strike on 31 March that shattered the Greek 28th Infantry Regiment and killed its commander, that broke the Greek effort. The Greek command began withdrawing that evening; Nationalist cavalry pursued for several days but could not trap the retreating force, and the front settled back to roughly its earlier line by early April.
Second İnönü cost the Nationalists roughly five thousand men killed, a far bloodier fight than the first battle even if it produced no equivalent diplomatic breakthrough. But its military significance was unmistakable: for the second time in three months, a rebuilt Turkish army built from scratch out of a defeated empire's rubble had stopped a Greek offensive cold. Mustafa Kemal's telegram to İsmet after the battle has become one of the most quoted lines of the war: "You have defeated not only the enemy, but the evil fate of the Turkish nation." It was not yet true (the hardest fighting still lay ahead), but for the first time it seemed as though it might become true.
Crisis at Kütahya-Eskişehir
The Greek high command drew the obvious lesson from two failed offensives on a narrow front: attack somewhere wider, with overwhelming force. Reinforced with fresh conscript classes and fresh credit from London, the Greek Field Army of Asia Minor grew to well over one hundred thousand men by midsummer 1921, and on 10 July it launched a much broader offensive on two axes toward Kütahya and Eskişehir at once.
The result was the one clear defeat the regular Nationalist army suffered in the entire war. Afyonkarahisar fell on 13 July, Kütahya on the 17th, Eskişehir on the 19th; İsmet's forces, outnumbered and outgunned, were compressed into an increasingly dangerous salient and suffered catastrophic desertion (as many as thirty thousand men by some estimates) alongside several thousand killed and wounded and the loss of dozens of guns and machine guns. On 17 July İsmet made the decision that, in retrospect, saved the army: rather than stand and be encircled, he ordered a general withdrawal all the way back across the Sakarya River, trading territory for the survival of his force. Mustafa Kemal later called it a calculated retreat rather than a rout: pull the Greek army as deep into Anatolia as it dared go, stretch its supply lines to breaking point, and fight the decisive battle on ground and terms of the Nationalists' own choosing.
The retreat still produced a genuine political crisis in Ankara. The Council of Ministers voted on 22 July to evacuate the government to Kayseri; panic spread through the Assembly when the chief of staff, Fevzi, initially told deputies Ankara would be defended before the true scale of the withdrawal became clear. Mustafa Kemal personally intervened on 24 July to reverse the evacuation order, keeping the Assembly itself in the capital even as government archives were shipped east as a precaution. He then travelled to İsmet's headquarters at Polatlı, and in a secret session of the Assembly on 27–28 July proposed a step without precedent in the short history of the national movement: that he personally assume, for a period of three months, the full legislative and executive powers of the Assembly as Başkomutan (Commander-in-Chief), with absolute authority to mobilize the nation's resources for the war. The Assembly voted first in secret, 169 to 13, then unanimously and publicly, 184 to nothing. It was, functionally, a wartime dictatorship granted by a legislature to the one man it trusted to use it and then give it back. Eventually, he did.
Under the sweeping authority of the Commander-in-Chief law, Mustafa Kemal issued the Tekalif-i Milliye (the National Obligations decrees) in the first days of August 1921, requisitioning a fixed share of the country's remaining resources for the war effort: forty percent of all food, clothing and transport stock in private and commercial hands, a fifth of all draft animals and vehicles, the labor of every blacksmith, cobbler and tailor in the country, and one uniform's worth of clothing from every family in Anatolia. It amounted to conscripting the entire remaining material wealth of an exhausted nation, not merely its men, enforced where necessary by the Independence Tribunals. In the months that followed it produced an army equipped well enough to fight the battle that would decide the war.
Sakarya: the officers' battle
Convinced (correctly) that the Nationalist army had not been destroyed at Kütahya-Eskişehir, and unwilling to let the momentum of the summer slip away, the Greek political leadership overruled its own more cautious generals and ordered one final push aimed directly at Ankara itself and the destruction of the Nationalist army in the field. It would be the last Greek offensive of the war.
Mustafa Kemal, still formally holding his three-month grant of dictatorial authority, went to the front on 17 August 1921 and took personal command of the army. He directed the campaign, remarkably, while nursing a broken rib from a riding fall, and those around him described him alternating between iron determination and private moments of despair. The Greek Field Army of Asia Minor committed roughly seventy-seven thousand combat troops on a march of over a hundred and thirty kilometers through difficult terrain toward the upper reaches of the Sakarya River; the week-long approach march, and a fateful three-day pause at the river itself, gave İsmet just enough time to complete a strong defensive line along the Gök River before the main Greek assault began on 23 August.
Against this Greek force, İsmet could concentrate roughly ninety-six thousand men of his own, nearly the whole of the Western Front Command and some eighty-five percent of everything available to him, arrayed along the Gök and Sakarya lines in five tactical Groups with a strong reserve held back under cover. It was a narrower numerical gap than either side had faced in the earlier battles at İnönü, and it meant that for the first time the campaign would be decided less by maneuver than by which army could keep feeding fresh troops and shells into an unbroken killing ground for longer. On this ground, over the days that followed, that calculation ran steadily against the attacker.
An officer's battle
What followed was twenty-two days of the hardest fighting of the entire war, across a front roughly a hundred kilometers wide, much of it hand-to-hand combat for barren hilltops that changed hands three and four times. The climactic struggle came at the end of August for the twin heights of Çal Dağı and Ardıç Dağı: Greek infantry took Ardıç Dağı by bayonet charge, and the Nationalist 15th Division, bearing the brunt of the defense, suffered a forty-four percent casualty rate (over 2,400 men out of roughly 5,500) in a matter of days. Turkish cavalry under Colonel Fahrettin came close enough in a raid on 27 August to nearly capture the Greek army's own field headquarters, forcing clerks and walking wounded to improvise a defense. By early September, even the Greek commander's own staff was reporting to Athens that continued losses would soon make further offensive operations impossible.
Mustafa Kemal later gave the battle the name Turks still use for it: the "officers' battle." Of roughly five thousand officers present in the Nationalist army, three hundred were killed and a thousand wounded: a staggering proportion that reflected how uniformly Turkish commanders, from division commanders down to lieutenants, led their exhausted men from the front rather than from the rear. It was the price of holding a line built largely of conscripts and reservists against a numerically superior professional army, and it worked.
Turning the tide
By 6 September the Greek offensive had stalled completely; on 7 September İsmet detected the first signs of a general withdrawal and, rather than simply let the enemy go, launched a full counteroffensive that recovered the contested high ground by 10–11 September. The Greek army conducted a skillful, disciplined retreat rather than a rout (it recrossed the Sakarya intact, with most of its equipment, and destroyed the bridges behind it), but the strategic verdict was unmistakable. On 13 September, İsmet reported to Kemal that the campaign was over, and gave it the name it has carried ever since: the Battle of Sakarya.
It was the war's genuine turning point. The last time a Turkish army had been driven back this far from the heart of Anatolia was the retreat from the failed Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683; now, for the first time since the world war began, the strategic initiative passed decisively and permanently to the Turkish side. The Greek field army never again mounted a major offensive. The political consequences arrived almost immediately: Italy, which had already begun scaling back its Anatolian presence, withdrew entirely; and within six weeks France (its own diplomats later admitted that Nationalist success against the far stronger Greek army made further resistance to Ankara pointless) signed the Treaty of Ankara ending the war in Cilicia. The Assembly granted Mustafa Kemal the honorific title of Gazi and promoted him to the rank of Mareşal, Field Marshal, of the army he had just saved.
The long pause
Sakarya broke the Greek army's offensive power, but it did not by itself win the war, and both sides now settled into nearly a full year of reorganization, recruitment and diplomatic maneuvering rather than major combat. An attempted Nationalist follow-up offensive around Afyonkarahisar in the weeks after Sakarya achieved little against a Greek army still able to reinforce faster along its own rail lines than İsmet could concentrate against it: a sharp reminder that the war was not yet won.
Ankara used the respite to rebuild in earnest. Diplomatic settlements with the Soviet Union, Soviet Armenia and France freed troops from every other front for concentration in the west; French withdrawal from Cilicia alone left behind ten thousand rifles' worth of equipment, and arms purchases arranged through Mersin and Antalya brought in machine guns, aircraft and hundreds of trucks. Refet, now minister of national defense, built dozens of small workshops and continued to requisition domestic textile and leather production under the authority of the Tekalif-i Milliye decrees. Full mobilization of an additional twenty conscript year-groups was ordered in February 1922; by the start of that year Ankara commanded twenty-three infantry and five cavalry divisions nationwide, still individually smaller than their Greek counterparts but now standardized, trained, and drilled in the same assault tactics that had proven decisive in the world war. New training schools at Konya and elsewhere taught modern indirect artillery fire and machine-gun tactics to an officer corps that, division for division, had more 1912–1918 combat experience than its Greek opposite number.
Greece, by contrast, spent the same year sliding into political and financial crisis. No new British loans materialized; the government resorted to forcibly halving its own currency to raise funds for the war. A rival "National Defense" faction agitated for the army's withdrawal to a defensible line; the field commander who flirted with the idea resigned in June 1922 after Athens rejected his plan, and was replaced by a general later described by his own colleagues as eccentric, high-strung, excitable, and widely thought to be mentally unbalanced: a choice that would prove catastrophic. By the middle of 1922 Mustafa Kemal and Fevzi judged the army ready, and on 2 July Mustafa Kemal ordered İsmet to prepare a plan for what would be called simply the Great Offensive (Büyük Taarruz).
The Great Offensive and the race to the sea
The plan called for a concentrated breakthrough south of Afyonkarahisar, followed by a rapid cavalry envelopment to trap the bulk of the Greek field army before it could retreat. Concealment was total: Mustafa Kemal traveled to the front in secret overnight on 17–18 August while his Ankara staff maintained his public social calendar to disguise his absence; troop movements were conducted only at night; mail was censored. The reserve II Corps was quietly pulled out of line and marched south to the assembly area without the Greek high command noticing. Nationalist forces massed roughly 143,000 infantry and nearly 16,000 cavalry against a Greek defense of comparable overall size but spread across a front of nearly eight hundred kilometers with no operational reserve whatsoever: a fatal dispersal the Nationalist plan was built to exploit.
Breakthrough at Afyonkarahisar
The assault opened at dawn on 26 August 1922 with an artillery bombardment that Greek accounts themselves describe as more intense and accurate than anything the Field Army of Asia Minor had previously experienced in the war. Mustafa Kemal, İsmet and Fevzi watched from a hill outside the town as infantry went in behind the barrage; most attacks were checked on the first day, at heavy cost: one Nationalist division commander, having promised Mustafa Kemal he would take his objective within the half hour and then failed to do so, took his own life rather than report the failure. But Fahrettin's cavalry corps found a fifteen-kilometer gap in the Greek line and drove deep into the rear, cutting rail and telegraph communications; by the following afternoon the Greek 1st Division's position had been overrun after its own withdrawal order failed to reach it in time: a breakdown compounded, absurdly, by the fact that the Greek corps' radio set had been loaded onto the wrong train. The front was broken.
Dumlupınar and the Commander-in-Chief's Battle
What followed over the next four days was a textbook encirclement. Trapped Greek divisions, split into two pockets trying to fight their way south and west, were progressively boxed in around the villages of Aliören and Dumlupınar. Mustafa Kemal moved his own command post to a hill the army afterward named Zafer Tepe (Victory Hill) to direct the final battle in person; Turkish troops call the climactic action of 30 August the Başkomutanlık Meydan Muharebesi, the Commander-in-Chief's Pitched Battle. By evening the surrounded Greek force, reduced to some twenty thousand men with nowhere left to shelter from Nationalist artillery, attempted a breakout in three columns under cover of darkness. Two of the three columns were run down and forced to surrender within days; among the prisoners taken on 2 September was the Greek army's own field commander, General Trikoupis. In a bitter irony that historians of the battle never fail to mention, he did not yet know that Athens had just named him the overall commander of the entire Field Army of Asia Minor.
The pursuit to İzmir
With the Greek field army broken, Mustafa Kemal gave the pursuit order that has become one of the most quoted lines of the entire war: "Armies, your first goal is the Mediterranean, Forward!" What followed was a headlong pursuit across nearly three hundred kilometers of western Anatolia in barely a week, successive Greek defensive lines collapsing within a day or two of contact as cavalry and infantry alike pressed the retreat without pause. Turkish cavalry entered İzmir on the morning of 9 September 1922, taking well over a thousand prisoners in the city alone; Nurettin's infantry followed that afternoon, and by nightfall the army that had come ashore under Allied protection three years and four months earlier had ceased to exist as an organized force on the Anatolian mainland.
Not every Greek unit fled in disorder. On the northern axis, a Greek independent division under Colonel Theotokes conducted a disciplined six-hundred-kilometer fighting withdrawal over seventeen days to the port of Dikili, holding together as an organized force to the end and evacuating its men and refugees alike by sea; elsewhere, an entire Greek division was cornered and forced to surrender at Mudanya on 12 September. But these were the exceptions. Along most of the front the retreat became a rout, and it is this collapse (rather than any single battle) that historians now generally regard as marking the true military end of Greece's three-year attempt to establish itself in Asia Minor.
The retreat and its aftermath left a legacy of accusation and counter-accusation on both sides that historians still debate today. As the defeated Greek army fell back toward the coast it carried out, by multiple Turkish and independent accounts, a policy of deliberate destruction: whole towns between Uşak and İzmir burned to the ground, tens of thousands of homes destroyed at Alaşehir and Manisa alone. Four days after the Nationalist entry into the city, a catastrophic fire broke out in İzmir's Armenian quarter on 13 September and consumed much of the city; who started it, and why, remains one of the most disputed episodes of the entire war, with responsibility claimed and disclaimed on every side and death-toll estimates ranging from the low thousands into the tens of thousands. What is not disputed is that the city was by then under Nationalist martial law, and that no serious effort was made to fight the blaze before it had run its course.
To the Straits: Çanakkale and Mudanya
Victory in western Anatolia did not end the war, because Eastern Thrace and the Straits themselves (the last Allied-occupied and Greek-held territory the National Pact claimed) still lay ahead. As Nationalist forces pushed north and east toward the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus through September 1922, their cavalry patrols came into direct contact with thin British garrisons at Çanakkale and on the Kocaeli peninsula, producing an international crisis (remembered in Britain as the Chanak Crisis) that briefly threatened to reignite a full-scale war between Turkey and the British Empire. The local British commander, Major General Sir Charles Harrington, made the consequential decision to withhold an ultimatum from London demanding immediate Nationalist withdrawal, buying time for negotiation rather than confrontation; France, unwilling to be drawn into a new war it had only just extricated itself from in Cilicia, withdrew its own troops from the contested neutral zone and pressed the British toward talks instead. Mustafa Kemal halted his forces short of open conflict and proposed armistice negotiations, even as, in Athens, the military disaster in Anatolia triggered a revolution that toppled the Greek monarchy and sent the wartime government's leading ministers before a firing squad that November.
Talks opened at the town of Mudanya on 3 October 1922, with İsmet representing Ankara opposite British, French and Italian generals and a Greek delegation that arrived late and found the essential terms already agreed without it. The armistice signed on 11 October provided for a Greek withdrawal west of the Meriç River, Allied occupation of the evacuated zone in eastern Thrace for thirty days pending its formal transfer to Nationalist administration, and Nationalist restraint from occupying Istanbul and the Straits pending a full peace treaty. It was, in substance if not in name, victory: the war's last remaining territorial claims of the National Pact (Istanbul, the Straits, eastern Thrace) were secured without another shot fired, obtained from a position of complete Turkish military dominance for the first time since Mudros four years earlier.
From war to republic
The armistice at Mudanya ended the fighting; it took nine more months of hard negotiation at Lausanne, led for Turkey by the same İsmet who had commanded at İnönü and Sakarya, before the war formally ended with a peace treaty on 24 July 1923. It is the only one of the settlements ending the First World War that remains in force, unrevised, a century later. The National Assembly formally demobilized the Nationalist army to peacetime garrison strength that August, closing the military chapter of a conflict that Turkish official history dates, start to finish, from the landing at İzmir in May 1919 to the following November.
It had been, in the truest sense, a war made of wars: a conventional campaign against Greece punctuated by two defensive stands and one decisive offensive; a short, sharp campaign against Armenia in the east; an irregular guerrilla war against France in the south fought without a single regular division; and a long, often brutal internal war against rebellion and separatism that ran underneath all the others from start to finish. It was won by an army built twice over: first improvised from militia and hidden Ottoman arsenals, then rebuilt from scratch as a modern conscript force. And it was won by a small circle of commanders, Mustafa Kemal, Fevzi, İsmet, Kazım and Fahrettin chief among them, who had learned their trade in the same world war that had just destroyed the empire they served. Three months after Lausanne, on 29 October 1923, the Grand National Assembly that had governed the war from Ankara declared the Republic of Turkey. The war that made the republic possible had been fought, from its first shot to its last, on Turkish soil, by a Turkish army, for the frontiers a Turkish assembly had drawn for itself and then made good by force of arms.
PAGE LAST UPDATED ON 25 JULY 2026