Reforming the Army - Turkey in the First World War

The story of the Ottoman Army in the First World War cannot be understood without first understanding the decades of reform, failure, and renewed effort that preceded it. The institution that fought at Gallipoli, in the Caucasus, and across the deserts of Arabia was not the decayed, stagnant force that had stumbled through the nineteenth century. It had been rebuilt, sometimes hastily and imperfectly, but rebuilt nonetheless, through three successive waves of reform driven by defeat, foreign expertise, and the ambitions of a new generation of officers determined to modernise the army before the empire collapsed entirely around it. That story begins with the catastrophe of 1877 and ends, still unfinished, on the eve of the war that would finally exhaust what the reformers had built.

The Condition of the Army at the Turn of the Century

Ottoman military weakness in the late 19th century stemmed from deep structural problems exposed by the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War, revealing an army that required radical but difficult reform.
The officer corps was heavily distorted by patronage and political favoritism, producing an overinflated senior hierarchy and an ageing, unevenly trained leadership often incapable of effective command.
Conscription practices disproportionately burdened poor Anatolian Muslim peasants, while exemptions and cash payments allowed wealthier and non-Muslim populations to largely avoid service, weakening manpower quality and balance.
Chronic financial crisis, naval neglect, poor training systems, and underdeveloped logistics left both army and navy far below European standards, creating a military structure unable to modernize effectively despite awareness of its deficiencies.

The defeats and humiliations of the nineteenth century made one thing abundantly clear to Ottoman statesmen and military commanders: the army was broken, and without radical change it could not defend an empire already haemorrhaging territory on multiple fronts. The war against Russia in 1877–78 proved the decisive turning point. The catastrophic Ottoman performance in that conflict exposed the full depth of the army's dysfunction and compelled the government to confront, at last, the true scale of what was needed. But recognising the problem and solving it were very different things. The obstacles to genuine reform were not merely technical or financial. They were structural, political, and in many ways rooted in the very nature of Abdülhamit II's rule itself.

The Officer Corps: Patronage, Age, and Institutional Decay

The most fundamental problem was the officer corps. At every level, the system through which men were selected, trained, promoted, and retained had been corrupted by decades of political interference, and the resulting institution bore almost no resemblance to the professional body that a modern army required.

Promotions were made on the basis of court connections rather than merit, performance, or seniority earned in the field. Officers with access to palace patronage could rise rapidly through the ranks regardless of ability. Those without such connections, however capable, could remain frozen at the same rank for a decade or more. Salaries were meagre and paid irregularly, typically once every five or six months, a situation that bred corruption throughout the officer corps as a simple matter of economic survival. Officers supplemented their incomes through whatever means were available, including the skimming of soldiers' pay, the inflation of unit rosters to claim the salaries of fictitious enlisted men, and the sale of favours within their commands.

The results were grotesque. By the end of Abdülhamit's reign the army counted 31 field marshals and 468 generals, a proliferation of senior rank that had no relationship to operational capacity or actual military structure. These were not fighting commanders. They were, in large measure, political appointments whose continued existence drained the army's budget while contributing nothing to its readiness. The sultan's court had become an engine for the creation of a military aristocracy that was expensive, idle, and deeply resistant to any reform that might disturb its privileges.

At the middle and lower levels of the officer corps the situation was only marginally better. The War Academy, the Mekteb-i Harbiye, could produce only modest numbers of qualified graduates each year, and the gap between the academy's output and the army's needs was filled by the class of officers known as alaylı: men promoted to commissioned rank through seniority and regimental service, without formal military education of any kind. These officers were not incompetent by disposition, but they had received no systematic instruction in tactics, staff work, logistics, or any of the other disciplines that modern warfare demanded. Their ability to train their own subordinates was consequently limited, and the standard of unit training throughout the army reflected this. Among these alaylı there were lieutenants aged 58, captains aged 65, and majors aged 80. The army's officer corps was not merely underprepared; in many cases it was physically incapable of taking the field.

Manpower: The Burden of Conscription and its Inequities

The enlisted ranks of the army were filled through a conscription system that had been codified in its modern form by the regulations of 1844 and 1870, but which carried within it deep structural inequities that fundamentally distorted the pool of men available to serve.

In theory, military service was an obligation of Muslim male subjects. In practice, an elaborate system of exemptions and financial substitutions meant that the burden fell almost entirely on one specific group: Anatolian Muslim peasants. Non-Muslim Ottoman subjects such as Christians and Jews paid a cash substitute known as the bedel-i askeri, theoretically in lieu of military service. While non-Muslims had formally been subject to a draft since the mid-nineteenth century, in practice the Ottoman state and military consistently preferred the revenue from the bedel over actual non-Muslim recruits. The result was an army drawn overwhelmingly from the rural Muslim Anatolian population, a reservoir of manpower that was large but limited, and whose depletion through casualties and disease was felt acutely once the wars of the early twentieth century began.

Muslims of means could also pay a cash substitute, the bedel-i nakdi, to avoid personal service. Residents of Istanbul enjoyed a long-standing exemption, as did students in religious colleges and members of various professional and civic categories. By the late nineteenth century, a very large proportion of those who served were men who had no other option: poor, rural, and Anatolian. The wealthier and better-connected layers of Ottoman society, Muslim as well as non-Muslim, had effectively purchased their way out of the obligation that fell on everyone in theory and on a specific and repeatedly depleted demographic in practice.

The active service term for infantry conscripts had been set at various lengths over the decades, eventually settling at two years for the infantry with subsequent reserve obligations, but the distinction between active service, reserve service, and the home guard was poorly enforced and the transition between categories was haphazard. Soldiers who had technically completed their active service often remained with their units for want of a formal discharge mechanism, or were recalled without notice when units were undermanned. The records of the reserve forces, the redif, were maintained with little rigour, and mobilising them reliably in an emergency was more an aspiration than a tested capability.

Training, Equipment, and Operational Readiness

Below the officer cadre and the conscription system lay the practical questions of how soldiers were trained, what weapons they carried, and whether formations could actually perform the tasks assigned to them. The picture at each of these levels was discouraging.

Soldiers carried out daily routine drills, but these exercises were disconnected from the requirements of actual combat. There was no systematic programme of field exercises, live-fire training, or coordinated manoeuvre between units. Reserve forces received even less attention: their training was sporadic at best and entirely absent at worst. The War Academy itself, despite the formal prestige attached to a mektepli education, provided instruction that lagged behind the standards of European military schools. Courses in mathematics and the natural sciences, modern languages, and advanced staff work were either absent or poorly taught. The institution produced graduates who held the forms of a modern military education without always having absorbed its substance.

The disposition of units across the empire compounded these problems. Regiments and divisions were scattered across vast distances, often stationed far from the other formations with which they were supposed to coordinate. It was entirely common for units belonging to the same division to be garrisoned hundreds of kilometres apart, with no regular communication and no shared training. The concept of combined-arms cooperation, the coordination of infantry, artillery, and cavalry in pursuit of a common objective, was largely foreign to Ottoman military practice at the unit level. When formations were brought together for operations, they were doing so for the first time under conditions that made controlled manoeuvre exceptionally difficult.

The Deliberately Weakened Navy

The condition of the navy during this period was in some ways even more parlous than that of the army, and it illustrated with particular clarity the logic of Abdülhamit's approach to military power. His predecessor, Sultan Abdülaziz, had invested heavily in the navy and had built it into one of the more powerful fleets in the eastern Mediterranean by the mid-nineteenth century. Abdülhamit distrusted the admirals who had aligned themselves with the reformist faction around Midhat Pasha, and after the humiliations of 1877–78 he concluded that a large, well-trained, and independently commanded navy was a threat to his personal security rather than an asset to the empire's defence.

His response was to lock most of the fleet inside the Golden Horn, where the ships remained at anchor for the next thirty years with no training, no manoeuvres, and no maintenance. The vessels rotted in place, their guns unused, their crews unpaid and untrained, their officers appointed to prestigious but wholly ceremonial positions that kept them close to the palace and far from any independent command. The navy that would be needed to control the Aegean, protect the coasts, and transport supplies in any future war simply ceased to exist as a functional instrument. When the Young Turk revolution restored constitutional rule in 1908, its leaders found a fleet that was beyond mere repair: ships had to be scrapped, officers retrained from near scratch, and an entirely new naval institution rebuilt from the keel up.

The Financial Constraint

Underlying all these failures was a financial crisis that made remediation perpetually more difficult. The Ottoman Empire had been a debtor state for decades. The public debt accumulated during the wars and mismanagement of the nineteenth century had grown to the point where, by the Decree of Muharrem in 1881, the empire was compelled to accept European administration of a large portion of its revenues through the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, an institution controlled by the empire's foreign creditors. Funds that might have gone to military modernisation went instead to debt service. The military budget was repeatedly cut during the last fifteen years of Abdülhamit's reign, at precisely the moment when the European powers were accelerating their own rearmament programmes. Weapons purchased from Germany were withheld from distribution not only out of political paranoia but also because the empire lacked the funds for ammunition, spare parts, and the training programmes that would have made distribution meaningful. The army's dysfunction was inseparable from the empire's bankruptcy: one fed the other in a cycle that no single reform, however well-intentioned, could easily break.

The First German Mission

After the 1877–78 war against Russia exposed deep military weaknesses, the Ottoman Empire turned to German advisers despite its long reliance on French military traditions.
The first German mission under Koehler (1882–83) had little effect, as Abdülhamit II kept advisers in ceremonial roles and blocked real institutional control.
Colmar von der Goltz (1883–1895) introduced Prussian-style reforms, reshaping military education around staff training, tactics, and mass mobilization ideas from his book "Das Volk in Waffen".
Goltz improved officer education and the War College, but palace patronage, weak logistics, and limited funding meant reforms remained partial, despite clearer gains by 1897.

The decision to invite German officers to rebuild the Ottoman Army was not made lightly or quickly. Preliminary contacts between Istanbul and Berlin had begun as far back as 1880, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian war, but two years of negotiations passed before an agreement was reached and a mission was formally constituted. The delay reflected genuine ambivalence on both sides. The Ottomans had spent decades orienting their military institutions toward France, and switching the army's foundational doctrinal model was not a trivial undertaking. The French influence had shaped the curriculum of the War College, the structure of the general staff, and the tactical assumptions embedded in officer training since the founding of the Mekteb-i Harbiye in 1834. Abandoning this inheritance meant not simply replacing one set of instructors with another but changing the fundamental intellectual framework within which Ottoman officers understood war.

Germany's attractions were nevertheless compelling. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 1871 had demonstrated beyond argument that the German model produced the most effective army in Europe. The speed and completeness of Prussia's victory over France, a country whose military had been considered formidable, had made the German general staff system, its approach to officer education, and its philosophy of mobile aggressive warfare the benchmark against which every European army now measured itself. For the Ottomans, who needed not incremental improvement but fundamental reconstruction, adopting the winning model was a rational choice. Germany's lack of territorial ambitions in the Ottoman Empire, compared to the very direct interests of Russia, Britain, and France in Ottoman lands, made it a politically safer source of military expertise as well.

Koehler: A Mission Neutralised

The first German military mission arrived in Istanbul in 1882, led by a cavalry officer named Koehler. His mandate was straightforward: train Turkish officers and prepare recommendations for structural reform. What happened in practice was something quite different.

Sultan Abdülhamit's response to Koehler's arrival illustrated the central paradox of the reform era under his rule. He wanted a more capable army, but he feared one. An institution commanded by officers of genuine ability, trained in modern methods, and bound together by professional loyalty, was a potential challenge to his authority. His solution was to honour foreign advisors with gestures of personal favour that simultaneously removed them from any position of real influence. He promoted Koehler to the rank of general and appointed him as his aide-de-camp, an honour that in practice meant the German officer spent the majority of his time within the ceremonial orbit of the Imperial Palace rather than with the armies he had been sent to reform. The mission produced no meaningful results. Koehler died in 1883, barely a year after his arrival, without having left any substantial mark on the institution he had been tasked with transforming.

Goltz: The Man and His Ideas

The officer who replaced Koehler was a fundamentally different figure, and it was on him that the first German mission's real legacy would rest. Colmar von der Goltz was born in 1843 in East Prussia into an impoverished noble family, and had built his reputation through intellectual rather than battlefield distinction. He had served in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 1871, but it was as a military thinker and educator that he had made his name. In 1878 he was appointed lecturer in military history at the Berlin Military Academy, where he spent five years developing the ideas he would publish in 1883, the same year he departed for Istanbul, in his most influential work: Das Volk in Waffen, translated as The Nation in Arms.

The argument of Das Volk in Waffen was both strategic and sociological. Goltz contended that the era of cabinet wars, fought by professional armies on behalf of governments while civilian life continued undisturbed, was definitively over. Modern war, he argued, was total war, involving the full mobilisation of national society, its manpower, its industry, its railways, and its psychology. Victory went not merely to the side with the better-trained army but to the side that had more thoroughly prepared its entire national life for the demands of modern conflict. The book became a military classic almost immediately upon publication, and its influence extended far beyond Germany: it was translated into multiple languages, adopted as a theoretical handbook by several foreign armies, and read closely by a generation of Ottoman officers who would go on to shape the institution that fought the First World War. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk himself was among those who studied at the reformed Harbiye during the years that Goltz's influence over its curriculum was most pronounced.

Goltz arrived in Istanbul in June 1883. He was promoted to brigadier general in the Ottoman Army, appointed Inspector of the Ottoman Military Schools, and later made Deputy Chief of the General Staff and Vice President of the Ottoman General Staff. His dual role, overseeing both military education and the general staff, gave him a broader reach into the army's intellectual foundations than any previous foreign adviser had possessed.

Reforming the War College

Goltz's first and most consequential act was to diagnose the problem at the Mekteb-i Harbiye and begin changing it. When he took up his position as Inspector of Military Schools, he found an institution whose curriculum was oriented far more toward theoretical and engineering instruction than toward the practical preparation of officers for command. Students were taught subjects that had little relationship to what they would actually do in war. The French tradition that had shaped the school emphasised technical competence and formal procedure over the flexible, initiative-driven command style that Goltz, schooled in the Prussian tradition, regarded as the decisive quality in a modern officer.

He prepared a detailed memorandum identifying three fundamental problems in the school's teaching and proposed a systematic overhaul. Working from Prussian models, he reoriented the curriculum away from engineering-focused theoretical instruction toward practical tactics, military history, and the kind of decision-making exercises that trained officers to act independently under pressure. Textbooks were revised, with some written or co-authored by Goltz himself. Subjects central to German military education, including military history, applied tactics, topography, and mathematics, were given substantially greater prominence. The study of actual campaigns replaced abstract doctrine as the primary vehicle for teaching officers to think about war.

The school's name was changed to Mekteb-i Fünunu Harb, the School of War Science, reflecting the new ambition for a more rigorous and scientifically grounded curriculum. The War College, the Erkan-i Harbiye, the institution responsible for producing the army's staff officers, was reorganised along Prussian lines. Goltz selected the top graduates of the Harbiye for advanced training at the War College, aiming to build a professional general staff corps modelled on the Prussian system that he regarded as the foundation of German military effectiveness. The Erkan-i Harbiye, as a coherent professional concept and institutional structure, was in significant measure his creation.

Constraints and Contradictions

Despite these genuine achievements, Goltz's authority remained severely circumscribed throughout his twelve years in Istanbul, and he was under no illusions about why. His formal positions were impressive: general in the Ottoman Army, Inspector of Military Schools, Deputy Chief of the General Staff. In practice, he operated within limits that Abdülhamit enforced through obstruction rather than explicit prohibition. The Sultan allowed reform at the level of curricula and organisational charts while ensuring that the broader conditions that made reform meaningful, adequate funding, a merit-based promotion system, weapons actually distributed to troops, and units allowed to train together, remained unchanged.

Goltz wrote about the Sultan with barely concealed contempt. Those whose fathers had held comfortable palace sinecures, he observed, who had grown up in ease without knowing the struggle for survival, could not produce great commanders on the battlefield. As long as Abdülhamit and the existing ruling class remained at the helm, he concluded, one could not speak of the rescue of Turkey. These private views did not prevent him from continuing his work, but they reflected a clear-eyed assessment of the fundamental obstacle to everything he was trying to achieve.

The tension between Goltz's reforming ambitions and the Sultan's political priorities played out most visibly in the question of authority over promotions and appointments. Goltz could shape what officers learned at the War College, but he could not ensure that the officers trained under his system were the ones who received commands and promotions. The palace patronage network continued to operate alongside, and often in competition with, the merit-based criteria that Goltz was trying to institutionalise. Officers who had gone through his reformed curriculum could find themselves passed over in favour of men with court connections and no comparable professional preparation. The coexistence of a modernised educational system with an unreformed promotion system was one of the most damaging contradictions of the Hamidian military, and it was one that Goltz could expose but not resolve.

The Proof: The Greco-Turkish War of 1897

The practical test of what the first German mission had achieved came in the spring of 1897, when war broke out between the Ottoman Empire and Greece over the status of Crete and the question of Greek expansionism in Thessaly. Goltz had returned to Germany the previous year, but the officers who went to war against Greece were, in significant numbers, products of the reformed War College and the changed curriculum he had introduced over twelve years.

The results confounded the expectations of most European observers, who had anticipated an Ottoman performance roughly consistent with the army's recent history of failure. Instead, Ottoman forces, commanded by officers who bore the marks of German-influenced training, advanced with discipline and coherence through Thessaly, winning a series of engagements that drove Greek forces back and threatened Athens itself. The war was effectively over militarily when the great powers intervened diplomatically to impose an armistice. The Ottoman Army had been winning so decisively that external political intervention was required to stop it from achieving a complete military victory.

The 1897 campaign was not evidence that the Ottoman Army had been fully transformed. Many of its deeper problems, the alaylı officers still filling large portions of the corps, the inadequate reserve training system, the logistical weaknesses, the financial constraints on equipment and supply, remained intact. But it was clear evidence that Goltz's educational reforms had produced a cohort of capable, professionally trained staff officers and commanders who could plan and execute operations at a level that the pre-reform army had been incapable of. The investment in twelve years of patient institutional work had produced a measurable return, even if that return remained far short of what a fully reformed army would have achieved.

The Legacy

When Goltz departed Istanbul in 1895, elevated to the Ottoman rank of mushir (field marshal) in recognition of his service, he left behind an institution that was genuinely different from the one he had found. The Mekteb-i Harbiye was producing more graduates, better educated, and trained in a more practically oriented tradition than its French-influenced predecessor had managed. The War College had been reorganised as a serious staff training institution. A generation of officers had been exposed to German military thought, to the ideas of Das Volk in Waffen, and to a conception of war as a demanding intellectual as well as physical enterprise. Among the young cadets who passed through this reformed system in the 1890s and early 1900s were men who would command Ottoman armies in the First World War.

The War Academy and the Officer Question

The Ottoman officer system was built as a formal pipeline (rüşdiye, idadi, the Harbiye, and the Erkan-i Harbiye) but chronic underfunding and political interference prevented it from producing enough trained officers for a mass army.
The system’s apex institutions, especially the War Academy and War College, were designed to produce professional officers and staff officers, but limited intake meant the army was always structurally short of educated commanders.
This created a deep divide between mektepli officers (formally educated, staff-trained, German-influenced) and alaylı officers (promoted by experience and seniority), producing cultural hostility and competing visions of military professionalism.
After 1908, CUP-led reforms empowered the mektepli and marginalized the alaylı, resolving the institutional struggle in principle but leaving the army with a more professional yet numerically insufficient officer corps on the eve of the First World War.

The Ottoman Army's officer production system rested on a hierarchy of institutions that, in theory, created a clear and progressive pathway from early schooling to commissioned rank. In practice, chronic underfunding, uneven quality, and the political distortions described elsewhere in this article prevented the system from functioning as designed, but understanding its structure is essential to understanding both what the reformers were trying to build and why the task proved so difficult.

The foundational layer of the pipeline was the rüşdiye, the secular secondary school introduced in 1838 as part of Sultan Mahmud II's broader modernisation effort. By the 1890s, rüşdiye schools had spread to most provincial towns across the empire, with over 35,000 students enrolled by 1895. Their curriculum covered languages, mathematics, science, history, and religion over a four-year programme. Military rüşdiyeler, separate institutions with a more explicitly martial character, fed directly into the next level: the military preparatory schools known as idadi. These institutions, introduced in 1845 initially in Istanbul and gradually extended to the provinces, provided the bridge between secondary education and the War Academy. Their upper years were explicitly designed to prepare students for the competitive entrance process of the Mekteb-i Harbiye.

The War Academy itself, the Mekteb-i Harbiye or Imperial School of Military Sciences, had been founded in 1834 under Marshal Ahmed Fevzi Pasha and Mehmed Namık Pasha, producing its first class of commissioned officers in 1841. By the late nineteenth century the institution occupied a campus in the Pangaltı district of Istanbul, accepting cadets typically between the ages of 14 and 18 and putting them through a multi-year programme that combined military subjects with general education. Annual enrollment fluctuated between approximately 300 and 600 cadets, a figure that, when set against the size of the army the school was supposed to officer, made the chronic shortage of educated officers mathematically inevitable. Graduates were commissioned as second lieutenants (mülazım-ı sani) and assigned to units across the empire, often finding themselves isolated among older, less formally educated officers who viewed them with a mixture of resentment and suspicion.

The apex of the system was the Erkan-i Harbiye, the War College, a two-year staff training institution whose sole mission was to produce the general staff officers who would plan operations, manage headquarters, and eventually command formations. Entry was competitive and restricted to the best graduates of the Harbiye. The concept and organisational structure of the Erkan-i Harbiye were, as noted in the previous section, largely the work of Colmar von der Goltz, who modelled the institution on the Prussian General Staff Academy.

The Mektepli and the Alaylı: A Divided Officer Corps

The existence of this educational pipeline, however imperfect, created the fundamental division in the late Ottoman officer corps: between those who had passed through it, the mektepli, and those who had not, the alaylı. These were not merely different educational backgrounds; they represented different worlds, different cultures, and ultimately different conceptions of what the army was and what it was for.

The mektepli officer was a product of a decade-long institutional formation beginning in childhood. He had sat in classrooms learning mathematics, military history, tactics, and European languages. He had been examined, ranked, and selected at multiple points. He thought of himself as a professional, a technician of war, a member of an elite whose authority rested on knowledge and tested competence. He had been exposed, particularly after Goltz's curricular reforms, to German military thought, to the concept of the officer as an independent decision-maker, and to a model of warfare that demanded intelligence and initiative rather than mere obedience.

The alaylı occupied a completely different position. He had risen through the ranks by seniority and service, promoted by decisions made at regimental level without reference to any examination or educational criterion. He often had little formal education of any kind. What he possessed instead was decades of practical experience, an intimate knowledge of his soldiers and their capabilities, and a deep personal authority rooted in long shared service. He was, in many cases, genuinely trusted by his men in a way that a young mektepli lieutenant fresh from the Harbiye was not. But he had received no instruction in the principles that governed modern warfare, could not read a staff map with facility, could not write the operational orders that corps and divisional headquarters required, and could not supervise the kind of combined-arms training that the reformed army needed to conduct.

The cultural and psychological gulf between the two groups was wide enough that it expressed itself in open social antagonism. Mektepli officers regarded the alaylı with professional contempt, seeing them as a dead weight dragging the army back toward the incompetence that had produced the humiliations of the century. Alaylı officers regarded the mektepli with resentment, seeing them as arrogant young men who had never experienced real hardship or battle, whose theoretical knowledge gave them unearned authority over men with decades of service. The contempt ran in both directions, and the army contained both groups in proportions that made the tension structural rather than occasional.

A further complication was the presence of a third category that sat outside both. Princes and other prominent statesmen were granted military ranks at birth or by virtue of their position, the so-called "born officers," adding a layer of unearned seniority that both groups of genuine officers found demoralising. A young lieutenant who had spent years progressing through the rüşdiye, the idadi, and the Harbiye could find his career blocked by a prince who had never undergone any military formation whatsoever.

The CUP and the Radicalisation of the Mektepli

The division between mektepli and alaylı was not merely a professional or cultural conflict within the army. It was a political one, and understanding it is essential to understanding why the 1908 revolution took the form it did and who drove it.

The mektepli officers were, almost without exception, younger. They had been formed in an environment that exposed them to European ideas, European military theory, and European models of institutional organisation. They had read Goltz. Some had been sent abroad to study in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, London, or Petersburg, and had returned with a direct understanding of how the armies of the great powers functioned and how starkly the Ottoman institution compared. They understood the army's failings better than anyone, and they were uniquely positioned to see that those failings were not accidental but structural, rooted in a system of patronage and personal autocracy that Abdülhamit had deliberately maintained.

Yet these same officers were almost entirely powerless to change anything. Their professional formation had given them the knowledge to diagnose the army's problems with precision. The political system denied them any legitimate means to act on that diagnosis. Promotion was controlled by a palace network to which they had no access. Merit was not rewarded. Initiative was viewed with suspicion. The reformed War College and the improved Harbiye were producing officers who were demonstrably more capable than their predecessors, but placing those officers in an institution where capability was penalised and mediocrity was rewarded by connection. The frustration this generated was intense and, over time, radicalising.

By the early 1900s, the mektepli officers, particularly those serving in Macedonia, had become the primary human material of the reform movement that would eventually produce the Young Turk revolution of 1908. The Committee of Union and Progress, the CUP, had explicitly restricted membership to officers of mektepli rather than alaylı background, an organisational decision that both reflected and reinforced the political character of the educated officer class. These were men who had studied history, who understood what modern states and modern armies looked like, and who had concluded that the Ottoman Empire could not survive without fundamental political change. When the revolution came in July 1908, it was organised in Macedonian barracks and led by men who had passed through the Harbiye, graduated from the Erkan-i Harbiye, and spent years watching the army they had been trained to serve being deliberately kept weak by a sultan who feared it.

The Conflict After 1908 and Its Consequences

The revolution that restored the constitution in 1908 did not resolve the tension between mektepli and alaylı; it transformed it into open conflict with political stakes. The alaylı officers, who had been the dominant majority throughout the Hamidian period, now faced a CUP-controlled reform process that was explicitly aimed at displacing them. They were not passive. The 31 March Incident of April 1909, a counter-revolutionary uprising in Istanbul that was in significant part driven by alaylı soldiers and officers who feared the consequences of the reform agenda, was partly an expression of this institutional conflict. The alaylı demanded equal treatment with the mektepli and protested vehemently against the prospect of mass retirements. Their demonstration combined with broader social discontent to produce a brief but serious challenge to the new constitutional order before the Action Army marching from Macedonia suppressed it.

The aftermath of the suppression accelerated the process of forced retirement that the alaylı had feared. The age-limit decree of 1909 and the mass retirements that followed were described in the section covering the post-1908 reforms; what belongs here is the institutional context that made those retirements so fraught. They were not simply a technical adjustment of the officer corps. They were the culmination of a decades-long conflict between two fundamentally different conceptions of what an Ottoman officer was, a conflict that had begun in the classrooms of the reformed Harbiye and played out in the barracks and on the streets of Istanbul in the first years of the constitutional era.

The outcome was that the army acquired a more homogeneous, more formally educated officer corps, but at the cost of a severe numerical deficit that it never fully made good before the First World War began. The mektepli had won their institutional argument. The army would be theirs to lead. What they had not resolved, and what the war would demonstrate with brutal clarity, was whether the numbers of educated officers the system could produce were anywhere near sufficient for the scale of conflict the empire was about to enter.

Goltz Returns

After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, the CUP invited Colmar von der Goltz back to advise on military reform, seeking practical guidance for an army undergoing major reorganization.
Goltz focused on improving training standards, introducing standardized instruction for all branches and helping expand German advisory support within Ottoman units.
He played an important role in promoting large-scale field manoeuvres and the adoption of the modern triangular division structure, bringing Ottoman organization closer to European standards.
Although officer exchanges abroad and German advice improved professionalism, Goltz recognized that persistent shortages of officers, resources, and infrastructure limited the overall impact of reform before the Balkan Wars and the First World War.

When the Young Turk revolution of July 1908 restored the constitution and ended Abdülhamit's personal autocracy, the new leadership of the Committee of Union and Progress inherited an army that was simultaneously their primary instrument of political power and their most urgent institutional problem. The weapons that had been locked in depots were distributed to the armies. The mass retirement of over-age officers was set in motion. The structural reorganisation that would culminate in the Military Organisation Regulation of 1910 was under active preparation. But the CUP reformers were also acutely aware that reorganising charts and forcing retirements were not the same as training an army to fight. The institution needed practical guidance, and the most logical source of that guidance was the man who had done more than anyone to shape its officer corps over the preceding two decades.

The request to Goltz came from Ali Rıza Pasha, the Minister of War, in 1909, channelled through Major Enver Bey, then serving as Ottoman military attaché in Berlin and already one of the most politically connected officers in the reform movement. Enver was an ideal intermediary: he was personally known to Goltz from his time in Berlin, he was fluent in German, and he possessed the combination of charm and authority that allowed him to present the request as both flattering and urgent. Goltz's response was characteristic of the man: measured, candid, and attentive to practical constraints. He was approaching retirement and could not offer another extended posting. What he could offer was periodic visits of approximately four months each year, timed to follow the German autumn manoeuvres, during which he would be available for consultative work. He set a salary requirement of 250 golden liras per month. The Ministry of War accepted these terms without hesitation.

The Character of the Second Mission

Goltz's return was a different undertaking from his original twelve-year tenure, and it is important to understand precisely what it was and what it was not. He was not resuming a formal institutional role as Inspector of Military Schools or Deputy Chief of General Staff. He was returning as a senior adviser of enormous personal prestige, whose influence rested less on any defined authority than on his relationships with the officer corps he had helped shape, his intellectual standing in German and Ottoman military circles, and his long familiarity with the specific problems of the Ottoman institution.

What he found on his return was an army in the early stages of a structural overhaul that was proceeding with genuine energy but without an adequate practical foundation. The reorganisation decreed in the regulation of July 1910 was ambitious: new corps headquarters, revised divisional structures, reformed conscription obligations, new training responsibilities assigned to the army inspectorates. But these changes were largely organisational in character. They told units how they were supposed to be structured; they did not, by themselves, give officers and soldiers the practical skills needed to operate within those structures effectively. The gap between the army's new organisational design and its actual field capability was wide, and Goltz understood this gap as well as anyone alive.

His primary focus during these visits was on practical training standards, which had been one of the weakest dimensions of the Ottoman Army throughout the Hamidian period. He established standardised training protocols for each of the main branches: infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engineering. These protocols gave unit commanders a common framework and a set of measurable benchmarks against which training could be assessed, something the army had previously lacked almost entirely. Alongside this, fourteen German officers of ranks between captain and lieutenant colonel were brought to Turkey and assigned to Ottoman posts at one grade higher than their German rank, providing technical expertise and direct training supervision at unit level across multiple branches simultaneously.

The Autumn Manoeuvre of 1910

One of Goltz's most concrete contributions to this second period of engagement was a direct one: it was during or shortly after one of his visits in 1910 that he planted the ideas directly responsible for the Ottoman Army conducting its first formal autumn field manoeuvre, held in October and November of that year. The manoeuvre involved the First and Second Corps, whose formations were exercised over the terrain between the Istanbul-Edirne railway line, around the towns of Lüleburgaz and Babaeski in eastern Thrace — the same ground, as fate would have it, where the army would fight the Bulgarians in one of the decisive engagements of the First Balkan War only two years later.

The exercise lasted four days and concluded with a formal parade review. Its significance went beyond the specific tactical lessons of those four days. It was the Ottoman Army's first serious attempt to conduct large-scale field training of the kind that had been standard practice in the German, French, and Russian armies for decades, and which was considered essential to testing whether organisational structures actually worked in the field under realistic conditions. Analysis of the terrain, identification of geographic advantages and obstacles, and the testing of communication between formations were all among its objectives. Goltz's influence on the design and execution of the manoeuvre, rooted in his long experience of the German autumn manoeuvres after which his Ottoman visits were deliberately scheduled, gave the exercise a professional character it could not have had without him.

He also advised on and helped conceptualise the structural change that was among the most significant of this entire reform period: the adoption of the triangular division structure, in which a division was built around three infantry regiments rather than four. This was the emerging standard among the leading European armies, offering a better balance between mass and manoeuvre than the older four-regiment square division, and Goltz's advocacy for it during this period was directly credited in Ottoman military circles with accelerating its adoption.

Sending Officers Abroad: Promise and Limitation

Alongside the German officers arriving in Turkey, the reform programme of this period also sent promising young Ottoman officers abroad for training in the armies of the European great powers. Officers were dispatched to Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, London, and Petersburg, with the intention that they would absorb the latest doctrinal thinking, observe exercises and manoeuvres, and return with practical knowledge that could be diffused through the Ottoman institution.

In theory this was sound policy, and it produced some individual benefits. Officers who spent time in Berlin or Vienna returned with genuine familiarity with German and Austro-Hungarian staff methods, with an understanding of how modern headquarters functioned, and with personal contacts in allied armies that would matter when those armies became operational partners after 1914. The best of these officers brought back knowledge that they were capable of applying.

In practice, however, the programme confronted a fundamental structural problem that limited its institutional impact. The military doctrines of the armies to which Ottoman officers were sent were not interchangeable. The German system, the French system, the Russian system, and the Austro-Hungarian system differed from one another in their assumptions about command authority, the role of initiative, the relationship between staff and commander, and the tactical principles governing offensive and defensive operations. An officer who spent a year with the French Army and an officer who spent a year in Berlin had absorbed not merely different techniques but different intellectual frameworks for thinking about war. When both returned to the same Ottoman headquarters and tried to apply what they had learned, the result was not synthesis but confusion. Doctrinal diversity among the senior officer corps made it harder, not easier, to develop coherent shared practices. The German connection was by far the dominant one, reinforced by Goltz's influence and the overall orientation of the reform programme, but it was not the only one, and the resulting eclecticism created coordination problems that were never fully resolved.

There was also a more basic difficulty. The officers sent abroad were, by selection, among the more capable and better-educated of the mektepli cohort. They were precisely the men who most needed to be at home, filling the officer shortage created by the mass retirements of 1909 and 1911. Sending them to Europe for a year or more simultaneously deprived the army of their services at a moment when cadres were dangerously thin, and there was no guarantee that when they returned, the institutional environment would allow them to apply what they had learned. An officer who had studied German staff methods at the Kriegsakademie could find himself assigned to a command where the headquarters had neither the trained personnel nor the communications equipment to implement those methods, and where the distance between doctrinal ideal and practical reality was large enough to be demoralising.

The Honest Assessment

Goltz himself, with the clear-eyed realism that had characterised his Ottoman engagement since 1883, was under no illusions about the limits of what the second mission was achieving. His personal relationships with many of the senior officers who had been his students during the first mission gave him an unusually direct view of the army's internal state, and the picture was mixed. The commitment to reform among the CUP leadership was genuine and in many respects more energetic than anything the Hamidian period had allowed. But the underlying structural problems such as the officer shortage, the logistical inadequacy, the financial constraints on equipment and ammunition, the enormous diversity of the fronts on which Ottoman armies might have to fight were not problems that training standards and periodic advisory visits could solve. The German contribution could not go further than the theoretical level, as his previous work had demonstrated, and the practical benefits depended on an institutional environment that the Ottoman Army, for all the progress of the post-1908 period, had not yet fully managed to create.

When Goltz retired from the German Army following the 1911 manoeuvres and was promoted to the rank of Generalfeldmarschall, the formal framework of his periodic Ottoman visits came to an end. The second German Military Mission under Liman von Sanders, which arrived in December 1913, would take over where Goltz's consultative work had left off, but with a broader mandate, more personnel, and the far more urgent conditions of an army that had just been severely tested by the Balkan Wars. The thread connecting the two missions ran through Goltz personally: he knew Liman, he had helped shape the officer corps that Liman would now command, and his influence on Ottoman military culture was woven deeply enough into the institution that it persisted long after he had ceased to hold any formal role.

The Balkan Wars: Catastrophe as Catalyst

The First Balkan War exposed the weakness of incomplete reforms. The army had been reorganized but remained short of officers, poorly trained, and inadequately prepared for large-scale war.
Ottoman forces suffered major defeats and territorial losses. Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece captured most of the empire's remaining European territories, including Thessaloniki and Edirne.
Logistical failures and disease worsened the catastrophe. Ammunition shortages, weak mobilization, cholera outbreaks, and massive refugee flows undermined the war effort.
The Balkan Wars triggered deeper reforms. The crisis strengthened the CUP government and led to the arrival of Otto Liman von Sanders and a new phase of German-led military modernization.

When the First Balkan War began on 8 October 1912, the Ottoman Army was in arguably the most dangerous position a military institution can occupy: midway through a fundamental transformation. The post-1908 reform programme had achieved real things. The mass retirement of over-age officers had cleared the worst of the Hamidian deadwood from the cadres. The Military Organisation Regulation of 1910 had established a new structural framework. The autumn manoeuvre of that same year had given the First and Second Corps their first experience of large-scale field exercise. Goltz had returned and established branch training standards. The triangular division structure was being adopted.

But none of this was consolidated. Units had been reorganised on paper without being adequately retrained in their new roles. The army's mobilisation machinery, the process of calling up reservists and assembling them into their wartime formations with their weapons, equipment, and supplies, had been designed under the new regulations but never fully tested. The officer corps was numerically depleted from the retirements; as previously noted, only 55 percent of officer positions were filled at the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, leaving units operating with roughly half the commissioned leadership they required. New corps headquarters had been established, but the staff officers who were supposed to man them had not yet been trained in the procedures the new structure demanded. The army that marched to war in October 1912 was carrying the skeleton of a reformed institution over the body of an unreformed one, and the Balkan coalition forces were about to expose every seam.

The empire had also entered the Balkan Wars directly from another conflict. The Italo-Turkish War of 1911 and 1912, fought in Libya and the Dodecanese, had consumed weapons, ammunition, officers, and political attention for over a year before the Balkan coalition struck. The army had planned to mobilise 750,000 officers and soldiers for the Balkan conflict, but by the time war began, only approximately 12,000 officers, 325,000 enlisted men, 47,960 animals, 2,318 artillery pieces, and 388 machine guns were ready for battle. The army was fighting a new war while still absorbing the exhaustion and losses of an old one.

The Course of the First Balkan War

The Balkan League, composed of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro, had prepared its coalition carefully and attacked with a coordination that the Ottomans had not anticipated. The strategic problem facing the Ottoman high command was the simultaneous pressure on two geographically distinct fronts: Thrace in the east, where Bulgarian forces were the primary adversary, and Macedonia in the west, where Serbian and Greek forces attacked concurrently. The total length of the front, the distances between the two theatres, and the limits of the Ottoman railway network made it impossible to concentrate strength at both simultaneously. Extended and insecure communications left the Ottoman forces in Macedonia effectively isolated from timely reinforcement or supply.

In Thrace the main Bulgarian armies, advancing after the declaration of war on 18 October, caught the Ottoman Eastern Army in a partially mobilised state around Kırk Kilise. The Ottomans attempted an aggressive flanking operation against a Bulgarian force that was numerically superior, and the manoeuvre was executed with inadequate intelligence and poor coordination between formations. The defeat at Kırk Kilise on 24 October was followed eight days later by the Battle of Lüleburgaz, the largest engagement in Europe between the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the First World War, in which Bulgarian forces outnumbered the Ottoman defenders in artillery and overwhelmed their positions over four days of fighting. A decisive factor in the Ottoman defeat at Lüleburgaz was the near-total collapse of the logistical and supply system: the failure of supply lines led to a critical shortage of artillery ammunition across the front, forcing the Ottoman guns into silence just when sustained fire support was most desperately needed.

The retreating Ottoman forces fell back in disorder, abandoning equipment and artillery, with confused command arrangements contributing at every stage to the disorganisation of the withdrawal. Only an effective rearguard action by the III Corps allowed the army to reach the Çatalca defensive line, a naturally strong position running 30 kilometres from the Lake of Terkos in the north to the Sea of Marmara in the south, approximately 30 kilometres west of Istanbul. The position had been fortified with German advice since the Russian war of 1878 and represented the last defensible line before the capital itself. The Bulgarian advance halted here in November 1912, exhausted and epidemic-ridden. An attack on the Çatalca positions on 17 November failed, and both sides settled into a winter stalemate.

In Macedonia the news was equally dire. At the Battle of Kumanovo on 23 October, Serbian forces crushed the western Ottoman army and opened the way into Macedonia and beyond. Greek forces advanced north through Thessaly, winning engagements at the Sarantaporo pass and at Giannitsa before accepting the surrender of Thessaloniki on 9 November, along with its garrison of 26,000 men. The loss of Thessaloniki, the empire's second city, its largest Aegean port, and the birthplace of the Young Turk movement itself, was a shock of enormous proportions. Bulgarian forces meanwhile laid siege to Edirne, the former Ottoman capital in Thrace, which held out until March 1913 before falling after a siege of five months.

Disease and the Human Cost

The military catastrophe was compounded by epidemic disease on a scale that turned the Çatalca position from a military bastion into a charnel house. The retreating army arrived at Çatalca in conditions of extreme physical deterioration, starved, thirsty, and wearing summer clothing in the onset of a Balkan winter. In early November 1912 a cholera outbreak struck the III Corps. On a single day, 15 November, 2,786 men fell ill and 817 died of cholera. These numbers rose in the days that followed. The sick, the wounded, and tens of thousands of Muslim refugees fleeing the Bulgarian advance all converged on Istanbul simultaneously. Within days, 50,000 people had poured into the city, and with them came the cholera epidemic. The disease that had already been afflicting Ottoman populations sporadically since 1910, killing over 12,000 people in the epidemic of 1911 alone, now had a new and catastrophic vector of transmission in the collapsing army and the displaced civilian population.

The scale of the human suffering was enormous. In the lost Balkan provinces, Muslim populations who had lived there for generations were expelled, fled, or were killed. The empire lost more than 80 percent of its remaining European territory and approximately four million subjects, the majority of them Muslim. A vast wave of muhacir, Muslim refugees, poured into Anatolia from the Balkans over the following years, arriving traumatised, destitute, and in many cases carrying disease. They placed enormous strain on a state already financially exhausted by the wars, and their presence became a defining feature of the social and political landscape of Anatolia in the years leading to the First World War.

The Second Balkan War and the Recovery of Edirne

The armistice concluded at Çatalca in December 1912 did not end the conflict. Peace negotiations in London broke down in January 1913, and the CUP, which seized power in the coup of 23 January engineered by Enver Pasha and his associates precisely to prevent the government from surrendering Edirne, resumed the war. Further fighting in the spring of 1913 produced no reversal of the military situation on the main fronts, and on 26 March 1913 Edirne fell to Bulgarian forces after its garrison's food supplies were exhausted. The Treaty of London of 30 May 1913 formally ceded to the Balkan states virtually all remaining Ottoman territory in Europe.

Within weeks, however, the Balkan coalition collapsed under the weight of its own internal rivalries. Bulgaria, dissatisfied with the distribution of the conquered territories, attacked its former allies Serbia and Greece in late June 1913. Romania joined the war against Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Army seized the opportunity. In July 1913, Ottoman forces under the command of Enver Pasha marched into Eastern Thrace and recaptured Edirne on 21 July without significant resistance. The Treaty of Istanbul of September 1913 confirmed the return of Edirne and eastern Thrace to Ottoman sovereignty. It was a fragile recovery achieved against a distracted and exhausted opponent rather than through any demonstration of restored military capability, but its symbolic importance was immense. The recapture of Edirne, the city whose loss had been experienced as a national humiliation of the deepest order, was celebrated throughout the empire and used by the CUP to project an image of military regeneration and political resolve.

What the Balkan Wars Revealed

Set against the optimism of the reform programme, the Balkan Wars were a profound humiliation and a revealing diagnosis. They demonstrated with painful clarity that reorganising an army on paper was not the same as training it to fight, and that institutional transformation, however genuine, could not be rushed past a certain point without catastrophic risk.

Several specific failures stood out with particular clarity. The mobilisation system, which was the foundation of every modern army's capacity to project force, had failed in precisely the ways that had been theoretically identified but never adequately addressed: the redif reserve formations were not ready, their equipment was inadequate, their officers were absent or incapable, and the logistical machinery needed to move them and supply them in the field broke down under operational pressure. The problem of coordinating formations that had been trained in isolation from one another and had never exercised together manifested immediately in the confused and poorly coordinated attacks that characterised Ottoman offensive operations in Thrace. The officer corps, thinned by the mass retirements and operating below establishment, was managing the full weight of a major war with only half its required commissioned leadership.

The doctrine of offensive encirclement that the German-influenced reform programme had promoted, drawing on the Prussian tradition of Cannae-style battles of annihilation, proved entirely beyond the army's actual capacity to execute. The tactical proficiency of the Ottoman officer corps was judged by contemporaries and historians to have been below European standards, and the army's frequent numerical advantage on individual battlefields could not compensate for failures of staff work, supply, and coordination. On the other hand, where Ottoman forces held prepared defensive positions, as at Çatalca, they showed themselves capable of sustained and effective resistance, a pattern that would repeat at Gallipoli three years later.

The Balkan Wars also exposed the consequences of the empire's financial exhaustion in direct operational terms. The ammunition crisis at Lüleburgaz, which silenced Ottoman artillery at the decisive moment of the war's largest battle, was not an accident of logistics; it was the predictable result of years of inadequate procurement, insufficient stockpiling, and the absence of a modern military supply system. An army cannot fight a modern industrial war on the budget of a bankrupt state, and the Balkan Wars demonstrated this with a clarity that the preceding decade of theoretical reform had obscured.

Catastrophe as Political Catalyst

The military catastrophe had immediate and drastic political consequences, and these in turn became the driving force behind the third and most ambitious wave of military reform. The CUP coup of January 1913, which brought Enver Pasha and his associates to power in the most direct and violent fashion, was inseparable from the military disaster. The loss of Edirne, a former imperial capital and a city of enormous symbolic significance for the Muslim population of the empire, had made the existing government's position untenable. The CUP seized on the territorial humiliation as both justification and pretext for taking full control of the state.

The political transformation that followed the coup was total. Within months the CUP had imprisoned or exiled opposition figures, consolidated control of the cabinet, and placed the reform of the military at the centre of its governing programme. The lesson drawn from the Balkan Wars was not that the reform programme had been wrong in its conception, but that it had been insufficiently radical and insufficiently funded. The German military model remained the goal, but a more serious and authoritative German engagement was needed than periodic advisory visits and the goodwill of Goltz Pasha. What was required was a formal military mission with genuine executive authority, large numbers of trained officers embedded directly in Ottoman formations, and the political will to implement change even where it created friction with existing institutional interests.

The interval between the armistice of December 1912 and the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 was barely twenty months. In that compressed window, the Ottoman Army attempted to absorb the lessons of the Balkan Wars, rebuild its depleted officer cadres, re-equip with German weapons, and prepare for a global conflict whose dimensions no one had yet fully imagined. The Liman von Sanders mission, which arrived in December 1913, was the direct institutional response to the Balkan catastrophe. Whether it could accomplish in months what three decades of slower reform had failed to complete was a question the battlefields of the First World War would answer.

The German Military Mission of 1913

After the Balkan Wars, the CUP sought a stronger German role in military reform. Ottoman leaders concluded that advisory missions were insufficient and requested German officers with direct authority over training, organization, and planning.
The new mission was led by Otto Liman von Sanders, who arrived in December 1913. He and dozens of German officers were placed in key command, staff, and educational positions throughout the Ottoman Army.
The mission triggered an international crisis. Russia strongly opposed a German general commanding forces responsible for defending the Straits, leading to the so-called Liman von Sanders Crisis and heightened tensions among the European powers.
Before 1914, the mission improved training, organization, and logistics. However, limited time and deep structural problems meant that many weaknesses remained unresolved when the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War.

The decision to seek a new and more authoritative German military mission was not made calmly or with deliberation. It was made in the aftermath of catastrophe, by men who had just watched their army collapse under Bulgarian, Serbian, and Greek pressure, and who understood that the previous approach to German engagement, periodic advisory visits, a handful of attached officers, consultative influence at best, had demonstrably failed. The lesson the CUP leadership drew from the Balkan Wars was not that reform was impossible but that it had not been pursued with sufficient authority or scale. What was now needed was not advisers but commanders: German officers embedded directly in Ottoman formations, with real executive power over training, organization, promotions, and operational planning.

Negotiations between Istanbul and Berlin began in June 1913, even before the Second Balkan War had run its course. The timing reflected both the urgency felt by the CUP and the strategic calculations of Berlin. Germany's interest in the Ottoman Empire had deepened through the preceding decades of railway construction, commercial investment, and military engagement, and the Balkan Wars had made clear that a weakened Ottoman state, humiliated and stripped of its European territories, was a liability to German strategic plans for the region. A stronger Ottoman Army was in Germany's interest as well as the empire's own. The negotiations were not without friction, but both parties had strong reasons to reach an agreement quickly, and the contract was signed on 27 October 1913.

The Man Chosen: Otto Liman von Sanders

Liman von Sanders arrives in Istanbul where he is received by Ahmet İzzet Paşa

The German government selected as the mission's leader Lieutenant General Otto Viktor Karl Liman, who had taken the name Liman von Sanders in June 1913 on the occasion of Kaiser Wilhelm II's 25th accession anniversary, when he was elevated to the nobility. Born in 1855 in Stolp, Pomerania, the son of a merchant, Liman had joined the army in 1874 and spent nearly a decade in the German General Staff before rising through divisional commands to his current position as commander of the 22nd Prussian Division in Kassel.

He was not the obvious choice. He had no prior experience of the Ottoman Empire, spoke no Turkish, and had no knowledge of the country, its politics, or its military culture. He had not been part of the Goltz circle that had shaped a generation of Ottoman officers, and he came without the personal relationships with the institution that Goltz had accumulated over thirty years. What he brought instead were the qualities of an energetic, methodical divisional commander: a strong will, an insistence on clear standards and their enforcement, and an impatience with the gap between doctrine and practice that had characterised Ottoman military performance in the Balkan Wars. He was, in the estimation of the German government, the right man to impose discipline and practical reform on a demoralised institution, even if he was not the most diplomatically sophisticated choice for an assignment that would immediately become one of the most contentious in European international relations.

The Terms of the Contract

The agreement signed on 27 October 1913 was in its scope far more ambitious than any previous German military engagement with the Ottoman Army. Under its terms, Liman von Sanders was appointed to lead the German Military Mission for five years. He was given the rank of Ottoman pasha and, critically, the direct command of the First Army Corps stationed in Istanbul, the most important operational formation in the empire, responsible for the defence of the capital and the Straits.

The mission's formal authority extended to overseeing inspections of all military units, directing military schools and training centres, holding membership in the Ottoman Military Council, and exercising veto rights over reorganisation, armament, education, training, supply, conscription, and mobilisation planning. The most critical command and administrative positions within the First Army Corps were to be held by German officers from the mission. Liman and his officers were also to be directly responsible for reforming military schools and supervising the modernisation process across the army as a whole.

The breadth of this authority was deliberate and reflected the CUP's firm conclusion that the principal failure of previous German engagements had been the limitation of German influence to an advisory role. Ottoman leaders had observed the mistake with Goltz's first mission: his authority had been kept restricted by a sultan who feared reform, and the gap between what Goltz could recommend and what he could enforce had nullified much of his potential impact. This time the authority was to be executive, not consultative. Liman von Sanders arrived in Istanbul on 14 December 1913 with a staff of ten officers. A further 32 German officers were already present or shortly followed, bringing the total to 42 and the scope of their assignments to every major formation and institution in the army.

The Personnel of the Mission

Each of the mission's senior officers was given a position that placed German expertise directly into the Ottoman chain of command rather than alongside it. General Bronsart von Schellendorf, a highly capable staff officer who had already spent time in the Ottoman Empire in 1911, was appointed commander of the 3rd Division and simultaneously took up the post of First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Ottoman Army, a position that made him the second most senior figure in the army's operational planning machinery. His background made him particularly influential: in February 1914 the Sultan formally appointed him as one of the two sous-chiefs of the General Staff, and from that position he worked in close coordination with Enver Pasha on operational planning throughout the war, his proximity to the Minister of War making him arguably the most consequential German officer in the Ottoman Army during the conflict.

Colonel Zadernstorn was assigned command of the 5th Division, Colonel Tronnier the 10th Division, and Lieutenant Colonel Nicolai the 3rd Artillery Regiment. Captain Stange took command of the 8th Infantry Regiment, and Lieutenant Colonel von Strumbel became chief of staff of the German Military Mission itself. Lieutenant Colonel Feldmann was made head of the 3rd Department of the Turkish General Staff. The remaining German officers were distributed to various headquarters and military schools across the army, including positions in the logistics and supply apparatus and in the officer training establishments where the next generation of Ottoman commanders was being prepared.

By mid-1914 the number of German officers serving in the Ottoman Army had risen to approximately 70, organised by Liman into command, operational, and training sections. This was a qualitatively different kind of engagement from anything that had preceded it: not advice from the outside but direct German leadership at every level of the institutional structure simultaneously.

The Diplomatic Storm: The Liman von Sanders Crisis

The formal announcement of Liman von Sanders' appointment on 11 November 1913 triggered an immediate and severe international crisis, one that would reverberate through European diplomacy for two months and leave lasting damage to German-Russian relations in the months before the First World War.

Russia's objection was not principled but strategic. A German general in command of the First Army Corps meant a German general in command of the forces guarding the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits, the only maritime route between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Roughly half of Russian foreign trade, including the bulk of its grain exports, passed through those Straits. Russian access to warm-water ports was an ancient strategic priority, and Russian ambitions toward Istanbul itself were equally longstanding, discussed in private Entente communications as a potential reward for Russia in any future war that destroyed German power. Placing a German officer in operational command of the forces defending the Ottoman capital and the Straits was, from St. Petersburg's perspective, a direct threat to everything Russia hoped for in the region. Foreign Minister Sazonov protested vigorously from 18 November onward, warning that Germany was not acting in good faith and had no real intention of accommodating Russian concerns.

Sazonov made the affair a test of Entente solidarity, pressing France and Britain to take a united stand against Germany. France was prepared to support Russia. Britain was more cautious. Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey initially avoided direct involvement in a crisis he considered primarily a Russian concern, but as the situation escalated he was drawn in. On 7 January 1914, the same day the Ottoman government formally confirmed Liman's command through an imperial decree, Grey sent a telegram to the British ambassador in Berlin stating that the issue of German command in Istanbul was causing more concern than any other diplomatic matter. The Kaiser and his government felt the weight of three-power pressure; Russia, meanwhile, went so far as to begin internal discussions about whether the crisis might justify military action against the Ottoman Empire.

The resolution came through what one contemporary British diplomat described as bureaucratic sleight of hand. On 18 December 1913, the German ambassador in Istanbul, Hans von Wangenheim, suggested in a telegram to Berlin that one way to defuse the crisis would be to remove Liman from direct command of the First Army Corps. The Kaiser agreed, and by January 1914 a compromise had been reached: Liman von Sanders was elevated to the ceremonial but less operationally threatening title of Inspector General of the Ottoman Army, relinquishing the corps command. The post was the same arrangement that had been applied to Goltz in his earlier career, a formula both sides understood. Russia, gritting its teeth, accepted the settlement, though Sazonov was under no illusion that German influence over the Ottoman Army had actually been reduced. It had not. The embedded German officers remained in their positions, Bronsart von Schellendorf retained his role at the heart of the General Staff, and Liman continued to direct the mission's reform programme with undiminished energy.

The crisis itself had consequences that extended well beyond the immediate question of Liman's title. It deepened Russian suspicion of German intentions in the Near East and hardened the alignment of interests among the Entente powers. The German willingness to push the appointment despite Russian objections, and the Russian willingness to entertain military action over a matter of strategic geography, illustrated in miniature the mechanisms that would produce general war less than a year later. The Liman von Sanders affair was not merely a dispute about one general's command; it was an early and very visible demonstration of how directly the Ottoman question intersected with the fundamental rivalries that were driving Europe toward catastrophe.

What the Mission Achieved Before the War

In the months between the mission's arrival in December 1913 and the outbreak of war in August 1914, Liman von Sanders and his officers worked intensively on the practical dimensions of Ottoman military reform that the previous decade had addressed only partially. Their approach was characteristically German: methodical, standards-driven, and focused on the gap between what units were supposed to be able to do and what they could actually do.

German officers took direct command of a division and five brigades and occupied staff positions across the army's headquarters structure. In 1914, as part of this accelerated reform process, over a thousand Ottoman officers were further purged from the rolls, continuing the clearance of underperforming cadres that Enver Pasha was simultaneously driving from his position as Minister of War. The army's structural reorganisation from seven armies into four inspectorates under a new Supreme Military Council, incorporating the triangular division structure that Goltz had earlier promoted, was finalised and given its practical implementation under the mission's supervision. Liman's authority over military schools meant that officer training was brought more closely into line with German practice, emphasising practical field work, map exercises, and the development of independent judgment at junior officer level.

The supply and logistics machinery that had failed so catastrophically at Lüleburgaz received particular attention. The ammunition crisis of the First Balkan War had been a direct result of inadequate supply planning and the absence of reliable procedures for moving stocks from depots to firing units in field conditions. German logistical expertise was directed at this problem, though the structural limitations of Ottoman transport infrastructure, the incomplete Baghdad Railway, the mountain gaps, the underdeveloped road network, meant that the problem could not be solved by planning alone.

The overall assessment of what the mission achieved before August 1914 is necessarily qualified. The time available was extremely short: barely eight months separated the mission's arrival and the outbreak of war. Some improvements were genuine and measurable. The army that fought at Gallipoli in 1915, less than two years after Liman's arrival, showed capabilities and defensive resilience that would have been difficult to predict from its Balkan Wars performance. But the structural constraints, the officer shortage, the logistical weakness, the financial inadequacy, and the absence of an industrial base capable of sustaining modern warfare, were beyond any military mission's power to resolve in eight months. The mission had been asked to accomplish in weeks what thirty years of earlier German engagement had failed to complete. It did what it could, and the results were enough to make the Ottoman Army a more formidable opponent than its enemies had anticipated. They were not enough to make it the army the empire needed.

Enver Pasha: Reformer and Gambler

Enver Pasha became Minister of War in 1914 and accelerated military reform. He purged over a thousand officers, promoted younger mektepli officers, and intensified training throughout the army.
He introduced major organizational reforms. New conscription laws, reserve reforms, literacy programs, and a modern divisional structure aimed to create a more professional and effective army. Working alongside the German mission led by Otto Liman von Sanders, he improved discipline, training, and command standards.
His reform drive was not matched by consistent operational judgment in wartime command. His emphasis on bold, centralized decision-making sometimes led to risky strategic choices that exposed the limits of the army’s improved but still fragile capabilities.

The most energetic and consequential of the Ottoman Army's reform architects in this period was also its most contradictory figure. In late 1913, the Committee of Union and Progress pressed for the appointment of Lieutenant Colonel Enver Bey, celebrated as the "Hero of Liberty" for his role in the Young Turk revolution, as Minister of War. His rank was too low for the position, so special promotions were engineered for his service in the Turco-Italian War and the Balkan Wars, and in less than three weeks a lieutenant colonel became a general. He was appointed chief of staff and Minister of War on 3 January 1914. He was 32 years old.

Enver moved immediately and with remarkable speed. His first act was the completion of the officer purge that had been underway since the Balkan Wars. More than a thousand officers were removed from the rolls in a single sweep. The targets were specifically those who had failed in the Balkan Wars or who were associated with the old alaylı culture that had resisted reform for decades. Among those dismissed were two field marshals, three lieutenant generals, thirty major generals, and thirty-five brigadier generals, a culling of the senior establishment so sweeping that it left the army's upper command structure emptied and refilled almost simultaneously with younger men. One contemporary source records that on a single day, Enver dismissed over 1,200 officers at a stroke. In their places he promoted young, educated, General Staff-trained officers, the mektepli graduates of the reformed Harbiye who were the human product of everything Goltz and the post-1908 reformers had been trying to build.

Discipline was Enver's governing principle. He intensified training so relentlessly that, as the existing text notes, officers and soldiers had neither time nor energy for political involvement: this was deliberate and explicit policy. Enver had watched the army become a vehicle for political faction under Abdülhamit, and he was determined that under his leadership it would become a professional fighting force insulated from political distraction. He encouraged initiative and adhered strictly to a system of rewards and punishment, making clear that performance, not patronage, would determine advancement under his management.

He launched a new educational programme aimed not only at officer development but at basic literacy among enlisted men, introducing materials that allowed recruits to learn to read using a new phonetic approach to the Ottoman script. This was a recognition that an army whose soldiers could not read could not follow written orders or benefit from printed training manuals, a limitation that had constrained unit-level performance throughout the empire's military history.

In May 1914, a new conscription law revised and updated the Ottoman recruitment system, minimising exemptions and bringing the provisions more closely into line with the demands of a genuine mass army. The redif reserve system, which had proved so disastrously unready in the Balkan Wars, was restructured under new regulations that placed conscription at the local regional level, aimed at creating reserves whose members were actually traceable, trainable, and mobilisable rather than administrative fictions on paper rolls.

His structural vision for the peacetime army was clear: maintain a war-footing organisation in peacetime rather than scrambling to improvise new formations at the moment of mobilisation. Each army was to consist of corps of three divisions each. Each division was to comprise three infantry regiments, one artillery regiment, and ancillary units. Infantry regiments had three battalions of four companies each, plus a machine gun detachment. Artillery regiments had two battalions of four guns each, with additional battalions earmarked for mobilisation. It was a rational and coherent design, fully consistent with contemporary European practice. Its weakness was that it required approximately 450,000 additional men to fill the cadres, a number that peacetime conscription could not provide and that made the army's wartime structure dependent on a mobilisation machinery that had not yet been tested.

The Gap Between Vision and Reality

Enver's reforms were genuine and their effects measurable. The army that fought at Gallipoli in April 1915 was, in its discipline, its unit cohesion, and its tactical effectiveness, a recognisably different institution from the one that had collapsed in Macedonia in 1912. Officers were younger and better trained. Training was more intensive and more systematic. The German military mission under Liman von Sanders was working in close coordination with Enver's programme, embedded in formations and schools throughout the army, and the combination of German technical expertise and Enver's organisational energy produced results in the months before the war that exceeded what either could have achieved alone.

Enver Pasha addressing regimental commanders • "I. Dünya Savaşı'nda Osmanlı Cepheleri", Istanbul Military Museum, 2016

But the same qualities that made Enver an effective reformer also carried the seeds of catastrophic failure in command. He had enormous confidence in his own judgment, a confidence that had been reinforced by a career in which boldness had consistently been rewarded: the Young Turk revolution, the suppression of the counter-revolution, the recapture of Edirne, all had vindicated his instinct for decisive action. He modelled himself consciously on Napoleon, whom he studied closely and whose operational style, which was about rapid movement, concentration at the decisive point, the willingness to accept risk in pursuit of annihilating victory, he attempted to translate directly into Ottoman conditions. He was, as Liman von Sanders bluntly assessed, a man who thought of himself as a great military leader but whose actual operational judgment did not match that self-assessment.

The Battle of Sarıkamış in December 1914 and January 1915 demonstrated with terrible clarity the limits of his judgement. The Ottoman plan relied on highly mobile troops capable of reaching specific objectives at precise times, drawing on German and Napoleonic tactical principles. However, Ottoman forces were inadequately equipped for harsh winter conditions and suffered severe losses in the Allahüekber Mountains, with approximately 25,000 soldiers freezing to death before the main engagement even began. Enver had dismissed the experienced commander on the scene, Hasan İzzet Pasha, who had counselled caution, and assumed personal command. His strategy looked well on paper, but he had ignored external conditions such as the terrain and the weather, and tens of thousands of Turkish soldiers froze to death on the Allahüekber Mountains without firing a single shot. After the Sarıkamış disaster, Enver never again led an army in a campaign.

The Sarıkamış disaster encapsulates the central paradox of the reform era. The army had been transformed by men of genuine ability and ambition. Its structure, training, and command organisation had all improved dramatically since the dark days of Abdülhamit. Yet the same political culture that had driven the reform process, with its emphasis on personal authority, rapid self-promotion, and the suppression of institutional checks, had also placed in command of that army a man whose strategic overconfidence would cost it tens of thousands of lives in a single campaign.

The Ottoman Army that entered the First World War in November 1914 was the product of thirty years of reform conducted under the most adverse conditions imaginable including chronic financial constraint, political instability, successive military defeats, and the constant tension between the urgency of modernisation and the resistance of entrenched institutional interests. It had passed through the hands of German advisors from Koehler to Goltz to Liman von Sanders, each leaving their mark on its structure, its training, and its tactical doctrine. It had been shaken to its foundations by the Balkan Wars and rebuilt, partially, in the brief and frantic period that followed. The alaylı had been swept away, the command structure rationalised, and new weapons and formations introduced. Yet the gaps remained: in officers, in equipment, in logistical capacity, and in the institutional culture that still allowed a single minister's recklessness to destroy an entire army in a Caucasian winter. The reforms had made the Ottoman Army more formidable than it had any right to be given the empire's circumstances. They had not made it strong enough for the war it was about to fight.

PAGE LAST UPDATED ON 30 MAY 2026