Alliance Diplomacy and the Rise of Anglo-Turkish Antagonism, October 1943-September 1944

Abstract

The foregoing discussions about Turkey and the war during late 1942 and the first half of 1943 (Chapters 4 and 6) focused particularly on the British perspective, at a time when Turkey did not bulk large in Soviet or American policy. Increasing security in the Caucasus reduced Soviet anxiety about Turkish opportunism in that area, while the fighting elsewhere in the Soviet Union remained bitter. The United States was, to a large extent, willing to leave Turkey to Britain. Their limited interests in the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East meant that they had been prepared to let Britain take the lead on behalf of the western Allies. Churchill believed that he had formalised this agreement at Casablanca, with Britain authorised to ‘play the hand’ in Turkey, as the United States did in China. In the autumn of 1943, however, Allied conferences drew Turkey back into international politics and Alliance diplomacy. More than ever, British policy towards Turkey was influenced by the interests and actions of its two Great Power allies, with the Soviet Union able at last to think clearly about its own ambitions for the post-war world, and the United States — now the dominant partner in the Anglo-American alliance — increasingly willing to overrule Churchill and the British and impose its own vision on Allied grand strategy. Churchill’s enduring ambition for a campaign in the eastern Mediterranean, and an Anglo-Soviet ‘junction’ via the Black Sea, remained the focus of increasingly desultory British efforts to bring Turkey into the war. The failure of this policy, by the end of 1943, resulted in a period of Anglo-Turkish antagonism, during the first 6 months of 1944, which dissipated only when the extent of post-war Soviet influence in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean became clearer in the summer of that year.