We were fools to follow the British line and that’s why we ended up in Gallipoli

IN his response to my article on Gallipoli (March 23), Mark Cronin (Letters, March 25) reveals that the propaganda constructed to justify England’s invasion of Mesopotamia and Turkey during 1914/15 has done its job well in Ireland to this day.

To get to the point, Mr Cronin claims that, firstly, Turkey voluntarily and willingly entered the Great War on Germany’s side and, secondly, that Britain actually desired Turkish neutrality in that war.

Of course, these two assertions were commonplace in British publications and statements during the Great War and they formed the “official line”.

However, the following British Foreign Office memo, written by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, in October 1914, a few weeks before the declaration of war on Turkey, gives the true facts of the matter. Grey writes, in outlining British policy toward war on Turkey, that the policy was: “To delay the outbreak of war as long as we could, to gain as much time as we could, and to make it clear, when war came, that we had done everything to avoid war and that Turkey had forced it.” (From AL Macfie, The Straits Question in the First World War, Middle Eastern Studies, July 1983, page 49).

That tends to give the truth of the matter, from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, that England had every intention of going to war with Turkey and it was just a matter of timing.

But if Mr Cronin does not accept the word of Sir Edward Grey he will find plenty of evidence contained within my book – The Great War on Turkey – of Britain’s long-term ambitions in the region to incorporate parts of the Ottoman empire into the British empire, like Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf and Palestine. How would it have achieved such ambitions, one might ask, without a war involving the Ottomans? My book also lists all the attempts Turkey made in the years and months before the war to form defensive alliances with England, Russia and France – the powers that were intent, and who made secret agreements, to divide up its territory.

It shows how the Turks put their navy in the hands of the British admiralty, had British yards build its battleships, placed a British admiral in charge of the defences of the straits, entrusted its main armoury to the British Vickers Co and had the defensive plans of its capital drawn up by the Royal Navy.

Now, surely, if the Ottomans were intent on joining a war against the Entente Powers they were Turkeys voting for Christmas!

If Mr Cronin thinks the obscure incident in the Black Sea that was used for the Russian and then British declarations of war on the Turks was sufficient provocation for setting the Middle East ablaze with war, then surely he must admit the Austrians were justified in declaring war on Serbia, after the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg throne.

And that then really puts the cat among the pigeons with his argument.

In this country, nowadays, we are all too willing to accept England’s version of history as fact when our history and experiences should tell us that we were, and are, fools to do so. Wasn’t it that that led us to the shores of Gallipoli in the first place?

Dr Pat Walsh

Leyland Crescent

Ballycastle

Co Antrim