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Ordered to Die. A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War. Edward J. Erickson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. (265pp.- $67.95)
Ottoman Turkey's significance in the overall picture of World War I and its outcome is underscored by three landmark events associated with that war: (1) The inordinate endurance of the Turkish army in the face of enormous handicaps, such as the scarcity of a host of indispensable resources, an antiquated system of roads, a wholly inadequate transportation set-up, and widespread epidemics among the recruits that nearly crippled the force structure of that army. Nevertheless, that army remarkably managed to maintain a modicum of stamina and fighting spirit for four years of grueling warfare against the overwhelming armed forces of the Entente powers counter posed to them, i.e. Great Britain, Russia and France. (2) The direct and indirect role of that army in the organization and implementation of the wartime Armenian genocide. Noteworthy in this respect is the active involvement of its auxiliary units, in particular the irregular cavalry brigades and infantry regiments, and killer bands of the semi-autonomous Special Organization (Te§kilat-i Mahsusa), which were almost entirely led by a select group of staff and reserve officers of that army. (3) The costly failure of that army at the very least to preserve the Ottoman Empire, whose war-related ultimate collapse through a twist of fate and a combination of fortuitous circumstances served to spawn in the aftermath of the war the modern Republic of Turkey.
Given these conditions, a comprehensive study of the performance of that army during World War I, theoretically speaking, has the potential to enrich our knowledge in such areas as military organization, strategy, detailed staff planning, methods of deployment of reserves, and combat doctrines and tactics. Equally significant, however, such a study could, beyond the scope of these domains, illuminate an ancillary phenomenon of that war, a phenomenon that Toynbee classified as a devastating crime in his massive documentation of the Armenian genocide, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empirel91516, and which American ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, characterized as "the murder of a nation" in his book entitled Ambassador Morgenthau's Story. At issue here are the underlying governmental motivations and the mechanics of subverting the standard...