Ismail Enver Pasha was an Ottoman military officer and a leader of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. He became the main leader of the Ottoman Empire in both the Balkan Wars (1912–13) and in World War I (1914–18).
Background
Enver was born in Istanbul on 22 November 1881. Enver's father, Ahmed (c. 1860–1947), was an Albanian either a bridge-keeper in Monastir or a small town public prosecutor in the Balkans and his mother Ayşe an Gagauz peasant. His uncle was Halil Pasha (later Kut). Enver had two younger brothers, Nuri and Mehmed Kamil, and two younger sisters, Hasene and Mediha.
Education
He studied for different degrees in military schools in the empire and ultimately graduated from the Harp Akademisi with distinction in 1903. He became a major in 1906. He was sent to the Third Army, which was stationed in Salonica. During his service in the city, he became a member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).
Career
In 1906, as a young major, he was assigned to the headquarters of the politically turbulent Third Army at Monastir. Enver joined the revolutionary Young Turk movement. Two years later, on the verge of being arrested as a political criminal, he fled to the local mountains, and set off the insurgency that developed into the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.
Despite a wealth of political opportunity, Enver chose to continue with his military career. He went to Berlin as a military attaché, returning briefly to help defeat the counterrevolutionary movement of 1909. In 1911/1912 he distinguished himself in Turkey's war against Italy. The Italians drove him out of Benghazi where he commanded the local garrison, but Enver countered with a successful resistance movement in the Libyan hinterland.
During the Balkan Wars of 1912/1913 Enver rose to lasting national prominence. When the Turkish cabinet in January 1913 considered ending hostilities in the face of repeated military disasters, Enver led a small raiding party that ousted the government on January 23 and pushed the war forward. This set in motion the establishment of a full-fledged dictatorship under the Young Turks. In July 1913, during the Second Balkan War, Enver directed the advance that recaptured the Turkish stronghold of Adrianople. Promoted brigadier general, in January 1914 he took the cabinet post of war minister from the hands of Izzet Pasha. His marriage to the niece of the reigning sultan added to Enver's potent ability to shape Ottoman policy.
The view that Enver along with Talat and Cemal Pashas constituted a triumvirate dominating the Young Turks and controlling the Turkish government no longer commands scholarly agreement. Enver, however, enjoyed very substantial influence in Ottoman affairs. The youthful war minister helped bring Ottoman Turkey into World War I and then directed the course of his country's military policy. Although widely viewed by contemporaries and historians alike as Germany's firmest supporter among the Young Turks, Enver generally put Turkish interests first. A military planner on a grandiose scale (perhaps given confidence by his successes in smaller wars against weaker opponents) his campaign schemes turned out to be widely impractical.
His driving desire was to create a new Turkish empire based on ethnic solidarity and stretching from the Bosphorus through the Caucasus into Russian Central Asia.
In late July 1914, Enver negotiated a defensive alliance with the Central Powers almost singlehandedly. The possibility that Turkey might suffer territorial losses beyond those of 1908/1913 made it imperative to have the support of some of the Great Powers at a time of a continental war. Given Russia's designs on Turkish territory, an approach to Berlin seemed the logical option. Enver's admiration for German military power reinforced that choice.
Bringing Turkey into the hostilities required three more months. Enver's personal order allowed the German war vessels Goeben and Breslau, under the command of Admiral Souchon, to enter Turkish waters on August 10/11. It was a dramatic step toward war. But other Young Turk leaders, notably Talat and Cemal Pashas, held Enver back until the close of October.
With Turkey in the conflict, Enver played a para¬mount role in deciding Turkish strategy. His imperial dreams required an offensive into the Caucasus, followed by a thrust eastward to the Turkish populations of Central Asia. The war minister took personal command of the Third Army facing the Russians in the Caucasus. The prospect of a sweeping advance over mountainous terrain in the dead of winter would no doubt have terrified most World War I generals. And with good reason. His attempt to outflank the Russians in December 1914/January 1915 led to the disaster of Sarikamish. Faced with able opponents like General Yudenich, Enver suffered calamitous losses and exposed eastern Anatolia to the Russians.
Turkish concern over the threat to eastern Anatolia led to the controversial policy of removing the Armenian population from this region. The diffusion of authority among the Young Turk leaders has made it difficult to establish the precise responsibility for the decision and for the savage manner in which it was implemented. The weight of Western scholarly opinion considers the deportations a form of genocide, unwarranted by military necessity. Enver and Talat are generally held to be the culprits. An important minority view, however, has come from Stanford Shaw. He points first to the serious military threat posed by Armenian subversion. Moreover, he denies that any massacre took place.
New indications that Enver's strategic ambitions outran his talents came in 1916. Word of Yudenich's capture of the stronghold at Erzurum led to more grandiose plans. Enver called for a combined offensive by two Turkish armies against the western and southern flanks of Yudenich's newly won salient. What seemed possible on Enver's maps collided with impossible realities. The terrain, the weather, and the Russian's countermoves smashed Enver's hopes. By September the Turkish army facing Yudenich from the west had been shattered; the southern force had been stopped dead in its tracks.
In March 1917, Baghdad fell to British troops led by General Maude. Enver's active imagination produced the design for a bold counteroffensive. Troops from Syria and eastern Anatolia were to form a special army for the Yilderim ("Lightning") project—a Turkish riposte to retake the ancient city. The hard facts of geography and logistics halted the operation. No way existed to get these forces anywhere near Baghdad or, once there, to supply them. But the operation's preparatory stages served to disrupt the Turkish defense of Palestine. The other major event of 1917 shaping Turkey's war effort was the March Revolution in Russia. Enver saw it as an occasion for building the new empire: Russia's dying military machine could no longer halt Turkish ambitions.
Enver's call for shifting the war's weight to the Caucasus disturbed his Young Turk comrades. Talat for one objected strongly, but to no avail. Enver, the incompetent general, displayed by this move a parallel ineptitude as a diplomat. A thrust eastward in the political and strategic currents of 1917 meant a challenge to Berlin this at a time when Germany was Turkey's economic lifeline. Enver had offered Turkish troops for German use in Europe in 1916; alone among the Young Turk hierarchy, he was conciliatory on economic concessions to Berlin; and in early 1917 he led the successful move to break relations with the United States. This pro-German orientation he suddenly abandoned.
In early 1918 Turkish forces trekked eastward. During March Enver's legions passed over the 1914 border with Russia; by May, they were threatening the circle of German satellite states and economic spheres set up in Transcaucasia by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. To make matters worse, the Turkish units that Germany needed to parry General Allenby's offensive in Palestine left instead for the Caucasus. New massacres of Armenians darkened Turkey's reputation, as Enver's forces entered Russian Armenia. By the fall of 1918 Enver's Caucasian ambitions had strained the alliance with Berlin to the point of collapse.
Turkish defeats in the south Damascus fell on October 1 and Allenby's cavalry rode hard for Aleppoled to the resignation of the Young Turk cabinet in mid-October. Enver and most of his colleagues left their country with German assistance in early November. The remaining years of Enver's life were spent in colorful, but still shadowy, adventures in European and Near Eastern diplomacy. He attempted to serve as a go-between in dealings linking Soviet Russia and postwar Germany. He had hopes of returning to Turkey, perhaps to replace his former subordinate, Mustafa Kemal, in leading the struggle against Greek invasion. Finally he took up the cause of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, joining them in combat against Soviet rule. He was killed in Uzbekistan in a clash with the Red Army on August 4,1922.
Politics
Enver seems, in sum, to have been a flawed would be Napoleon. By 1914 only thirty-three years old, Enver occupied a nearly dominant position in Turkish affairs. Confident in his military and political gifts, he assumed a role clearly beyond his abilities and acumen. No longer adjudged by historians a mere German puppet, he still stands condemned especially for his actions of 1917/1918 as a diplomat blind to political realities. The Armenian massacres continue to besmirch his reputation as a statesman. First and foremost a soldier, he has been subject to the harsh and lasting condemnation of scholars like Allen and Muratoff: "an incorrigible amateur."
Connections
By his marriage to Emine Naciye Sultan, a granddaughter of sultan Abdülmecid I, Enver had:
HH Princess Dr. Mahpeyker Enver Hanımsultan (1917–2000), married and divorced, Dr. Fikret Ürgüp (1918–?), and had issue, one son:
Hasan Ürgüp (1948–89) unmarried and without issue
HH Princess Turkan Enver Hanımsultan (1919–89), married HE Huvayda Mayatepek, Turkish Ambassador to Denmark, and had issue, one son:
Osman Mayatepek (b. 1950), married Neshe Firtina and had one daughter
Mihrishah Türkan Mayatepek (b.1992)
HH Prince Sultanzade Captain Ali Enver Beyefendi (1921 – Australia, December 1971), married and had issue, one daughter:
Arzu Enver (b. 1955), married Aslan Sadıkoğlu and had Issue[citation needed]
Burak Sadıkoğlu
His widow remarried his brother Mehmed Kamil Killigil (1900–1962) in 1923, and had one daughter:
HH Princess Rana Killigil Hanımsultan (1926; Paris – 14 April 2008; Istanbul), married Osman Sadi Eldem and had three children:
Ceyda Eldem (b. 1952)
Necla Eldem (1954–64)
Edhem Eldem (b. 1960) married Zeynep Sedef Torunoğlu and had issue, one son: