Caucasian Gambit of the Fuhrer. Under the tutelage of London and Washington
How to "choose" in Ankara
Behind the Main Caucasus Range was the main oil box of Russia. This is what Winston Churchill called the Baku crafts in 1919, when the prospect of their transfer to the complete control of Britain was more than real. The Transcaucasian interest of the West (and behind it and Turkey) did not weaken even in the interwar period.
Perhaps the most compelling proof of this is the notorious 1940 Fuel Plan, which provided for a joint invasion of British, French and Turkish troops in Transcaucasia no later than mid-March 1940. This was to be real "help" to Finland who fought with the USSR. The plan envisaged the seizure of the Baku oil fields, the Baku-Tbilisi-Batumi oil pipeline, the Batumi port and the Trans-Caucasian railway.
The implementation of the plan was disrupted by the Soviet-Finnish truce on March 12, 1940. However, the invasion project did not go away, and at the same time, US President F. Roosevelt in 1942 literally imposed on Stalin the deployment of the American and British Air Force in Transcaucasia. This was, of course, explained by the "high vulnerability of this region to the Nazi invasion" in the summer and autumn of 1942.
From Roosevelt and Stalin’s correspondence well-known with us, but not in the USA and Britain, one can learn that the Americans, while offering the deployment of their Air Force in Transcaucasia, did not say a word about the possibility of a German or Turkish invasion of the region. But she was quite real in 1942. By the autumn of 1942, Turkey had mobilized up to 20 divisions equipped with German and Italian, but also British weapons, to invade Transcaucasia.
Fortunately, the Turkish-German friendship treaty, which was not fulfilled by Ankara, was signed just four days before the Nazi invasion of the USSR - June 18, 1941. The document entered into force from the date of signing without ratifications, but at the same time it continued to enter Turkey. British weapons, and in the fall of 1942 - and American.
The ambassadors of the USA and Great Britain in Moscow explained to the leadership of the USSR the need for such supplies by the desire to induce Turkey to enter the war ... against Germany. However, Ankara did this only on February 23, 1945 in order to “have time” to be designated as part of the UN. And until the middle of 1944, that is, before the allies landed in Normandy, Turkey not only provided economic assistance to Germany, but also passed the military and merchant ships of Germany and Italy in both directions through the straits.
In the summer and autumn of 1942, military provocations of Turkey were noticeably more frequent on the land and sea borders with the USSR. It is not easy to judge how much this affected the failures of the Soviet troops in the Crimea and the North Caucasus, but the delegations of the Turkish Ministry of Defense and the General Staff too often “visited” the German troops on the Soviet front in 1942 and 1943. In Turkey itself, pan-Turkic, in fact pro-German, agents sharply intensified at that time.
Presidential Recognition
Most likely, we should still pay tribute to the Turkish leadership for not joining the war. However, the Turks themselves should also be grateful either to fate or to the Allies for this. After all, they also remembered who first came to their aid in the early 20s, when a real threat loomed over the division of the former Ottoman Empire. It was Soviet Russia.
Turkish President Ismet Inenu cannot be denied "flexibility"
The fact of Ankara’s policy was very peculiar in its flexibility, admitted, albeit indirectly, by Turkish President Ismet Inenu, speaking on November 1, 1945 at the opening of the 3rd session of the 7th national parliament:
In some places in the USSR it was argued that when the Germans advanced to the Volga, we interfered with the Soviets, concentrating our forces on our eastern borders.
But more specifically, the position of Turkey in the early 1940s was explained by Franz von Papen, the German ambassador to Ankara in those years. He was surprisingly acquitted at the Nuremberg trials.
F. von Papen once competed with Hitler for the post of German Chancellor, but "stayed" in Ankara during the war
In a dispatch to the German Foreign Ministry (March 1942), he noted:
As President Inenu assured me, "Turkey is highly interested in destroying the Russian colossus." And that "Turkey’s neutral position is already much more profitable for the Axis countries than for England," the president said. "
And the allies of the USSR participated in these discussions in Turkey - through the British ambassador H. Netubull-Hugessen and the American L. Steingard.
In this regard, the information of the “World of the Turkish Coalition” portal, clearly oriented towards “pan-Turkism,” dated October 17, 2018 is also interesting:
von Papen had to play a triple game in Ankara: the ambassador, Hitler’s secret envoy and a representative of the supposedly “opposition”. The main partners in the game were the American, British ambassadors and the Nuncio of the Vatican. Pope Pius XII, like the Fuhrer, sent to Turkey not just a priest, but a talented diplomat and “apparatchik”. All this seriously scared Moscow.
Moscow did not dare to take military measures against such actions by Turkey so as not to provoke it to official military support of Berlin. The Western allies of the USSR stubbornly did not join the Soviet protests about Ankara's flagrant violations of official Turkish neutrality in favor of Germany and Italy - for example, the corresponding notes of the Soviet government against Turkey dated July 12, August 14, 1941, November 4, 1942.
In March 1942, headquarters exercises were held in the Caucasus, in which Turkey was in the role of the enemy. The actions of the Red Army began, according to the scenario of the exercises, with an attack on eastern Turkey from the Black Sea coast of this region and ended with the capture of Oltu, Sarykamysh, Trabzon and Erzurum, more precisely, the whole of eastern Turkey and most of the East Turkish Black Sea ports.
But these exercises did not provide for admission of observers from the USA and Great Britain to them. Thus, Moscow made it clear that it does not trust the Allies' policy towards Turkey and does not forget about the plan for the invasion of Transcaucasia in 1940 ("Fuel"). At a session of the Allied Council of Foreign Ministers held in Moscow in October 1943, Stalin stated that
Turkish neutrality, which at one time was beneficial to the Allies, is now beneficial to Hitler. For it covers the German rear in the Balkans.
What will Comrade Stalin say to this?
But the Allied delegations did not respond to this statement. With all these factors in mind, Washington and London seem to have paved the way either for the implementation of the same Fuel plan, or to get ahead of Turkey in its possible seizure of strategic targets in Transcaucasia. Let us cite in this connection documents from the already mentioned correspondence between Stalin and Roosevelt during the war years.
October 9, 1942, Roosevelt - Stalin:
I have received a copy of the message from the British Prime Minister in your name. We are going to act as soon as possible in order to provide you with the air forces that will operate under your strategic command in the Caucasus.
Without waiting for Stalin’s response to such a proposal, the US president more specifically announced military plans in the Caucasus. Already on October 12, 1942, Roosevelt informed Stalin:
Our group of heavy bombers has been ordered to immediately prepare for operations on your southern flank. The implementation of this event will not depend on any other operation or task (that is, the Transcaucasian project has a higher priority. - Approx. Aut.), And these aircraft, as well as a sufficient number of transports will be sent to the Caucasus in the near future.
Note that two weeks before this letter, the Wehrmacht almost blocked Dzaudzhikau, the capital of North Ossetia. That is, the shortest path in the Caucasus was under the real threat of Nazi capture. The Americans offered options for basing the Allied Air Force in Batumi, Tbilisi, Baku, Julfa, the main transit point of Lendlisian supplies through Iran, and in Azerbaijani Lankaran, a port near the border with Iran. But Stalin continued to ignore these proposals.
Which, of course, offended Roosevelt. A fragment of his letter to Stalin on December 16, 1942:
It’s not clear to me exactly what happened in relation to our proposal for an American aviation help in the Caucasus. I am quite ready to send connections with American pilots and crews. I think that they should act on the composition of formations under the command of their American superiors, but each group would, of course, be under general Russian command with regard to tactical goals.
What I mean is mainly airplanes such as a bomber, which can be transferred to the Caucasus on their own. (From Iran and Iraq. - Approx. Aut.)
What I mean is mainly airplanes such as a bomber, which can be transferred to the Caucasus on their own. (From Iran and Iraq. - Approx. Aut.)
Finally, Stalin clarified this issue, although without a hint of understanding the true intentions of the Allies. In his letter to Roosevelt of December 18, 1942, it was noted:
I am very grateful to you for your willingness to help us. As for the Anglo-American squadrons with flight personnel, at the moment there is no need to send them to the Caucasus. Now the main fights are being fought and will be fought on the Central Front and in the Voronezh region.
However, Roosevelt subsequently no longer offered to redirect the American squadrons intended by the Caucasus to Stalin's directions. It is easy to assume that American plans to "protect" that region from the Wehrmacht were timed to coincide with a possible invasion of Turkish troops there. Then, together with the allies, to cut off Transcaucasia from the USSR and to seize, first of all, the region’s oil resources and the Caspian-Black Sea corridor. But it didn’t happen ...
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