Civilian and military casualties
"Hunger Map of Europe", published in December 1918, indicates serious food shortages in most of the territories of the Ottoman Empire, and famine in the eastern parts.
Ottoman casualties of World War I
were the civilian and military casualties sustained by the
Ottoman Empire
during the
First World War
. Almost 1.5% of the Ottoman population, or approximately 300,000 people of the Empire's 21 million population in 1914,
[1]
were estimated to have been killed during the war. Of the total 300,000 casualties, 250,000 are estimated to have been military fatalities, with civilian casualties numbering over 50,000. In addition to the 50,000 civilian deaths, an estimated 1.5 million
Armenians
, 750,000
Greeks
, and 300,000
Assyrians
,
lebanese Maronites
200,000 were
systematically targeted and killed
by Turkish authorities either via the military or Kurdish gangs.
[2]
Likewise, starting in 1916, Ottoman authorities forcibly displaced an estimated 700,000 Kurdish people westward, and an estimated 350,000 died from hunger, exposure, and disease.
[3]
The post-war
partitioning of the Ottoman Empire
, as well as the mass migrations that occurred during and
after World War I
,
[3]
made it difficult to estimate the exact number of civilian casualties. However, the figure of military casualties is generally accepted as stated in
Edward J. Erickson's
Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War
.
Disparity exists between Western and Turkish estimations of casualty figures. Analysis of Ottoman statistics by Turkish Dr Kamer Kasim suggests that the total percentage of Ottoman casualties amounted to 26.9% of the Empire's 1914 population. This estimate, however, is greater than numbers reported by Western sources.
[4]
Kasim has suggested that an additional 399,000 civilian casualties have not been accounted for by Western estimations.
Millets
|
Prewar
|
Civilian
|
Military
|
Post-War
|
|
%
|
1914 census
[5]
|
Other sources
|
|
|
Military perished
|
Civilian perished
|
Total perished
|
Survived
|
Armenian
|
16.1%
|
1,229,227
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Unknown
[6]
[7]
|
Greeks
|
19.4%
|
1.792.206
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jews
|
.9%
|
187,073
[5]
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Assyrian
|
3%
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Others
|
.9%
|
186,152
[5]
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Muslim
|
59.7%
|
12,522,280
[5]
|
|
9,876,580
|
2,800,000 (18.6%)
[2]
|
507,152 (5.1% of its group)
[2]
|
|
|
|
Total:
millets
|
100%
|
20,975,345
[5]
|
|
|
|
507,152 (2.4% of its group)
[2]
|
4,492,848
|
5,000,000
[1]
|
|
Ottoman military casualties
[
edit
]
Until World War I, Istanbul's civilian Muslim population and non-Muslim millets (minorities for some sources) were exempt from the conscription
[8]
Making exception of the indirect effects of often perennial arrangements, such as those that existed for the labor force of the arsenal and the dockyards. Full conscription was applied in ?stanbul for the first time during World War I, and a lasting phraseology describes the
Dardanelles Campaign
as Turkey having "buried a university in
Canakkale
". Non-Muslim Millets (minorities for some sources) were also issued a general call to serve in the military for the first time during World War I in the history of the Empire; but they did not participate in action and served behind the lines.
[8]
At the end of the war, many families were left with the elderly, children and young widows, see
the figure widowhood in Anatolia
. Given that the Ottoman Empire was engaged in nearly eight years of continuous warfare (1911?1918
Italo-Turkish War
,
Balkan Wars
, World War I) social disintegration was inevitable.
[9]
H. G. Dwight relates witnessing an Ottoman Military burial in
Constantinople
(modern-day
Istanbul
) and took pictures of it. H. G. Dwight says that the soldiers were from every nation (ethnicity), but they were only distinguished by their religion, in groups of "Mohammedans" and "Christians". The sermons were performed as based on the count of Bibles,
Korans
, and
Tanakhs
in provenance of the battlefield. This is what the caption of one slide reads (on the right):
One officer was left, who made to the grave-diggers and spectators a speech of a moving simplicity. "Brothers," he said, "here are men of every
nation
? Turks,
Albanians
,
Greeks
,
Bulgarians
, Jews; but they died together, on the same day, fighting under the same flag. Among us, too, are men of every nation, both Mohammedan and Christian; but we also have one flag and we pray to one God. Now, I am going to make a prayer, and when I pray let each one of you pray also, in his own language, in his own way.
When war was declared in Europe in 1914, there was only one military hospital in
Van, Turkey
, which was soon overcrowded with wounded and sick people.
[10]
The conditions were extremely bad; There were only two surgeons and no nurses, only male soldiers helping.
[10]
The conditions on the whole in the Ottoman army were almost bad beyond description. Soldiers, even at the front and who received the best care in comparative terms, were often (a) undernourished, (b) underclothed; troops deployed at high altitude in the mountains of Eastern Anatolia often had only summer clothes; Ottoman soldiers in Palestine often took great risks just to rob the British dead of their boots and even clothing; and (c) largely suffering from diseases (primarily
cholera
and
typhus
), which took many more lives than the actual fighting.
[11]
The
German
general
Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein
, in a report he wrote to army group headquarters on 20 October 1917, describes how a division (the 24th) that departed from
Istanbul
-
Haydarpa?a Terminal
with 10,057 men arrived at the
Palestinian Front
with only 4,635. 19% of the men had to be admitted to hospitals since they were suffering from various diseases, 24% had deserted and 8% were allocated on the way to various local needs.
[12]
[13]
Category
|
Totals
[2]
|
Total number of
conscripts
and
officers
mobilized
|
2,873,000
|
Killed in action
|
175,220
|
Missing in action
|
61,487
|
Died of wounds
|
68,378
|
Perished from diseases and epidemics
|
466,759
|
Dead:
Killed in action
and other causes
|
771,844
|
Seriously wounded (permanent loss, including died of wounds)
|
303,150
|
Total wounded in action
|
763,753
|
Prisoners of War (combined from all theaters of war)
|
145,104
|
Absent without leave
|
500,000
|
Civilian casualties
[
edit
]
Distribution of
widows
is used in finding out males perished
[14]
Armenians
[
edit
]
Assyrians
[
edit
]
The Assyrian Genocide was the massacre of the Assyrian population in the Ottoman Empire, which were in the regions of southeastern Turkey and the Urmia region of
Iran
, were deported and massacred by Ottoman and Kurdish armies in 1914 and 1920. Sources have put the death tolls at around 300,000.
Greeks
[
edit
]
The Ottoman Empire under the Young Turks, committed genocide against their Greek citizens from 1914 to 1918, killing approximately 750,000 Greeks, 353,000 of whom were Pontic Greeks from the Black Sea area.
Muslims
[
edit
]
The closest estimate of Muslim civilian casualties in this period is around 500,000.
After the
partitioning of the Ottoman Empire
, for reliability reasons, the data regarding the Muslim casualties had to be collected by region. The records regarding the Muslim civilians were sealed at the time of the
Paris Peace Conference
, and there is very little literature review on the Muslim millet, compared to Christian millet of the Empire (see:
Armenian casualties
).
One plausible explanation that needs further study may be attributable to productivity patterns of the Muslim millet, which could have dropped beyond sustainable levels since most of the men were under arms.
The Anatolian refugees included people who had migrated from war zones and immediate vicinity attempting, by doing so, to escape persecution. For World War I, the relatively most reliable sources can be found for
Anatolia
, especially in relation to the
Caucasus Campaign
. There is a total number reached and reported by the Ottoman Empire at the end of 1916. On the basis of previous Ottoman census, the Turkish historian Kamer Kasim (
Manchester University
, PhD), arrives at the conclusion that the movements of refugees from the Caucasus war zone had reached 1.500.000 people who were relocated in the
Mediterranean region
and
Central Anatolia
under very difficult conditions.
[4]
Kamer Kasım's number or any other number on this issue has not been reported in western sources.
The most horrible cases originate from the current region of
Syria
, a part of Ottoman Empire until the end of the war. The civilian casualties of Syria was covered in a detailed article (the whole of Greater Syria, and thus including Akkar) by Linda Schatkowski Schilcher.
[15]
Contributing to as many as 500,000 deaths of the civilians living in this region in the 1915?1917 period, the study lists eight basic factors: (a) the Entente powers' total blockage of the Syrian coast; (b) the inadequacy of the Ottoman supply strategy; deficient harvest and inclement weather; (c) diversion of supplies from Syria as a consequence of the
Arab revolt
; (d) the speculative frenzy of a number of unscrupulous local grain merchants; the callousness of German military official in Syria, and systematic hoarding by the population at large.
[15]
In a series of graphs and charts discovered in the Ottoman archives that date to 1915, Zachary J. Foster has shown that hundreds of Lebanese were starving to death or dying from starvation-related diseases (between 156 and 784) everyone month of the war from the fall 1915 onwards.
[16]
See also
[
edit
]
External links
[
edit
]
Notes
[
edit
]
- ^
a
b
James L. Gelvin
The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War
, Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN
978-0521618045
p. 77
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
Edward J. Erickson (2001).
Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War
. General Huseyin Kivrikoglu (forward). Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 211.
ISBN
978-0313315169
.
- ^
a
b
S.C Josh (1999), "Sociology of Migration and Kinship" Anmol Publications PVT. LTD. p. 55
- ^
a
b
Kamer Kasim, Ermeni Arastirmalari, Sayı 16?17, 2005, p. 205.
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
Stanford Jay Shaw, Ezel Kural Shaw "History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey" Cambridge University pp. 239?241
- ^
*
File:US State Department document on Armenian Refugess in 1921.jpg
- ^
McCarthy, Justin (1983),
Muslims and minorities: the population of Ottoman Anatolia and the end of the empire
, New York: New York University press,
ISBN
978-0871509635
- ^
a
b
Nur Bilge CRISS,
Istanbul under Allied Occupation 1918?1923
, 1999 Brill Academic Publishers,
ISBN
9004112596
p. 22
- ^
Nur Bilge CRISS,
Istanbul under Allied Occupation 1918?1923
, 1999 Brill Academic Publishers,
ISBN
9004112596
p. 21
- ^
a
b
Grace H. Knapp; Clarence D. Ussher (1915).
The Mission at Van: In Turkey in War Time
. Privt. Print. [Prospect Press]. pp. 41?43.
- ^
Erik-Jan Zurcher
, "The Ottoman conscription system in theory and practice, 1844?1918", in: Erik Jan Zurcher (ed.), Arming the State: Military Conscription in the Middle East and Central Asia, London: I.B. Tauris, 1999, 88.
- ^
Hans Kannengiesser, The campaign in gallipoli, London Hutchinson, 1927, p.266
- ^
Erik Jan Zurcher, "Between Death and Desertion. The Experience of the Ottoman Soldier in World War I",
Turcica
28 (1996), pp. 235?258.
- ^
Webster, Donald Everett (1935)
The Turkey of Ataturk
Philadelphia.
[
ISBN missing
]
[
page needed
]
- ^
a
b
"The famine of 1915?1918 in greater Syria", in John Spagnolo, ed.,
Problems of the Modern Middle East in Historical Perspective
(Reading, 1992), pp. 234?254.
- ^
Zachary Foster, "4 Beautiful yet Horrifying Graphs of Death from Ottoman Lebanon, 1915?6," MidAfternoonMap.com' 16 February, 2015.