Italo-Turkish War

Italian dirigibles bomb Turkish positions on Libyan territory. The Italo-Turkish War was the first in history to feature aerial bombardment by airplanes and airships.[22]

Ismail Enver Bey in Cyrenaica, 1911.

Despite the time it had had to prepare the invasion, the Royal Italian Army (Regio Esercito) was largely unprepared when the war broke out. The Italian fleet appeared off Tripoli in the evening of September 28, but only began bombarding the port on October 3. The city was conquered by 1,500 sailors, much to the enthusiasm of the interventionist minority in Italy. Another proposal for a diplomatic settlement was rejected by the Italians, and the Turks determined, therefore, to defend the province.[23]

The Turks did not have a full army in Tripolitania. Many of the Ottoman officers had to travel there by their own means, often secretly, through Egypt, since the British would not allow Turkish troops to be transported en masse through Egypt. The Ottoman Navy was too weak to transport troops by sea. The Turks organized local Libyans for the defence against the Italian invasion.[24]

Between 1911 and 1912, over 1,000 Somalis from Mogadishu, the then capital of Italian Somaliland, served as combat units along with Eritrean and Italian soldiers in the Italo-Turkish War.[25] Most of the Somalian troops stationed would only return home in 1935, when they were transferred back to Italian Somaliland in preparation for the invasion of Ethiopia.[26]

The first disembarkation of Italian troops occurred on October 10. The city of Tripoli and surroundings -after a destructive bombing of the Turkish fortifications- were quickly conquered by 1,500 Italian sailors, welcomed by the population (mainly the local Jews) who started to collaborate with the Italian authorities.[27]

The Italian contingent of 20,000 troops was deemed sufficient to accomplish the conquest at the time. Tobruk, Derna and Khoms were easily conquered, but the same was not true for Benghazi. The first true setback for the Italian troops happened on October 23 at Shar al-Shatt, when poor placement of the troops near Tripoli led them to be almost completely encircled by more mobile Arab cavalry, backed by some Turkish regular units. The attack was portrayed as a simple revolt by the Italian press, but it nearly annihilated much of the small Italian expeditionary corps.

The corps was consequently enlarged to 100,000 men who had to face 20,000 Libyans and 8,000 Turks. The war turned into one of position. Even some of the earliest examples of utilisation in modern warfare of armoured cars[28] and air power by the Italian forces had little effect on the initial outcome.[29] However, the war was notable for the first military use of heavier-than-air craft. Capitano Carlo Piazza flew the first military reconnaissance flight on 23 October 1911. A week later, Sottotenente Giulio Gavotti dropped four grenades on Tajura (Arabic: تاجوراء‎ Tājūrā’), also spelt Tajoura, and Ain Zara in history's first aerial bombing.[30]

16 May 1912: surrender of the Turkish garrison in Rhodes to the Italian general Ameglio near Psithos.
(From Italian weekly La Domenica del Corriere, 26 May – 2 June 1912).

The Libyans and Turks, estimated at 15,000, made frequent attacks by day and night on the strongly entrenched Italian garrison in the southern suburbs of Benghazi. The four Italian regiments of infantry acted on the defensive and were supported by the San Marco and Agordat. The Italians rarely attempted a sortie.[31]

An attack of 20,000 Turkish and local troops was repulsed on November 30 with considerable losses. Shortly after this, the garrison was reinforced by the 57th infantry regiment from Italy. The battleship Regina Elena also arrived from Tobruk. During the night of December 14 and 15, the Turks attacked in great force, but were repulsed with aid of the fire from the ships. The Italians lost several field guns.[31]

At Derna the Turks and Libyanas were estimated at 3,500, but they were being constantly reinforced and a general assault on the Italian position was expected. The Italian and Turkish forces in Tripoli and Cyrenaica were constantly reinforced. The withdrawal of the Turks into the interior enabled them to reinforce their troops considerably.[31]

The cost of the war was defrayed chiefly by voluntary offerings from Muslims. Turkish officers and men, weapons, ammunition, and all kinds of supplies were constantly sent across the Egyptian and Tunisian frontiers, notwithstanding their neutrality. The Italians occupied Sidi Barrani on the coast between Tobruk and Solum to prevent contraband and troops from entering across the Egyptian frontier, while the naval blockaders guarded the coast and captured several sailing ships with contraband.[31]

Italian troops firing on the Turks in Tripoli, 1911.

Italian troops landed at Tobruk after a brief bombardment on December 4, 1911, occupied the seashore and marched towards the hinterlands facing weak resistance.[32] Small numbers of Turkish soldiers and Libyan volunteers were later organized by Captain Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The small December 22 Battle of Tobruk resulted in Mustafa Kemal's victory.[33] With this achievement, he was assigned to Derna War quarters to coordinate the field on March 6, 1912. The Libyan campaign ground to a stalemate by December 1911.[5]

On 3 March 1912, 1,500 Libyan volunteers attacked Italian troops who were building trenches near Derna. The Italians, who were outnumbered but had superior weaponry, held the line. A lack of coordination between the Italian units sent from Derna as reinforcements and the intervention of Turkish artillery threatened the Italian line, and the Libyans attempted to surround the Italian troops. Further Italian reinforcements, however, were able to stabilise the situation, and the battle ended in the afternoon with an Italian victory.

On September 14, the Italian command sent three columns of infantry to disband the Arab Turkish camp near Derna. The Italian troops occupied a plateau, interrupting Turkish supply lines. Three days later, the Turkish commander, Enver Bey, attacked the Italian positions on the plateau. The larger Italian fire drove back the Turkish soldiers, who were surrounded by a battalion of Alpini and suffered heavy losses. A later Turkish attack had the same outcome. After that, operations in Cyrenaica ceased until the end of the war. Although some elements of the local population collaborated with the Italians, counterattacks by Turkish soldiers with the help of local troops confined the Italian army to the coastal region.[7] In fact, by the end of 1912 the Italians had made little progress in conquering Libya. The Italian soldiers were, in effect, besieged in seven enclaves on the coasts of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.[34] The largest of these, at Tripoli, extended barely 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) from the town.[34]

Italian cruiser bombarding Ottoman vessels in Beirut harbor.

At sea, the Italians enjoyed a clear advantage. The Italian navy had seven times the tonnage of the Ottoman navy and was better trained.[35]

In January 1912, the Italian cruiser Piemonte, with the Soldato class destroyers Artigliere and Garibaldino, sank seven Turkish gunboats (Ayintab, Bafra, Gökcedag, Kastamonu, Muha, Ordu and Refahiye) and a yacht (Sipka) in the Battle of Kunfuda Bay. The Italians blockaded the Red Sea ports of the Ottomans, while actively supplying and supporting the Emirate of Asir which was also concurrently at war with the Ottoman Empire.[36]

Then, on 24 February, in the Battle of Beirut, two Italian armoured cruisers attacked and sank an Ottoman casemate corvette and six lighters, retreated, then returned and sank an Ottoman torpedo boat. Avnillah alone suffered 58 killed and 108 wounded. By contrast, the Italian ships not only took no casualties but no direct hits from the Ottoman warships at all.[37] Italy had feared that the Ottoman naval forces at Beirut could be used to threaten the approach to the Suez Canal. The Ottoman naval presence at Beirut was completely annihilated and casualties on the Ottoman side were heavy. The Italian navy gained complete naval dominance of the southern Mediterranean for the rest of the war.

Although Italy could extend its control to almost all of the 2,000 km of the Libyan coast between April and early August 1912, its ground forces could not venture beyond the protection of the navy's guns and were thus limited to a thin coastal strip. In the summer of 1912, Italy began operations against the Turkish possessions in the Aegean Sea with the approval of the other powers that were eager to end a war that was lasting much longer than expected. Italy occupied twelve islands in the sea, comprising the Ottoman province of Rhodes, which henceforth became known as the Dodecanese, but this raised the discontent of Austria-Hungary, which feared that this could fuel the irredentism of nations such as Serbia and Greece, causing imbalance in the already fragile situation in the Balkan area. The only other relevant military operation of the summer was an attack of five Italian torpedo boats in the Dardanelles on 18 July.

Mustafa Kemal (left) with an Ottoman military officer and Libyan mujahideen.

With a decree of November 5, 1911, Italy declared its sovereignty over Libya. Although it controlled the coast, many of the Ottoman troops were not killed in battle and nearly 6,000 remained to face an army of nearly 140,000 Italians. As a result, the Ottomans began using guerrilla tactics. Indeed, some "Young Turk" officers reached Libya and helped organize a guerrilla war with local mujahideens.[38] Many local Libyans joined forces with the Turks because of their common faith against the "Christian invaders" and started a bloody guerrilla warfare: Italian authorities adopted many repressive measures against the rebels, such as public hanging as a retaliation for ambushes.

On October 23, 1911, nearly 500 Italian soldiers were slaughtered by Turkish troops at Sciara Sciatt, on the outskirts of Tripoli.[39] As a consequence, on the next day—during the 1911 Tripoli massacre—Italian troops systematically murdered thousands of civilians by moving through local homes and gardens one by one, including setting fire to a mosque with one hundred refugees inside.[40] Although Italian authorities attempted to keep the news of the massacre from getting out, the incident soon became internationally known.[40] The Italians started to show photos of the massacred Italian soldiers at Sciara Sciat in order to justify their revenge.

In 1924, the Serbian diplomat Miroslav Spalajković could look back on the events that led to the First World War and its aftermath and state of the Italian attack, "all subsequent events are nothing more than the evolution of that first aggression."[47] Unlike British-controlled Egypt and French-influenced Morocco, the Ottoman Tripolitania vilayet that made up modern-day Libya were core territory of the Empire, like that of the Balkans.[48] The coalition that had defended the Ottomans during the Crimean War (1853-1856), minimized Ottoman territorial losses at the Congress of Berlin (1878), and supported the Empire during the Bulgarian Crisis (1885–88) had largely disappeared.[49] The reaction in the Balkans to the Italian declaration of war was immediate. The first draft by Serbia of a military treaty with Bulgaria against Turkey was written by November 1911, with a defensive treaty signed in March 1912, and an offensive treaty signed in May 1912 focused on military action against Ottoman south-east Europe. The series of bilateral treaties between Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro that created the Balkan League was completed in 1912, with the First Balkan War (1912-1913) beginning with a Montenegrin attack on 8 October 1912, ten days before Treaty of Lausanne.[50] The swift and nearly complete victory of the Balkan League astonished contemporary observers.[51] However, the Serbs were unhappy with the division of captured territory and continued to hold areas promised to Bulgaria, resulting in the Second Balkan War (1913), in which Serbia, Greece, the Ottomans, and Romania took almost all of the territory that Bulgaria had captured in the first war.[52] In the wake of this enormous change in the regional balance of power, Russia switched its primary allegiance in the region from Bulgaria to Serbia, guaranteeing Serbian autonomy from any outside military intervention. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by a Serbian nationalist and the resulting Austrian plan for military action against Serbia is the oft-stated precipitating event of World War I (1914-1918)

The Italo-Turkish War illustrated to France and Great Britain that Italy was more valuable to them inside the Triple Alliance, rather than formally allied with the Entente. In January 1912, French diplomat Paul Cambon wrote to Raymond Poincaré that Italy was "more burdensome than useful as an ally. Against Austria, she harbours a latent hostility that nothing can disarm."[53] The tensions within the Triple Alliance would eventually lead Italy to sign the 1915 Treaty of London abandoning the Triple Alliance and joining the Entente.

In Italy itself, massive funerals for fallen heroes brought the Catholic Church closer to the government from which it had long been alienated. There emerged a cult of patriotic sacrifice, in which the colonial war was celebrated in an aggressive and imperialistic way. The ideology of "crusade" and "martyrdom" characterized the funerals. The result was to consolidate Catholic war culture among devout Italians, which was soon expanded to include the world war (1915–18). This aggressive spirit was revived by the Fascists in the 1920s to strengthen their popular support.[54]

Because of World War I, the Dodecanese remained under Italian military occupation. According to the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which was never ratified, Italy was supposed to cede all of the islands except Rhodes to Greece, in exchange for a vast Italian zone of influence in southwest Anatolia. However, the Greek defeat in the Greco–Turkish War and the foundation of modern Turkey created a new situation that made the enforcement of the terms of this treaty impossible. In article 15 of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which superseded the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, Turkey formally recognized the Italian annexation of the Dodecanese. The population was largely Greek, and by treaty in 1947 the islands eventually became part of Greece.[55]