Ottoman Labour Battalions in World War I

[Gavur]

Erik Jan Zürcher (Universiteit Leiden)

[March 2002]



The assignment of the Armenian conscripts in the Ottoman army to unarmed labour battalions (amele taburları) and the subsequent killing of the large majority of these recruits is an important aspect of the complex and still hotly debated issue of the persecution of the Ottoman Armenian community in 1915-16. Some Armenian authors see the extermination of the Armenians in these battalions as part of a premeditated strategy on the part of the Committee of Union and Progress (İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti). Even if the documentary basis for such an assumption is extremely weak (the so-called “Ten commandments” of the Young Turks, which the British acquired after the Moudros armistice of 1918 are of extremely doubtful provenance and authenticity),[1] it is undeniable that, once a policy of persecution had been decided upon, the labour battalions were a very suitable instrument for the execution of this policy. Drafting the Armenian male adults of the ages between 20 and 45 into unarmed units in this manner after all had the twin effects of leaving them in a vulnerable position within the army and at the same time depriving the communities they left behind of their most active defenders.

The killing of the worker-soldiers is also an issue that touches on the most sensitive aspect of the whole debate on the Armenian question: whether the Unionist leadership actually instigated not only the deportations but also the mass killings or, alternatively whether it merely was powerless to stop them. After all: if those Armenians who were actually on active service in the army were the subject of wholesale killings by their own side, that cannot possibly be attributed to a lack of effective control. The chain of command within the Ottoman army was quite effective throughout the war and, indeed, beyond it.

If we look carefully at what for instance Taner Akçam says in his İnsan Hakları ve Ermeni Sorunu (which in many ways can be considered a well-balanced summary of the state of the art in this field), we see that he discerns three stages in the use made of labour battalions: First, Armenian males between the ages of 20 and 45 were drafted into the regular army, while younger (15-20) and older (45-60) age groups were put to work in labour battalions. Then, in the aftermath of the disastrous outcome of Enver Pasha’s winter offensive at Sarıkamış, the Armenian soldiers in the regular army were disarmed out of fear that they would collaborate with the Russians. The order for this measure was sent out on 25 February 1915. Finally, the unarmed recruits were among the first groups to be massacred. These massacres seem to have started even before the decision was taken to deport the Armenians to the Syrian Desert.[2]

Clearly, then, it is important to try to determine the place of the labour battalions in the context of the persecution of the Armenians during World War I, but these battalions were not created for the specific purpose of killing off the Armenians. In order to understand the role of the labour battalions in the Ottoman army, and of the Armenians who served in them, we should also put them into a triple historical context: that of the Ottoman conscription system, that of the changing relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in the empire and that of the circumstances in which the Ottoman army fought during World War I.

The history of conscription in the Ottoman Empire goes back to the Gülhane edict of 1839. An army organized and equipped after the example of Europe was already in existence by that time. Sultan Selim III had started his ill-starred experiment with the “New Order” (Nizam-ı Cedid) army in 1792 and his successor, Mahmud II had reconstituted it as the “Well-trained Victorious Muhammedan Soldiers”(Muallem Asakir-i Mansure-i Muhammadiye) in 1826. These first Western-style armies had not been recruited through conscription, however. The state’s manpower requirements were made known yearly to the provincial governors, who were free to raise the troops in any way they saw fit. Conscription was first discussed in the army council in 1838. In the reform edict of Gülhane, the introduction of conscription is announced as a measure designed to spread the burden of service more evenly and avoid damage to the state or the population. In 1843 the first regulations on conscription were published. They foresaw a two-tier system with males from the age of twenty liable to serve first in the regular army (Nizamiye) for five years and then in the reserve (Redif – a copy of the Prussian Landwehr for seven). Five years later, in 1848, detailed regulations on the draft were published. Throughout the nineteenth century there were changes to the system, with service in the regular army gradually being shortened until by 1908 it was three years.

When the Young Turks came to power, making the army more modern and effective was among their top priorities. After all: the constitutional revolution was largely the work of young and highly educated officers, who had been brought up with the ideas on the “Nation in Arms” of the German general and military theorist Colmar, Freiherr von der Goltz, who had himself served as military advisor to the Ottomans.[3] In 1909 they reduced the period of service in a number of areas with an especially unhealthy climate (Iraq, Yemen) to two years and in May 1914, it was finally brought down to two years for the whole infantry. At the same time, the Young Turks tried to broaden the recruitment base of the army by reducing the number of exemptions.

This brings us to the important issue of who did and who did not serve in the Sultan’s army. From the start, in the eighteen forties, a number of groups had been exempted from military service: all women of course, but also all inhabitants of Istanbul, most civil servants, religious functionaries, pilgrims to Mecca, students in the theological colleges. Non-Muslims are not mentioned in any of the regulations on recruitment and military service drawn up by the Ottoman government during the nineteenth century (although the issue was discussed repeatedly in circles of Tanzimat statesmen). Apparently, the fact that only Muslims were expected to serve was self-evident at the time. This is true of the 1871 regulations as much as it is of the 1844 conscription law: “all Muslims are required to serve” (bilcümle ahali-yi müslime).[4]

The famous reform edict, which the Ottoman government published in 1856 after intensive consultations with the French and British ambassadors, and which accompanied its entry into the “Concert of Europe”, had as its central theme the equality between all the Sultan’s subjects, irrespective of religion. Nevertheless, it did not lead to equal shares for all communities in the burden of national defence. The edict promised the abolition of the discriminatory poll-tax (cizye or haraç) paid by Ottoman Christians and Jews, and the tax was indeed abolished, but in practice it was replaced by an exemption tax, which was first called iane-i askeri (military assistance), and later bedel-i askeri (military payment-in-lieu). This should not be confused with the bedel-i nakdi (payment in cash), the sum of money, which could be paid by Muslims in lieu of military service. The latter was far higher and really only affordable for members of the elite. The net result was that, still, non-Muslims did not serve and the 1871 regulations clearly took this situation for granted.

Nevertheless, this situation created fundamental problems for the defence of the empire. The empire’s population was relatively small. The 1844 census, conducted (albeit very imperfectly) specifically for the introduction of conscription indicates a population of between 23 and 35 million (the latter number including all of the outlying provinces). Just before the outbreak of World War I, with population growth and loss of European provinces more or less cancelling each other out, the number can also be put at between 25 million if the outlying provinces are included.[5] Compared with the major European powers this was a relatively low number, but the exemptions meant that, when compared with European states depending on conscripted armies, the Ottoman Empire also recruited a much smaller percentage of its male population. Russia was, of course, the empire’s most dangerous enemy all through the nineteenth century. It presented a mirror image of the Ottoman situation. In Russia, too, some parts of the population, those considered “aliens”(Inarodsii) were not conscripted before 1916. This category included the Central Asian Muslim peoples, but not the Tatars of Kazan or the Crimea. Russia, too, recruited only a small percentage of its eligible males. But unlike the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire had a (Slav and Christian) majority population, which was so large that the peacetime establishment of its army was five times the size of that of the Ottomans. In other words: Russia could afford to be inefficient in her recruiting, while the Ottoman Empire could not.

The question of who was and who was not conscripted was not only a practical matter, of course, and exclusions not only created a manpower problem. Ever since the introduction of modern conscription during the French revolution, the system had been built on the underlying assumption that to serve in the army was the inalienable right, but also the duty, of every (male) citizen. It was inextricably linked to the question of citizenship and identification with the nation. For those like the Yong Turks who supported a programme of Ottoman nation-building, the idea of generic exemptions for large sections of the Ottoman population was therefore anathema.

No wonder, then, that ending the exemptions was high on the list of the Young Turks when they came to power in 1908. As early as July1909, the military conscription law was changed and the number of exemptions drastically reduced. Students at religious colleges were now required to serve (rumours about this change helped trigger the counterrevolution of April, 1909 in Istanbul) and, more importantly, the same was now true for the Christians and Jews of the empire. From now on, they could only stay out of the army by paying the much higher bedel-i nakdi, which Muslims had to pay to buy their exemption. The sum involved was very large, however, and this meant that only the well-to-do could avail themselves of this opportunity. In October 1909 the recruitment of conscripts irrespective of religion was ordered for the first time, although the numbers of Christians actually called up seems to have been very low at this time.[6]

The reactions of the Christian communities to the new law were mixed, but there was no real enthusiasm anywhere. The spokesmen of the Greek, Syrian, Armenian and Bulgarian communities - in other words: the members of the elite - agreed in principle, but with the all-important proviso that the members of their community serve in separate, ethnically uniform, units officered by Christians. The Bulgarians also insisted on serving in the European provinces only. This was totally unacceptable to the Young Turks, who saw it as just another way to boost the centrifugal forces of nationalism in the empire - the opposite of what they were aiming for. At grass-roots level, many young Christian men, especially Greeks, who could afford it and who had the overseas connections, opted to leave the country or at least to get a foreign passport.[7] This of course tended to confirm the Young Turks’ suspicion that these members of the Christian communities did not regard themselves primarily as Ottoman citizens.

[Gavur]

Cont...

Labour Battalions

Just like the other armies of the day, the Ottoman army had labour battalions (amele taburları) included in both its peacetime and its mobilized strength. These battalions were attached to the inspectorates of troop movements (menzil müfettişlikleri) of the seven armies into which the Ottoman army was organized. The number of labour battalions varied throughout the war, but between 70 and 120 units seem to have been active at any given time.[8] Total strength may have varied between 25.000 and 50.000 men.[9] The labour battalions performed a range of different services, but the most important were road repairs and transport. Transport and communications were the Achilles’ heel of the Ottoman army. The empire only had 5700 kilometres of railway at its disposal – a density (when compared to the surface area of the country), which was thirty times lower than that of France.[10] The railways were single track and the vital railway connection with the fronts in Palestine and Mesopotamia was interrupted where it crossed the Taurus and Amanos mountain ranges, making it necessary to load and unload all trains four times. The railheads, Çerekli (East of Ankara), Ulukışla (North of the Taurus) and Rasülayn (West of Mosul) were three to four weeks marching away from the front in, respectively, the Caucasus and Mesopotamia. . Every single shell or sack of fodder had to be carried for enormous distances over roads, which had been in a bad state of repair when war broke out and which now quickly deteriorated under the heavy traffic. It took eight moths after the start of the war to carry out the most urgent repairs.[11] There was a lack of pack animals, primarily camels, because the Arab tribes, which provided them, were reluctant to sell to the army. Hence, a large portion of the supplies had to be carried on the backs of the soldiers in the labour battalions.

Apart from these primary functions within the field army, labour battalions also fulfilled a number of functions for the Office of the Quartermaster General (Levazim Dairesi) of the armed forces. These were partly industrial, with a number of munitions, arms, shoes and clothing factories in and around Istanbul being run as military establishments (as they had been even in peacetime).[12] They were partly artisanal (repair shops, bakeries) and partly agricultural, with labour battalions being formed to replace peasants being sent to the front, especially in the vital grain-growing areas of Central Anatolia. These last named units, which seem to have been formed from non-Muslims, but also from women, played an important role in increasing the area under cultivation, which had dropped by two thirds in the first year of the war due to lack of manpower.[13] This was especially important, because the supplies of Russian and Romanian wheat, which had been the main sources for the provisioning of Istanbul, had dried up in the first years of the war as well.

By and large the labour battalions were composed of Christian recruits, primarily Armenians but also Syrian Christians and Greeks. The percentage of Armenians is put at 75 in one source.[14] This should not come as a surprise. The evidence about the ethnic composition of Ottoman military units is contradictory. It certainly was the declared policy of the Unionists to use the army as a “melting pot”, but this seems to have meant primarily that the Christian minorities, which were considered dangerous, were submerged in Turkish units. There is evidence that where Muslims were considered ethnically homogeneous units were the rule rather than the exception. Both British sources and German officers speak about “good Anatolian units” and “second class Arab troops”. There clearly was a distinct hierarchy among the different ethnic communities, with Arab units being considered second rate and Kurdish ones utterly unreliable.[15] Armenians and Greeks, whose loyalty was doubtful in the eyes of the Ottoman army were obvious candidates for recruitment into the labour battalions, which were held in low esteem. In the first instance, the units were formed from the age groups (over 45 years old), from which, in the case of Muslims, the Mustahfız (territorial reserve) were recruited. The decision of 25 February 1915, in the wake of the failure of the Ottoman army’s eastern offensive and the defeat of Sarıkamış, to disarm all Armenians in the army obviously meant that many of those Armenians who had been recruited into the regular army units were now transferred to the labour battalions as well. This certainly was the practice on the Caucasian front. It may not have been universal, as we find mention of Armenian soldiers serving in the front line on the Sinai front as late as the spring of 1916.

Eyewitnesses describe atrocious conditions in the Armenian labour battalions: the soldiers were underfed, exhausted, suffering from disease.[16] One should bear in mind, however, that conditions on the whole in the Ottoman army were almost indescribably bad. Soldiers, even the units at the front, which received the best care, were often undernourished. Troops deployed at high altitude in the mountains of Eastern Anatolia often had only summer clothes. Ottoman soldiers in Palestine often took great risk just to rob British dead of their boots and even clothing. Diseases (primarily cholera and typhus) took many more lives than did the fighting. In all these respects, support units like the labour battalions and also fortress garrisons were even worse off than the front soldiers.[17]

The Armenians in the labour battalions were mistrusted by the military leadership and field commanders, especially after the deportations of the Armenian civilian population had started. They were put under armed guard and watched constantly.[18]

The treatment of the soldiers, with officers often described as mercilessly beating their men, should also be understood in the general context of the Ottoman Empire’s difficulties in mobilizing its army. Unlike in Europe, there was no great wave of patriotic enthusiasm, which brought men flocking to the colours in 1914. Quite the reverse: very stern measures had to be taken to get recruits to join up. It was not unusual for units – even as large as divisions – to lose up to half their strength on their way to the front. The problem was especially great with Arab units. We have a number of reports describing how Arab recruits were being taken to their frontline units under escort – and in chains.[19] The descriptions of how these soldiers were being treated in many ways resemble the descriptions of what went on in the Armenian units. In other words: the mistreatment of Armenian recruits in the labour battalions in the winter of 1914-15 is but an extreme case of what was going on throughout the army.

What started happening in April 1915 is, of course, of an entirely different nature. Once the massacres started, the unarmed recruits in the labour battalions were sitting ducks. The massacres were aimed primarily at the Armenian male population and here there were tens of thousands of Armenian men, who were already assembled and under guard of armed soldiers. They did not stand a chance once the decision to attack them was taken. The timing and method of the killings seems to have differed from place to place, however. On the Caucasian front, with the Russian army on the attack, the priority was to make the Armenians harmless and to prevent them from deserting to the enemy.[20] After the disarming most were sent to join labour battalions, but many were simply kept under guard in prison-like circumstances and eventually marched off to their deaths. The actual killing is reported as having been the work both of soldiers and gendarmes and of Kurdish tribes. The former are described as taking groups of fifty to a hundred Armenians to secluded spots and finishing them off with bullets and bayonets.[21] The latter lay in waiting to attack the convoys on the road.[22] On other fronts, such as the Dardanelles and the Sinai, as well as on the construction sites of the Baghdad Railway, the Armenians seem to have continued their work in the labour battalions until the end of 1915 and even the summer of 1916. It is probably correct to say that the killing off of the Armenian soldiers was concentrated at either end of the great terror campaign of 1915-16. Those in the East were among the first to fall victim, even before the deportations started in earnest in May 1915, while others were part of the last sweep, aimed at those who, until then, had been considered indispensable. Of course, for the army being deprived of workers and carriers wrought havoc on its logistics. No wonder that a prominent general like Vehip Pasha, the commander of the Caucasus front, instigated court martial proceedings against those responsible for killing all of “his” Armenian labourers, who were engaged in road repairs.[23] But once the fury was unleashed, rational arguments, even if they were based on the interests of the army, ultimately fell on deaf ears. This was for instance the case with the Baghdad Railway, which depended on the skilled Armenian workers and clerks for its smooth operation. It fought hard and with some success to protect its own employees from deportation, in the face of growing pressure from the Ottoman government. This resorted to the deportation of wives and children as a means to put pressure on the workers. The railway company ultimately failed to protect the construction workers in the tunnels through the Amanos range from deportation and death, in spite of the vital strategic importance of these tunnels.[24]
Some Armenian soldiers seem to have escaped deportation by converting to Islam. Sarafian estimates that between five and ten percent of the Ottoman Armenians escaped the death marches by converting, either voluntarily (if one can call it that, in view of the circumstances) or under government pressure, but the practice of (forced) conversion is usually associated with Armenian women and children who were taken into Muslim households or orphanages.[25] The practice of forced mass conversion seems to have existed in the army as well, however, as an eyewitness account from the Sinai front in the spring of 1916 relates. Apparently, quite significant numbers of Armenian soldiers agreed to become Muslims, change their names and be circumcised in field hospitals and dressing stations and this was an occasion for official celebrations.[26]

In the military histories of World War I, whether Turkish or foreign, the labour battalions are almost completely overlooked. One looks in vain for a mention of their fate in the memoirs of most Turkish and German commanders (Ali İhsan, Halil, Mustafa Kemal, Kazım Karabekir, Liman von Sanders, Kannengiesser, Kress and others). The same is true for the purely military histories written about the Ottoman army in World War I such as Ed Erickson’s otherwise excellent Ordered to die, which can now be read alongside Maurice Larcher’s older La guerre turque dans la guerre mondiale. This is lamentable, not only because it concerns an important aspect of the persecution of the Ottoman Armenians, but also because it is part of a more general lack of interest in the fate of the common Ottoman soldier (let us not forget that that is after all what these Armenians were – Ottoman soldiers who were massacred by, or with the connivance of, their own army). The social history of the Ottoman army in World War I still remains to be written.



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Notes



[1] Vahakn Dadrian analyses the document in his: "The secret Young Turk Ittihadist conference and the decision for the World War I genocide of the Armenians", Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 22:1 (1994), 173-198. He accepts it as genuine, but – while there can be little doubt that the extermination of the Armenians was planned by circles within the C.U.P., the document itself to me seems a forgery. It was offered for a large sum of money to the British after the war, but it is internally inconsistent (article 10 states that the instructions should not go to more than two or three persons, so why then produce a set of written instructions at all, when the people most directly involved in the planning attended the meeting where these plans allegedly were drawn up anyway?) and it does not tally with what we know about the way instructions for the killing of Armenians were transmitted to those who were to execute them, i.e. orally through trusted C.U.P. lieutenants. That the instructions in the document seem to fit exactly with the way the Armenian persecutions were actually carried out, should cause no surprise. Any insider forging a document to make money would have taken care that it did and inserted it among genuine documents of the period.

[2] Taner Akçam, İnsan Hakları ve Ermeni Sorunu: İttihat ve Terakki’den Kurtuluş Savaşı'na, Ankara: İmge, 1999, 243.

[3] I am grateful to Dr Handan Nezir, who allowed me privileged access to a chapter on this issue from her 2001 Manchester University Ph.D. thesis on the Ottoman military press in the Young Turk era, in which she points out the importance of the ideas of von der Goltz.

[4] Erik Jan Zürcher, "The Ottoman conscription system in theory and practice, 1844-1918", in: Erik Jan Zürcher (ed.), Arming the State: Military Conscription in the Middle East and Central Asia, London: I.B. Tauris, 1999, 88.

[5] Stanford J. Shaw, "The Ottoman census system and population", International Journal of Middle East Studies, 9 (1978), 325-38; Ahmed Emin [Yalman], Turkey in the World War, New Haven: Yale, 1930, 79.

[6] A British report puts it at five percent of those liable to serve. See: Zürcher, "The Ottoman conscription system", 89, 93.

[7] PRO/FO 195/2445, 275, 363 (reports from Gallipoli and Rhodes).

[8] The lower number is arrived at on the basis of the enumeration given by Erol Çatma in his Asker İşçiler, İstanbul: Ceylan, 1998, 40 ff. The higher number is given by Austrian ambassador Pomiankowski in his Zusammenbruch des Osmanischen Reiches, Graz: Akademische Druck-und Verlagsanstalt, 1969 (reprint of 1928 edition), 93.

[9] During the war most Ottoman units were seriously undermanned. One of the witnesses, whose testimony is given by Raymond H. Kevorkian in his "Receuil de témoignages sur l’estermination des amele tabouri ou bataillons de soldats-ouvriers Arméniens de l’armée Ottomane pendant la première guerre mondiale", Revue d’histoire arménienne contemporaine, 1 (1995), 289-303, says there were 350 men in the battalion to start with. Another says that 280 were killed in the battalion he was a part of.

[10] Erik Jan Zürcher, "Between death and desertion: The experience of Ottoman soldier in World War I", Turcica, 28 (1997), 250.

[11] Ahmed Emin [Yalman], Turkey in the World War, 88.

[12] Çatma, Asker İşçiler, 41-42.

[13] Zafer Toprak, Türkiye’de “Milli İktisat”(1908-1918), Ankara: Yurt, 1982, 318.

[14] Document 33 (no. 6738) in Documents, Ankara: Directorate General of Press and Information, n.d, 91-92, kindly provided by Hilmar Kaiser.

[15] Erik Jan Zürcher, "Between death and desertion", 240-241.

[16] Harry Morgenthau, Secrets of the Bosphorus, London: Hutchinson, 1918, 199.

[17] Erik Jan Zürcher, "Between death and desertion", 249-250.

[18] Document 33 (no 6738), where the communication commander asks for more armed troops to watch the workers and also a telegram of 25 July 1915 from the Chief of Staff in Istanbul asking for special watchfulness. Askeri Tarih Belgeleri Dergisi, special issue 1, p. 92, kindly provided by Hilmar Kaiser.

[19] Francis Yeats-Brown, Golden Horn, London: Gollancz, 1932, 120.

[20] Rafael de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, London: Scribner’s, 1926, 45. The author describes wholesale desertion of Armenian troops as a very serious threat to the Ottomans.

[21] Kevorkian, "Receuil de témoignages", 290 (testimony of the Swiss Zurlinden). The same method is described by the German Künzler in Urfa and (on the authority of others) by Morgenthau in his memoirs. (Cf Akçam, İnsan Hakları, 243).

[22] Kevorkian, "Receuil de témoignages", 295.

[23] Akçam, İnsan Hakları, 244.

[24] Hilmar Kaiser, "The Baghdad Railway and the Armenian genocide, 1915-1916", in: Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999, 67-112.

[25] Ara Sarafian, "The absorption of Armenian women and children into Muslim households as a structural component of the Armenian genocide", in: Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (eds.), In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, Oxford/New York: Berghahn, 2001, 211.

[26] Report by a Dr Krieger, discovered by Hilmar Kaiser in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem in Z 3 (Zionistsiche Zentralbüro Berlin 1911-1920), file 66 (Konstantinopel 1913-1918) and used with his kind permission.