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Uh, oh… Tuesday again, and therefore a new blog for Tore’s Tuesday… No rest for the wicked.

I have already taken you to Germany’s ally, the crumbling and dusty Austro-Hungarian empire. This time we will go to another ally, the similarly crumbling Ottoman Empire, so crumbling in fact that Russia’s Tsar Nikolai I is said to have dubbed it “The sick man of Europe”.

This old empire, ruled from Constantinople, was indeed falling apart, having lost territory in several ill fated wars, not least in the Balkan wars immediately preceding WWI, in 1912-13.

They had started leaning towards Germany for a while before WWI, getting their arms and military impulses from them, and encouraged by early German success they went ahead and allied themselves with Germany. The Germans very early, in August 1914, transferred two warships to them, the SMS Goeben and the SMS Breslau, that were used to harass the Russians.

Though the Ottoman Empire was faltering, it was still a force to be reckoned with, not least because they controlled the two straits that one has to go through to get into the Black Sea and to Russia. This meant that entente aid to Russia had to be shipped all the way north to Arkhangelsk and sent by rail southwards from there. A far from efficient route. So, the brits tried to take the straits in the Dardanelles campaign (in English called Galippoli, In Turkish Çanakkale) which was a terrible battle that cost a huge number of lives, ending in British defeat and Winston Churchill’s resignation from government.

Early in the war German aid to The Ottomans was hindered by the British naval blockade. When Bulgaria entered the war it became possible to send aid by train. And a steady stream of German weapons went to Turkey. After Bulgaria capitulated the aid stopped again.

I cannot tell the entire story of that part of the war, but it is quite a story, with Lawrence of Arabia fighting Guerilla warfare together with Arab tribes… An interesting and little known fact is that one of the conflicts of today does in part stem from this. Desperate for support during the war the British managed to promise to give the area of Palestine to two different peoples. The Balfour declaration made it the future home for the Jews. Meanwhile Britain’s chief negotiator McMahon promised a Pan-Arabic state to the Arabs for fighting on their side. Post WWI there was much debate as to whether McMahon included Palestine in that promise or not. The Arabs were certainly convinced that he did.

Be that as it may, the brits obviously never intended to keep any of those promises and made a deal with the French to divide the remains of the Ottoman Empire between themselves, thus ensuring continued bloodshed and hatred in the decades to come.

But, – to the physical remnants of that old empire. Here are the swords of the 1909 regulations, when the Ottoman Empire modernized their forces. These are the official ones, though they went to war with lots of other sidearms too, they could not afford to discard older types.

Here is first a German made M1909 cavalry sword, a M1909 officers dress sword, a M1909 officers sword for field use and a reused M1874 bayonet reused as NCO sidearm in the 1909 regulations. More about each sword in the captions.