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CHAPTER 2 – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
46 
battleship in Moudros bay on Lemnos, having begun on 27, concluded on 30 
October. Leading members of the CUP government among them the wartime 
triumvirate of Enver, Talat and Cemal fled Istanbul on board a German vessel on the 
night of 1 November
56
. 
The war, as a legal formality, did not end until the Treaty of Lausanne, signed on 24 
July 1923, came into force on 6 August 1924; and, despite the 1918 armistice, war 
was much more than a formality between 1919 and 1922. The intervening conflict 
eventually crystallised by the spring of 1921 into a straightforward frontal 
confrontation between the Greeks and the Turkish nationalists of Ankara, which the 
latter decisively won in September 1922. Its development into this state was a 
convoluted one and to the end and beyond neither side faced the other with a united 
nation behind it. 
Designs on territory within the 1918 armistice lines from all directions were known 
to exist at the time of the armistice
57
; from the Greeks on Eastern Thrace and 
Western Anatolia; from the Italians on Southern Anatolia; from the French on Cilicia 
and Northern Syria; from the Armenians on North-Eastern Anatolia; and from the 
British on Northern Mesopotamia. The British, too, had a particular care to ensure 
freedom of navigation through the Straits and in association with this an oscillating 
inclination to internationalise Constantinople itself.
56
Zürcher 2004, 133-134 
57
Mango, 189 

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CHAPTER 2 – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
47 
These designs mostly failed and the peace eventually concluded was mostly on 
Turkey’s terms. Yet, in 1918 Turkey was no less a defeated empire than Germany or 
Austria-Hungary. It was not obvious on the morrow of the armistice either that the 
official Ottoman government in Istanbul would lose control over the territories for 
which it was formally responsible; or that a nationalist resistance effectively 
independent of that government would develop and prevail; or that more armed 
conflict would precede peace. To these results and their concomitant devastations a 
succession of Allied decisions made an essential contribution. The decision in May 
1919 to allow Greek troops to occupy İzmir, purportedly for security under the terms 
of the armistice but actually to forestall an Italian lunge in its direction, had a 
galvanising effect on Turkish sentiment and exacerbated ethnic tensions to a pitch of 
serious violence in the territories occupied. The subsequent decision formally to 
occupy Istanbul in March 1920 simply separated it from Anatolia and handed distant 
Ankara a monopoly of resistance. The Allies persisted between April and August 
1920 in dictating peace terms of such severity as would not only discredit any 
political forces perceived in Turkey as accommodating to the Allies but also 
authenticate nationalist resistance. But at the same time the Allies were unable or 
unwilling to threaten the military force which their own experts had calculated as 
necessary to overcome it. This made further conflict almost inevitable. And, as if 
further to ensure it, the Allies in June 1920 authorised a Greek advance well beyond 
the previously authorised limits in order to save themselves the trouble of protecting 
the Straits from nationalist encroachment.

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