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femme and thehandsome. On Dardanelles front alone some 250.000 Turkish soldiers lost their lives. The Ottoman Empire was attacked on almost all its fronts and had to deal with a chain of revolts provoked primarily by the UK and Russia. The number of casualties was so large that the medical faculty in Istanbul could not graduate any students for a couple of years since all of its students had died on the fronts.
Ottoman Empire:
Total casualties :1.550.000
Breakdown:
Dardanelles: 253896
Caucasian front: 270.000
Gulf theater: 220.000
Arabia and Yemen: 280.000
The Canal front: 280.000
Iranian front:20.000
Galicia-Bulgaria: 60.000
After the war, the male population decreased significantly and many women could not find husbands. Folk songs that remained from those days tell us about people rushing to fronts never to come back again. In some cities, when no eligible people were available for recruiting to the army they began recruiting 13 year olds. All of this happened in a very short period of time and at a time when the economy was at the brink of bankruptcy due to excessive foreign debts.
Turkish people did not actually want to join the war. The reasons came out of the blue due to Enver Pasha's excessive fondness of the Germans. He wanted to act together with them hoping to restore the country's economy with German help.
On the whole it was a war of total destruction for Turks. It meant long years of deprivation, poverty and misery. The soldiers were inadequately outfitted. They were deployed to the Caucasian front in their summer uniforms and majority of them died freezing rather than by the enemy bullet.
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