LogFAQs > #950533546

JBaLLEN66 posted...

Austria Hungary and the Ottomans were liabilities not assets

That's far more true of the Austrians than of the Ottomans. Germany was never forced to divert substantial resources to shore up a crumbling but vital front in the case of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman collapse in 1918 didn't take place until the final seven weeks of the war: the Hindenburg Line had already cracked two days before Damascus fell to the Allies on October 1, and by the time Germany addressed her proposals for an armistice to the United States on October 4, the advancing Allies who were fighting on the Ottoman fronts were no closer to the "soft underbelly" of the Central Powers than Western Thrace.

Germany enjoyed a fairly decent return on her relatively cheap investment in propping up the Ottoman war effort. The total German ground combat strength on the Ottoman fronts amounted to only around seven battalions, and the bulk of this commitment was not made until June 1918 (when it was made to the Palestine front). Yet during the critical months of March to July 1918, the Ottoman fronts were tying up the equivalent of fifteen Allied divisions: seven infantry and four mounted divisions in Palestine and five infantry divisions in Mesopotamia.

The combat support wasn't all one way, either. The Ottoman army contributed two divisions to the Central Powers' defence of the Galician front for over a year, from June 1916 to August 1917; in his memoirs, Falkenhayn stated that the Turks were an "uncommonly valuable asset to the Southern Army". They also contributed three divisions to Mackensen's Danube Army during the conquest of Romania between September 1916 and February 1917.

Of course, combat manpower wasn't the most significant way in which Germany propped up the Ottoman war effort. The German treasury subsidized it to the tune of a little over five billion marks in financial assistance. Germany spent roughly 136 billion marks on fighting the war between 1914-18, which meant that less than 4% of her war expenditure went on financial assistance to the Ottoman Empire.

So no, the Ottoman Empire wasn't a "liability".

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Incinerate