The Great Idea and the Catastrophe Part 2: Why did the Greek campaign in Asia Minor fail? Could it have succeeded?

September marked the 100th anniversary of The Catastrophe, Greece’s failed campaign after World War One to carve out an empire in the Near East. This is the third of four articles on that story.

Greek troops landing equipment at Smyrna, 1919.

What went wrong?

The Greek army landed in Smyrna on 19 May 1919. It spread to occupy the nearest reaches of the Meander valley, and for a year encountered resistance only from irregulars (or chettes), since the Ottoman Army had been largely disbanded.

Meanwhile from his base on the Anatolian plateau, Mustafa Kemal concentrated on rebuilding the army whose disarmament he had been sent to oversee.

In January 1920, a group of Kemal’s nationalists had raided a depot of Ottoman war matériel on the Gallipoli peninsula, taking skiffs from the Asiatic shore of the Hellespont. In mid-June, a nationalist force attacked the British battalion stationed at Izmit, on the eastern shores of the Hellespont. The raid alarmed the British, because it threatened the international zone around the Bosphoros, and British prime minister David Lloyd-George gladly accepted an offer from his Greek counterpart, Eleftherios Venizelos, to deal with the threat.