Istanbul street named after Japanese officer who saved over 1000 Turks
The name of the commander of the Japanese ship Heimei Maru[1], which brought 1,012 Turkish soldiers captured by the Russians during World War I to Istanbul, has been given to a street in Beykoz district.
Sadullah Kabahasanoğlu, a member of the Istanbul Municipal Council, made a request to the Beykoz district council on July 1, 2019. “The Japanese commander did not give our soldiers to Greece, showing a great example of courage,” Kabahasanoğlu said in the official request.
“I respectfully request that the name of Lieutenant Colonel Tsumura be given to a street in our district,” he noted. The council Assembly accepted the decision to give Tsumura’s name to an avenue in Beykoz district on the city’s Asian side.
Lieutenant-Colonel Yukichi Tsumura refused to hand over the Turkish prisoners to the Greek soldiers who had blocked the Japanese ship in the Aegean Sea.[2]
Tsumura’s heroism was revealed in a documentary named “Vatana Giderken: Heimei Maru,” (Going to the Homeland: Heimei Maru)[3] directed by Hayriye Savaşçıoğlu.
More than 65,000 Ottoman soldiers were captured by the Russians on the Caucasian Front, and some of those soldiers were sent to camps in Vladivostok[4], the easternmost port city of Russia, during World War I.
When Japan, which was with the Allies during the war, occupied Vladivostok in April 1918 taking advantage of the turmoil caused by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Japanese authorities took over the responsibility of the Ottoman prisoners.[5][6]
After the war, efforts were made to bring the prisoners home, and in 1921 the Japanese decided to send the Turks to Istanbul.
The Ankara government sent 48,000 pounds to bring back captive soldiers, and the Japanese government commissioned Lieutenant-Colonel Yukichi Tsumura on the Heimei Maru ship.
Turkish soldiers, some of whom had started families during the period of captivity, set sail on Feb. 23, 1921.
The ship would sail to the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal and then to Istanbul.
However, on April 5, it was stopped by the Greek warship near Lesbos island.
The Greeks demanded the prisoners be handed over to them, but Tsumura refused the request.
However, it was not easy for the ship to reach Istanbul.
Some of the prisoners taken to the island of Asinara, which is located between Corsica and Sardinia islands, died from illness.
Finally, the Ümit Ferry (Hope Ferry), which went to the island on June 19, 1922, took the captive Turks and brought them to Istanbul.
Source: Fatma Aksu - ISTANBUL
[1] Heimei Maru (1921~1925) Heimei Maru (+1944)
general nationality: japanese purpose: transport type: cargo ship propulsion: steam date built: 1919 details tonnage: 4366 grt dimensions: 105.2 x 15.2 x 8.6 m material: steel engine: 1 x 3-cyl. triple expansion engine, single shaft, 1 screw power: 391 n.h.p. speed: 9.5 knots
On 4th January 1944, USAAF B-25s (5th Air Force), covered by RAAF Beaufighters, attack Japanese shipping in Tenau harbor, Timor, sinking army cargo ship Heimei Maru,
10°10´S, 123°35´E.
ref. used:Cressman R. J., Official Chronology of the U.S. Navy in WWII
Read more at wrecksite
Maru is a suffix usually attached to the names of Japanese Merchant ships, Heimei could be translated as ‘dawn’ or ‘daybreak’.
[2] Due to the outbreak of the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), the chartered ship, the Heimei Maru was interned by the Greek government as it entered the Dardanelles. Japan, wishing to fulfil a promise to the Turkish government, save its own sense of honour, and also demonstrate its humanitarian intentions, worked with the League of Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to have the ship and its cargo of prisoners released. This paper, based on previously unused archival material, will document Japan’s diplomatic efforts to secure the release of these prisoners. Although a relatively small incident in the comparison to the chaos across Europe the incident highlights the functioning of the new post war diplomacy and the hopes for international cooperation in the wake of the First World War.
1 Misawa Nobuo, ‘The Crisis Between the Greece and Japan Immediately after WWI: The Japanese Policy to Advance to the Mediterranean World’, in Mediterranean World (地中海論) (Chichūkai ronshū) (Discussions on the Mediterranean), 23 (2017), 123–134, 125.
2 Yücel Yanıkdağ, Healing the Nation: Prisoners of War, Medicine and Nationalism in Turkey, 1914–1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 13.
See also: The Crisis between Greece and Japan Immediately after WWI:
The Japanese Policy to Advance to the Mediterranean World
Nobuo Misawa
Link PDF
[3] Going to the Homeland Heimei-Maru
Turkey, 2019, 42’, Color
Turkish, Japanese with Turkish and English subtitles
Director: Hayriye Savaşçıoğlu; Cinematography : Adem Metin, Mehmet Nezir Çelebi; Editing: Zeynep Akköy; Producer: Hayriye Savaşçıoğlu
During the First World War, Ottoman Soldiers were taken as prisoners of war in Russia. The commander of the ship Heimei-Maru was Japanese Lieutenant Colonel Yukichi Tsumura and he was tasked with the transfer of the soldiers to Istanbul. The journey that began on 23 February 1921. And the return of those soldiers to Istanbul was realized only on 25 June 1922. Mustafa Dokur's father was one of the soldiers who returned İstanbul with Heimei-Maru. He lost his father when he was 4 years old. Only a pale photo and a notebook were left from his father. So he began to search for his father's captivity years.
(Pictured) Russian POW with Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian troops, ca 1916
[4] Sretensk was a Russian prisoner-of-war camp established in October 1914 with the intent of housing Central Powers' troops captured during the course of World War I. The camp was situated in the city of Sretensk and combined barracks and private residences to house the internees. The internal affairs of the camp were regulated by a committee of interned officers and the camp authorities. Between December 1915 and March 1916 the camp was affected by a typhus epidemic. Following the abdication of Nicholas II of Russia in February 1917, conditions in the camp worsened. A number of prisoners joined rival factions during the Russian Civil War while those who remained came under fire when the fighting spread to the camp. The last prisoners were evacuated from the camp in the middle of 1921.
The Sretensk prisoner-of-war camp was established in October 1914 with the intent of housing captured German and Austro-Hungarian troops. Sretensk was among the 10 camps established in the Zabaykalsky Oblast, the others being Chita, Nerchinsk, Troitskosavsk, Verkhneudinsk, Barguzin, Peschanka, Dauria, Antipicha and Berezovka. The camps were not camps in the strictest sense but rather housing projects within preexisting settlements dedicated to the internment of prisoners. As of 14 October 1914, Sretensk housed around 1,000 prisoners. By the end of 1915 the number had risen to 11,000. In contrast, the city's permanent population numbered only 7,000. The majority of the prisoners were held in the barracks of the 16th Siberian Infantry Regiment and the railway station barracks. A small number of high ranking officers settled in private houses due to the lack of available quarters. The camp was guarded by the 719th Ufa Infantry Druzhina as the town's former garrison had departed for the frontlines.
At first foreign officers were allowed to venture through the town freely visiting the local coffee shop and billiards club, but this was put to an end by an order dated 23 October 1914. Nevertheless, officers lived a relatively comfortable life, receiving at least 50 rubles per year depending on their rank, allowing them to acquire products from the local marketplace. They were assisted by batmen who acted as cooks and servants. The order also put into place an officers committee, tasked with maintaining order, regulating the health services, security, leisure, and religious life of the prisoners in conjunction with the camp authorities. Lutheran and Catholic Christians held services in a wooden church of their own construction, while Jews were permitted to practice in a separate room with the help of the town's rabbi. The committee organized football, tennis, volleyball, weightlifting, athletics competitions, with an orchestra and a theater supplementing them. The committee also regulated the postage service and the distribution of aid from the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations. With the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the war, the camp began receiving prisoners captured during the Caucasus Campaign. In early 1915, Sretensk received a group of 43 Ottomans, among whom were some Armenians. The absence of Turkish speaking translators complicated their internment and led to the 1917 transfer of Ottoman prisoners to the Dauria camp.[*]
The combination of extreme climatic conditions, contacts with civilians, the density of the population in the barracks and poor organization led to the first outbreak of typhus in December 1915. In February 1916, a quarantine was enforced and sick prisoners were transferred either to the hospital or separate barracks. The epidemic was subdued in March with the help of two Swedish Red Cross sisters of mercy who had arrived two months earlier. In order to further isolate the healthy from the sick, healthy prisoners formed groups which were employed in the local agricultural sector. Productivity improved rapidly once the work became paid. The spectrum of employment opportunities gradually expanded to include the telegraph–post service, railroad maintenance, leather work, logging, photo ateliers, mills, construction work, production of building materials and soap. The influx of cheap labor greatly benefited the local economy. Over time the camp was visited by delegations from the Danish and Swedish Red Cross as well as the American embassy. The commander of the Zabaykalsk gendarmerie believed the Swedish Red Cross mission to be motivated by intelligence gathering rather than humanitarian concerns. Reports issued by the delegation attested to the upholding of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.
Following the abdication of Czar Nicholas II of Russia in February 1917, conditions within the camp turned for the worse. Rations were reduced and the supply of clothing and medication limited to the point of distributing the clothes of dead internees to their comrades. The outbreak of the October Revolution of 1917 marked the beginning of the Russian Civil War, making the internees almost entirely dependent on the help of the Red Cross. On 3 March 1918, the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending Russia's participation in World War I. At the same time Adolf Osipovich a local Bolshevik agitator began his propaganda campaign in the camp. A number of Hungarian internees were persuaded by his appeals to world revolution and joined the Bolshevik International Battalions. German and Austrian prisoners on the other hand enlisted into units under the command of Grigory Semyonov and Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, who belonged to the rival white movement. However, the majority of the prisoners remained neutral, awaiting their release. In early 1920, a Bolshevik unit under Ivan Fadeev took cover in the camp's barracks leading to numerous casualties among the internees after it became the target of a Japanese artillery bombardment. In April 1921, the remaining prisoners were transferred to Primorie, the last prisoners left for their homelands from Vladivostok in the middle of the same year. A self made memorial dedicated to the prisoners that perished in the camp was erected in the Fillipicha valley outside the camp, an inscription in Hungarian reads, "To our comrades that perished so far from the motherland. Officers and soldiers of the allied Austrian–Hungarian–German–Turkish army. 1914–1915–1916."
[5] Ottoman Prisoners of War taken by the Entente Powers
217,746 Ottoman prisoners should be considered the minimum number of captives because much like the Ottomans, the Entente powers did not always keep accurate statistics. The most accurate seem to be those provided by the British but those, too, are suspect as they sometimes separated "Turks" from other ethnic Ottoman peoples and categorized them as "Others" belonging to "friendly nationalities," while at other times they referred to them simply as "Turks" in their reports. The most questionable is the number of those in Russia.
SOURCE
CaptorNumbers
Russia65,000-90,000
United Kingdom(camps in Egypt, India, Burma, Cyprus, Mesopotamia)150,041
France2,000
Italy (men captured in Libya) 100
Romania 605
TOTAL 217,746-242,746
Table 1: Ottoman Prisoners of War[**]
[**] Yanıkdağ, Healing 2013, p. 20; and Taşkıran, Cemalettin: Ana Ben Ölmedim [Mother, I Did Not Die]. Istanbul 2001, p. 51. A recently discovered U.S. document states that a high Russian official reported that his country held 90,000 Ottomans, 1,400 of whom were officers. Telegram from Copenhagen to Secretary of State, Washington, D.C., 31 October 1917, Records of the Department of State Relating to World War One and its Termination, 763.72114/3004, Record Group 59, p. 2. See also "Report on the Condition of Military and Civil Prisoners of War in Siberia," 14 June 1915, 763.72114/622, p. 8, which reported western Siberian military district of Steppny alone had 25,000 "Turks."
[6] Ottoman Prisoners in Russia
Of between 65,000-90,000 Ottoman prisoners of war held by the Russians, approximately 10,000 are thought to have been captured on the Galician front. On the Middle East and the Caucasus fronts, there was quite the discrepancy in the number of prisoners captured and the number of prisoners who remained alive by the end of the war. Some Ottoman doctors and officers captured by the Russians estimated that about 27 percent of the Ottoman prisoners never even made it to their permanent prison camps, which they shared with prisoners from other Central Powers who had also been captured by the Russians. If this is a reliable assessment, these losses should be added to the 10,000 Ottoman dead in the camps, reported by former Austro-Hungarian prisoners who seemed to have kept good records of mortality in Russian camps. An estimate based upon the total of two numbers - transport and prison camp losses - would suggest a death rate of about 43 percent for Ottoman prisoners during their captivity.
Ottomans captured during the initial fighting were usually sent directly to one of the many prison camps located all over Russia. Sometimes this travel lasted months. As cases of typhus began to spread on the Caucasus front in early 1915, and as Russians captured more prisoners on the European fronts than they could accommodate in the existing camps, they sent thousands of Ottoman prisoners to the Island of Nargin in the Caspian Sea. A desolate piece of rock even today, the intention was that the island would serve double duty as a staging and quarantine area, while the Russian authorities decided where to send the surviving prisoners who did not die from typhus or other diseases while on Nargin.
Regimes of privilege also operated for captives held by Russia that sought to favour Slav captives over Germans, who were often sent to the worst camps in Siberia, far from European Russia; as early as November 1914, the Russian Stavka ordered that Slav and Alsatian prisoners receive the best food and lodgings, while Magyrs, ethnic Germans and Jews were to be treated worst. Russia also held roughly 65,000 Ottoman prisoners of war; conditions for these men varied, but some were able to attend lectures and educational classes in their camps.[*] Ottoman captives suffered badly during transport, as was the case for many captives taken by Russia who were moved in heated box cars known Teplushki across vast distances; often lack of fuel for heating meant prisoners suffered hardship or even died during transport. The Russian holding camp for Ottoman prisoners on Nargin Island, where conditions were poor, had a particularly high death rate.
The types of prison camps in Russia varied significantly in size and functionality. Especially when large numbers of Austro-Hungarian prisoners started to arrive, almost anything served as a prison camp: abandoned factories or distilleries and large military garrisons now sitting empty, drafty artillery barracks in such garrisons, and commandeered or rented large houses in small towns. Most of the prisoners were sent to Siberia to places such as Krasnoyarsk, Omsk, Vladivostok, Irkutsk, Tomsk and others. One of the most notable camps of garrison size was in Krasnoyarsk, which housed tens of thousands of prisoners from all Central Powers. No matter the size or location of the camp, the most common complaint among the prisoners was related to issues of overcrowding. Overcrowding increased the death toll from diseases in the camps. The 1916-typhus outbreak in Russia killed more than 64,000 prisoners of all nationalities. In the winter of 1914-15, the same disease claimed 1,300 casualties in Krasnoyarsk camp alone. The typhus epidemics all over Siberia during the war, coupled with overcrowding guaranteed more deaths. Ottomans seem to have died at a higher rate in comparison to other prisoners. Another frequent complaint concerned the quality and quantity of food, both of which declined considerably after the October revolution.
Much like those in British captivity, officer prisoners in large camps organized various activities for themselves: they learned languages from fellow prisoners, established schools to teach and learn collectively in more formal fashion, and formed sports teams, as well as musical and theatrical groups.
When the war broke out, the Ottoman state employed the services of Spain for its diplomatic functions, as well as affairs of prisoner of war in Russia. It seems that this was a poor choice, however, as Spain had very limited diplomatic presence in the Russian Empire and no consuls in Siberia. A single Ottoman civil servant appointed to the Spanish Embassy for such a task was insufficient. Later, with the assistance of the German government, Swedish and Danish agencies agreed to provide periodic and partial aid to Ottoman prisoners. Occasional additional aid was provided through the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) as well.
[*] Yanikdag, Yucel: Healing the Nation. Prisoners of War, Medicine and Nationalism in Turkey, 1914-1939, Edinburgh 2013.
Dr. Yucel Yanikdag
Associate Professor of History
Global Studies Concentration Advisor: Cultures and Communications
He received his B.A. in History from ODU in 1991, and his M.A. in 1994.
Yyanikda(at)Richmond(dot)edu
107 Ryland Hall
T: (804) 289-8336
I am currently working on a monograph dealing with gender and masculinity in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. I am interested in knowing how the war altered expectations and perceptions of gender and masculinity. While there exists a plethora of scholarly literature on masculinity on the European Great War, there is not a single study, with the exception of an article or two I have written, on the late Ottomans. It is as if masculinity was discovered only in the Turkey of the 1930s, if we are to judge from the still small but quickly growing number of works focusing on that time period. What many of these studies focusing on the 1930s seem to miss is that the connection between manliness and military service so prevalent then, as still voiced in the frequently uttered militarist-nationalist motto "every Turk is born a soldier," was actually there much earlier than they assume.
I am still producing occasional articles on the history of medicine and psychiatry since invitations continue to arrive. My book also turned me onto exciting areas for possible short projects. For example, I am contemplating a major article on Turkish nationalism from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. However, who knows when I might be able to get to it.
My archival research in Turkey has been both in Istanbul and Ankara. The Ottoman state archive is in Istanbul, but the military archive happens to be in Ankara. The latter is controlled by the military. While I worked in both extensively, I found my most unique sources, especially for the first book, in libraries around the country—in the provinces as well as major cities. These were hand-written prisoner of war newspapers produced by the Ottoman POWs in camps in Egypt and Russia. Not all, but most were uncatalogued or catalogued only under the title without any description. In some places libraries did not know what they were.
Because of the Allied invasion of Turkey after the First World War and the War of Liberation (1919-1922), which followed it, there might have been some plundering or removal of documents relating to the war. In the 1930s there was even a deep disregard for Ottoman history and Ottoman imperial documents. This was part of the Kemalist effort to build a new Turkish identity by making the Ottomans the ultimate Other. The republican government at the time actually "sold" at recycled paper prices truckloads of Ottoman imperial documents to places like Bulgaria, which expressed interest in acquiring documents relating to Ottoman Bulgaria before their independence. So, while there are small private or institutional archives in the provinces, provincial archives as such do not exist in Turkey. Thus, those wanting to do research on Ottoman Bulgaria would have to go to both Bulgaria and Istanbul.
There are private or foundation archives in various parts of Turkey, but provincial archives as such do not exist in the same sense as, say, Russia. I think one can still find sharia court records in the provinces, but that's about the extent of it. A lot of these documents were brought to the capital city either in hard copy or microfilm.
Acknowledgements
Author’s note on usage
List of maps and figures
List of tables INTRODUCTION
1. The Ottoman Great War And Captivity In Russia And Egypt
2. Imagining Community And Identity In Russia And Egypt: A Comparison
3. Saviour Sons Of The Nation: Inside The Prisoners’ Minds
4. Prisoners As Disease Carriers: Cases Of Pellagra And Trachoma
5. War Neurosis And Prisoners Of War: Wartime Nervous Breakdown And The Politics Of Medical Interpretation
6. Degenerationist Pathway To Eugenics: Neuro-Psychiatry, Social Pathology And Anxities Over National Health
Epilogue: The Search For A Useable Past: Prisoners Of War, The Ottoman Great War And Turkish Nationalism
Bibliography
Index
This highly original and impeccably researched study helps us understand not only the workings of the Ottoman military establishment but also the state formation in the late Ottoman Empire and the influence of German theories of medicine, psychiatry and eugenics in this complex process.
- M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Princeton University
`Yanıkdağ’s skill and craft as a social historian shines brightly in this account of Ottoman soldiers who were not heroes, as he tells us two stories at once: the tale of those who were silenced and that of those who did the silencing...His work is a must read for any scholar or interested observer who would like to go deeper into the ethics of military heroism as it has been embraced by Turkish national official and mundane, at the expense of untold stories of what war really does to us all.`
- Associate Professor, Nergis Canefe (York University, Toronto), Turkish Review
'Yanikdag (Univ. of Richmond) has written a fascinating book about Ottoman prisoners of war during WW I and the development of the Republic of Turkey and Turkish identity...A very valuable study for all interested in military and medical history as well as the development of nation-states.'
- R. W. Zens Le Moyne College , Choice
"The original sources and new insights offered by Healing the Nation gives scholars of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and the modern Middle East much to consider. Few, if any, works preceding this study have considered the history and legacy of wartime internment, thus adding considerably to the breadth of our understanding of World War I."
- Ryan Gingeras, The American Historical Review
"Weaved together in a comprehensive work with inquisitive reasoning and clever writing style, [Healing the Nation] deserves a warm welcome to historiography."
- Sanem Güvenç Salgırlı, Insight Turkey
'beginning with tracing Turkish nationalism among POWs and following with the analysis of the reports of medical doctors, Yanıkdağ creates a unique and untraditional approach to point out the trajectory of the emergence of Turkish nationalism among POWs…the author’s approach is a methodologically creative way to discuss the Ottomans’ role in the Great War. Consequently, the medical publications, the bibliography, and above all the prisoners’ literature, including prison-camp newspapers, poems, folk songs, and cartoons that the author unearthed, make the book a real gem for scholars.'
- Haldun Yalçinkaya, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara, War in History
'Healing the Nation is a very important, well-researched, and original contribution to the literature and should inspire new studies on the topic.'
- M. Alper Yalcinkaya, The Historian