TURKEY: STRATEGIC & SCRAPPY

Bigger than France, more populous than Yugoslavia, Turkey adjoins oil-rich Iran and sits astride the Dardanelles, through which the Russian navy's Black Sea fleet would have to pass in time of war. Along with Greece, Turkey has been newly invited to join NATO, to anchor down the Eastern end of the defense line. TIME Correspondent Jim Bell last week reported on strategic Turkey:

THE Turk is a nice guy to have on our side. He's a realist, he knows where he's going, he's got the guts and stamina to get there. He's a realist, certainly, in his dealings with the U.S. By coming to Turkey's aid in 1947, the Americans raised themselves to the position of second least hated foreign nation (least hated: the Germans). We have made a valuable gesture of recognition now by sponsoring Turkey for NATO membership. The Turks are properly appreciative. But it is a mistake to say that Turkey today is pro-U.S. We simply have something to offer the Turks. They trade us something we can use (position, courage, strength) for something we can give them (military and financial assistance).

The Turks wanted to get into NATO badly. More specifically they wanted a firm military partnership with the U.S. Surreya Agaoglu, a famous Istanbul woman lawyer who has known many Westerners (including the late Wendell Willkie), put it this way:

"We don't depend on anyone but the U.S. Norway and France aren't going to fight for Turkey, no matter what the North Atlantic Treaty says. The French wouldn't even fight for themselves in the last war. But the U.S. will fight for Turkey. Even without the Americans, we aren't afraid of anyone, including the Russians. But having the Americans with us makes it better."

Turkey emerged from World War II lonely and friendless. It had played the hard-to-get neutral, declaring war on Nazi Germany only at the last moment, in February 1945, in time to qualify for U.N. membership. It was cut off from the Balkans and the Arab world too, and isolated from Islam. No one loved the Turks. The Turks loved no one. Then the Moskofs (as the Turks call the Russians) started growling. Turkey's stout defiance of Soviet demands for joint control of the Dardanelles taught the U.S. and the Western world, in 1946 still under the dreamy illusion of being able to do business with Russia, a great deal. If you said no with conviction and determination, the Russians paused.

Under Western Hats

Today most Turks have no doubts about why they have been accepted into the Western community of nations. Ahmet Emin Yalman, independent, Western-minded (Columbia-educated) editor of the Istanbul Vatan (The Motherland), wrote: "It was the troops in Korea that paved the way [into NATO]. Had the unit not been sent to Korea, Turkey would have remained a second-rate state."

When the Korean war broke out, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and his brilliant Foreign Minister, Fuat Koepruelue, acted with courage and decision.

"They asked me to come over as soon as they got the message," U.S. Ambassador George Wadsworth recalls. "They asked me how big a unit they should send. Before I could answer, they told me they'd decided on a division as a starter. It took some talking to get them down to a brigade, which at that time was the largest unit we could equip and send off right away."

When the first casualty figures came in from Korea--nearly 25% of the brigade--Wadsworth called on Koepruelue to extend the U.S.'s condolences to the Turkish people. "Don't feel sorry for us, Mr. Ambassador," Koepruelue said. "This is a most wonderful thing for Turkey. Since World War II, the world has been saying that Turkish soldiers were no good. Now the world will know we can fight, and will fight."

Admission to NATO will mean completion of a task Kemal Atatuerk set out upon 28 years ago this month: the westernization of Turkey. His original dream of converting Turkey from an Eastern empire to a Western nation is now, many Turks believe, a reality. NATO membership will be worn like the brimmed Western hat that replaced the fez.

Oxen & Tractors

Turkey, predominantly an agricultural nation despite Atatuerk's brave show of steel mills and modern factories, is still a long way from using its land's full strength, though 80% of Turkey's 20 million people live off the dry and parched land (there are only twelve cities of over 50,000 population).

The really hopeful thing is that Turkey isn't standing still, or slipping backward. It's advancing. Turkish agricultural land is expanding; this year there is an alltime high of 10.5 million hectares under cultivation. The Turk is a hard worker and he's used to sacrifice. Last month, the central Anatolian plain was seething with harvest activity. Though 1,283 ECA combines have been imported since 1948, most of the threshing is done by ancient methods. Oxen pull sleds, equipped with sharp flint points, around & around in the harvested wheat stocks, cutting them apart. Then the peasant and his family toss the grain into the air, allowing the wind, as it has for centuries, to separate wheat from chaff. (Sometimes there is the incongruity of a flint sled being pulled around by a bright, red, new, ECA tractor.)

A record grain crop (50% over the 1934-38 average) is in. During 1949 and 1950, to the acute embarrassment of ECA Boss for Turkey Russell Dorr, who has always contended that Turkey should be a wheat-exporting nation, the country had to import the grain. This year, Dorr happily predicts, it will export 200,000 tons. In the south, cotton pickers are gathering another record crop (300% over 1934-38).

All this means money to the Turks. The cotton crop will be worth $165 million this year (last pre-ECA crop: $25 million); wheat, $535 million. The ECA people would have you believe it's the Marshall Plan that has done it. The Turkish Democratic Party says it's their doing. Both acknowledge a valuable assist from Allah, who brought rains at just the right time during the growing season. Most of the $294 million of Marshall Plan aid has been passed on to the farmer: 6,468 tractors, 3,242 disk plows, 6,176 tractor-drawn plows, 4,258 disk harrows.

"Marshall" has become part of the language. It means easy installments. Vedad Baykurt, a young businessman, says that when the peasant comes into a farm equipment store these days, his first question is, "Bu Marshall mi? [Is this Marshall?]," meaning, can I buy this on 20% down and 20% each year for five years, borrowing the down payment from the Agricultural Bank?

Out of the Rut

But perhaps ECA's biggest impact on Turkey has been its road-building program. Turkey is a big country, cut apart by rugged mountain ranges and vast areas of distant plateau. Counting everything which wasn't simply a wagon track, ECA found barely 13,000 miles of roads, only 5,000 miles of them good enough for a truck. In the event of a Soviet attack on Turkey, the eastern Mediterranean port of Iskenderun (Alexandretta) would be vital; 360 miles northeast of it is Erzurum, headquarters of the Third Army which controls the Soviet-Turkish frontier. Yet there was no direct road between the two places.

Atatuerk and his followers actually considered the lack of roads a defense weapon. Turkish defense thinking prior to 1947 was sometimes described as the "Gallipoli mind." Widely separate cadres of troops were assigned to defend mountain passes and strategic positions. They had their orders--plant the flag on the hilltop and stick until every man died. If there were no roads, the thinking ran, then the enemy would have a harder time moving than the defenders would have defending. The new military equipment and tactical conception the U.S. brought to Turkey in 1947 demanded that the Gallipoli approach be changed, that the Turkish army become mobile.

The U.S. Bureau of Public Road sent some of its best road builders. A 21,638-mile national highway system was designed. A veteran Public Roads man named Fred D. Hartford lived for months in a trailer with his wife while touring Turkey, building strong, cheap, simple steel bridges of his own design (Turks now call these bridges Hartfords). Today, no matter where you travel between the communications centers of Turkey, you see orange bulldozers, scoops, graders and gangs of men at work. In three years, some 2,500 miles of first-class highway have been cut.

Recently ECA Boss Dorr was out in the wilds of eastern Anatolia. He asked an old farmer if he had heard of the Marshall Plan. Indeed the farmer had. "Before Marshall," the old man said, "there was no hard road near my house. I could only get 20 kilos on my donkey's back. If I put more on him, he sunk into the mud. Now I can put 30 kilos on the donkey, thanks to the Marshall Plan."

Enter Democracy

Of all hopeful signs in Turkey, none is more compelling than the political situation. There's less graft, more honest and devoted officials in Turkey than any place in the Middle East.

In 1945, Kemal Atatuerk's successor, President Ismet Inoenue, took a gamble on true democratic rule. His Republican People's Party dropped its iron control, allowed the new, opposition Democratic Party to form. Last year, when the Republican Party allowed a free election, long-neglected Anatolian peasants, who make up more than 80% of Turkey, found their good will sought and their needs catered to. It was a new experience for peasants, who formerly had been asked merely to die in wars, starve in peace. They voted the Republicans out, brought the Democrats in.

Last week versatile young Kasim Gulek, Republican Party secretary general, sat outside the Ankara Palas Hotel and told me that the Democrats had also taken 18 or 20 National Assembly seats in recent by-elections, through intimidation of voters', police interference with candidates, and the pouring of government funds into contested villages.

"Even the personality of candidates was attacked," he complained. "They said I once went to a mosque in Ad.ana without doing my ablutions. They said I was not circumcised. They displayed a picture of me in academic cap & gown when I graduated from the American Robert College in Istanbul, saying I was a Christian and these were my robes as a Christian priest." The significant fact is not that the party out of power views with great alarm, but that they can do all the viewing in public and no one runs them in. Democracy is now a fact.

Politically, one thing is sure. No matter which party controls the government, it will be antiCommunist. No Turkish political leader in sight would alter that course. Actually, Turkey (which keeps its Communist Party cells in Ankara, Istanbul and other cities neatly in hand) is more anti-Russian than antiCommunist. In Greece, the opposite is true, but the Turk, who has fought the Moskof 13 times in the past 400 years, would hate and fight him whether he were a Communist, monarchist or playing third base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Here, of all countries in the world, is the one we need never worry about doublecrossing us to the enemy.

Oscar with Bazookas

JAMMAT (Joint American Military Mission for Aid to Turkey) is the biggest military advisory group in any country the U.S. is helping. It has 1,250 officers, enlisted men and civilians, and seems to be growing all the time. It started in 1947 with Army, Navy and Air; recently, field training teams, and engineers to build jet fighter airstrips which will screen the British colony of Cyprus from the North, were added.

Counting the current year's budget, the Turks have officially received $500 million in military aid from the U.S. We've given tanks, trucks, jeeps, machine guns, Bofors AA guns, howitzers, big & little bazookas, spotter planes, $17 million worth of signal equipment including radar, B-26 bombers and C-47 transports, six subs, four destroyers and eight minesweepers.

About the only original weapon left in the Turkish army is the Ankara 7.92 mm. rifle, a locally produced bolt-action copy of the old Mauser, carried by the asker. The asker (pronounced "Oscar" by Americans here) is the basic, unadulterated, conscripted Turkish soldier.

Fighting men in Turkey come cheap. JAMMAT people figure they get a rifleman complete with pay, housing, food and all equipment for $500 a year. This compares to around $2,700 for the American doughfoot. The asker gets an allowance of about 12-c- a month, which he somewhat bitterly calls his tras parasi (shave money). The asker's boots and uniform look awful. The asker looks particularly bad on furlough. The army, very practically, gives him a sloppy, patched-up uniform for leave, so he won't tear up his fighting clothes. But there is a proud spirit in the Turkish army, and that's what pays off. For every place in the original contingent to Korea, there were six volunteers.

The Turkish army, like all good armies, is full of pride and tradition. Sometimes it has thought what the Americans preached was a little foolish, and has simply ignored it. For instance, because he has always done it, and because he is afraid of ears listening in on the new American radio equipment, a corps commander will still--incredible as it may seem--put an order for a division commander in an envelope, paste a postage stamp on it, and post it at the nearest mail drop. The Turkish general officer thinks his new radio equipment is too valuable to waste on silly things like administration traffic.

The Prettiest Brigades

All has not been as smooth between JAMMAT and the Turks as would be desired, or has generally been reported. Basic troubles have been blustering lack of tact and feeling by certain Americans dealing with proud and sensitive Turks; and on the other side, the Turk's distrust of any foreigner. The Turk regards the American he sees as a guy with a big mouth and no sense of military security. The Turks are actually quite right in playing things very carefully. Last month I was sitting in the bar of Beirut's St. Georges Hotel. Two American sergeants on leave were pretty drunk and holding forth at the top of their voices about how incredibly stupid Turks are at learning to use tanks. They illustrated their points with considerable detail. Two known Communist barkeepers got an earful, kept stiff drinks coming to the two loud Americans.

The job of helping the Turk is by no means finished. The load of supporting his military establishment is simply too great for his economy. This year alone his deficit, out of a total budget of 1.5 billion Turkish lira ($530 million), is 234 million lira. In 1946, the last year before we joined up with Turkey, the army cost 40.59% of the country's budget. We have cut this to 30.9% and trimmed an oversize force of 900,000 men to just about half that, and at the same time actually doubled its firepower.

"We've got six of the prettiest little armored brigades you ever saw," George Wadsworth says, speaking of the Turkish army we've helped build. "They're really more like the German Panzer division. They're wonderful." He belligerently asserts it is "the best army in all of Europe" and defies any one to argue with him.

Wadsworth is probably a little overenthusiastic. Furthermore, Turkey already has 367 miles of Soviet frontier to defend. If Iran falls behind the Iron Curtain, 290 miles more of Soviet frontier (plus a likely invasion route, past Mt. Ararat) will be added to Turkey's defense problem. From a military point of view, Eisenhower's right flank is certainly stuck away the hell and gone out into enemy territory.

But if there's a brawl, you can be sure of one thing--Turkey won't stand off as it did in World War II. Turkey has a good strong fist that'll bloody any nose that comes poking out from behind the Iron Curtain.

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