It wasn’t until February 23, 1945, that the Turkish Grand National Assembly voted—unanimously—to declare war on Germany and Japan. This was only six weeks after Turkey severed links with Japan, six months since ending diplomatic relations with longtime trading partner Germany, and less than three months before the German surrender. The declaration of war was mostly a formality to join the postwar United Nations—Turkey would remain a non-belligerent—but it was still an unexpected act from a country that for years had stubbornly refused to be drawn into choosing a side in the war. In the words of one Turkish minister, Turkey “was determined to maintain her neutral- ity to the end.” While the rights of neutrals were rarely respected by the warring countries, Turkey had dug in its heels.
It was a fine and dangerous line on which Turkey balanced. The country was terrified by the threat of Luftwaffe bombers in occu- pied Greece, which could level Turkish cities overnight. But Turkey feared a victorious Soviet Union even more than a victorious Ger- many, as the Soviets had been eyeing Turkish ports and waterways for years. This animosity was nothing new: beginning in 1568 Turkey and Russia had fought 17 wars, the majority of which resulted in Russian victories. As Ottavio De Peppo, the Italian ambassador to Turkey during the war, phrased it, “the Turkish idea is that the last German soldier should fall upon the last Russian corpse.”
Beginning in 1939, war had consumed the region around Turkey, the nation that served as the literal bridge between Europe and Asia. Along with Nazi-occupied Greece directly to the west, the Germans also controlled the former Ottoman Balkan territories of Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Serbia to the northwest. Turkey’s southern neighbors, the British and French colonial empires occupying Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, had quickly been drafted into battle for the Allies and, after 1941, Turkey’s longtime enemy, the Soviet Union,
