Great Offensive

Even senior officers are, in some cases, informed of the specific point of attack only in the final days before the offensive begins, a level of compartmentalization unusual for the time, but reflective of how completely the entire nationalist project now rests on this single throw.

The great offensive begins in the pre-dawn hours of August twenty-sixth, nineteen twenty-two, with a concentrated artillery bombardment against the Greek positions on the heights near Kocatepe and Tanastepe, south of Afyon, a modest hill unremarkable in itself, from which Mustafa Kemal personally observes the opening of the assault, a detail that would come to carry considerable symbolic weight in the way the offensive is remembered, the commander watching from the very ground his soldiers are about to take.

The bombardment, though limited by the standards of the artillery duels, then still fresh in memory from the Western Front of the Great War, is sufficient, combined with the total surprise achieved by the direction of attack, to shatter the initial Greek defensive positions within the first day of fighting.

Turkish infantry moving in the gray light before full dawn storms positions that the defending Greek units, caught unprepared for an assault of this scale in this sector, are unable to hold.

And Mustafa Kemal understands even amid the exhaustion and the complicated, often grim realities of a city in the aftermath of military collapse and civil catastrophe, that the essential military question of the war, whether an independent Turkish state could survive the attempt to partition it, has now been answered.

What remains through the autumn of nineteen twenty-two is not further major combat, but a tense and consequential diplomatic reckoning with the British forces still garrisoning the neutral zone around the Dardanelles Straits, a confrontation that comes perilously close in the days around the town of Canakkale in late September and early October nineteen twenty-two to reigniting the war on a new front, this time directly against British troops before diplomacy, aided by a British government and public with no appetite for a renewed war after the exhaustions of nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighteen And by the fall of Lloyd George's government itself, brought down in part by the domestic backlash against the risk of war over Canakkale, succeeds in avoiding open conflict and produces instead the Armistice of Mudanya in October nineteen twenty-two, under which Allied and Greek forces agree to withdraw from Istanbul and from Eastern Thrace, restoring these territories to Turkish administration without further fighting.

By November of nineteen twenty-two, less than three months after the great offensive began at Kocatepe, the war that had opened with Greek troops marching ashore at Smyrna and had threatened at its darkest point along the Sakarya to reach the very gates of Ankara comes to its effective conclusion.

The Ottoman Sultanate itself, its authority already hollowed out by three years of nationalist governance from Ankara and now stripped of any remaining claim to represent a nation that had won its own war of survival through its own arms, is formally abolished by the Grand National Assembly on the first of November, the last sultan departing Istanbul aboard a British warship within weeks, bringing to an end more than six centuries of Ottoman dynastic rule, an ending that arrives not through foreign conquest, but through the deliberate act of the very assembly that Mustafa Kemal had labored through those long, uncertain months in Ankara three years earlier to bring into being.