THE JOINT AMERICAN MILITARY MISSION TO AID TURKEY: IMPLEMENTING THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE AND TRANSFORMING U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, 1947-1954 By HOWARD ADELBERT MUNSON IV A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY Department of History MAY 2012 To the Faculty of Washington State University: The members of the Committee appointed to examine the dissertation of Howard Adelbert Munson IV find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted. ____________________________________ Noriko Kawamura, Ph.D., Chair ____________________________________ Matthew Sutton, Ph.D. ____________________________________ Robert Staab, Ph.D. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The most important people who aided me in the writing of this dissertation are my family and the members of my dissertation committee. My wife Brenda deserves the most singular thanks for her various forms of support, from providing the financial support and child care that made writing this dissertation possible, to listening aloud to every page and offering feedback and encouragement. I would also like to thank my father for helping to inspire my love of history in the first place, and for being an outside reader for this dissertation, in the second. Next, my sister has the distinction for being my only research assistant, not only giving me a place to stay in Washington D.C., but also helping me sift through thousands of documents at the National Archives. I would also like to thank my fellow graduate student, Caleb Sparks, for timing his family’s vacation to D.C. so that he could help me drive back to Pullman Washington in thirty- two hours of Indy rock and philosophical discussion. Finally, I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee for their professional support and criticism. This dissertation is much stronger for your ideas, editorial suggestions, and individual expertise. iii THE JOINT AMERICAN MILITARY MISSION TO AID TURKEY: IMPLEMENTING THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE AND TRANSFORMING U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, 1947-1954 Abstract By Howard Adelbert Munson IV, Ph.D. Washington State University May 2012 Chair: Norikio Kawamura This dissertation examines the early history (1947-1954) of the Joint American Military Mission to Aid Turkey (JAMMAT) and its role in shaping U.S.-Turkish relations and as a window into the developing Cold War policies and strategies of the United States. This study begins by depicting the relevant and unique contexts for both Turkey and the United States leading up to the Truman Doctrine speech that brought the American mission to Turkey into existence. The remainder of the study uses the National Archive records of the mission itself, related Department of State documents, and memoirs to reveal both the substance of the aid mission and the vagaries of U.S. foreign policy that accompanied it. On the surface JAMMAT was a military modernization program for Turkey as part of the Containment Strategy. Underneath, this study depicts how the actions of JAMMAT also functioned to outfit and direct the Turkish military into a crucial and unknown role in top secret Anglo-American contingency war plans as a sacrificial speed bump in the event of full-scale war with the Soviet Union. Within this context, the work of JAMMAT did serve overt Turkish national security interests, but only secondarily to secret U.S. strategic designs. The great irony of JAMMAT’s legacy is that the iv work of the mission, combined with the impact of the Korean War and the excellent performance of the Turkish Brigades in the UN police action to Korea, ended up increasing the value of Turkey as an American ally in the Cold War to such an extent that the United States pushed for the inclusion of Turkey into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Thus, intentionally and unintentionally, JAMMAT created the Turkish Model that was a blueprint for later U.S. aid programs and left a legacy affecting the security of Turkey, the Middle East, and the United States. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………………..iii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………...iv INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER 1. CONTEXT: TURKEY FROM KÜÇÜK KAYNARCA TO THE SOVIET DEMANDS OF 1945………………………………………………………………...12 2. CONTEXT: THE UNITED STATES FROM WORLD WAR II TO THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE………………………………………………………………………….44 3. THE MISSION BEGINS: ESTABLISHING THE MISSION TO AID TURKEY....67 4. UNCERTAIN FUTURE: JAMMAT AND THE VAGARIES OF U.S. POLICY...102 5. THE KOREAN FACTOR: THE WAR, THE TURKISH BRIGADE, AND NATO MEMBERSHIP…………………………………………………………………….131 6. CONCLUSION: THE TURKISH MODEL AND THE LEGACY OF JAMMAT...157 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………188 vi INTRODUCTION It is common knowledge that the Truman Doctrine was a significant step in the history of America’s foreign affairs, casting a long interventionist shadow on a global scale from 1947 until the present. Some historians consider it America’s declaration of war against the Soviet Union and condemn it for starting the Cold War. Others trumpet it as the policy shift that committed the United States to the defense of the free world and praise it for inaugurating the anti-communist Containment Strategy. Frequently overlooked in the debates over the meaning and/or legacy of the Truman Doctrine are the military missions to Greece and Turkey that the president’s speech produced. While the Greek mission helped to defeat the communist rebels in the Greek Civil War, the mission to Turkey represented an ever greater departure from traditional American foreign policy and exerted a significant impact upon the United States, Turkey, and the Middle East during the early years of the Cold War. The Joint American Military Mission to Aid Turkey (JAMMAT) 1 was a modernization program undertaken by all three branches of the United States military at the beginning of the Cold War. This dissertation examines the mission during the years 1947 to 1952, beginning with the articulation of the Truman Doctrine, which called JAMMAT into existence, and ending with the inclusion of Turkey into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). After 1952 the Mission to Aid Turkey essentially became an unofficial part of the NATO mission rather than a strategic American policy independently helping to shape the early Cold War. The story that this dissertation tells begins well before 1947. The mission was an American idea put into practice 1 The original title was the American Mission to Aid Turkey (AMAT), but this became JAMMAT in October 1949 following a minor reorganization. To avoid confusion and since it superseded AMAT and became the permanent title for the mission and all its records, this study will subsequently only use the JAMMAT acronym. 1 half-way around the globe, in a part of the world informed by its own deep and meaningful history. The American mission operated at the invitation of the Turkish government, in conjunction with the Turkish military, and as the records from the mission and relevant State Department files demonstrate, Turkish agency was an ever present component of the mission and its ensuing relevance. This dissertation, therefore, seeks to place the mission within the two important contexts that it bridged. On the Turkish side the context of Russo-Turkish antagonism influenced virtually all Turkish actions, opinions, and policy decisions that related to the American mission. In the United States the essential context revolved around embarking on a new interventionist foreign policy and the subsequent creation of a developing Cold War policy. It is the thesis of this dissertation that between 1947 and 1952 JAMMAT played a much more decisive role in influencing the geopolitical future of the United States, Turkey, and the Middle East than most historians have previously acknowledged. For Turkey the mission was the key to getting into NATO, fulfilling centuries of Ottoman-Turkish aspirations for security, while for the United States JAMMAT and Turkey together helped draw the new superpower into the defense of the Middle East, before oil and terrorism made it a fixed part of American national security. This dissertation begins by establishing the roots undergirding the American Mission to Aid Turkey, emphasizing the separate paths that Turkey and the United States were on until 1946. The focus of chapter one is the context for Turkey. This chapter establishes the depth and breadth of Russo-Turkish antagonism, while also highlighting the desperate situation that surrounded the recent establishment of the Republic of Turkey. When the American mission began operations in 1947, the Republic of Turkey was a mere twenty-four years old. Nearly every adult, and certainly every leader in Turkey, remembered first-hand the trauma that accompanied the country’s independence. These factors, along with Soviet actions during the 2 Second World War, combined to create enduring Turkish feelings of weakness and vulnerability, and motivated the search for outside assistance, which illuminate the full significance of the American mission in helping Turkey attain NATO membership. Chapter two presents the relevant American context, beginning at the end of World War Two and establishing the European setting that ultimately invited American intervention in the form of the Truman Doctrine. This dissertation argues that despite the United States taking an increasing interest in the situation unfolding in the Eastern Mediterranean immediately after the Second World