By fratermal
OregonLive
In late evening of August 10, 1914, a Turkish destroyer, acting on instructions from authorities in Constantinople, escorted into and through the Dardanelles Straits two German warships, the Goeben and the Breslau, bearing with them (as Churchill later wrote) “more slaughter, more misery, more ruin” than anyone could have foreseen. This action signaled that the still officially neutral Ottoman Empire was tending to side with Germany in the war which had just begun. By November it was on the side of the Central Powers and at war with Russia, France, and Great Britain.
From there runs a century of damage: the futile bloody battle at Gallipoli, the genocide of Armenians, British campaigns in Mesopotamia and Palestine, the eventual collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the post-war re-drawing of the map of the Middle East, whose results still make headlines today.
In the morning of that same August 10, a small Italian liner docked at Constantinople. Among its passengers were family members of the new U.S. ambassador, Henry Morgenthau Sr., including his grand-daughter Barbara Tuchman, who 50 years later would publish what is still the most readable account of that fateful month — “The Guns of August.”
August 10, 2014