Adana Conference

General George Marshall and other high-ranking US military showed reluctance for fear that the extension of the war to a new Turkish front would "burn the Allied logistics down the line".

However, US President Franklin Roosevelt gave Churchill the green light on 18 January to "play the Turkish hand".

To put pressure on the Turks to give up their neutrality, Churchill made clear that if Turkey refused to join the Allies, he would not try to stop the Soviets from moving to control the Dardanelles.

He hoped that "Turkey’s neutrality will from now on assume a far more biased nature in favour of the allies", and while the Turkish forces could not have been trained to be of much use, the real value would have been the use of aerodromes and as a jumping-off place for future action.

But he said that his "wild dreams" about Turkey remained that, as von Papen "fooled the Turks about fictitious concentrations of German troops in Bulgaria, which never existed."

[10] In April 1943, a British military delegation of General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson requested access for 25 RAF fighter squadrons to Turkish airports.

Wilson urged Turkish commanders to teach their men mechanical skills but noted that meant that prospective tank crews 'had to be taught the workings of the internal combustion engine from page one of the book'.