Military history of Turkey
1931s (equipped with two 7.62mm machinegun turrets), four T-27 tankettes, and many vehicles and motorcycles to the Turkish Army in order to increase its part of the arms market and expand the USSR's influence beyond its vast borders.
[2] This information is probably even more strange in light of the fact that 20 years after its delivery, there was no sign of Soviet weapons systems remaining in Turkey, with the country instead receiving vast numbers of US tanks for possible use in a battle against the USSR.
[1] The tank, armed with only a single 7.62mm DT machine gun and weakly armoured (3mm to 10mm at the front), offered few remarkable features aside from its amphibious capability.
[2][9] The tankette concept was also rejected by Turkish Army leadership, and aside from the four prototypes supplied by the Soviets, Turkey made no attempt to obtain further T-27s or contemporary designs from other sources.
Of course, after WWII, the tankette concept was generally abandoned (with the noteworthy exception of the German Wiesel), and their intended mission of reconnaissance was instead filled by light tanks and armoured cars.
[9] The tanks began to wear out by the early 1940s, and their bad condition was aggravated by a dearth of spare parts, which could no longer be obtained from the war-torn Soviet Union.
1933s remain in the gardens of the Harbiye Military Museum in Istanbul and the Etimesgut Tank Müzesi in Ankara, albeit without their original camouflage scheme.
[12] Although Turkey had 300 trained pilots, the majority of them would be rated with moderate ability to fly in bad weather in a Western European Air Force.
[12] In 1942, Ernest Phillips in his work Hitler's last Hope: A factual survey of the Middle East warzone and Turkey's vital strategic position admitted: "If the Germans were to stage an all out offensive in this area, they could bring more planes into the air than the Turks could even gather, and if we were to send too many from Libya to help Turkey, the weakness there would be such that we should be in difficulties on the other side of the Suez.
The daughter of former Air Forces Commander Emin Alpkaya, who had been sent to Britain for training during the war, stated she found something amazing while examining her father's wartime diaries.
The Germans sent Franz von Papen to Ankara, while Winston Churchill secretly met with İnönü inside a train wagon near Adana on January 30, 1943.
Until 1941, both Roosevelt and Churchill thought that continued Turkish neutrality would serve the interests of the Allies by blocking the Axis from reaching the strategic oil reserves of the Middle East.
But the early victories of the Axis up to the end of 1942 caused Roosevelt and Churchill to re-evaluate a possible Turkish participation in the war on the side of the Allies.
Turkey had maintained a decently-sized Army and Air Force throughout the war, and Churchill wanted the Turks to open a new front in the Balkans.
The fear of a Soviet invasion and Stalin's unconcealed desire to control the Turkish Straits eventually led Turkey to give up its principle of neutrality in foreign relations and join NATO on February 18, 1952.
On 15 July 1974, the Greek military junta under Dimitrios Ioannides carried out a coup d'état in Cyprus, to unite the island with Greece.
[26] In response to the coup, five days later the Turkish army invaded the island, citing a right to intervene to restore the constitutional order from the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee.
Iraq Turkey's armed forces participated in the NATO-led military intervention and no-fly zone in Libya against Muammar Gaddafi's government troops.
