The Armenian Legionnaires: Sacrifice and Betrayal in World War I

Description

Following the devastation resulting from the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire beginning in 1915, the survivors of the massacres were dispersed across the Middle East, Europe and North and South America. Not content with watching World War I silently from the sidelines, a large number of Armenian volunteers joined the Legion d'Orient. They were trained in Cyprus and fought courageously in Palestine and Cilicia alongside Allied commander General Allenby, eventually playing a crucial role in defeating German and Ottoman forces in Palestine at the Battle of Arara in September 1918. The Armenian Legionnaires signed up on the understanding that they would be fighting in Syria and Turkey, and, should the Allies be successful, they would be part of an occupying army in their old homelands, laying the foundation for a self-governing Armenian state. Susan Paul Pattie describes the motivations and dreams of the Armenian Legionnaires and their ultimate betrayal as the French and the British shifted priorities, leaving their ancestral Armenian homelands to the emerging Republic of Turkey. Complete with eyewitness accounts, letters and photographs, this book provides an insight into relations between the Great Powers through the lens of a small, vulnerable people caught in a war that was not their own, but which had already destroyed their known world.

Susan Pattie is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at University College London and former Director of the Armenian Institute in London. In recent years she served as Director of the Armenian Museum of America and was Program Manager of the National Armenian Genocide Centennial Commemorations in Washington, DC. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from University College London.

Celebratory and heroic. It is written in the style of retrieving noble lost causes, gestures of bravery and fortitude that deserve preservation ... The photographs and first-person accounts of military service in the Middle East are intriguing. * Slavonic and East European Review * In effect a portable exhibition - most welcomed no doubt by the diaspora but also of great value to anyone interested in Armenian history or of the aftermath of the First World War. * Chartist *