AN EXAMPLE OF TURKISH TACTICS ON THE TABLE

I think that the best example of a good Turkish mentality mixed with the proper tactics can be found in my friend Steve. Steve fielded a Spanish army. Lord what a dunce! At least this is what we proclaimed when he started. But he answered our insults quietly, and with a cool resolve. He said that we might defeat him time after time, but should he ever win, then there'd be no end to the bragging rights. I have come to realize the sobering truth of this, having had to face his army countless times. Like my fellows, I too thought that his rabble could be easily swept from the field. And with great arrogance, we'd send our troops forward to the attack. Much as did the crusading knights at Varna. But the Spanish have defeated us. And they've managed to do so repeatedly. Anyway, we finally wised up and began looking at how Steve was doing it. Steve was using good Turkish tactics.

Steve would deploy his army in two or more layers with his weakest troops up front, heavily supported by artillery. If there were any sort of farm, village, or significantly strong piece of terrain, he would anchor part of his line in it. He would then await his enemy's attack, blasting them with artillery as they came forward, and letting them bury themselves against his weaker first line of defense. As this was going on, his cavalry would be surging forward to engage that of the French. As the initial assaults went in his first line would eventually begin to crack and retreat. He'd pull what was left of it behind his second line.

Meanwhile, for some mystic reason, his cavalry would be putting the final touches into defeating the French cavalry. A mobile reserve would move towards any threatened sector and together with the remnants of the first line. They'd both form another layer of defenders. His cavalry would win through a combination of fantastically good luck and calculated boldness. And he'd accomplish this feat by flushing out with his cavalry in layers. The first two ranks woulcl be his Spanish dragoons followed by his lights, followed by his heavies. Horseman to horseman the French would be of better quality than their Spanish enemies. And they would drive into the first several layers of the Spanish cavalry attack, perhaps winning the first couple of engagements and then perhaps riding off in wild pursuit of the defeated enemy regiments.

But they'd always run into the next layer of horsemen. Meanwhile, the defeated Spanish regiments would flee to the rear where they might eventually rally and head back into the fray. Before long, the French would lose enough casualties to finally cause them to begin failing morale checks and would be easily defeated. The same would happen to the infantry attack, and the Spanish would have the day. These tactics worked on just about everyone, until the Spanish met the Turks and were subjected to a heavy dose of their own medicine.

Steve's "Spanish" tactics are representative of an excellent adaptation of the classic Turkish methods. When the Turks combine a variation of the Spanish tactics just described with a dose some of their own special touches, then you can end up with an excellent means of defeatig a European enemy. Like Steve, place your army in layers with your worst troops forward. Upon a carefully selected position, placed pretty much towards the center of your line, construct a series of mutually supporting fixed positions, and place artillery into each one. These forts should then be supported with infantry. The fortifications provide a hard place around which to maneuver, or behind which to retreat should things get a bit rough. They also represent the classical center position formally held by the Janissaries and the artillery. As dictated by tradition, stick your cavalry reserve behind it. I have noticed that this combination of heavy guns, earthworks. infantry, and lance equipped cavalry is more than enough to intimidate another player into not attacking the middle. Instead, their armies either adopt the defensive, or try to concentrate against one or both of your flanks.

This narrows down the locations where you need to be strong. Since you probably have a larger infantry to cavalry ratio than the Turks had in the past, not all of the infantry will be able to sit behind the fortifications.

Therefore, they should be deployed in layered lines to either flank of the fixed position. Again. the worst troops to the front in the first line. Now set a large portion of your expendable light cavalry in similar layers on both your flanks, again, worst troops to the front, better ones to the rear--just like the classic Ottoman tactic. You'll find that many players do not like to attack forward until after they ve cleared away your cavalry. And this is the attitude you wish to foster.

It generally takes cavalry to clear away cavalry, and if his horse should attack yours it is your hope to wear out the enemy with your expendable levy scum, before finally striking at him with the carefully horded reserve of professionals. The main disadvantage to your Ottoman cavalry is their tendency to go off in uncontrolled pursuits after their defeated foes. This is true even of the best of it, and thus gives you another reason for sticking the really good stuff in the rear to await the outcome of the irregular forces.

Notice that an important aspect of initial deployment is the positioning of your lower order irregulars to the front. Arguably, this is a Turkish tradition dating back to the Renaissance. If the enemy attacks you, the levies are there to meet them and by the time that he manages to clear them out of the way you have hopefully moved your reserves to meet the threat, or else you have reduced his numbers enough to allow for an easy repulse of the attacking force by the second line. It matters not that your front line troops will be defeated. It is sufficient to know that they are doing their job if they manage to take out a few enemy bodies. This is especially important when facing the superior European cavalry formations.

On a one to one ratio, they can probably defeat the majority of your cavalry formations with little or no difficulty. However, as you advance your cavalry in waves, and the enemy tears his way through your lead formations of nags and peasants, he will begin taking losses, or accumulating fatigue. Eventually, like an ant horde, you'll eat his elite formations to the bone. This process works even faster if the enemy cavalry formations take offin wild uncontrolled pursuits of your defeated cavalry. This generally disorders or "blows" their horses, and your fresh formations to the rear can attack the pursuers at significantly better odds.

On the attack, the reverse is true. Use the peasant scum to shield your good troops as you advance against the enemy's position. Then throw the levies and looters against the enemy positions, hoping once again that they'll manage to soak up some artillery fire and enemy casualties before finally routing back towards the rear. As a rule point, morale failures generally set off other morale checks as formations break and rout. But as it is the job of the levies and scum to fight until they break, their failures should not cause any morale checks against the rest of the army.

When fighting in Europe, Turkish armies will often outnumber their enemies. But again keeping my fellow players in mind, I have found most wargamers to be easily intimidated by this fact and the matter of numbers could cause you some difficulty. For believe me, the sight of a large Turkish army is quite intimidating.

However, if we use history as our guide, it can be shown that relatively modern 18th and early 19th Century Western European amlies habitually engaged huge Turkish armies and defeated them. Western military leaders throughout the 18th Century realized that fighting against the Turk involved fighting outnumbered as much as two, three, or more to one.

Think back to the example of Eugene of Savoy at the Siege of Belgrade, who with 20-30,000 men attacked a relieving Turkish army of 200,000+ troops, defeated them, and afterwards, captured the dty. He was not only faced with the mother of all armies coming right down his throat, but also had to contend with a sortie coming out of the besieged city. Boy, what a guy!

And closer to our era, at the Battle of Mount Tabor, near Nazareth, Napoleon, with hardly more than 4,000 men, mostly infantry, defeated and drove off the Army of the Pasha of Damascus which numbered upwards of 25,000 cavalry and 10,000 infantry. That was in April of 1799.

At his famous victory over the Turkish Army of Rhodes at Aboukir in July 1799, Napoleon attacked 15,000 dug-in Janissaries with probably less than the 10,000 men he had available, and drove them into the sea. Therefore, the lesson on size and numbers is that in order to have an enjoyable and challenging game, the Turks should healthily outnumber their opponents, else they'll probably not stand a chance--especially against experienced players. To see an example of this, we need only look at the Battle of the Pyramids. There, despite the fact that the Mamlukes had adapted a variation of the Turkish defensive formation and had even managed to outnumber their opponents by about 75,000 men, the French managed to avoid the larger share of the Mamluke army by attacking their positions on the Westemrn side of the Nile River, where only 6,000 Mamlukes and about 11,000 infantry were stationed. Napoleon easily defeated them, and thus drove away the remainder of the Mamluke army. I think the best example of a good Turkish versus European battle was when I was playing a campaign against Austria. I had managed to slip the bulk of my army deep into enemy territory near the town of Osiiek. There I expected to engage a reinforcing army of Austrians and Russians heading for the frontier. After causing them to halt and deploy, I determined that it would be best if they'd attack my positions. But I also knew that Frank, my opponent, would never do so if he thought that I was there in great strength. He was one of those fellows influenced by numbers.

I therefore carried out an elaborate deception scheme where I managed to convince him that his 60,000 men were opposed by a mere 45,000 Turks. Anchoring our right flank on the Danube, I dug my redoubts in a line extending from the river to the town. I set my Croats, Albanians, Anatolians, Wallachians, and a large bunch of Janissaries behind the line of redoubts and set nine ortas of cavalry on the open flank. The cavalry were deployed in depth, weakest to the front, elite Suvarileri to the rear.

Offboard in reserve were the balance of my 90,000 men.

A bunch of the off board troops were conducting an outflanking move against the enemy's right. Still, the guy I was playing against remained suspicious, and as a further trick, on the day of the battle, I left all of the reinforcing figures in the trunk of my car.

It worked. The Austro-Russian forces were deployed with the Russians on their left, opposite the line of redoubts. The Austrians deployed into a deep attack formation on the right. Their cavalry was set up on the open flank, and they too were making use of offboard reserves. Although in this case, it was because they lacked the room to deploy all of their troops. As room became available on the table, more Austrians were added. The Austrians advanced, with their cavalry charging forward seeking to quickly engage my horse and drive it from the field. Two Austrian line infantry divisions followed them, both advancing side by side. The whole was to envelop my open left flank with what they thought were superior numbers. But as they moved forward, things began to happen.

First their cavalry ran into considerable trouble against my supposedly inferior Turkish horse. The weak Rumanian stuff did its job and broke up the enemy cavalry by losing to it in melee, and forcing all of their charging formations to take a control checks to keep them from launching uncontrolled pursuies. Most of the attacking cavalry failed these control checks causing them to exploit into the fresh Tartar cavalry lined up behind the Rumanians.

By exploiting in an uncontrolled status, they were now forced to melee using the disordered modifier wich gready improved the odds for the Tartars. In this way, the Tartars and the Suvarileris defeated most of the enemy cavalry ateacks. Frank's infantry came up to support his cavalry,and my horsemen had to fall back a bit. Something which we didn't mind, for on turn five, an enveloping force, consisting of European irregular cavalry and Bosnian infantry, hit the Austrian infantry on their flank, forcing them to peel off troops to meet the situation.

Frank still managed to advance. On his left, the Russians remained in place doing next to nothing. Facing the redoubts, poor Frank was too intimidated by the earthworks to attack them. He gave strict orders to the fellow running them not to attack.

Finally, one of Frank's badly ravaged cavalry regiments managed to batter its way towards my table edge, and judging the unit to be close enough to observe my reserves, I informed Frank that he now saw a huge dust cloud approaching. It was the bulk of the Turkish army advancing towards his attacking force. Where he thought I was weak, I was actually quit strong. And the sudden appearance of both the outflanking force and the huge off board reserves were more than enough to shatter his morale. That alone almost gave us the battle.

Unfortunately, something terribly Turkish destroyed our chances of winning. In typical reactionary Janissary fashion, my co-commander, in charge of the Turkish forces supporting the fortified gun position, decided that he was bored. So in a bid for glory he surged forward to attack the Russians to his front. As he advanced, the Russian commander counter attacked and charged his battalion columns into those of the Anatolians.

Instead of standing and firing at the attacking Russians, which might have at least disordered the Russians as they charged into our formations, the Anatolians were made to counter charged the Russians. The Anatolians lost every encounter. As they broke and ran, the Anatolians took the rest of their fellows with them through secondary morale checks and through failure of brigade level morale checks. The Russians were close behind.

The Janissaries charged into the Russians hoping to retrieve the situation, but they too counter charged instead of standing and shooting, and as a result, also lost. And as they all ran, the redoubts were left undefended, and fell to the Russians one by one. The Austrians were still in a great deal of trouble, but the Russian advance was threatening to cut my force off from the river, the only fast means of escape back to Belgrade. So I withdrew from the fight, and headed back down stream. Fortunately, I had enough cavalry to cover my escape.

This battle is an excellent example of everything that can go right for the Turks as well as those things that can "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory." The Turks managed to outnumber the enemy. They managed to trick the enemy into attacking their positions before finally outflanking the attackers and smashing into them with superior force. It had a properly positioned line of fixed fortifications backed by sufficient infantry which succeeded in intimidating the Allied commander into not attacking it.

However, on the negative, the Anatolians andJanissaries foolishly attacked out of their strongholds against superior quality Russian troops and after losing the fight, ran, leaving the gun positions virtually undefended. And although there were significant forces as yet uncommitted, since this was a campaign game, it was wiser to save the army as opposed to risk losing everything to the advancing Russians. Not a good day, nor a bad one. And it does show how close the Turks can come to defeating a qualitatively superior Westem force.

CONCLUSION

When you meet unbelievers in the battlefield strike off their heads and, when you have laid them low, bind your captives f rmly. Then grant them theirfreedom ortake ransom from them, until War shall lay down her armor. "Thus shall you do. Had Allah willed, He could Himself have punished them; but He has ordained it thus that He might test you, the one by the other. " Holy Koran, Surah 47, Verses 4-8.

Thus it was ordained that the Ottomans should be tested and tested they were. It is said that during the Napoleonic Wars, the Ottomans were engaged in more wars and major battles than even the Prussians. They managed to fight wars against three of the five leading powers in Europe (Russia, France, and England), and actually managed to fight them to a stand still. France was defeated at Acre, and a combined Turkish and British alliance forced the French to surrender Egypt.

Later, when the Turks decided to recognize Napoleon as the Emperor of France, the Russians and English commenced hostilities against the Turkish Empire. The British invaded Egypt but were defeated at Rosetta by Mahomet Ali Pasha in 1807. The Russians invaded Wallachia, Moldavia, and Bessarabia in 1806. Between 1809 and 1811, the two powers fought ten major engagements. The Turks won almost half the battles, but lost a great deal of ground. Eventually both sides become exhausted, and in 1812, with Russia threatened by war with France, a treaty was signed, ending the war.

The Ottomans were also tormented by continuous intemal rebellions both within the military and from the provinces. The Janissaries revolted in 1798, after a decree was made intending to disband them in favor of the Nizam-ijedid. They were led by the mutinous Pasha of Widdin, Pasvan Oglu. And although they were initially successful, eventually it took the French invasion of Egypt to save them from the wrath of the Sultan's field army.

Pasvan Oglu retained his status as a provincial leader and to his credit, he managed to make a significant contribution to the defense of the Empire during the Russian attack in 1807. One particularly savage revolt took place in 1804, at the Sultan's bidding, when the Serbs petitioned Selim III to help alleviate the oppressions fostered upon them by disobedient Jannissaries. The Janissaries were aided by Pasvan Oglu, but the Serbian Rayas actually succeeded in throwing the Janissaries out of their country. When the Sultan sought to regain control over the province, the Serbs laughed in his face and declared their total independence.

Another Janissary revolt in 1807 resulted in the abdication of the Sultan Selim III. His successor, Mustafa IV was overthrown by troops loyal to Selim, but both Selim and Mustafa are killed in the uprising. The Mamlukes attempted to regain control over Egypt in 1811, but were quickly defeated by Mahomet Ali Pasha. Also in 1811, Wahhabis tribesmen battled Ottoman forces in Arabia for control of the Holy cities of Medina and Mecca. This last war lasted for almost seven years.

But throughout all of this, despite dire predictions by such worthies as Napoleon of France and Tsar Alexander of Russia, the Ottoman Empire managed to survive, stretching its existence into the early 20th Century. All of the rebellions were crushed, and all of the extemal wars were eventually resolved. In fact, the Ottoman position at the end of our period was actually better than it was before. Although the Janissaries were still a potent threat, they were for the moment quiet and content. Control had been regained over Arabia and Syria. A stable regime was established in Egypt, which at least gave lip service to the Sultan and assisted him militarily. And except for Greece, the Balkans were finally subdued and orderly.

Most important of all, the Ottomans finally had a man on the throne who was crafty enough to bring about the badly needed reforms of the military. While it is true that Mahmud II had to bide his time and appear weak to appease the reactionaries and the Janissaries, he was actually plotting the downfall of them all.

Should you decide to field an Ottoman ammy, I hope that you decide to use the opportunity to innovate and experiment to your heart's content. Create your own leaders and give them wonderfully Islamic names. My army's commander is one Amur Khan the Magnificent, a cruel and merciless leader whose craftiness and guile has sent many a Christian army to its doom. Of course, for those wishing to use real Turkish generals, there are a number who proved quite able. Mahomet Ali Pasha in Egypt, Pechlivan Khan who defeated Bagration at Tartaritza, Kuschanz Ali, victor of the first battle of Schiumla, and Ibrihim Pasha, subordinate and son of Mahomet Ali Pasha, all are at quite capable.

The Turks are the only major Napoleonic army, outside the colonial provinces, that are open to tinkering, and maybe that is why I love them so. Those who delight in the Native armies of the Colonial period will get the most enjoyment out of them. For they are amongst the most massive of such armies, and unlike the Fuzzy-wuzzies, Zulus, and others of their kind, the Turk's enemies aren't so far ahead of them as to overly dominate the battlefield. My army ignites a special spark in me, sort of a romantic charge which brings to mind thoughts of the desert, the Foreign Legion, oasis', and Lawrence of Arabia. Must be the romantic in me. Oh well whatever you decide to do, consider the Turks. They are a better investment than you might at first think. And if you win, just think of the bragging rights.

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