Mustafa Ertuğrul

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Mustafa Ertuğrul's memoirs

Mustafa Ertuğrul (full name after the 1934 Law on Family Names in Turkey; Mustafa Ertuğrul Aker) was a Turkish officer during the World War I and the early stages of the Turkish War of Independence (he was wounded near Aydın in 1919), who had accomplished a number of brilliant military feats, the most notable being the sinking of the British aircraft carrier Ben-my-Chree with shore fire. During the same campaign along the coasts of southwestern Turkey, he also sank the French auxiliary aviso Paris II and the converted trawler Alexandra ^[1] and a number of other Allied vessels in the course of the year 1917.

Mustafa Ertuğrul was recently rediscovered in Turkey thanks to research done on him and on the shipwrecks off the coast in Ağva Bay ^[2] near Kemer in Antalya Province by the skin diver and amphora collector Mustafa Aydemir.

A book based on the account Mustafa Ertuğrul had typewritten himself in 1934, on Atatürk's personal encouragement, "Ben bir Türk zabitiyim" (I am a Turkish officer), was re-edited by Aydemir and supplemented with photographs and archive documents, notably from France, and was published for the first time in 2004, running into several editions since. Prior to Ertuğrul's account having been, as such, made public, the general information on the officer was restricted to a few lines in the memoirs of Liman von Sanders and the Field Marshal Erich Ludendorff, as well as to documents and literature treating Ben-my-Chree's sinking. Paris II commander Henri Rollin, taken prisoner by Ertuğrul's unit after his ship's sinking, had also presented a detailed official report on Paris II and Alexandra at the end of the war in 1918. Ertuğrul's story remains open to more in-depth research, with a number of points included in his account awaiting further clarification, notably his mention of another British military vessel he claimed to have mortally touched and he thought was the actual ship commended by Charles Rumney Samson, HMS Dard

Mustafa Ertuğrul was born in 1893 in Hanya to Turkish Cretan parents. His family remained in Crete until 1903 and then they moved to İstanbul where Ertuğrul attended military college.

Ben-my-Chree burning and sinking after having been hit by shore fire while at the port in Kastelorizo

By the start of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), he was assigned to Aydın region where he took up the task of organizing and training Demirci Mehmet Efe's efe militia units. He was wounded in an ambush in 1919 and he spent the rest of his life in Antalya as a disabled officer. Mustafa Ertuğrul died in 1964.

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