Ottoman Army bravely fought at different fronts over three different continents (Balkans, North Africa, South Arabia, Palestine, East Anatolia, Gallipoli, and South Anatolia) and by the end of a decade of war the losses amounted to 1,000,000 lives as well as the loss of 4,000,000 square meters of the Ottoman Empire. There have so far been political, military and economical reviews about the number of deaths. However, none of these investigations included infectious diseases as a possible explanation for the heavy losses suffered by the soldiers throughout the Gallipoli campaign and the WWI.

Similar to the allies, the Turkish side also started compiling records related to the losses and casualties immediately after the WWI. Recently investigations such as the one presented here have been carried out under the Turkish Ministry of Defense as an evaluation of data generated by the Archives Division on war related losses. The causes of 423,779 deaths from written records were analyzed using translations of the transcriptions from the Ottoman script into the current Latin alphabet used since 1923 were carried out and 587 different causes were entered into the system database. It is estimated that the number of deaths will be above 700,000 once the current Archives Division led project is completed.

Completed investigation so far indicate that out of the 423,779 deaths 43.8% (185,619) were caused by infectious diseases, 19.6% (83,257) were due to other disease related causes and the remaining 36.5% (154,903) had other war related causes. The percentage of deaths reaches a substantial 34.5% when undocumented deaths marked as ‘unidentified’ due to possible other causes such as drowning, freezing and so on are also taken into consideration. The major causes of death due to infectious diseases appear to be other gastro-intestinal infections (35%), dysentery (16.5%) and respiratory tract infections (12.1%). In the Gallipoli front, deaths related to infectious diseases were identified as 23.9% (28,886), whereas in the Caucasus front, it stood at 49.3% (43,210). Intense war conditions experienced in Gallipoli battlefields were the major cause of deaths ahead of infections. At Gallipoli, respiratory tract infections (16%) and dysentery (30.2%), whereas in the Caucasus front gastro-intestinal infections (38.5%) and typhus (13.5%) were the major causes of death. Other non-infectious diseases, which played a role in wartime deaths, were scurvy, malnutrition and anemia constituting 30% of the deaths over other disease-related causes.

The Ottomans entered WWI without any preparatory steps and preventative measures making conditions miserable to the army. Medical aspects of the war was then was not perceived important when the war started, including the lack of proper evacuation routes for the sick and wounded. However, Turkish medical teams solely with their extraordinary efforts and self-sacrifice attended to most casualties as described in the memoirs of Turkish Army doctors who attended the casualties. They even produced vaccines against typhoid fever, typhus, cholera and smallpox under primitive conditions in Anatolian towns and administered these not only to soldiers but also to the general public. They implemented public health measures and prevented greater disasters from happening, and these practices successfully reduced the percentages of death and disease from 1916 onwards. Their unexhausted efforts will be communicated in this presentation.