Battle of Sakarya - Aftermath

Aftermath

The retreat from Sakarya marked the end of the Greek hopes of imposing settlement on Turkey by force of arms. In May 1922 General Papoulas and his complete staff resigned and was replaced by General Georgios Hatzianestis, who proved much more inept than his predecessor.

On the other hand, Mustafa Kemal returned in triumph to Ankara where the Grand National Assembly awarded him the rank of Field Marshal of the Army, as well as the title of Gazi rendering honours as the saviour of the Turkish nation.

According to the speech that was delivered years later before the same National Assembly at the Second General Conference of the Republican People's Party which took part from October 15 to October 20, 1927; Kemal said to have ordered that " ... not an inch of the country should be abandoned until it was drenched with the blood of the citizens...," upon realizing that the Turkish army was losing ground rapidly, with virtually no natural defenses left between the battle line and Ankara.

Lord Curzon argued that the military situation became a stalemate with time tending in favour of the Turks. The Turkish position within the British views was improving. In his opinion, the Turkish Nationalists were at that point more ready to treat.

After this, the Ankara government signed the Treaty of Kars with the Russians, and the most important Treaty of Ankara with the French, thus reducing the enemy's front notably in the Cilician theatre and concentrating against the Greeks on the West.

For the Turkish troops it was the turning point of the war, which would develop in a series of victorious clashes against the Greeks, driving out the invaders from the whole Asia Minor in the Turkish War of Independence. The Greeks could do nothing but retreat and this would almost inevitably decline into a rout characterized by the most appalling atrocities: rape, pillage and arson rendering up to one millon Turks homeless.

As by August 26. 1922 Kemal dispatched his army on a drive to the coast of the Aegean Sea pursuing the shattered Greek army with an increasing ferocity including the massacres of many prisoners, which would culminate in the direct assault of Smyrna between September 9 and 11th 1922.

The war would be over and sealed with the defeat of the Greeks, formalized by the Treaty of Lausanne on July 24. 1923.