In part I of this post yesterday, I set the general strategic and political stage on which the British and Ottoman Empires played out an increasing confrontation in the Gulf in the weeks leading up to Turkey's formal entry into the Great War a century ago. In this post, I hope to detail those events. (I'm drawing on multiple sources, official and secondary.)
HMS Odin
On the day before the Ottomans (or rather the local German commander), closed the Dardanelles on September 26, the Government of India had already proposed that, with tensions rising with Turkey, a Brigade of Indian Army troops should be deployed to the Gulf to protect the Iranian oilfields and the Abadan refinery. On September 27, the local Turkish authorities declared the Shatt al-'Arab in its entirety to be Turkish waters. HMS Odin at the time was positioned off Abadan Island, in what Britain insisted was international waters and in which a 1913 Anglo-Turkish agreement had permitted non-belligerent passage to the Persian side.
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