It COULD have been worse... We gave the Irish thousands of Ross Rifles! thank you dude for all of great stuffs...:p
Richard Aldrich's tome on GCHQ has a chapter or section on the wartime SIGINT work undertaken in a British Consulate / Embassy. He referred to it in a talk a few years ago; the book was published in 2011.
Scrolling down to the snippet on Lt Ahmet Ersin, who trained at Cranwell circa 43-44: RAF Cranwell in the Second World War 1939-1945 - The Wartime Memories Project - may be of interest. Another insight is in the reminiscences of William Sterland at: BBC - WW2 People's War - From the Coal Mines to the R.A.F. who used to maintain aircraft used to train Turkish aircrew during the War. Indeed, an inclusion at: Military history of Turkey indicates a number of training casualties ...... as well as suggesting a few flew on bombing missions over Germany. There is detail at: Turkish Casualties which subsequently gives names and other information on those who perished. Chatting to a Turkish officer training at Bracknell thirty some years ago, he cited a number of examples and added that he knew one who had not long retired.
Many years ago an elderly gent in a hotel in Bournemouth at which we stayed, asked from whence we came. "Lincolnshire" I replied, to which he responded he was an officer at Cranwell during the Battle of Britain, teaching Turkish pilots to fly the Bristol Blenheims we had sold them and he added "as if we did not have need of them ourselves at that time!"
Turkish policy in WWII was conditioned by their experience of WWI, in which they had gotten their fingers severely burned. Turkey, a weak state striving to hang on to a discontented multi-ethnic empire, would have been well advised to stay neutral in the Great War. Colonel Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk) disliked the Germans and felt that they were likely to lose and to drag Turkey down in their ruin. He was dead right. Turkey lost hundreds of thousands of casualties, suffered terribly as a result of the blockade, and after some early victories the Turkish armies were soundly thrashed by the British. The Turks lost their empire and very nearly their national existence when Anatolia was carved up by the Allies. Inonu was Ataturk's disciple and a Great War officer, and he took the lesson of that war very much to heart. Turkey had nothing to gain and potentially a great deal to lose by coming into WWII. If they doubted that, all the Turks had to do was look next door to Bulgaria and Romania, which were swallowed first by the Germans and then by the Russians. I have never understood, either, why Churchill was all on fire to bring Turkey in. Turkey had little industry and much of the country was barely modernized. The Turks had a fine reputation as fighters but they had little navy (a major weakness in any campaign against the Axis-held Greek islands), a weak air force, and an army equipped with a ragbag of stuff from many sources, much of the contents of the bag being obsolete.
Turkey was not quite so neutral and dismissive: Economic relations between the Weimar Republic and Turkey increased, except for small relapses, from 1923 onwards. Even at that time, Germany was pursuing the goal of economic expansion in the East and exchanging raw materials for end products. This was just as convenient for Turkey as it was for Germany. Through this development, they even managed to almost become Germany's prime exporter of raw materials. With this policy, Germany in turn managed to become the leader in imports and exports in Turkey in 1933. In addition to trade, the German side also sent advisors at the civilian and military level before 1933 to support the Turks on their path to modernisation The formerly good relationship between Turkey and Germany did not break down even due to the course of the Nazi government in the 1930s, because both countries continued to reap its benefit: 1933 was the year in which the German-Turkish economy was to be more closely linked and was to increase until 1939. On 10 August 1933, for example, a trade agreement between Turkey and the German Reich was signed in Berlin. In addition, there were loans in the triple-digit millions and the already mentioned intensive economic promotion through advisors and construction projects, also of a military nature. Up to this point, this is only a rough outline: By far the most important for the Third Reich, however, were the chrome ore deliveries, which in 1939 already accounted for 50% of the total demand, just as a large part of Turkish exports went to Germany. The loss of turkish chrome ore supplies quickly made itself felt in the marked decline in the quality of tank steel, which the Allies described as "brittle" - with the corresponding negative consequences for the survivability of these vehicles.... see also: https://1997-2001.state.gov/www/regions/eur/rpt_9806_ng_turkey.pdf
