İsmet İnönü on the cover of Time magazine
On the 22nd anniversary of the Turkish War of Independence, a Turk was featured once again on the cover of Time magazine’s May 19, 1941 issue: İsmet İnönü.
The interest in İsmet İnönü at a time Nazi armies were annexing France and the Balkans stemmed, in fact, from expectations that Turkey would be the new target of the Nazi armies. Turkey, after all, had declared mobilization for the same reason and serious precautions had been taken in Thrace against a possible German invasion.
As the eyes of the entire world were focused on Turkey, the Nazi army attacked, with a surprising maneuver, the Soviet Union instead of Turkey and thus eradicated all speculations on the future of Turkey. Only a few days after the signing of the German-Turkish Non-Aggression Pact on June 18, 1941, Germans opened the Eastern Front against Russia.
