Mustafa Ertuğrul Aker

Who was Mustafa Ertuğrul Aker?

Mustafa Ertuğrul was an officer of the Ottoman Army during World War I and of the Turkish Army in the early stages of the Turkish War of Independence, who had accomplished a number of brilliant military feats, the most notable being the sinking of the British seaplane tender HMS Ben-my-Chree with shore artillery fire. During the same campaign along the coasts of southwestern Turkey, he also sank the French auxiliary aviso Paris II, the converted naval trawler Alexandra and a number of other Allied vessels during 1917.

Mustafa Ertuğrul was born in 1893 in Hanya to Turkish Cretan parents. His family remained in Crete until 1903 when they moved to Istanbul where Ertuğrul attended the Ottoman Military Academy.

He married a daughter of his commander Şefik Bey. After the 1934 Surname Law, he chose the family name of his father-in-law.

By the start of the Greco-Turkish War, he had been posted to Aydın region where he had the task of organizing and training Demirci Mehmet Efe's efe militia units. He was wounded in an ambush in 1919 and he spent the rest of his life in Antalya as a disabled officer. Mustafa Ertuğrul died in 1964.