TURKEY: Faces Made and Lost

In Ankara last week Germany tried to save face as desperately as the most flustered Japanese.

Fortnight ago Turkey refused to sell Germany any of the Turkish chrome the Nazis want for airplane engines (TIME, Oct. 13). Last week Germany’s fat, blasty negotiator, Dr. Karl Clodius, made as threatening faces as his lardy jowls would permit. But Turkey’s negotiator, Numan Menemencioglu, constantly in touch with British Ambassador Sir Hughe M. Knatchbull-Hugessen and U.S. Ambassador John van Antwerp MacMurray, quietly repeated that Germany could have no chrome until Turkey’s pledge to sell its whole output to Britain expired in January 1943.

To Dr. Clodius, breathing heavily after six weeks of futile grimacing, chrome in the far-off year 1943 sounded better than no chrome at all. He tried to preserve his visage by bargaining for 150,000 tons in 1943-44. M. Menemencioglu coolly traded him down to 90,000 tons, with the added stipulation that Germany should sell Turkey £T18,000,000 ($13,500,000) worth of war materials, from rifles to tanks, before an ounce of chrome was delivered.

It was rumored that wily German Ambassador Franz von Papen (see p. 102) had tried to save his own foxy countenance by requesting a token shipment of 2,500 tons of chrome at once. But this contract, with its never-never quality, was the best that Germany could get.