Blood Upon the Sand: The Armenian Genocide in World War I
On April 29, 1915, sandwiched between advertisements for “Groves Tasteless Chill Tonic” and “Chamberlain’s Tablets” near the bottom of page two of the Thursday edition of the Pensacola Journal (column five), was a short report on the Turkish arrest of hundreds of Armenian residents of Constantinople (Istanbul), the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The obscure placement of the article must have made sense to the editors given other dramatic stories reported that day. America was at peace, but Europe and much of the world was in the ninth month of World War I. The small Pensacola paper dutifully relayed the developments in that week’s landing of Allied troops along the Gallipoli Peninsula in an attempt to wrest control of the Dardanelles from Turkish troops and seize Constantinople, a campaign designed to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war on the road to the defeat of that country and its ally, Germany.
