14

Protons – Massacres – Bombs. Ireland and Iraq

Nature is not static. The nature of things is not peace but agitation. Charles Darwin, drawing on the economic theories of Thomas Malthus, had constructed for his Victorian contemporaries an evolutionary theory of life itself being based on struggle, conflict, selfishness. Twentieth-century physics told an impersonal story, but it was no less disturbed, and disturbing. Matter itself was destabilized. Atoms, which were tiny specks of emptiness containing one energetic nucleus, were not the smallest constituent parts into which matter could be divided. Shortly after he became the Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge in 1919, Ernest Rutherford would pursue his researches further into the nature of nitrogen atoms. By bombarding them with alpha particles, he discovered that the impact knocked out hydrogen nuclei, which he called protons. Barely a quarter of a century elapsed between this fascinating discovery and the nuclear obliteration of two Japanese cities. Even to Rutherford and his fellow physicists, the terrible implications of his discovery were not immediately apparent.¹ But they did not take place in a peaceful world. They took place in a world where the poet W. B. Yeats, as if he had peered through Rutherford’s microscope, saw that ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’. Beyond the calm of the Cavendish laboratory, the world, though some of its nations had signed up to a so-called armistice, was very far from being at peace. The fighting men did not simply pack up their old kitbags and return to a stable homeland. All over the world, following the First World War, there was trouble.

The Islamic world had suffered a terrible blow with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire – a blow which to this day many Muslims regret and which the followers of al-Qaeda are still committed to avenge or reverse. In French, Italian and British African territories where there were Muslims, their mosques and clerics called for reprisals. They were labelled ‘fanatics’, of course, by the ruling authorities. What could be more fanatical than their objection to being ruled by Western secularists who had no sympathy with their culture, religion or history? There was a deep fear on the part of the British that there would be a united Islamic resistance to the British Empire. This had been the dream of the influential Islamic thinker Jamaluddin al-Afghani (1839–97), whose followers hoped to throw the British out of Egypt, India and Nigeria. The Khalifat Movement in India was seen as the greatest threat to British rule since the uprising in 1857–9.2 It fizzled out, but when it threatened to engulf India at the same time as unrest in Egypt, some of the elder statesmen felt cause for concern. Arthur Balfour, when Egypt appeared to be on the point of eruption in March 1919, wrote to the high commissioner:

The Egyptian unrest is doubtless part of a world movement which takes different forms in different places, but is plainly discernible in every continent and in every country. We are only at the beginning of our troubles and it is doubtful whether, and how far, the forces of an orderly civilization are going to deal effectively with those of social and international disintegration.³

This was the central political problem of the postwar generation – chaos or order? And if order, order of what kind, and at what cost to human liberty? The ingredients for revolution – hunger, injustice, an unstable economy, and a much-weakened autocratic government – were present in almost all the nations of the world in 1918–19. Probably there was a degree of pure chance which determined which nations did or did not opt for outright civil war and revolution, and which chose to muddle along. And one element of chance was how ill the populations felt. As the war drew to an end, the world suffered ‘the greatest single demographic shock mankind has ever experienced, the most deadly pestilence since the Black Death’.⁴ Influenza swept round the world, greatly exacerbated by the unwonted movements of ships, troops, supplies, merchant vessels, politicians, refugees, which the war had occasioned. It probably killed 50 million worldwide. Two-thirds of Sierra Leone’s population caught flu, with 1,000 dying in Freetown alone. At San Francisco Hospital in California, 3,509 cases were admitted, with 25 per cent mortality. It was a deadly viral pneumonia, soon wiping out soldiers and civilians at a rate which even General Haig and Clemenceau would have found difficult to match. Twenty-four thousand US soldiers died of flu, compared with the 34,000 who died in battle. In all, 675,000 Americans died of it, and 200,000 in Britain. Then, as quickly and mysteriously as it had come, the flu vanished, and the world was fit enough to resume death by violent means.

A month after Balfour wrote to the Egyptian high commissioner that he foresaw universal anarchy, there occurred the worst bloodshed in India for seventy years, and an event took place which hindsight can see quite clearly as the beginning of the end of British rule. Rioting broke out in Amritsar, a glorious pilgrim-city in the Punjab, famed for its Sikh Golden Temple, in April 1919. At one point, 40,000 people were out on the streets. There was looting, and burning, and Christian churches were pulled down. Marcia Sherwood, a missionary doctor who had worked in Amritsar for fifteen years, mounted her bicycle and tried to ride to each of the five schools where she worked with the intention of sending her 600 female students (Muslim and Hindu) to their homes. She was set upon by a mob, and heard discordant cries of ‘Kill her, she is English’, and ‘No, she is one of God’s chosen who is educating our children.’ She was badly beaten and left for dead as the crowd yelled: ‘Victory to Gandhi.’ (Gandhi was in Bombay at the time, totally unaware of what was happening in the Punjab.) Some Hindu shopkeepers rescued Dr Sherwood, and she would have been killed but for their courage. Very badly battered, she was taken to the Fort.

There were some other European deaths during the riots, many Indian injuries, and much wreckage of property. The response of the local British military commander, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, was, first to proclaim a curfew, and to announce that any person found leaving their house after 8 pm would be shot. This announcement led to a furious riot, with thousands of people banging kerosene tins and shouting: ‘An end to the British Raj.’ A great crowd collected near the Temple in the enclosed square called the Jalianwala Bagh, for it was Baisakhi Day, the beginning of one of the most important Sikh festivals. With a mixed troop of Gurkhas, Sikhs and British soldiers, Dyer marched to the edge of the crowd and gave orders to fire. As the crowd panicked, and tried to escape the garden enclosure where they were such easy targets, the soldiers continued to fire with accuracy and determination. The superintendent of police, Mr R. Plomer, told Dyer that he was teaching the crowd a lesson it would not forget. From where Dyer was standing, on a platform of stamped-down earth looking down on the Temple gardens, he could see the corpses piling up like carcasses in an abattoir. By the time he ordered a ceasefire, 1,650 rounds of .303 ammunition had been fired, 379 had been killed, and many more injured.

The next day, Dyer grudgingly permitted the Indians to reclaim their dead and to begin burying them. When they went on strike and closed their shops, Dyer harangued them in bad Urdu: ‘Speak up if you want war. In case there is to be peace, my order is to open all shops at once. Your people talk against the Government and persons educated in Germany and Bengal talk sedition. I shall uproot these all.’ As a punishment for the attacks on Miss Sherwood, Dyer forced all the residents who had been living in the alley where she was assaulted to be punished – even though it was by no means clear that any of them had been responsible. He made every resident crawl along the alley on their stomachs, through the dust, the grit and the animal excrement. If any lifted a limb or their heads, they were prodded with rifle butts and bayonets. Conditions in the street only became worse, since street-cleaners were afraid to enter it, and anyone wanting to leave their house to buy food was obliged to crawl, in a street with no drainage and where the only way of getting rid of the human excrement was to throw it out of the window. The ‘Crawling Order’ as it was called was in force for about two weeks, until 24 April, when the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, got to hear about it and insisted that it be revoked.

There were many other tortures and humiliations enforced by British officers upon the Indians. At Kasur, an entire wedding party, including the priest, were flogged because the wedding broke curfew regulations. Captain Doveton, an obvious sadist, ordered beatings and floggings of men found in a brothel; the prostitutes were forced to watch as their clients were punished. Women had their veils wrenched off while Mr Bosworth Smith, the district administrator, spat at them and called them ‘flies, bitches, she-asses and swine’. Shopkeepers were taken out and flogged if they did not sell their goods cheap to British soldiers, and children were made to salute the Union Flag three times a day. An order was given that Indians should dismount from their vehicles and bow if a European approached. At Wazirabad a man who failed to salaam a British officer was forced to lick his boots.5 Dyer’s excuse was the same as that given throughout the twentieth century by brutal people inflicting death and injury on their fellow mortals – ‘It was my duty – my horrible, dirty duty.’⁶ Lord Stamfordham, the King’s Private Secretary, gave an accurate picture of public opinion in Britain when he wrote to the Viceroy: ‘On the one hand he [Dyer] is condemned for what is regarded as heartlessness, callousness and indifference to the value of human life; on the other hand, there are those who sum up their position in the words, “Dyer saved India”.’ History has shown that the latter view could not have been more wrong. The Amritsar massacre united Indians behind Gandhi’s campaigns of civil disobedience, and destroyed any claims the British might try to advance that they were bringing values to the Indians which were more ‘civilized’ than what they could evolve for themselves.

Dyer was a child of Empire. He was born in the Punjab, where his father was a successful brewer. He had been educated at Simla – Bishop Cotton School – and almost his only experience of England was training at Sandhurst. After being commissioned into the Queen’s Royal Regiment in 1885, his professional life had been spent in the Indian army, in which he had served with bravery and distinction in the Burma campaign of 1886–7, the relief of Chitral (1895), the Waziristan blockade and other examples of imperial derring-do from the pages of G. A. Henty. His India was not that of the early days of the East India Company, when Englishmen delighted in the exotic and alien civilization into which they had come as traders. It was post-Mutiny India, in which the white men were afraid of the brown men, and so asserted their invented superiority with racialistic slurs and military brutality.

It has been astutely observed that the Amritsar massacre had strong Irish overtones. Both Dyer and Sir Michael O’Dwyer (governor of the Punjab, who approved Dyer’s actions and was assassinated in 1940) were ethnically Irish Protestants. In the Commons debate about Amritsar it was the Unionists and the Ulstermen who stuck up for Dyer, most notably Sir Edward Carson.7

Ireland had cascaded into violent anarchy almost before the end of the World War. The postwar election of December 1918 produced an overwhelming majority in Ireland for the Sinn Fein party. The old moderate Nationalists or Home Rulers had been ousted in favour of those who wanted complete independence of England, an Irish Republic with its own laws. The Irish Secretary in London said that ‘the Irish question will be settled peaceably or bloodily within the next six months’. Four years were to elapse before the last British troops left Ireland. In the intervening period, both sides did their best to settle matters bloodily rather than peaceably, foolishly rather than wisely. After a dreadful Civil War, in which many had been killed, the island of Ireland was split up. The Irish Free State came into being one year after the signing of a treaty on 5 December 1922, and the six counties of Ulster remained part of the United Kingdom. It was the worst possible solution, and certainly not one which either the Irish Nationalists or the English Unionist politicians had envisaged.

There was probably no way of solving the Irish question, but of one thing we can be certain. After the agitations and terrorist outrages began in Ireland, and on the British mainland, the government of Lloyd George made it far worse by attempting, Dyer-style, to intimidate the population by acts of state-sponsored terror.

Hear the words of Lieutenant-Colonel Smyth, DSO, a one-armed Great War hero who had been appointed divisional commissioner of the Royal Irish Constabulary for Munster after some Sinn Fein violence in June 1920:

Now, men, Sinn Fein has had all the sport up to the present, and we are going to have the sport now. The police are not in sufficient strength to do anything to hold their barracks. This is not enough, for as long as we remain on the defensive, so long will Sinn Fein have the whip hand. We must take the offensive and beat Sinn Fein with its own tactics … If a police barracks is burned or if the barracks is already occupied, then the best house in the locality is to be commandeered, the occupants thrown into the gutter. Let them die there – the more the merrier. Police and military will patrol the country at least five nights a week. They are not to confine themselves to the main roads, but make across the country, lie in ambush and when civilians are seen approaching, shout ‘Hands up!’ Should the order be not immediately obeyed, shoot and shoot with effect. You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent people may be shot, but that cannot be helped, and you are bound to get the right parties some time. The more you shoot, the better I will like you, and I assure you that no policeman will get in trouble for shooting any man.8

Yes, this speech was written up in the Irish Bulletin, a Republican propaganda sheet, but the behaviour of the men whom Smyth was addressing showed that such orders were being carried out to the letter. These were the so-called Black and Tans, named after a pack of foxhounds which ran with a hunt in County Tipperary, but very far from being good sportsmen. They were not, as Irish propaganda liked to believe, the scourings of the British gaols, but out-of-work ex-servicemen recruited by Lloyd George as deliberate agents of terror to supplement the army and the regular police force. Sir Henry Wilson, himself destined to die by an IRA bullet in June 1922, discovered that Lloyd George believed that the Black and Tans were murdering ‘two Sinn Feiners to every Loyalist the Sinn Feiners murdered. I told him, of course, that this was absolutely not so, but he seemed to be satisfied that a counter-murder association was the best answer to the Sinn Fein murders. A crude idea of statesmanship, and he will have a rude awakening.’⁹

After the election, the Sinn Fein members of Parliament, rather than assembling in Westminster, convened their own parliament, or Dail, in the Dublin Mansion House in 1919. Eamon de Valera, hero of the 1916 Easter Rising, escaped from Lincoln gaol in February 1919, was elected president of the Dail, and went to New York to rally support. He raised money, but no mainstream American politician at this date would recognize an Irish republic. On the very first day the Dail met in January 1919, two policemen were killed at point-blank range in County Tipperary and ‘the Troubles’ had begun.

Undoubtedly the mastermind behind the Sinn Fein operations was Michael Collins, who had joined the Fenian movement when working as a Post Office clerk in London. He was a natural organizer, and one of nature’s spies, with agents in almost every big police station, a ruthless killer and fighter. All the most effective terrorist outrages had been planned by him. When the Irish Republican Brotherhood/Irish Republican Army began its offensives it had all the tricks up its sleeve. By contrast, the British were appallingly badly prepared. When General Sir Nevil Macready, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was put in charge of the forces in Ireland in March 1920, it was an appointment made by Lloyd George without consulting Churchill, the Secretary of State for War, or Sir Henry Wilson. Macready was appointed because Lloyd George could remember the vigour with which he had supervised the crushing of the Welsh miners’ strikes in 1910. Arriving at Dublin, he recorded: ‘Before I had been here three hours, I was honestly flabbergasted at the administrative chaos which seems to reign here.’10 But if the British were in their usual muddle over Ireland and its affairs, they ultimately possessed more fire power, and more political clout. Michael Collins could outwit them by planting a bomb here, stealing some police papers there, but in the long term he was a pragmatist. After a hopeless struggle (hopeless both politically and militarily) to achieve a treaty with the English which allowed the Irish possession of the whole island, he compromised and went along with peace and the Free State. There was a certain illogic in his position. He gave as his reason for signing the treaty in 1922: ‘To me it would have been a criminal act to refuse to allow the Irish nation to give its opinion whether it would accept this settlement or resume hostilities.’ But he had not consulted the Irish nation as to whether it wanted to start the hostilities in the first place. The treaty was subsequently ratified by the Dail and passed overwhelmingly in a referendum. Collins, an official delegate in the peace negotiations, paid for the compromise with his life. He died in an ambush set up during the civil war in County Cork in August 1922.¹¹

The carnage in Ireland has still, at the time of writing, not entirely ceased. When one contemplates the heroes of the Republican cause such as de Valera and Collins, it is hard to see them entirely as victims. They gloried in bloodshed and violence. The double standards applied were, admittedly, grotesque. If the English hanged an Irishman for sedition, there would be lachrymose scenes outside the prison, with crowds saying the rosary, followed by a huge funeral. When it came to Irishmen executing other Irishmen during the civil war the deaths were meted out with rather less ceremony. (Seventy-three Republicans were executed by their fellow Irish between November 1922 and May 1923.) But the Irish people whose shops and farms and houses were wrecked in the civil war were victims, both of Fenian terror and of English reprisals. It was very simple really. ‘If we lose Ireland,’ Sir Henry Wilson said, ‘we’ve lost the Empire.’¹² If the British lost the Empire, what had been the point of fighting the Great War? How could the British define themselves?

A British soldier sets up a light Maxim gun at Chilas Fort on the North-West Frontier. Younghusband’s expedition to Tibet was based on the false belief that the Russians were infiltrating that country and threatening the British Raj. The ensuing massacre of Tibetans was widely criticized.

George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India leaves Bombay on 18 November 1905. Becoming Viceroy was for this learned, arrogant man ‘the dream of my childhood, the fulfilled ambition of my manhood’.

Rudyard Kipling, here painted by John Collier, was the greatest writer to embrace the Imperial Theme.

Winston Churchill, whose career dominated the first half of the twentieth-century, and to some extent determined its course. Here, as Liberal First Lord of the Admiralty, he is seen arriving by air at Portsmouth from Wiltshire in 1914.

(Top) Here Churchill is seen defending Lloyd George’s controversial Budget of 1909. At this stage of his career, Churchill believed in the abolition of the House of Lords. (Bottom) As Home Secretary, Churchill held the values of the clubland heroes depicted by John Buchan and ‘Sapper’. He is seen at the head of the queue besieging a house of violent criminals in Sidney Street, Stepney, enjoying the prospect of pitched battle with anarchists from Eastern Europe.

Sir Edward Elgar, a keen cyclist, was the greatest English orchestral composer since Purcell; his mingled themes of elegy and triumphalism caught the period’s mood

Model ‘T’ Fords at the factory in Trafford Park Manchester, poised to destroy rural England

Gertrude Jekyll (pronounced to rhyme with treacle) the inspired horticulturalist

The Edwardian age was marked by fierce industrial unrest. London crowds are here seen swarming on to the overcrowded buses during a tube strike.

George V succeeded to the throne in 1910. Here he is seen with his wife, the former Princess Mary of Teck, on their way to India for the Durbar ceremony at Delhi, one of the most magnificent of all Imperial demonstrations of pomp and glory.

Two power maniacs meet on horseback – Kaiser Wilhelm II and President Theodore Roosevelt

A late photograph of King Edward VII (left in the carriage) being escorted through the streets of Berlin by his nephew Kaiser Wilhelm II (to the right of the picture)

The great American novelist Henry James who adopted British citizenship during the First World War

Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture were craggy embodiments of the new modernism. He was destined to die fighting for France before his twenty-fifth birthday.

Percy Wyndham-Lewis, novelist, Vorticist painter, and controversialist

Lewis’s Vorticist Review, Blast, sought to relate art to the forces of industry, machinery and the mechanized warfare which was the most sinister development of the age

H.G. Wells (1866–1946) depicted here with his mistress, the writer Rebecca West, and other friends. Wells’s prophetic fictions saw the centrality of science in the new century’s imaginative life.

Dr Hawley Crippen was an American and not really a doctor. His arrest for the murder of his wife was facilitated by the new Marconi telegraphy. Here he is seen in the dock with his mistress Ethel le Neve.

Women’s struggle for political suffrage led to many scenes such as this in British cities

Ireland’s political destiny haunted that of England and helped to bring it down. The poet W.B. Yeats, here photographed with his wife Georgie Hyde Lees, was a fervent nationalist.

The strange career of Sir Roger Casement (1864–1916) took him from British consular service to the gallows where he was hanged for treason. British intelligence made unscrupulous but successful use of his homosexual diary-confessions to blacken his reputation.

Eamon de Valera (1882–1975), ultimately the President of Ireland, seen here addressing a meeting in Los Angeles to drum up support from the American Irish whence he sprang Three Imperialisms. The Entente Cordiale between France and Britain could be said to have led ineluctably to the First World War. In a French cartoon, President Wilson of America helps David Lloyd-George, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Georges Clemenceau, the French leader, to carve up the world after the War.

Arthur Balfour, former Tory Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary in Lloyd-George’s coalition Government made the famous Declaration giving support to the aspirations of the Jews for a political homeland. Here he is seen in Jerusalem laying the foundation stone of the Einstein Institute with Chaim Weizmann the Russian chemist and Zionist champion – later first President of Israel.

Such an idea was, for most political and military Britons, unthinkable. That is why the Morning Post, the most Tory of the newspapers, was able to raise £26,371.4.10 for General Dyer as a token of its readers’ high esteem for a man who in a later age would probably have been prosecuted. (Rudyard Kipling gave £10.) That is why readers of popular English newspapers are still encouraged to think of the Irish as potential troublemakers, and to see the British Empire as an essentially benign institution – which in some respects, compared with other empires in the world, it undoubtedly was.

The British Empire had in fact now passed its apogee, begun its decline. After the Irish treaty it ceased its expansion. Talk of the Empire being on the point of dissolution would have seemed complete insanity to the vast majority of its citizens in 1922. Far from being in retreat, the Empire was growing, and had been hugely expanded by the treaty of Versailles. In the postwar settlement it gained over 800,000 square miles, more than twice the area of Nigeria. Mesopotamia, now renamed Irak, with all its Mosul oilfields, became a British mandate. So did Palestine. Though Egypt became an independent kingdom in 1922, the British insisted on maintaining a military presence there in order to protect the Suez Canal. Much of Africa remained under British control, and the dominions of South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia all owed allegiance to the Crown. There had never been a moment in history when, technically at least, Britain dominated a larger area of the planet. Yet for all its power, or perhaps because of it, it was not immune from the convulsions which upset less obviously fortunate countries, and the experience of Amritsar and of the Irish Troubles appears to offer a demonstration of the fact that the British government, no less than any other in the world, depended ultimately upon its willingness to use violence, not merely in war but against political enemies within its own state, and on its own civilian population.

The twenty-first-century world is that which was carved out by the diplomats and politicians after the First World War, and nowhere is this truer than in the Middle East. We are still, nearly a hundred years after its demise, living with the consequences of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The British saw themselves as the natural successors of the Ottomans in the Middle East. It was there that their natural imperial instincts were most clearly shown, and the essential precariousness and illogicality of the British imperial idea was demonstrated. The indigenous populations of the region had been offered self-determination when the war was over, but this generous dispensation was made by men who had no authority to make the offer, on behalf of governments who had other ideas. The big powers who took part in the Paris Peace Conference were committed to the idea of self-determination so long as it did not interfere with their own imperialism; and most Europeans felt uneasy about the idea of anyone with a brown face being left in charge of his own country or destiny. That was the one inherent contradiction in the post-Versailles thinking of the British: they supported a self-determining Hungary or Czechoslovakia, but were much less certain that an Arab or a Punjabi was really capable of managing his own affairs without the patronage of the white man. Attempts by such people to become self-governing were nearly always described by the British at this date as ‘rebellions’. This is true in the newly established kingdom of Iraq. Glubb Pasha, a sympathetic and pro-Arab British soldier, for example, writes in his book Britain and the Arabs: ‘In May 1920, the British government announced its acceptance of a mandate for Iraq, as decided’ … not of course by the Iraqis, but ‘by the San Remo conference’ (which was composed entirely of Europeans). ‘In June 1920, the Iraq tribes rose in revolt.’13 You could as well speak of the Poles rising in ‘revolt’ when the Germans invaded in 1939. Throughout his exciting book, War in the Desert, about the part played by the RAF in establishing the kingdom of Iraq, Glubb talks about the Iraqis who fought against the British as ‘rebels’.

As well as the political problems being stored up for the Empire, there was the economic contradiction of British imperialist dreams. The Empire which was begun for commercial reasons in the eighteenth century was becoming by the 1920s a drain on resources; but for that very reason it was seen by some imperialists as a duty which the British needed to continue. The very fact that it made no economic sense any more to have an Indian Empire, for example, was one of the reasons some of the British went on wishing to keep it. The fact that it was losing money seemed to demonstrate that the true motives for staying there were British altruism, and a desire to share with the Indians the superior administrative skills of the British.

If today the world has problems in Israel–Palestine, in Iran, in Iraq, these stem directly from decisions which the British did or did not make in the crucial period of the early 1920s. So many different factors come into play when describing the origins of Iraq that it would require book-length treatment to make sense of it. Crucial as it is to the world’s concerns in the twenty-first century, we can see perhaps more clearly than we would have done a few years ago that Iraq was pivotal, not just for us today, but for them at the time. The British need to dominate and control this area, important in itself, was an early demonstration of so many factors which would colour the rest of the twentieth-century story, among them the British obsession with India, and dependency upon having an Indian Empire; the British need for oil; and the emerging importance of air power. In all these things, domination of the area now known as Iraq was vital. The population of the region was in some ways a secondary consideration as far as the British were concerned. Asquith’s question in the House of Commons on 15 December 1920, when they were discussing the necessity of hanging Arab ‘rebels’ in Iraq, goes to the heart of the Middle Eastern question: ‘Why are Arabs rebels? To whom traitors?’14 Successive generations of imperialists or quasi-imperialists in the Middle East have failed to ask themselves that question, or to answer it satisfactorily. In the French Senate one senator got up one day in 1920 and asked: ‘Why does not England take the mandate for Armenia since the U.S. have refused it?’ Another replied: ‘Because there are no oil wells there.’¹⁵

The Berlin–Baghdad Railway had been a major preoccupation of the British in the years before the First World War. The very existence of the railway prompted a British fear that Germany would block or dominate the route to India. Once the world’s navies went over to fuelling themselves with oil, the oil-producing regions of the world, and especially Mesopotamia, or what we today call Iraq, assumed a consummate importance. After the First World War, the British would see it as crucial that they dominated the Middle East. Churchill was Colonial Secretary in the postwar Lloyd George administration. The ending of the war had left formidable problems all over the world, with many trouble-spots now requiring, either directly or indirectly, the attention of that office. Apart from the all-consuming problem of Ireland, there were troubles to be considered in the Middle East and India. In May 1920, Anglo-Indian troops were rushed to the shores of the Caspian after Russians seized Enzeli in support of the Persian nationalists who resisted British attempts to impose a new treaty on them. America and France resisted vigorously any attempts by Britain to dominate Persia. Apart from having to help provide garrisons in the Rhineland, British forces were waging war in the North West Frontier, suppressing an uprising in the Punjab. The British were also ‘policing’ Syria. Although the Anglo-Indian army there was due to evacuate whenever the French took up their mandate, in the years following the First World War, Syria alone was costing the British £9 million a year. In April 1920, Jerusalem was disturbed by violent riots protesting against Jewish immigration. Crowds brandished pictures of Faisal, yelling: ‘Long live Faisal, our king!’ Administering a reluctant Egypt was also ruinously expensive to the British.

The establishment of a kingdom of Iraq could satisfy almost every requirement of the self-contradictory imperialist dream. For such as T. E. Lawrence it could appear that the old adventures of 1917 in the desert might have a happy ending. Faisal could be rewarded, and the Arabs be offered ‘self-determination’ under the protection of the Crown. For the more hard-bitten mercantile realists, however, there was the fact that control of Iraq was of supreme tactical and economic advantage. By the establishment of a protected ‘Jewish homeland’, as opposed to Jewish state, in Palestine, a presence in Transjordan, as well as occupying and controlling Iraq, Britain could achieve its goal of keeping a land-bridge between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, and guarding the shortest overland routes to India. In addition to this, Britain could build a pipeline to Haifa for the English-owned Iraq Petroleum Company.16

The situation in Iraq at the end of the First World War was a bloody mess. In July 1920 a young American diplomat, W. H. Gallaher, described in a letter sent care of the American consul the situation near Basra where 10,000 Arabs, instructed by German-trained Turkish officers, cut the railway line and blew up bridges. Gallaher foresaw the British losing Mosul, and possibly being driven out of Iraq before they established a presence there.

In my opinion the trouble all started from the bullheadedness of the British, first in persisting in the belief that the trouble out here is mainly religious whereas it is entirely political, and secondly in persisting in the belief that they can scare the Arab into submission. The average Englishman seems hurt and surprised, he can hardly believe that others do not like him, so he puts Arabian antipathy down to religion.¹⁷

It speaks volumes about the British mandate in Iraq that in 1940, despite the fact that the Iraqi Prime Minister General Nuri was broadly pro-British, the overwhelming majority of Iraqi public opinion supported either neutrality in the war, or open alliance with Nazi Germany. Herr Grobba, the German minister in Baghdad, was extremely popular among the ordinary Iraqis; German, Italian and Japanese investment in Iraq during the interwar years increased anti-British feeling. You find no explanation for this in Glubb Pasha’s Britain and the Arabs, beyond a generalized suggestion that the Germans, Italians and Japanese, notoriously devious in their dealings, had mysteriously turned the Arabs against their natural friends. Glubb, a rather amiable soldier who had many friends in the Arab world and spent many years commanding the Jordanian army, gives a censored account of British involvement in Iraq from 1920 onwards, avoiding mention of the fact that, like the Anglo-American appointee and later enemy Saddam Hussein, in a subsequent generation, the British wished to subdue the rebellious population by dropping bombs of poison gas.

Churchill advocated the use of asphyxiating gases which would cause ‘discomfort or illness but not death’ in the dissident tribesmen. They were not in the event used in Iraq, since they were volatile and unpredictable in desert conditions. The so-called non-lethal gases, however, could ‘even kill children and sickly persons, more especially as the people against whom we intend to use it have no medical knowledge with which to supply antidotes’.18

Churchill, at forty-six, chubby, loud, overconfident, treated the Cairo Conference at which the kingdom of Iraq was established as something of a holiday. He sailed on the French steamship Sphinx from Marseille to Alexandria, a six-day journey, in early March 1921. Having visited Aboukir Bay, scene of Nelson’s victory over the French in 1798, he accompanied his wife by train to Cairo, where they motored to the Semiramis Hotel. Huge noisy aircraft circled ominously overhead, Bristol fighters and Handley Page bombers darkening the sky like metallic pterodactyls, while demonstrators gathered outside Shepheard’s shouting: ‘Down with Churchill.’ The group assembled by the Colonial Secretary to decide the fate of Iraq did not contain a single Arab. The only Arabs at the Cairo Conference were serving Churchill with his drinks while he daubed at his canvases. The other members of the delegation were Sir Hugh Trenchard (1873–1956); Sir John Salmond (1881–1968), another air officer, who had been commander of the Royal Flying Corps in France at the end of the war; Sir Percy Cox (1864–1937), a veteran of the Indian army, acting minister in Teheran and due to become high commissioner in Mesopotamia; and Colonel T. E. Lawrence. Jessie Raven, wife of the civil servant who was accompanying Churchill, J. B. Crosland, noted that: ‘When things were boring in the Hotel everyone would cheer up when Winston came in, followed by an Arab carrying a pail and a bottle of wine … he was unpopular with the Egyptians – many carriages had notices à bas Churchill – but he didn’t care. He took his easel out and sat in the road painting – he also talked so loudly in the street that the generals got quite nervous … He didn’t like the Arabs coming into the hotel, not even into the garden.’¹⁹ While the Colonial Secretary painted and got blotto, the officers agreed to give Amir Faisal the newly created kingdom of Iraq, and make his brother the king of Jordan.

It was highly significant that the Cairo Conference contained two such senior Air Force officers, for it was here that a decision was made of profound consequence, not only in Mesopotamia but throughout the world in the twentieth century. The military on the spot in Iraq were constantly telling the government in London that they needed more troops. ‘Whether we are to go or stay more troops are required’ was the repeated message, sent in cypher from the civil commissioner in Baghdad to the secretary of state for India in London. The Colonial Secretary had other plans. Air power had been used in the First War, sometimes with great effect. But it was in the postwar situation of Iraq that Churchill was able to experiment with the use of air power to police an entire country.

The comparative cheapness of air power, versus manpower, had been demonstrated first in Somaliland, then in Afghanistan. In Somaliland, Mullah Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan, inspired by memories of the Mahdi’s holy war with the British in the times of General Gordon, excited a huge following. He claimed magical powers. His followers believed that he could push whole towns into the sea with his feet. No fewer than four British expeditions were mounted against him between 1904 and 1918, killing thousands of the mullah’s men and expensively engaging thousands of British troops. On 21 January 1920 the first RAF bombing raid was sent against him at Medishe. A mere 36 officers of the RAF’s Z Unit, with 189 enlisted men and one flight of six DH9 bombers, visited the mullah’s fort twice daily. Within a month, the mullah had escaped to Abyssinia and the RAF men were back in Britain. The total of British casualties was two native soldiers. Churchill told the House of Commons that it would have cost £6 million to mount a conventional land assault on the mullah; the RAF campaign had cost £70,ooo.20

The emir of Afghanistan was the next to be subjected to RAF bombing raids. In 1919 he had declared jihad against British troops in the North West Frontier of India. The RAF shipped one Handley Page V/1500 bomber to Kabul, where it dropped four 112-pound and sixteen 20-pound bombs. ‘Napoleon’s presence was said to be worth an army corps, but this aeroplane seems to have achieved more than 60,000 men did,’ wrote Basil Liddell Hart.²¹

Fired by the success of the RAF in Somaliland and Afghanistan, it was decided at the Cairo Conference that the defence of the new kingdom of Iraq would be conducted with air power.

In any case, as General Sir Aylmer Haldane (1862–1950) – he had been Churchill’s fellow prisoner in Pretoria during the South African War – reported from Basra in 1922, when the temperature had reached 128 degrees Fahrenheit: ‘This is not a white man’s country and it is absurd to pretend it is. The British troops hate it and naturally so.’ Churchill himself had noted in 1920 that keeping ground troops in Mesopotamia would have meant maintaining an enormous garrison simply in order to police ‘a score of mud villages, sandwiched in between a swampy river and a blistering desert, inhabited by a few hundred half-starved native families, usually starving’.22 By October 1922, all financial control from the War Office over Iraq ceased, and it was administered from the Colonial Office, saving millions of pounds. Iraq was to be administered by about 2,000 air force men.²³

Faisal was installed as king, but Churchill made clear to Sir Percy Cox: ‘You shd explain to Faisal that while we have to pay the piper we expect to be consulted about the tune whether under Mandatory or Treaty arrangements. If he wishes to be a sovereign with plenary powers, he must show that he is capable of maintaining peace and order in Iraq unaided.’ He added: ‘I am quite sure that if Faisal plays us false, & policy founded on him breaks down, Br[itain] will leave him to his fate & withdraw immediately all aid and military force.’²⁴ Churchill became edgy when his department was attacked in the press for wasting public money in Iraq. He was furious in the course of the year that there were still 21,632 Indian followers of the army in Iraq, and he wanted them all dispatched back to India.

The estimate was that £9 million would be required to finance Iraq in the coming year of 1922. ‘Not one farthing more than 7 will be asked by me.’ When he was asked for £150,000 to build a hospital in Baghdad, he refused. ‘There is no military need.’ Asked by Colonel Meinertzhagen (1878–1967), his Middle Eastern adviser, of Danish origin, mistakenly supposed by some to be Jewish, whether he realized that the air force was planning to use lethal gas bombs, which could damage eyesight or kill children and sick persons, Churchill replied: ‘I am ready to authorize the construction of such bombs at once.’²⁵

One RAF officer explained the strategy:

One objective must be selected – preferably the most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe which it is desired to punish … The attack with bombs and machine-guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle. No news travels like bad news. The news of the punishment will spread like wildfire … This sounds brutal, I know, but it must be made brutal to start with. The threat alone in the future will prove efficacious if the lesson is once properly learnt.²⁶

Not everyone was convinced by the policy of, in the words of Field Marshal Henry Wilson, ‘appearing from God knows where, dropping their bombs on God knows what, and going off again God knows where’,²⁷ but the senior RAF officers in Iraq felt they had learnt valuable lessons, most notably Arthur Harris and Charles Portal, who would each head Bomber Command during the Second World War, and Edward Ellington, chief of Air Staff just before that war.28

In February 1922 the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, asked the cabinet ‘warmly to congratulate’ Churchill for having created a nation out of ‘a mere collection of tribes’.²⁹ In July, Lawrence resigned from his advisory job at the Colonial Office, believing that he had done all he could to establish Faisal in his kingdom. In fact, very few of the optimistic predictions of the Cairo Conference came to pass. Because of the threat of Turkish invasion in the north, the British did in fact maintain ground troops in Mosul all the year round. Lloyd George complained that little had been done to exploit the oil. Churchill, after all his initial enthusiasm, was scared by all the bad publicity he was getting in the Press, and decided he would rather Britain withdrew from Iraq altogether. It was another of his bungles. ‘We are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having,’ he wrote. ‘If we leave,’ Lloyd George complained, ‘we may find a year or two after we have departed we have handed over to the French and the Americans some of the richest oilfields in the world.’³⁰ So Britain stayed until the 1950s, and must bear a heavy burden of responsibility for having created the ‘kingdom of Iraq’ in the first place, and then administered it so badly.