Chapter 9
Turkish Delights
In This Chapter
Decision making with the Ottomans and the Young Turks
Encouraging holy war
Dealing with disaster at Ctesiphon and Kut
Courting catastrophe at Gallipoli
Carving up the Middle East
The war with Turkey witnessed some of the hardest fighting and most serious suffering of the war. Despite this, many people in Britain and France saw the war against Turkey as a sideshow compared with the importance of the Western Front. Underestimating the Turks, however, proved a common – and disastrous – Allied mistake. The war in the Middle East was to have huge and complex consequences that still resonate loudly today. If you want to know the origins of the modern problems in the Middle East, of the Palestine–Israel conflict, of the difficult relations between Iran, Iraq and the west, this chapter is the place to start.
The Ottomans and Their Declining Empire: Choosing a Way Forward
If you travelled back in time to the 16th century, you’d find that the Ottoman Sultan was probably the most powerful ruler in the world. At its height, the Ottoman Empire, run from Constantinople (nowadays called Istanbul), covered North Africa, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, the Caucasus, the Crimea and deep into Europe, almost to Vienna, as well as its heartland, Turkey. By the 20th century, however, the Ottomans were a shadow of the power they’d been, and other European countries thought they were too weak and decadent to put up much of a fight. Nevertheless, the sheer geographical size of the Ottoman Empire could give an advantage to whichever side it joined, so the other European powers were very interested in what the Turks might decide to do: would they stay neutral or would they join one of the warring sides?
Old Turkey?
The Ottoman Empire had declined in power because it had been hit by two powerful new forces:
Nationalism: This new idea from western Europe had inspired the Empire’s Balkan provinces to rise up in revolt against Turkish rule (see Chapter 2). As a result, by 1914 Turkey had lost nearly all its lands on the European mainland, except for the ancient city of Constantinople, the Turkish capital. But other peoples in the Empire could turn to nationalism as well, including the Arabs – and even the Turks themselves.- Industrialisation: While other European countries were developing into industrial powers, Turkey had kept to its traditional ways. This wasn’t a good policy: by the 19th century any country wanting to be a Great Power had to industrialise.
The Turks knew that other Great Powers, such as Russia and Austria-Hungary, had ambitions in the region and would seize any chance they could get to carve their lands up. In 1908 a group of young Turkish army officers decided that they had to act to modernise and industrialise the country. They seized control of the government, and a year later they overthrew Sultan Abdulhamid II and put their own man, Mehmed V, on the throne. Officially, they were called the Committee of Union and Progress, but everyone called them the Young Turks. The Young Turks sacked old and incompetent officials and started to bring the Turkish government into some sort of 20th-century shape.
Hmm – ruling isn’t as easy as it looks
The Young Turks soon found that reversing years of Ottoman decline wasn’t going to happen overnight. They suffered several military defeats:
- War with Italy (1911–2): The Turks lose control of Tripoli (Libya) and the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea (see Chapter 3).
- Balkan Wars (1912–3): The Turks lose control of their lands in the Balkans (see Chapter 3).
To make life even more difficult, the Young Turks found themselves coming under pressure from two very different directions. Islamic revivalists within the Empire were unhappy with the Ottoman government, not because it wasn’t modern enough, but because it wasn’t Islamic enough. They thought the Sultan should either start acting as a proper Islamic caliph – the spiritual successor of the Prophet Mohammad and leader of Muslims all over the world – or else he should recognise someone else as successor (see ‘The Arab Spring’, later in the chapter). And then there were the Germans.
We’d very much like to be your friends: The Germans court the Turks
For many years the Turks had been allied to Britain against their deadliest enemy, Russia, but now the war had started Britain and Russia were allies. In the meantime, Kaiser Wilhelm II, seeing another opportunity to move against the British, had been trying to interest the Turks in an alliance with Germany. Germany could promise heavy investment in Turkish industry and even a railway link from Berlin to Baghdad that would run right through Ottoman territory and connect the Ottoman lands directly with northern Europe (see ‘The train at Platform 3 is non-stop from Berlin to Baghdad’). The German General Liman von Sanders even arrived in Constantinople to advise the Turks on how to run their army. The trouble was, as the Turks soon discovered, the German version of ‘advising you on how to run your army’ turned out to be ‘we will take over your army’.
Germany hadn’t been a major player in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire before now. The Russians, Austrians, British and French had all been directly concerned with the area for their own political reasons, and the Italians were also interested in events in the Balkan region, which was just over the water from their own territory. Germany, though, was the one major power that didn’t have a direct interest in the region. So when the Germans started to get active in Turkey, and especially when they started offering the Turks military and political support, the other powers were worried. A variety of potential wartime scenarios featuring a resurgent Turkey, supported by Germany, began to appear before the other powers’ eyes:
- The Turks and the Austrians between them could control the Balkans. In this scenario, Serbia would be crushed and Russia cut off from any contact through the Mediterranean with its western allies.
- The Turks could open another front against the Russians, in the Caucasus. In this situation, Russia would have to divert troops from fighting the Germans and Austrians on the Eastern Front in order to fight the Turks. This was bound to weaken the Russians.
- The Turks might move against the British in Egypt and seize the Suez Canal. This move would cut Britain and France off from their possessions in Asia and could pose a serious threat to Allied shipping.
The Allies held on to the impression that the Ottoman Empire didn’t look strong. After all, the Turks had lost every war they’d fought for the previous half century, including since the Young Turks had taken control (okay, they were on the winning side in the Second Balkan War of 1913, but they’d joined in an attack by every Balkan state against the Bulgarians, so it doesn’t really count). What the Allies overlooked was that the Turks had shown in every war that they could be very skilful and dogged defenders of their own territory against invaders, and they would show this again when the First World War started.
This means war! With one side.Or maybe the other
When the war broke out in 1914, the Turks had a dilemma: should they stay neutral, should they join the Allies or should they join Germany? If they stayed neutral, they’d still have to get ready to defend their neutrality: the other powers wouldn’t hold back from attacking Turkey just because it was neutral. Britain and France had been very strong allies of the Turks, so it might make sense to fight on their side. On the other hand, joining the Allies would mean being on the same side as their old enemies the Russians, and few Turks liked that idea. In any case, it was fairly obvious that the French had their eyes on the Turkish province of Syria and the British were after the oil fields of Mesopotamia (Iraq). There again, joining the Germans would almost certainly mean the Germans taking more control of Turkey itself. The Turks didn’t much like that idea either. They had a tough decision to make.
In the end what made the Turks’ minds up for them was a saga of four warships.
Hey! Give us our ships back!
When war broke out between Britain and Germany in 1914, British shipyards had nearly finished work on two brand new battlecruisers of the latest design that had been ordered by the Turkish government. The Turks didn’t really have a navy so these new British-built warships had attracted a lot of public attention. They were very expensive too, and the Turks had had to launch a huge public subscription campaign to pay for them, which meant that ordinary Turks looked on the ships (to be called Sultan Osman and Reshadieh) as their own special property. But then, as the crisis over Bosnia grew in July 1914, Winston Churchill, Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, faced a tricky decision. Should he
- Let the ships go to Turkey as agreed? This course of action was the legally proper thing to do: the ships were Turkish property. But if Turkey were to declare war on the Allies, the ships would be able to do serious damage to Allied shipping in the Mediterranean.
- Seize the ships for the Royal Navy? Legally, such a move was allowed – in fact, it was common practice – when two countries were at war with each other, but Britain and Turkey weren’t at war. Seizing the ships would be bound to infuriate the Turks and might even drive them to join the Germans. On the other hand, Britain needed every ship it could get to meet the German threat in the North Sea. It seemed crazy not to take hold of two modern battleships being built in British shipyards.
Churchill decided to seize the ships. They were taken into the Royal Navy as HMS Agincourt and HMS Erin. They certainly helped Britain’s Grand Fleet fight the Germans; whether it was worth the risk of bringing Turkey into the war on the German side is a matter of opinion.
The elusive Admiral Souchon
To show the Turks that the British weren’t the only ones with flashy warships, in 1912 the Germans had sent Admiral Souchon with two modern battlecruisers, the Goeben and the Breslau, to Constantinople, where the German crews soon made themselves very popular with the locals. The ships were still based there when war broke out in 1914. Souchon took his ships out into the Mediterranean to attack the French, but he ran into a British squadron and had to make a run for home. Souchon outran the British and made it back to Constantinople, where the Turks announced that these German ships now belonged to them (to replace the ones the British had stolen, they said) and Admiral Souchon was now Commander-in-Chief of the Ottoman navy. Which consisted, essentially, of the Goeben and the Breslau.
The Allies hadn’t expected Souchon to get back to Constantinople (neither had the Turks) and they certainly didn’t expect what he did next. Despite the fact that his ships were now flying the Turkish flag, Souchon took them out into the Black Sea and to the southern coast of Germany’s enemy, Russia. Then he opened fire on a series of Russian ports, including Odessa, Sevastopol and Yalta. Because Turkey wasn’t at war with Russia – or indeed with anyone – the Russians, understandably, were keen to know just what the ‘Turkish’ Admiral Souchon thought he was doing, as was the Turkish government!
The Turkish government still hadn’t decided whether to stay neutral or join the war, and if so, on which side. The Young Turks’ leader, Enver Pasha, wanted Turkey to join in on the German side. So he signed a secret alliance with the Germans and then didn’t bother telling the Turkish Cabinet anything about it. They’d find out soon enough, he reckoned, when the Allies declared war. He was right. After Souchon’s attack on their coast, the Russians declared war on Turkey and Churchill sent a British squadron to the Dardanelles, where it did serious damage to the forts guarding the Straits. Turkey was now well and truly in the war on Germany’s side (see Figure 12 in the insert section). Enver Pasha was relieved, but many Turks weren’t at all sure that going to war with Britain and France was a good idea. And they weren’t entirely wrong.
Is a World War Not Enough? Have a Holy War Too!
The Turkish sultan wasn’t just the secular ruler of the Ottoman Empire, he was also the caliph – in theory. In practice, the Ottoman sultans of the 19th century had been an unimpressive lot and few Muslims took much notice of them.
Meanwhile, Kaiser Wilhelm was busy trying to promote himself as the great protector of the Islamic world against the big, bad British and French. This was why he’d claimed to be protecting Morocco against France back in 1905 (see Chapter 3 for more on the Kaiser’s machinations) and it was also how he sold the idea of a German alliance to the Turks. After war had broken out in 1914, the Germans persuaded the Young Turks to issue a call to holy war to all the world’s Muslims, calling on them to rise up against their British, French or Russian masters. All three Great Powers had large Muslim populations: the British ruled over Muslims in India and Singapore, the French in North Africa, the Russians in Central Asia. A Muslim holy war, the Kaiser hoped, would bring these mighty empires crashing to the ground.
Unfortunately for the Kaiser his holy war idea didn’t work. Some Muslims in British India talked excitedly about setting up a new Caliphate – the term they used was khilafet – with a Muslim sultan in Constantinople who’d lead the Islamic world in a great religious revival. But otherwise the call to holy war ended up in the waste paper baskets of the Muslim world. Here’s why:
- Very few Muslims thought the Ottoman sultan had enough religious authority left to start telling them what their religious duty was.
- In any case, the Young Turks said they wanted to make Turkey less religious and more secular. The actual Young Turk minister who issued the call to Islamic holy war wasn’t even a Muslim, he was a freemason!
- This call to Islamic holy war was being issued to help the Kaiser (who wasn’t a Muslim) fight a war against the British (who weren’t Muslim), French and Russians (and they weren’t Muslim either). Muslims didn’t see why they should get involved.
Apart from a few localised mutinies by Muslims in Britain’s Indian army, the call to holy war fell flat. However, if the Allies thought that meant the war against the Turks was going to be easy, they were in for a shock.
A Mess in Mesopotamia
When war with Turkey broke out, Allied eyes were fixed on one vital aspect: oil. The British were concerned that the Turks might attack the oil fields in Persia (modern-day Iran), so they launched an invasion of the neighbouring Ottoman province of Iraq, then known by its ancient name, Mesopotamia. This attack wasn’t run from London but by the government of British India, based in Delhi. At first it was supposed to be only a relatively small raid. The British and Indians took the port of Basra so the Turks couldn’t launch attacks on Persia from there. But then the government in Delhi decided to extend the war farther into Mesopotamia. They sent a force up the Tigris Valley to take the capital, Baghdad.
This advance on Baghdad ran into problems right from the start. The government in Delhi hadn’t checked with London before authorising it, and the government in London wasn’t pleased when it heard about the offensive. Delhi didn’t have anything like enough troops, transport or supplies to undertake such a campaign, but London wasn’t prepared to release extra men or supplies from the Western Front or from Gallipoli (see the next section, ‘Disaster at the Dardanelles’, for details of this campaign) to reinforce them. So the British and Indians advanced on Baghdad, got beaten back at Ctesiphon, about 25 miles short of Baghdad, and had to take refuge in the town of Kut-al-Amara. There the Turks cut the British and Indians off and beat back all attempts to relieve them. Eventually, on 29 April 1916 the British and Indian army at Kut had to surrender to the Turks. The defeat was a massive blow to British prestige and a huge boost to the Turks.
The prisoners who surrendered to the Turks at Kut-al-Amara had a terrible fate in store. Of 10,000 who went into captivity, 4,000 died from starvation and ill-treatment. Mistreatment of prisoners was found on both sides in the war, but the Turks were particularly brutal.
Meanwhile, the Allies had suffered an even bigger disaster and the Turks an even bigger victory: Gallipoli.
Disaster at the Dardanelles
The Dardanelles, or Gallipoli, campaign of 1915 was by far the biggest of the Allied offensives against the Ottoman Empire, but it was a complete disaster and cast a very long shadow. Even years later, in the Second World War, Allied leaders – especially Winston Churchill – were very wary about launching amphibious landings such as the 1944 D-Day invasion because of how badly the landings at Gallipoli had gone wrong in 1915.
Uh-oh: Winston’s had a bright idea
The Allied governments in 1915 faced a straightforward question: how to win the war? The obvious answer seemed to be to break the Germans on the Western Front, but by 1915 the Germans had given no sign of being broken and the Western Front showed no sign of being won either (see Chapter 5). The Allies could react to that situation in one of two ways:
- Keep on trying to break through on the Western Front. The ‘westerners’ said that the Western Front was the only front that mattered in winning the war; the trouble was that their policy was costing thousands of lives and not getting anywhere.
- Find somewhere else and break through there instead. This idea sounds clever, but everything depended on where the breakthrough would come. It also supposes that breaking through somewhere else would actually win the war, but this outcome was far from guaranteed.
The Allied situation was even bleaker on the Eastern Front, where the Russians were still reeling from their defeat at Tannenberg (see Chapter 4 for more on this Allied disaster). At the very beginning of 1915, they asked the British and French whether they could do something to relieve the pressure on the Eastern Front. It wasn’t easy to see what the western Allies could do to help the Russians. If they sent too many troops to the Eastern Front, the Germans might break through in the west, and that wouldn’t help anyone except the Germans themselves. Lord Kitchener, Britain’s Secretary of State for war, told the Russians that any help Britain gave would have to take the form of a naval attack somewhere. But where? The question passed to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.
Churchill’s idea was to use the Royal Navy on its own to attack and take the Dardanelles. He thought this was a brilliant idea; the First Sea Lord, Sir John Fisher, the man who’d single-handedly modernised the Victorian navy, thought the plan was crazy, and here’s why.
The Dardanelles is a very narrow sea passage that runs from the Mediterranean towards the Black Sea. It broadens out in the middle but at the two ends it’s hardly wider than a canal. Churchill thought the navy could sail into the Dardanelles, open fire on the Turkish forts along the shoreline and destroy them. Then, he thought, the Turks would surrender, the Allies would take hold of Constantinople, and they’d be able to rush troops and supplies through the Black Sea to Russia. These reinforcements would so strengthen the Russians that they’d rise up like a mighty giant and crush the Germans beneath their mighty boots. That, at any rate, was the theory.
Historians don’t agree on whether or not Churchill’s plan had any chance of success: some think it did, others think it was too ambitious. What is clear is that Churchill’s plan made a number of highly questionable assumptions:
- Questionable Assumption No. 1: Ships can defeat forts on their own. Fisher didn’t believe this; neither, back in his day, did Nelson. Both men thought that ships should leave forts well alone and only attack them in conjunction with ground troops.
- Questionable Assumption No. 2: When the forts have been destroyed, Constantinople will fall and Turkey will surrender. It wasn’t clear why the Turks should do this. Major cities don’t usually surrender to fleets and Constantinople could defend itself quite adequately.
- Questionable Assumption No. 3: Knocking Turkey out of the war would mean the defeat of Germany. It might, but it might not. The Germans might simply move troops down to Turkey to carry on the fight.
The Dardanelles offensive was therefore a massive gamble, with no guarantee that it would achieve its aims, even if it went well.
Phase 1: The naval attack – or ‘How not to win a quick victory’
On 19 February 1915 British and French ships moved into the Dardanelles and opened fire on the Turkish forts. The Turks were taken by surprise and the ships did serious damage to the Turkish defences, but the Turks soon started firing back and laying mines so the Allied ships had to pull back for their own protection. The British decided it would be crazy to risk losing a dreadnought battleship – they desperately needed these powerful ships to fight the Germans – so they withdrew the most powerful ship in the attack force, HMS Queen Elizabeth, and carried on the attack with battlecruisers. These ships had to get in close to do any real damage to the Turkish forts, but with the Turks lobbing shells at them from howitzers and with minefields in the narrow waters of the straits, the ships had to keep their distance.
Through the rest of February and into March the Allied ships continued battering the forts but they were getting nowhere. The French realised that they needed to commit ground troops. Duly, on 10 March they sent 18,000 colonial troops from French North Africa to the Dardanelles zone. The British too were coming to the conclusion that naval power on its own wouldn’t win this battle, but before the army arrived in strength and took over, the naval commanders decided to have one last go to show what they could do without army support. On 18 March British and French ships moved in to attack the Turkish forts – and ran into a minefield. Two French ships, Gaulois and Bouvet, and one British ship, HMS Ocean, were sunk, and two British ships, HMS Irresistible and HMS Inflexible, were badly damaged. Soon, on 23 March, Churchill told the British Cabinet that the naval attack had failed and that they had no choice but to use troops on land.
Phase 2: The landings – or ‘How not to take your enemy by surprise’
You may think that a major naval attack on the Dardanelles would give the game away that the Allies were planning an assault in the area. If so, you’d be right. The Turkish leader, Enver Pasha, was badly worried about the prospect of an Allied landing and was preparing to evacuate the Gallipoli peninsula on the northern shore of the Dardanelles. He didn’t think the Turks would be able to resist such an attack if it came. But the German General Liman von Sanders thought Enver Pasha was too pessimistic. He took over command and started to prepare the Turkish defences for when the Allies came back. And sure enough, they did.
The Allies’ best hope to beat the Turks was to land large numbers of troops on the Gallipoli peninsula as soon as possible, before the Turks had a chance to recover from their surprise at the Allied attack and put their defences in order. Instead, the Allies spent a whole month arguing about whether they should land, where they should land, which troops should land, who should be in charge of them and so on. Liman von Sanders could hardly believe his luck, and he used this month’s delay to prepare defences for the whole Gallipoli peninsula.
Von Sanders didn’t have enough troops to cover the whole coastline, so his plan was for the troops at the coast to delay the Allies for as long as possible, while his mobile reserve troops rushed to the danger spot and stopped the invaders advancing any farther. It was a plan that depended on the Allies making lots of mistakes and getting into serious muddles. Once again, von Sanders’ luck was in – the Allies were about to do both of these things.
Next time, study the map more carefully
In some ways, the Allies’ Dardanelles plan can seem quite clever if you look at a map showing the whole of Europe, but when you look more closely at the land involved it doesn’t look anything like such a bright idea. The Gallipoli peninsula is very rocky, and most of its coastline is dominated by steep cliffs and hillsides, with lots of rocky gullies and hills inland: perfect terrain for an army to defend against an enemy landing; not such great terrain to encounter if you’re on the attacking side (see Figure 9-1). The Allied commander, Sir Ian Hamilton, had the right maps showing all the details, but he still seemed surprised by the terrain he found.
© Imperial War Museums (Q 13400A)
Figure 9-1: ANZAC troops dug into the rocky terrain of the Gallipoli peninsula.
D-Day in the Dardanelles
The date for the landings in the Dardanelles was set for 25 April 1915. The plan was for three main Allied forces to head for the Gallipoli peninsula:
- A French force was going to land on the eastern side.
- A British force would land at the southern tip and on the western side.
- The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) would be landing at the far north of the landing area.
The plan was for the three forces to travel to Gallipoli on ships and get into lifeboats and other rowing boats to get ashore – no landing craft existed in 1915. One ship’s captain had what seemed a good idea for one of the British beaches: instead of making the troops climb into small boats, where they would be helpless targets for Turkish rifle fire, an old converted collier, the River Clyde, would sail inshore and beach itself, and then the troops could pour out of specially cut holes in the ship’s sides, straight into action.
The best-laid plans sometimes go awry, however, and at Gallipoli they did:
- French troops landed successfully on their landing beach. They had effective covering fire from the British fleet.
- British troops landed successfully on the western side of the peninsula. They faced virtually no opposition.
- The ANZAC troops landed in the wrong place and headed in the wrong direction. Then they advanced inland too far, too fast and got thrown back again towards the beach.
- The British landing from the River Clyde went disastrously wrong. The Turks massacred the troops as they emerged from the ship. The British suffered 1,200 casualties out of 1,500 men.
The Allied commanders had been prepared to accept heavy casualties, so despite the River Clyde disaster, their main concern was that the troops were now ashore.
The British are coming – to the rescue!
The Gallipoli front was in two main sectors (see Figure 9-2):
- Cape Helles, at the southern end of the peninsula: British and French troops had advanced inland and were sitting, facing the Turks, in a trench line that stretched across the peninsula. Neither side was able to break through. This was ironic, because the whole idea of the Gallipoli campaign was to get past the trench line on the Western Front that no one was able to break through!
- ANZAC Cove, farther up the west coast of the peninsula: This front, where the Australians and New Zealanders had landed, was bogged down in trench warfare too, though unlike at Cape Helles, the ANZACs were dug into the cliffs only just inland from the beach.
Figure 9-2: The Gallipoli front.
With the Gallipoli front now as badly bogged down as the Western Front, the only way to break the deadlock seemed to be to stage another landing to outflank the Turks. So the British landed troops at Suvla Bay, just north of ANZAC Cove. Just like the ANZAC landings, though, the British landed in the wrong place and weren’t able to advance very far inland. The two Allied landings, at ANZAC and at Suvla, were able to join up, but they weren’t able to break through the Turkish lines.
By the autumn of 1915 it was impossible to avoid the awful truth: the entire Dardanelles campaign had failed.
The Turkish officer who led the very successful defence against the ANZACs and the British at Suvla was Mustafa Kemal. Kemal was a tough commander and he led his men in fierce attacks against the Allied positions. His success at Gallipoli made him a national hero. He would go on to become the most successful Turkish general of the war and would eventually take power himself, with his name changed to Kemal Atatürk (you can read more about him in Chapters 17 and 19).
Should we stay or should we go?
After six months it was clear that the whole Dardanelles campaign – which had been intended as a way to break the deadlock of the Western Front, bring help to Russia and win the war – wasn’t going to achieve any of its aims. However, deciding what to do about it didn’t prove easy. The sequence of events went like this:
- The British government discusses withdrawal from the Dardanelles.
- The British commander, Sir Ian Hamilton, recommends withdrawal.
- Sir Ian Hamilton is sacked for being defeatist and replaced by General Monro.
- General Monro recommends withdrawal.
- Lord Kitchener says, ‘No, the campaign must go on,’ and he goes to Gallipoli to show Monro how to run it.
- Lord Kitchener recommends withdrawal.
Ironically, withdrawing the men before the Turks knew what was happening was about the only part of the campaign that can be called a success. The Allies were able to slip away so quietly that the Turks had no idea they’d gone. But this success couldn’t disguise the fact that the campaign had been a complete and very costly disaster. It was a serious blow to the prestige of the Allies and it caused serious resentment among the Australians and New Zealanders, who felt their young men had been sacrificed for nothing. To add insult to injury, the Allied failure convinced the Bulgarians to join the war on the German side (see Chapter 5). As a result of the campaign’s failure, Winston Churchill resigned from the government and rejoined the army, serving for a time as a colonel at the front in France.
And still the Ottoman war was far from over.
The Arab Spring
Nowhere did the First World War have a greater and longer-lasting impact than in the Middle East. In fact it was in this period that the term Middle East was first used to refer to the region: it meant the area between Europe and its colonial territories in Asia (also known as the Far East – that is, far from Europe). The British and French knew perfectly well that this area of desert and mountains was very rich in oil and they intended to get their hands on this precious resource if they could take the area away from the Turks. The Arabs who lived there, however, took a different view.
The Land of Araby rises up
Arabia wasn’t very clearly defined at the time of the First World War: it was a region stretching over modern-day Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. The whole area fell within the Ottoman Empire, though the Turks didn’t exercise much control over it. Outside the cities of Syria and Palestine, most of the area was inhabited by Arab tribes who were ruled by local chiefs and sheikhs, forever quarrelling among themselves and not particularly interested in what was going on elsewhere. One important exception was Sherif Hussein Ibn Ali, whose lands included the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The title Sherif indicates a descendant of the daughter of the Prophet Mohammad; that title made Sherif Hussein the only serious rival to the religious authority of the Ottoman Sultan himself.
Sherif Hussein wanted to rule a large, independent Arab state as the new caliph, the successor to the prophet. However, he couldn’t hope to take on the Turks without help, so in October 1916 he contacted the British high commissioner in Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, to see whether the British were interested in an alliance. Not knowing quite what to make of Sherif Hussein’s offer, but knowing that the Gallipoli campaign against the Turks was going down the drain fast, Sir Henry agreed and promised Sherif Hussein he could have a large Arab state after the war except for some areas, such as Palestine and Syria, which the British and French had earmarked for themselves. So in 1916 Sherif Hussein launched his revolt.
When Sykes met Picot
Just as the Arab Revolt was getting under way, a British official, Sir Mark Sykes, met his French opposite number, Georges Picot. They drew up an agreement about what should happen to the Middle East if the Allies were to defeat the Turks (this wasn’t as remote a possibility as you might think). The Sykes–Picot Agreement, which was to be kept hush-hush until the war was over, stated that Russia should get land in the Caucasus and Kurdistan, France would get a large swathe of land across Syria, Lebanon and southern Turkey, and Britain would get a large area covering Palestine, Jordan (known then as Transjordan) and Mesopotamia. This secret agreement didn’t say a word about giving any land to Sherif Hussein and his Arabs.
Hang on! I thought the Turks were winning everything?
The Turks had been very successful in the war so far, but now the Gallipoli campaign was over (see ‘Disaster at the Dardanelles’, earlier in the chapter) things began to change. They lost in a campaign against the Russians in the Caucasus and the British began to advance far more effectively in Mesopotamia, wiping out the memory of the fall of Kut-al-Amara (see the earlier ‘A Mess in Mesopotamia’ section).
The Arab revolt was underway too. It wasn’t very well organised, but the British – whose new Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, was determined to drive the Turks out of the whole Middle Eastern region – managed to get enough help to the Arabs to keep it going and the Turks weren’t able to stamp it out. Even so, the Arab Revolt might have remained a sideshow had it not been for the appearance on the scene of a rather unusual young Englishman: TE Lawrence, known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. You may have heard of him.
TE Lawrence was a rather intense young man who’d developed a love of the Arabs and their lifestyle while travelling through Arabia to study Crusader castles for his dissertation at the University of Oxford. He was employed by the British Arab Bureau to liaise with Sherif Hussein’s son, Prince Feisal, and the two men got on well. Lawrence became a sort of semi-official military adviser to Feisal and he hit on the crazy idea of leading a party across the desert to attack the Turkish-held port of Aqaba. The Turks didn’t use Aqaba much, but the British could. Lawrence, who had a powerful personal charisma, gathered support for the attack. When the attack came, the Turks, who hadn’t prepared for an attack out of the desert, were taken completely by surprise and beaten out of town. The British could now send supplies for the Arabs through the port. The Arab Revolt had suddenly become a much more serious problem for the Turks.
The twice-promised land: Arthur Balfour’s Declaration
As well as the Arabs, the British, the French and the Turks, one other group had an interest in what would happen to the Middle East after the war: the Zionists. Zionism was the Jewish nationalist movement that worked to set up a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George and the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, were sympathetic to Zionism. They wanted to win over Jewish opinion in the United States (American Jews were wary of supporting the Allies because Russia was violently anti-semitic).
So on 2 November 1917 Balfour wrote a letter to the British Jewish leader Lord Rothschild that became known as the Balfour Declaration. It stated that the British government viewed with favour the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, so long as nothing was done that might ‘prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. He didn’t say how this could be done and no one has worked out a way of doing it since.
To Jerusalem and beyond!
Nineteen seventeen proved a very disappointing year for the Allies (Chapter 15 explains why), so British Prime Minister David Lloyd George was determined to provide some good news. He told General Edmund Allenby that he wanted Jerusalem to be in Allied hands by Christmas. And it was.
Closing in on Turkey
Allenby was advancing from Egypt against the Turkish defence line in Palestine, between Beersheba and Gaza. He was well equipped: he’d received reinforcements from the Salonika front, he had plenty of cavalry and armoured cars, he had a huge concentration of heavy artillery, and British fighter planes prevented German reconnaissance flights from seeing what he was up to. At the end of October Allenby launched his attack. His men cut round the Turks’ flanks, captured the essential wells before the Turks could poison them and drove the Turks back towards Jerusalem.
The defending Turks weren’t alone. The Germans had set up a special army called Yilderim (or Thunderbolt) Force under General von Falkenhayn, who had been Chief of the German General Staff (you meet him in Chapters 4, 5 and 6). The Yilderim was originally supposed to fight the British in Mesopotamia, but the threat in Palestine was more urgent. Unfortunately for the Germans, the Yilderim was short of men and relied for supplies on a railway that kept having to stop because the track was different gauges. Allenby pressed on to Jerusalem and Falkenhayn wasn’t able to stop the Allies taking Jerusalem in time for Christmas (see Figure 9-3).
© Imperial War Museums (Q 12617)
Figure 9-3: General Allenby hears the proclamation of the British occupation of Jerusalem.
But Allenby wasn’t finished yet. In 1918 he launched an attack over the Jordan river in conjunction with the Arab Revolt, against the Yilderim forces in Transjordan under General Liman von Sanders, who’d overseen the Turkish victory at Gallipoli. This time Liman had met his match: Allenby’s attack worked and he took Transjordan’s capital, Amman.
Endgame: The Armageddon
The end came in September 1918 when Allenby’s troops converged on the Turks at Megiddo, also known as Armageddon – the place where, according to the Bible, the great battle will take place at the End of Time. As it turned out, the battle of September 1918 didn’t bring about the end of the world, but it did end Turkey’s hold over Palestine and Syria. (Chapter 16 has the details.) In October 1918 Allenby moved into Damascus, and by November, when the war finally ended, he’d advanced as far as Aleppo.
Allenby had achieved what he set out to achieve – and what he kept completely secret from his Arab allies: he’d captured all the land the British and French were proposing to take over under the terms of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. The British had made promises in both the McMahon–Sherif correspondence, which promised the Arabs a large, independent state, and the Balfour Declaration, which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine after the war. But the Sykes–Picot Agreement was the only one that they intended to honour. And no one could convince them otherwise. (You can find out how the map of the Middle East was redrawn in Chapter 17.)