Catching the temperament of his nation in late 1914, Oppenheim’s memorandum prophesied that once Turkey formally entered the war, and the prestige of the sultan-caliph had drawn the faithful millions to the banner of Islam, then the Jihad could be focused upon the hated British to deadly effect. ‘Only when the Turks invade Egypt and revolts break out in India,’ he predicted:
…will England be made to yield. Public opinion in ‘greater England’ will force the government in London either to send as much as half the fleet to India in order to protect the many Englishmen living there, as well as the billions invested in the country, and to sustain Britain’s place in the world, or – since it can be expected that England on its own [that is, without her empire] will be unable to achieve that last goal – to make peace on terms favourable to us.26
The Kaiser was clearly in agreement as to which of Germany’s enemies was the main target of the Jihad strategy. On 30 July 1914, five days before Britain had entered the war and three days before the signing of the secret alliance between Germany and Ottoman Turkey, Wilhelm had written:
Our consuls and agents in Turkey and India must inflame the whole Mohammedan world to wild revolt against this hateful, lying and conscienceless nation of shopkeepers. If we are going to shed our blood then England must lose India.27
To unleash the power of Jihad, Oppenheim’s October memorandum foresaw local revolts as well as military campaigns launched by the armies of Muslim states that lived under enemy domination. It envisaged the Emir of Afghanistan marching his army over the Khyber Pass and into British India, and the Suez Canal being closed when the Egyptian people rose up to support an Ottoman Army that would sweep down through Syria and Palestine. Oppenheim painted an intoxicating picture of both the British and French armies riven by insurrection, revolt and sabotage, as the Muslim contingents of their colonial forces turned against their masters; and he cast the Muslim PoWs being accumulated in German camps as an avante-garde of insurrection: converts to the cause, they would spread hatred of the Allies among their countrymen and march alongside German and Ottoman soldiers on secret missions to spread the word of Jihad.
In the late summer of 1914, when the war had seemed to be going Germany’s way, the sheikhs of Arabia, including the legendary Ibn Saud and Hussein bin Ali, the Sheriff of Mecca, had sent their sons to meet the Germans and the Turks in Istanbul. They arrived bearing gifts and promises to support any Jihad against the British and French. In November 1914, the events in Istanbul and outbreaks of violence elsewhere in the Islamic world seemed to suggest that Oppenheim’s predictions were beginning to prove correct. Within two days of the sultan’s call for Jihad in November, the news reached India: there British Army officers were lynched on the streets by Muslim crowds. Riots broke out, too, in French Algeria; and at the other end of the Mediterranean, cinema audiences in Cairo cheered the newsreels that announced German victories.28 Stirrings of discontent were reported among the hundreds of thousands of Muslim soldiers in the British Indian Army, and in London, Paris, Brussels, Washington and Moscow the newspapers schooled Europeans in the meaning of an unfamiliar word – Jihad.
The Kaiser’s rant of 30 July 1914, although written during a period of acute stress when British entry into the war looked imminent, gave voice to one of the great paradoxes of the conflict: that Britain, with its vast empire, had most to gain by restricting the conflict to Europe, while Germany, the continental power who lacked extensive colonies or a fleet capable of dominating the oceans, had the most to gain from spreading the war as widely as possible. The Jihad was one pillar of a wider German strategy to globalize the conflict, sowing the seeds of war and revolution beyond Europe.*6 When, in mid-September 1914, Allied victory on the Marne terminally derailed the German strategy of quickly defeating France, the prospect of a protracted war on two fronts became real – a war in which Britain would have the time to draw further men and materials from its enormous empire. Cutting off Britain’s supply line to India was no longer merely a potential means of forcing her to the negotiating table. It might even become a requirement for Germany’s survival against an enemy capable of marshalling the wealth and power of one-third of the world.
The ultimate aim of the Jihad strategy was to make real the Kaiser’s demand that ‘England must lose India’. This, along with the lesser aim of driving the Russians out of the Caucasus by inciting revolt among the Tsar’s 20 million Muslim subjects, was what Oppenheim had assured the Foreign Office his strategy could deliver. On receiving official backing and official funding in November 1914, he established two bases of operation. One was in Istanbul, while in Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse Oppenheim set up his Intelligence Bureau for the East – the ‘Jihad Bureau’ – as outlined in his October memorandum, and it was here that many of Germany’s leading orientalists, most-celebrated adventurers and most-shameless charlatans rushed to volunteer their services. It was from here, too, that Jihadi propaganda was disseminated. Oppenheim’s staff – most of them white, Christian Germans – set about writing propaganda pamphlets in Arabic, quoting verses from the Koran, and calling for Holy War against other Christians. Oppenheim himself wrote a pamphlet that contained the passage ‘The Blood of the infidels in the Islamic lands may be shed with impunity’ and which called for Muslims to ‘slay’ unbelievers. Under Oppenheim’s direction, the fatwas of November 1914 were translated into Persian and Urdu, and into Arabic and French, and distributed to agents and contacts across the world.
To the men of the German Foreign Office who were financing Oppenheim’s activities, one of the great appeals of his schemes was that compared to conventional warfare the Jihad strategy represented war on the cheap. Although not insignificant amounts of gold and arms were to be made available to the leaders of various missions sent out to foment revolt, or sent directly to wavering Islamic leaders whose acquiescence Germany and Turkey sought, such costs – when weighed against even the price of a single day’s fighting on the 475 miles of the Western Front – were near to insignificant.
Alongside the religious propaganda, the Intelligence Bureau for the East ran a sideline in false war reports, designed to convince would-be Jihadists and indecisive local leaders that Germany and its allies were on the verge of winning the war, and that the military power of Britain was waning. To this end, the Intelligence Bureau generated fake accounts of great German and Ottoman victories on the battlefield and concocted detailed narratives of the near collapse of the British Army. In this alternate reality, George V abdicated his throne and fled his realm, and the colonial soldiers of Britain and France turned their guns on their own officers and en masse turned their minds to the cause of Holy War. The general plot-lines and leitmotifs in the Oppenheim-approved re-imagining of the war were strikingly similar to those of pre-war German novels that had speculated on how Germany might win an enhanced place in the world at Britain’s expense. The scenarios conjured up in the Intelligence Bureau were no less fanciful than those penned by nationalist pre-war authors like August Wilhelm Otto Niemann, whose Der Weltkrieg: Deutsche Träume (‘The World War: German Dreams’) of 1904 imagined an invasion of a collapsed Britain, precipitated by its loss of control over India and the Indian Army. Sigmund Freud might have classified them all as examples of Wunscherfüllung – wish fulfillment.
In order to fulfil the Kaiser’s ultimate wish of seeing the British lose India, Oppenheim left no stone unturned and no potential source of revolution or discord untapped. In Berlin, he also formed the ‘Indian Revolutionary Committee’. Its mission was to incite a second Indian Mutiny, by radicalizing soldiers in the Indian Army – those deployed on the Western Front and in the Middle East, as well as their comrades who had remained on garrison in India itself. These types of revolutionary toxins, synthesized in a Berlin suburb, were political in nature rather than religious, the dream of national self-determination rather than holy war. The Indian Revolutionary Committee was manned by Indian students and revolutionary exiles from the Raj, who energetically tapped into
the growing surge of nationalist sentiment in their homeland. As well as generating propaganda and their own false accounts of the progress of the war, they devised schemes to run guns to India, distribute anti-British literature, and destabilize the economy of the Raj by flooding the subcontinent with counterfeit 10-rupee notes.
While the propaganda war was waged from Berlin, the Ottoman capital became the jumping-off point for the missions and expeditions that were to be dispatched to the Islamic world to inflame passions and incite revolt. As nervous British, French and Russian civilians flocked to Istanbul’s Sirkeci railway station in November 1914 to leave the country, arriving on trains coming in the opposite direction was a procession of German soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers and spies. Sirkeci became their entry point into Istanbul, and the fashionable Pera Palace Hotel – located conveniently near to the German Embassy – became their residence.*7 There they gathered their equipment, assembled their teams and prepared cases of bribe money, which, along with letters from the Kaiser and sultan, were intended to ease their passage and impress local Islamic leaders. Then they and their Ottoman co-conspirators would cross the Bosphorus to the jetty of Istanbul’s other rail terminal, the huge, beautiful and German-built Haydarpasha Station. From this gateway to the East they would slip away into Mesopotamia, Persia and beyond.
The list of agents and missions dispatched by Oppenheim is a long one. Although the German–Ottoman Jihad has rarely been a focus of great attention in histories of the war, when it has been explored most attention has tended to be lavished on the stories of these daring expeditions.*8 Led by small groups of highly educated, highly literate, middle-class European officers, travelling across exotic lands of classical tradition – Arabia, Persia, Mesopotamia – the expeditions have a powerful allure. They came to fame soon after the war when the dramatic memoirs of the officers who ventured into the deserts of Asia and the Middle East, to fight either for or against German and Ottoman interests, began to appear. T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the most famous of many such accounts, which formed their own sub-genre within the European orientalist tradition, the same tradition that had inspired men like Lawrence in the first place. But these romantic desert odysseys have perhaps overshadowed the wider story of the Jihad and obscured the fact that the whole scheme was a mechanism designed to bring yet more nations and societies into the most calamitous war the world had ever known.
There was, however, only one part of the British Empire against which Germany, in alliance with the Ottoman Empire, was able to directly launch a land attack: Egypt. In September 1914 the German agent Robert Mors had been sent to Alexandria on board a ship loaded with Jihadi literature and dynamite. Along with Egyptian co-conspirators, his mission had been to spread Holy War and launch terror attacks against infrastructural targets, including the Suez Canal; but the scheme in the end had come to nothing. Its failure did little to dampen the belief of Oppenheim and others that the Muslim peoples of Egypt, and the Muslim contingents of the British colonial forces stationed there, were ripe for Jihadi conversion and liable to revolt. Here, Oppenheim’s strategizing fused with conventional military strategy. An attack on the Suez Canal by the Ottoman Army had been Berlin’s first demand of its Ottoman allies, and Oppenheim convinced many that such an assault, bolstered by Jihadi volunteers and Mujahideen from North Africa, would be the spark that would ignite a general anti-British rising in Cairo and elsewhere.
The British had been preparing for a possible attack since October 1914, but, despite having a force of 70,000 to defend the canal, its size – a hundred miles from the Bitter Lakes in the south to Port Said on the Mediterranean – still made it vulnerable. Most of the potential reinforcements from India had, from September, been diverted on to Marseilles to shore up the Western Front. Targetting the canal was the Ottoman Fourth Army, equipped, partially funded and fitted out by the Germans and commanded by Young Turk Djemal Pasha, one of the prime movers behind the German–Ottoman alliance. Assisting him was the head of the German military mission to the Fourth Army, the highly competent Lieutenant Colonel Kress von Kressenstein. Before leaving to take up his command, Djemal Pasha gave a speech in Istanbul that, although containing the requisite amount of fiery righteousness, was perhaps not the oration of a commander confident of success:
I am fully aware of the greatness and of the difficulty of my task. If our endeavours fail, if my corpse and those of the brave men who accompanied me will remain on the shores of the canal, the friends of the fatherland will have to march over us in order to liberate Egypt, which is by rights the property of Islam, from the hands of the British usurpers.29
On 20 December 1914, the holy green flag of Islam was taken from Mecca and sent to Jerusalem; on 10 January 1915 an Ottoman force numbering 20,000 set off from that holy city towards the Suez Canal, with the green flag at its head.
Between their railway terminus in Palestine and the canal area itself, the men had to march the full 300-mile distance across the Sinai Desert. The heat and the terrain restricted the size of the attacking army, as everything from drinking water to shells for the artillery had to be hauled by pack animals. It was, by the standards of any era, a brilliantly executed crossing, down in part to the skills of Lieutenant Colonel von Kressenstein. As well as their food, water and ammunition, the Ottoman soldiers dragged across the desert howitzers and the pontoons with which they aimed to cross the canal. They marched at night to escape the terrible heat and avoid aerial observation by British pilots, and after three weeks they emerged from the desert in good spirits and with the canal before them.
The Ottoman army was as multiracial and polyglot as the British Imperial forces dug in along the canal, comprising Anatolian Turks, Circassians, Syrians, Kurds, Druzes, Bedouin men who were native to the Sinai itself, Arab Jihadi volunteers and, of course, a contingent of Germans. The British fielded an army dominated by Indians: men from the Punjab, along with Baluchis, Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Rajputs. Alongside them were Egyptian soldiers, and officers and men from Britain itself.
In the early hours of 3 February 1915, the Ottoman Fourth Army succeeded in lowering onto the still waters of the canal steel pontoons, of German manufacture. Teams of military engineers were even able to cross the canal; but once the morning light exposed their positions, the British and Indian machine gunners, who had been readied to expect the assault, brought Ottoman operations to a halt with a murderous blaze of fire. A second nocturnal attempt to bridge the canal was similarly repulsed, and after other smaller actions, the Ottoman force, having lost around 800 men, began a long retreat back to the Holy Land. Not only had the canal held, the Jihadi uprisings that Oppenheim had promised would erupt in Cairo had failed to materialize. Although the Egyptian capital had been tense and watchful, the city had remained quiet. Neither the Egyptian people nor the Muslim troops in the British defending forces showed any sign of revolt. There were a handful of Indian desertions, but the assertion peddled in Berlin and Istanbul that Indian Muslims, when confronted with an army of fellow believers carrying the banners of Islam, would join forces with their co-religionists had been proven fanciful.
The dream of severing the Suez Canal and driving the British out of Egypt was also the ambition behind the other German–Ottoman mission to North Africa – the attempt to co-opt the Senussi sect.
The desert region to the west of Egypt, but east of Tripoli, was known as Cyrenaica – today the eastern province of Libya – and in 1915 it was a somewhat lawless zone, home to the Senussi. A religious order rather than an ethnic tribe, they were in effect a brotherhood of the strict Islamic Sufi sect, with followers in North Africa, Arabia, Sudan and elsewhere. To most outsiders, the sect was an enigma – which was enough to ring alarm bells with the British, who had bitter memories of confronting Islamic Mahdists in nineteenth-century Sudan. Indeed, men in Whitehall, surveying the Islamic world in 1914, might well have reminded themselves that Britain’s own national warrior-hero, the man whose pointed finger stretched
out accusingly from thousands of recruiting posters, had in large part built his reputation fighting against Islamic rebels. Secretary of State for War Kitchener was, after all, Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, and as well as battling the Sudanese Mahdists he had fought in Somalia. The French, too, had their own experience of a long, protracted and highly costly series of colonial wars during their struggles to take full control over Algeria. The Italians had learnt similar lessons fighting against none other than the Senussi themselves, during the 1911–12 Turco-Italian war fought for control of Libya. In August 1914, the still neutral Italians and the rest of Europe had been reminded of Senussi military prowess when they had attacked an Italian baggage caravan, killing Italian troops and seizing arms and supplies.
There were therefore those in London and Cairo who regarded the Senussi as an unquantifiable but real danger to their geo-strategically vital hold on Egypt. And that the British later regarded the Senussi as a potential threat was good enough for Oppenheim. In his October memorandum, he identified the Senussi as prime candidates for the Jihad; but even before that, in early August 1914, the German agent Otto Mannesmann was sent to Tripoli to try and stir the Senussi into action against the British. His attempts floundered on his inability to deliver to them the arms they desperately needed and the military assistance they wanted. Despite this early setback, the Ottomans had good links to the Senussi, and in late 1914 Enver Pasha dispatched his half-brother Nuri Bey to Libya, with instructions to persuade the Grand Senussi Sayyid Ahmed ash-Sharif to embrace the sultan’s call to Jihad. Alongside Bey was Jafar al-Askari, a Mesopotamian Arab and senior officer in the Ottoman Army. (He had an eventful career: he was later captured, defected to the British, joined the Arab Revolt and ended up as prime minister – twice – of post-war Iraq.) They landed on the Marmarican coast from German U-boats and brought with them good-will money and a small quantity of rifles and ammunition, a sample of the huge stocks of arms the Germans and Ottomans promised to provide, should the Senussi join the Holy War and attack British Egypt.
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