The Making of the First World War

by Ian F W Beckett

To some extent, Enver had embraced German plans for Pan-Islamic war as early as 6 August 1914. As suggested before, he and his colleagues were motivated primarily by nationalism, and much the same nationalism motivated other ostensibly Islamic groups in the Middle East and Central Asia. Consequently, Pan-Islam had little real unifying potential. The aims of the Turkish Teskilâti Mahsusa (Special Organisation), which Enver had created, therefore, were not the same as those of the Germans, who stressed Islamic nationalism more than Pan-Turkism, since the extension of Ottoman rule was unwelcome to many nationalities. Indeed, the Turks actively suppressed non-Turkic minorities, the most obvious example being the Armenians though other Christian minorities were also targeted. The strategy had only mixed success. In the case of Persia, the Germans secured a treaty in 1915, and control over the Swedish-officered gendarmerie, but this sparked an Anglo-Russian occupation in response. Some German influence, through the Sikh Ghadarite movement, was apparent in the short-lived mutiny of an Indian battalion in Singapore in February 1915. The Turks supported the Senussi in Libya, who were not suppressed by the British until March 1916, and also a revolt by the Sultan of Darfur in the Sudan in 1916. Neither the revolt in Libya nor that in the Sudan, however, threatened the stability of the Entente.

  Ill prepared for war, the Turks had no domestic capacity for armaments manufacturing, and an inadequate transport infrastructure. By 1916, large areas of Lebanon, Syria and eastern Anatolia were also facing famine conditions: an estimated 500,000 people died in Lebanon and Syria alone as a result. Nonetheless the Turks proved doughty opponents in defence, as both the Gallipoli and Mesopotamian campaigns illustrated. Where they took the offensive, however, they failed. The Turkish advance on Egypt and the Suez Canal, directed by Cemal, was easily repulsed in February 1915. Enver regarded an offensive into the Caucasus as more significant, in the expectation of inspiring revolt among Russia's Islamic peoples. Therefore, he commanded the operation himself. The peoples of the region, however, had their own nationalist aspirations, not least the Kurds, many of whom deserted to the Russians. The Russians also raised a division among Christian Armenians. The latter were regarded by the Turks as Russian puppets and had suffered previous Turkish repression. Consequently, the role of Armenian troops in the repulse of the Turkish offensive in December 1914 and January 1915 – the Turks lost between 75,000 and 90,000 men around Sarikamish – and the subsequent declaration of a provisional Armenian government in April 1915, provoked genocide by the Turkish authorities. A local response by the Turkish Third Army quickly evolved into a general policy. An estimated 1.3 to 2.1 million Armenians died in both Anatolia and Transcaucasia as a result of massacre, deportation to the Mesopotamian desert, starvation and disease, the majority by September 1915. Both Enver and Talât were directly implicated in these policies. It was not just Armenians who suffered at Turkish hands. Other similarly suspect minorities such as Greeks were deported from Cilicia and the Bosphorus. Cemal, who became governor of Syria in 1915, was equally implicated there in the bloody repression of Christians, Syrians and Lebanese.

  After Russia's collapse in 1917, the Turks weakened their forces in Palestine and Mesopotamia to advance once more into the Caucasus in February 1918. They took Baku in November 1918, but were then forced to withdraw. The British had already advanced into Syria in September 1918: Damascus fell on 1 October and Aleppo on 26 October. On the Mesopotamian front, too, the British were advancing up the Tigris towards Mosul. The Turks opened negotiations on 26 October, and concluded an armistice at Mudros in the Aegean on 30 October 1918, by which the Entente occupied the Dardanelles and Bosphorus. The peace settlement partitioned Turkey's Middle Eastern possessions between Britain and France, and granted independence to Armenia, and autonomy for the Kurds. It was not the intention to reverse the verdict of the Balkan Wars with respect to Macedonia, which remained Bulgarian. Britain, France and the United States, however, all supported Greek territorial claims in some measure. Ultimately, Greek occupation of Smyrna (now Izmir) gave added impetus to Mustafa Kemal's nationalist revolt against Sultan Mehmed VI, who had succeeded as Sultan on the death of his brother in July 1918. Only peripherally involved in the pre-war Young Turk conspiracies, Kemal had made his military reputation at Gallipoli in 1915–16. He not only suppressed attempted independence on the part of Armenia, but also defeated the Greek attempts to annexe Thrace and Anatolia between June 1920 and August 1922. Kemal's victory brought the Turks into a new confrontation with the British occupation forces in the ‘neutral zone’ at Chanak (now Cannakale) near Constantinople, from which Britain was forced to back down through the lack of support from the French, Italians and the Dominions, apart from New Zealand and Newfoundland. The Sultan fled, and the Sultanate was abolished in November 1922. The Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923 revised the original terms of the Treaty of Sèvres in August 1920 to Turkey's advantage, in terms of the restoration of Armenia, eastern Thrace, Smyrna and Anatolia. It led to a mass exchange of Greek and Turkish populations: 1.5 million Greeks left Anatolia and 400,000 Muslims left Greek territory.

  In many respects, the reform programme of Mustafa Kemal fulfilled the aspirations of the Young Turks to secularise, modernise and Westernise Turkey. Ironically, therefore, it was out of defeat rather than victory that the kind of new Turkey, concentrated on the Anatolian heartland and envisaged by the CUP, emerged, albeit shorn of any wider ambitions of rekindling the greater glories of the Ottoman Empire. Like the CUP's vision, Kemal's also had little room for ethnic diversity. The CUP leadership, however, had already paid for its own failures. In July 1919 the Sultan's new Turkish government tried the absent leaders of the CUP, many of whom had slipped away after the armistice. Enver, Talât and Cemal were sentenced to death in absentia, and Cavid to fifteen years’ hard labour. Said Halim, who had been ousted as Grand Vizier in 1917 and replaced by Talât, was one of a number exiled to Malta. In December 1921 an Armenian assassinated him while he was visiting Rome. Talât had fled to Berlin at the end of the war, and had been assassinated there by another Armenian in March 1921. Cemal had also fled to Germany, but was assassinated in Tbilisi by yet another Armenian in July 1922. Cavid, who had returned to office as Finance Minister in 1917, initially fled to Switzerland, but returned to Turkey in 1921. Seen as a rival by Kemal, he was executed in 1926 for alleged sedition. Halil, who had become Foreign Minister in 1915 and Minister of Justice in 1917, was another of those exiled to Malta. He returned to Turkey in 1922, re-entering politics and serving as a parliamentary deputy between 1931 and 1946. Surviving supposed implication in the plot against Kemal that had cost Cavid his life, Halil died in 1948.

  As for Enver, he also initially went to Berlin, transported there with Talât and Cemal on a German submarine. He then accepted an invitation from the Bolsheviks to visit Moscow in 1919. Disillusioned with apparent Bolshevik support for Kemal, Enver appears to have convinced Lenin that he could unite the so-called Basmachi and turn them against British rule in India. Derived from the Turkish word basmak, meaning to plunder or violate, the term was used to describe the insurgents in a widespread popular Islamic uprising against the Bolsheviks that had followed their dissolution of the autonomous government in Turkestan in January 1918. Reaching Bukhara in November 1921, Enver promptly defected to the Basmachi, proclaiming himself Emir of Turkestan and commander-in-chief of all the Armies of Islam. Enver managed to bring about a temporary unity between the disparate groups fighting the Bolsheviks, but any lingering Pan-Turanian dream was extinguished when he was killed in a skirmish with Bolshevik cavalry near Bol'dzhura in Turkestan on 4 August 1922.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE MAKING OF A NATION

  Australia's Coming of Age at Gallipoli, 25 April 1915

  PLANNED AS Australia's new capital city in 1908 but only really constructed in the 1920s, it has to be said that Canberra rather lacks character. The buildings seem generally to try too hard to impress. There is one vista, however, that does make an impact. Looking up the broad expanse of Anzac Parade fr
om Old Parliament House, used by the Australian Parliament from 1927 to 1988, the eye is instantly drawn to the towering Byzantine-like dome of the Australian War Memorial (AWM) below the forested slopes of Mount Ainslie. The memorial's design was conceived in 1926, and it was completed in November 1941. Opened on 25 April 1965, Anzac Parade has a series of national monuments to Australia's armed forces, and to the wars in which they fought.

  One of the closest to the AWM is the Kemal Atatürk Memorial, unveiled on 25 April 1985. It is emblazoned with the same words of reconciliation, of the then Mustafa Kemal in 1934, that are inscribed on a similar monument unveiled on the same day at Ari Burnu on Turkey's Gallipoli peninsula. Ari Burnu ('Bee Point’ in Turkish) lies above, and at the northern end, of what has been known to Australians since 25 April 1915 as Anzac Cove. Having walked through the small war cemetery at Ari Burnu, the visitor can use a flight of steps to get down on to the pebbled shore. Turning to the left around the shallow headland of Ari Burnu itself, the astonishingly small area of Anzac Cove can be seen, arching gently away to the equally slight Hell Spit to the south. The modern road above the cove only marginally lessens the impact. The beach is somewhat less than half a mile long, and not much wider than the length of a cricket pitch. Yet, here, as testified by the whole atmosphere of the Australian War Memorial, and also by the very names of both Anzac Cove and Anzac Parade, a young nation's independent identity was seemingly forged from the experiences of the original Anzacs, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), albeit that independence was still seen as firmly within the orbit of the British Empire.

  In reality, the Anzacs were only a minority of the forces deployed at Gallipoli. More Frenchmen than Australians died at Gallipoli, and 87 per cent of Australia's dead in the Great War were lost in other theatres of war. The Australian federation itself had also come into being in January 1901, during an earlier imperial war in South Africa, in which over 16,000 Australians (and just under 8,000 New Zealanders) had served overseas. Nonetheless, Anzac Cove became the supreme evocation of a new national identity seen as distinctive from that of the mother country. Other imperial and colonial subjects asserted their new-found national pride in similar ways, but the continuing relevance of Anzac Cove and Gallipoli for Australians and New Zealanders marks it as a significant turning point in imperial and colonial history. That little of the Anzac legend was actually true remains a testament not only to the power of founding myths of national identity, but also to the imagination of one man, more than any other, whose vision was encapsulated in the original AWM. This was Charles Bean, official war correspondent and, later, Australian official historian of the Great War.

  Australia was in the midst of an election campaign when war broke out. The incumbent (and soon to be defeated) Liberal prime minister, Joseph Cook, and his Labor opponent, Andrew Fisher, vied to demonstrate imperial loyalty. It was Japan rather than Germany that was most feared but, legally, Australia had no choice but to follow Britain's lead. In any case, Australia's political and economic security were widely perceived as being ultimately dependent upon a British victory. The 52,561 men enlisted in Australia by the end of 1914 represented only 6.4 per cent of those eligible, but rigorous physical standards were applied to recruits for the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), as the Australian component of the Anzacs were officially designated. By 1918, however, between 412,000 and 416,000 Australians had enlisted, some 13.4 per cent of the white male population, of whom approximately 331,000 served overseas. This compares favourably with the 19.3 per cent of white males who enlisted in New Zealand, 13.4 per cent in Canada, 11.1 per cent in South Africa, and the 22.1 per cent of the British male population who served in the wartime army.

  Expecting to go direct to France via England, the initial Anzac corps comprising the 1st Australian Division and the mixed New Zealand and Australian Division, was instead diverted to Egypt, largely because of the difficulties of adequately accommodating the corps on Salisbury Plain, where the Canadian Expeditionary Force had already suffered deaths from pneumonia and meningitis. The Anzacs were still training in Egypt, therefore, when the Dardanelles campaign was conceived. Resulting, of course, from the Turkish entry to the war, the campaign was the great might-have-been that seemingly promised so much as an alternative to the deadlock and slaughter on the Western Front. The expectation of success was invested at the time with a romanticised, classical and crusading imagery evocative of Troy and the Hellespont. One who evinced such literary allusion was the poet Rupert Brooke, who died of blood poisoning from an infected mosquito bite on 23 April 1915 while his troop transport was riding at anchor in Tris Boukes Bay off the island of Skyros. Another was the commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, Sir Ian Hamilton, a liberally minded soldier of some literary skill. Hamilton's memoir of the campaign is suffused with classical romanticism, as in his description of the ‘enchanted background’ of the Dardanelles: ‘There, Hero trimmed her little lamp; yonder the amorous breath of Leander changed to soft sea form.’1 Perhaps not surprisingly, in an address to his troops on the eve of the landing on 25 April he proclaimed, ‘The difference between the spear of Achilles and our steel bullets will not be discernible in the sphere of the Gods.’2 Quite what the ordinary regular soldiers of the 29th Division made of this is uncertain.

  Unfortunately, the lack of any real governmental machinery in Britain for the adequate discussion of strategic options, compounded by the unwillingness and inability of the professional heads of the armed forces to offer any meaningful advice even when asked, left a vacuum in decision-making. The seemingly great diplomatic and military possibilities arising from knocking the Turks out of the war, based on a series of unproven assumptions about the reactions of the Turkish government and other states to a purely naval attack on the Dardanelles straits, seduced all into too easy an acceptance of success as a foregone conclusion. In the event, the initial naval operation to force a way through the straits, which began on 19 February 1915, was bedevilled by the problem of not being able to neutralise the Turkish shore batteries until the minefields had been cleared, and it being all but impossible to clear the mines until the shore batteries had been destroyed. An attempt to rush the fleet through on 18 March resulted in the loss of three battleships and the crippling of a fourth.

  Reluctantly, it was resolved that the army would have to neutralise the forts by landing on the Gallipoli peninsula, though this would take time to organise. There had been little cooperation between army and navy prior to the war, however, and the landings had to be improvised in the absence of any specialised landing craft. Since artillery could not be landed immediately, fire support would depend on the navy, but naval delayed-action high-explosive shells were not ideal for such a task, given the high angles required in the difficult terrain. Nor was there any efficient means available for easy ship-to-shore communication or, for that matter, ship- or ground-to-air communication. In any case, there were no adequate maps to assist indirect fire from the ships, and too few aircraft available for reconnaissance. Once ashore, matters would be no better, for artillery was technically limited at this stage, and it would prove difficult to locate Turkish positions accurately. There remained the difficulty of coping with steep elevations. Indeed, it is hard to see how a similar deadlock to that on the Western Front could ever have been avoided, even given what Winston Churchill later bitterly characterised as a long chain of missed chances. At no point, indeed, did the British or imperial forces advance more than 4 miles inland as the campaign became a bitter struggle for the high ground.

  The campaign was to give rise to more than its fair share of legends. The former collier, the River Clyde, deliberately run aground on V Beach at Cape Helles on 25 April, instantly called to mind the Trojan Horse. That same day, the 1st Battalion, The Lancashire Fusiliers won ‘six VCs before breakfast’ on W Beach, known thereafter as Lancashire Landing. Later, in August, according to supposed witnesses, the ‘vanished battalion’ – 1/5th Battalion, the Norfolk Regiment,
including a company recruited from the king's Sandringham estate – disappeared into strange clouds, from which it never re-emerged. The most potent myth of all, however, was that of the Anzacs at Anzac Cove.

  British forces landed at five beaches – S, X, V, W and Y – around Cape Helles on the southern tip of Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. The Anzac role was to land on Z Beach, also called Brighton Beach, some eight miles further to the north of Helles on the western side of the peninsula. Twice as long, and wider than Anzac Cove, and free of the steep and rugged terrain backing it, Z Beach offered relatively easy access to the heart of the peninsula at its narrowest point. The object was to cut off the main Turkish forces to the south, preventing any reinforcements reaching the Helles front. It was anticipated that there would be far more opposition at Cape Helles, hence the commitment there of the 29th Division. Landing in the pre-dawn darkness, without any preliminary naval bombardment, and where the Turks would not expect it, the 1st Australian Division and the New Zealand and Australian Division would be expected to achieve complete surprise. Yet, many of those within the Anzac command structure had serious misgivings about possible Turkish resistance to a landing, particularly from artillery positions known to be located on high ground at Gaba Tepe. There was a lack of clarity as to the precise point at which the landing was supposed to take place. It was originally believed that the difficulty of navigating steam pinnaces with packed cutters trailing behind, in darkness and in a strong current, brought the Anzacs ashore at Anzac Cove up to a mile and a half further north than intended. It would appear possible, however, that one of the midshipmen in charge of a leading tow chose to move further north in the belief that landing too close to Gaba Tepe would be too risky. Moreover, the Turks had become aware of the ships moving offshore at least half an hour before they opened fire on the approaching boats. Ironically, Turkish barbed wire and entrenchments on Z Beach would probably have led to just as many casualties, but landing in the wrong place caused instant confusion.