Turkish resistance was feeble, for the Basra front was hundreds of miles from the main concentrations of Ottoman troops and supplies near Baghdad. As the British Indian expeditionary force went about rounding out its position in Basra province, it parried Turkish counterattacks with ease.
Drawn into the interior of marshy lower Mesopotamia by the Turkish retreat, an ambitious newly appointed British commanding officer, Sir John Nixon, who had arrived in April 1915, sent his officer in the field, Major-General Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend, further and further upstream in quest of new victories but with no great sense of direction or strategic purpose. Finally, Nixon ordered the troops—despite Townshend’s misgivings—to keep on marching all the way to Baghdad.
A successful advance from Basra to Baghdad would have required a mastery of logistics and an abundance of troops, river transport, hospital equipment, artillery, and supplies that British India did not make available to the expeditionary force. The troops were advancing into a country of swamps and deserts, without roads or railroads, and were therefore obliged to follow the meandering course of the shallow, treacherous Tigris river. For this they needed flotillas of riverboats suited to the Tigris. The country was pestilential—there were maddening, sickening swarms of flies and mosquitos—so mobile hospitals and medical supplies would be required. Whereas in Basra the weakened Turks were at the end of their long supply line, in front of Baghdad Townshend’s forces would be at the end of theirs—and would need to have brought with them adequate supplies of food and ammunition.
Though his forces lacked these apparent necessities, Townshend, whose talent for generalship was close to genius, almost fought his way through to victory. But his final triumph, if it can be so termed—at Ctesiphon, about twenty-five miles southeast of Baghdad, and hundreds of river miles from the base of his supply line at Basra—was Pyrrhic: he lost half of his small force. On the night of 25 November he began his retreat.
Townshend had learned that Field Marshal Colman von der Goltz, whom he regarded as one of the great strategists of his time, had assumed overall command of Ottoman forces in Mesopotamia. He had learned, too, that 30,000 Turkish troops were about to reinforce the 13,000 that had opposed him at Ctesiphon. Townshend’s own fighting forces now numbered 4,500; and they were short of ammunition and food.
Townshend believed—with good reason—that the closest safe place for him to make a stand was some 250 miles downstream, but decided—unwisely—that his exhausted troops could not go that distance. After a punishing week-long retreat of nearly a hundred miles, punctuated by battles with the pursuing Turks, Townshend, who had suffered a thousand more casualties, chose to stop and make his stand at Kut el-Amara.
Kut was a mud village caught in a loop in the Tigris river, and surrounded by water on three sides. Sheltering within it and entrenching the fourth side, Townshend imprisoned himself in a fortress-like position. It made it difficult for the Turks to get in or for him to get out. In the event, von der Goltz’s Ottoman armies left a sufficient force at Kut to guard against a British breakout, and then marched on to entrench themselves downriver so as to block any force Britain might send to the rescue.
Townshend planned to be rescued, but ruined his own chances. Although he had supplies sufficient to last until April 1916, he cabled that he could only hold out until January. The full forces available to rescue him could not be assembled by then—a few weeks more were required—but driven on by Townshend’s inconsistent and increasingly unbalanced cables, the partial forces available launched one premature attack after another and were beaten back. Had they waited until they could attack in force, they might have fought their way through.
II
On 26 April 1916, the garrison at Kut having exhausted its last rations of food, the War Office in London offered Townshend the services of Captains Aubrey Herbert and T. E. Lawrence in negotiating a surrender. Both were associated with the Arab Bureau in Cairo, and Herbert, a Member of Parliament, had been a well-known friend of the Ottoman Empire before the war. Both had just arrived in Mesopotamia, and Lawrence had already been stricken with the prevalent local fever.
The siege of Kut had by then lasted 146 days, exceeding the records previously set by the famous sieges of Ladysmith (in the Boer War) and Plevna (in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877). It was an epic of heroism—as the defenders faced disease, starvation, and floods—and of heartbreak, as supplies parachuted to them were blown offcourse into the river, and riverboats sent to their aid went aground or were stopped by chains the Turks stretched across the river.
Townshend, who had never quite recovered from a fever contracted in 125-degree heat the summer before, had become emotionally unbalanced. At some point during the siege he had decided that the Turks might let him and his men go free on parole in return for a payment of a million pounds. Herbert and Lawrence, who went with him on 27—8 April to negotiate terms, were authorized by London to offer even more: ashamed though they were of doing so, they offered the Turks two million pounds. On orders from Enver, who apparently enjoyed Britain’s humiliation in begging to buy the freedom of her troops, the Turkish commander rejected the offer.
The British defenders of Kut thereupon destroyed their guns and unconditionally surrendered. Townshend was treated with courtesy, and sent by the Turks to live in comfort—and indeed luxury—in Constantinople. His diseased, starving troops, however, were sent on a death march—100 miles to Baghdad, then 500 more to Anatolia—and then were put to work on railroad chain gangs. Few of them survived.
Townshend’s forces suffered more than 10,000 casualties between the start of their advance on Baghdad and their surrender. Twenty-three thousand casualties were suffered by the British forces seeking to rescue them from Kut; yet the garrison was carried off into captivity and found death along the way.
It was another national humiliation inflicted upon Britain by an Ottoman foe British officials had always regarded as ineffectual—and whom the Arab Bureau proposed to bring crashing down by internal subversion later in 1916.
PART IV
SUBVERSION
26
BEHIND ENEMY LINES
I
In 1916 the question seemed to be: which of the warring coalitions, Germany and her allies or Britain and her allies, would collapse first under the enormous strains imposed by the war? Cairo, with its own special point of view, was betting that Turkey would be the first to crack. Would Hussein’s revolt, scheduled to occur in mid-1916, be able to subvert the loyalty of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman soldiers and millions of Ottoman subjects? British Intelligence thought it not improbable, always having regarded the Sultan’s regime as feeble.
In the western world it had been assumed for decades that one day or another the ramshackle Ottoman Empire would collapse or disintegrate. By such reckoning, the strain of waging war against Britain, France, and Russia would bring it crashing down; and subversion from within would add to the strain.
Yet the record as of mid-1916 suggested otherwise. As nationalists who campaigned against foreign influence and to eradicate the vestiges of colonialism, the Young Turk leaders were sensitive to any alien presence in their midst—even that of their allies. Both Enver and Talaat expressed concern about the reach of German influence in the administration of Turkey’s wartime effort.* Yet no serious wedge was driven between Turks and Germans.
Although many Germans serving with the Ottoman forces expressed frustration and disgust at the obstacles placed in the way of getting their orders executed, they did not allow their relationship with the Turks to break down. Germany exerted influence only with a view toward winning the war and made no move to subvert the independence of the Ottoman government or the position of the C.U.P. leaders. More than any other Great Power on either side, Germany demonstrated an ability to keep postwar ambitions in Asia from intruding into wartime decisions; and as a result she was best able to take advantage of opportunities to stir up trouble behind enemy lines. The Habsburg and Ottoman gover
nments were suspicious of each other, as well as of the Germans, and there was the inevitable bickering in the field between jealous officers; but, on the whole, the Germans imposed upon their allies, in the first years of the war in Asia, a sense that winning the war took priority over other objectives.*
Afghanistan was an exception: where it was concerned, officers in the field let their mutual mistrust get the better of them. Their mission was to subvert British control of that fierce Islamic country—a control exercised under the terms of the agreement of 1907 that ended the Great Game between Russia and Britain. As a result of bickering between Germans and Turks and between Germans and other Germans, only one of the four overland expeditions to Afghanistan sent out at the beginning of the war went on to reach Kabul, where the Germans spent six months vainly attempting to persuade the Emir to come into the war against Britain. The Emir declined to act unless the Central Powers could place armies in the field to ensure the success of his rebellion. They could not do so, so the Emir quietly remained within the British fold.
In Persia, however, the Central Powers enjoyed a considerable success. The Germans, long before the war, had solidified their relations with leading Persian politicians, and in 1915 they succeeded in inducing the Prime Minister to sign a secret treaty of alliance. The German ambassador also secured the support of the 7,000-strong Swedish-officered gendarmerie, while his secret agents built up support among the various tribes that constituted about 20 percent of the total population. By the end of 1915 the Allies found the situation so menacing that the Russians, supported by the 8,000-strong Russian-officered Persian Cossacks, occupied the north of the country, taking over the capital city of Teheran and, with it, the weak, recently crowned young Shah. The most pro-German of the politicians fled, initially to the holy city of Qum, and later to Kermanshah, near the Ottoman frontier, where a German puppet government was established, backed by Ottoman troops.
In the south, the most successful of the German agents, Wilhelm Wassmuss, stirred up a fierce tribal uprising that was quelled only with the utmost difficulty by Brigadier General Sir Percy Sykes, of the Government of India, who in 1916 created an 11,000-man British-officered native force, the South Persia Rifles, and took command of the south with a base of authority in Shiraz. The South Persia Rifles, the Persian Cossacks, the tattered remnants of the gendarmerie, and the German-sponsored tribal confederations were the only organized armed forces that remained in what had been at one time a sovereign, and indeed considerable, country. The Shah had no effective forces at his disposal to uphold Persia’s neutrality, enforce her laws, or defend her territorial integrity. In the north the province of Azerbaijan had been a battlefield between Turkey and Russia ever since Enver’s attack on the Caucasus at the outset of the war; and as the war went on, Russian and Ottoman troops surged back and forth, moving through and occupying Persian territory at will.
The German-Ottoman allies converted Persia, which had been an Allied preserve, into a contested battlefield. By 1915–16 the country had, for all practical purposes, disappeared as a sovereign entity, let alone one fully controlled by the Allied Powers.
II
Britain’s efforts to subvert the Arabic-speaking population behind Ottoman lines had met with no comparable success. But Djemal Pasha, the C.U.P. triumvir operating out of Damascus, took the subversion threat seriously enough to crack down on those he suspected of treason. In the wake of his raids in 1915 on the Arab secret societies in Syria, he published in Stamboul in 1916, under the imprint of the Ottoman Fourth Army, a book entitled La Verité sur la question syrienne, setting forth the evidence that he claimed would justify his treatment of the alleged plotters. In the book he discussed the secret societies and their aims in some detail, and argued that the convicted men were traitors, not nationalists.
Whether because or in spite of Djemal’s crackdown, the Arabic-speaking population did not waver in its loyalty. More important to the Porte, Arab soldiers demonstrated loyalty not only to Islam but also to the Ottoman government. A British Intelligence memorandum based on interviews with captured Arabic-speaking officers in prisoner-of-war camps reported that most of the officers actually supported the Young Turks, and that even the minority who did not were “unable to square their consciences with a military revolt in the face of the enemy.”2
III
In the eyes of the Young Turks, the loyalty of non-Moslem inhabitants of the empire was open to question. The Porte was suspicious, not only of Christians, but also of Jews—especially the 60,000 or more of them in Palestine.
It disturbed Talaat and his colleagues that at least half of the Jews in Palestine were not Ottoman subjects. Almost all of those who were not Ottoman subjects had come from the Russian Empire, mostly during the half century before 1914 and remained—in theory—subjects of the Czar.
The Young Turkey movement had no reason to mistrust them; they had left Europe to escape from politics and conspiracies, not to engage in them. Fleeing the pogroms of Russia, the Ukraine, and Poland, they could have found a new home—as many Jews did—in lands of opportunity such as the United States, which welcomed immigrants. Those who chose instead the hardships of pioneer life in barren Palestine were dreamers who asked only to be allowed to practice their religion or their ideals in peace.
Some were drawn to the Holy Land by religion; others were inspired to re-create the Judaean nationality that the Romans had detroyed 2,000 years before; but most were socialist idealists who aimed at establishing an egalitarian, cooperative society in self-sufficient agricultural settlements in a country distant from European anti-Semitism. Once arrived, they revived the ancient Hebrew language, restored the depleted soil, and cultivated self-reliance. By the early part of the twentieth century their settlements had begun to flourish; more than forty of them dotted the landscape of the Holy Land. They constructed towns as well; in 1909, on barren sand dunes by the sea, they began to build what is now Tel Aviv. They were encouraged and supported from abroad by the relatively small group of Jews whose program called for a return to Zion: the Zionist movement.
At the end of 1914, just after the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War, Djemal Pasha, who became Turkey’s ruler of Syria and Palestine, took violent action against the Jewish settlers. Influenced by a bitterly anti-Zionist Ottoman official named Beha-ed-din, Djemal moved to destroy the Zionist settlements and ordered the expulsion of all foreign Jews—which is to say, most of Jewish Palestine. The expulsions had already begun before the German government—fearful of alienating Jewish opinion in neutral countries—induced Talaat and Enver to intervene. The American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, acted together with von Wangenheim in the matter.
Though the American and German governments were able to influence the Porte, the Porte was not always able to control the actions of Djemal, who frequently played a lone hand and looked upon the Palestinian Jewish community as potentially seditious. To some extent this proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. While most Palestinian Jews chose to avoid involvement in the world war, David Ben-Gurion and Itzhak Ben Zvi, former law students at the University of Constantinople who were leaders of the Labor Zionist movement, offered to organize a Palestinian Jewish army in 1914 to defend Ottoman Palestine. But, instead of accepting their offer, Djemal deported them and other Zionist leaders in 1915. Ben-Gurion and Ben Zvi went to the United States, where they continued to campaign for the creation of a pro-Ottoman Jewish army. But early in 1918 they rallied to a Jewish army formation that was to fight in Palestine on the British side against the Ottoman Empire. Nothing the wartime Ottoman government had done had given them cause to remain pro-Turk.
Yet despite Djemal’s capricious and often cruel measures, most Jewish settlers in Palestine did nothing to subvert the Ottoman Empire; and only a tiny minority—albeit a highly effective one-worked against it. Of that tiny minority, led by an agricultural scientist named Aaron Aaronsohn, more will be said later.
IV
According to the Turks,
in 1914–15 Russian efforts at subversion behind Ottoman lines were directed across the frontier at the Armenians of northeastern Anatolia, adjacent to Russian Armenia. The episode has been a subject of violent controversy ever since.
Turkish Armenia was the staging area for Enver’s initial attack on the Caucasus plateau, and it was the initial objective of the Russian armies when, in turn, beginning in 1915, they streamed down from the Caucasus to invade Turkey. As Christians, the Armenians were inclined to prefer the Russian to the Turkish cause. Nothing in the history of Ottoman rule predisposed them to remain loyal to Constantinople. The Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1894, 1895, 1896, and 1909 were still fresh in their minds. Then, too, Enver had sent their blood enemies, the Kurds, into Armenia in Ottoman military units, rekindling ancient feuds and giving rise to new ones.
In early 1915, Enver, as Minister of War, and Talaat, as Minister of the Interior, claimed that the Armenians were openly supporting Russia, and had taken to mob violence. In reprisal they ordered the deportation of the entire Armenian population from the northeastern provinces to locations outside of Anatolia. Turkish government representatives even today insist that “At the instigation and with the support of Czarist Russia, Armenian insurgents sought to establish an Armenian state in an area that was predominantly Turkish” and that, prior to the deportations, “Armenian forces had already massacred the Moslem population of the city of Van and engaged in hit-and-run actions against the flanks of the Turkish army.”3
The deportations, organized by Talaat as Minister of the Interior, are still remembered as the Armenian Massacres of 1915. Rape and beating were commonplace. Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, drink, or shelter. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians eventually succumbed or were killed; Armenian sources have put the figure as high as 1,500,000, and though the figures are still the subject of bitter dispute, there can be no disputing the result: Turkish Armenia was destroyed, and about half its people perished.
A Peace to End all Peace Page 24
