by Hew Strachan
This was a call to revolution which had, it seemed, the potential to set all Asia and much of Africa ablaze, forcing the Entente powers to forget the war within Europe as they struggled to hold on to their empires outside it. The message was translated into Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Tatar. It was carried to the Crimea and Kazan, and through Central Asia to Turkestan, Bokhara, Khiva and Afghanistan; it went to India and China; it extended south-east to the Shi‘ite Muslims of Iran; and in Africa its call was heard in Nigeria, Uganda, the Sudan, the Congo and as far south as Nyasaland. But its reverberations were minimal. The First World War may have been a war in which men were motivated by big ideas, but that of Islam failed to override the loyalties of temporal rule.
For many the true author of holy war was not the Sheikh-ul-Islam but Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. In 1898 Wilhelm had visited Jerusalem and Damascus. His love of uniforms and military ceremonial, which looked faintly ridiculous to the cynics of the liberal West, struck a chord in the East. He was dubbed ‘Haji’ Wilhelm, implying that he was a ’saint’ who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. His reaction when he heard of Britain’s warnings to Ger-many on 30 July 1914 was to write angrily: ‘Now this entire structure must be ruthlessly exposed and the mask of Christian peacefulness be publicly torn away ... Our consuls in Turkey and India, our agents, etc., must rouse the whole Muslim world into wild rebellion against this hateful, mendacious, unprincipled nation of shopkeepers; if we arc going to shed our blood, England must at least lose India.’2 Moltke, the chief of the general staff, agreed with him. On 2 August he wrote to the Foreign Ministry calling for revolution in India, the heart of the British Empire, and in Egypt, which connected Britain’s eastern empire to London via the Suez Canal.
In November 1914 Cemal Pasha, the Turkish naval minister, took over the command of the Ottoman 4th Army, based in Palestine and earmarked for the invasion of Egypt Two Turkish attacks on the Suez canal, Britan’s vital route to the east, were repelled, in February 1915 and August 1916.
Here was the articulation of Germany’s strategy for world war: it would weaken the Entente powers by attacking them indirectly through their empires. Moltke’s problem was that the German army and German weapons were all fully committed to the war in Europe. He had no rifles he could send to those who might rise against British, French or Russian rule, and certainly no troops. And, even if he had had them, British naval supremacy meant that he could not send them by sea. The Ottoman Empire could confer two strategic benefits on Germany: its army could provide the troops for overseas deployment and its land mass could open the overland routes to Central Asia and Africa.
In some respects the Ottoman Empire bore a superficial resemblance to its western neighbour, Austria-Hungary. Like it, it was a multi-national concern in an age of nationalism, and it also possessed a monarchy in need of reform. In 1914, the empire was still geographically extensive, running from the Caucasus in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south, and from Iraq in the east right across North Africa in the west. For practical purposes, however, it had lost its grip west of the Sinai Desert, except in the case of Libya, where it was actively supporting the local population in their continued resistance to the Italian invasion of 1911. In Europe the Balkan wars had left it with no more than a toe-hold in Macedonia. It seemed that before long this once-mighty multi-national empire would be shorn of its outlying possessions and reduced to the Anatolian heartlands that constitute modern-day Turkey. None of the great powers necessarily wished to initiate this final collapse, but all were preparing themselves for the eventuality.
Germany, Britain, Holland, France, Italy and Austria-Hungary were represented on the Ottoman Public Debt Commission, an attempt to consolidate Turkey’s overseas borrowing, which by 1878 consumed 80 per cent of Turkish state revenues. But none of the powers intended to be marginalised from other forms of profiteering within the Ottoman Empire through this process. The privileges given to foreign businessmen in the days of Ottoman might - exemptions from Turkish law and taxation, called ‘capitulations’ - prevented any increase in tariffs to protect nascent Turkish industries from cheaper imports or the generation of state wealth from exports. Between them Britain and France controlled most of the Ottoman Empire’s banking and financial system as well as its debt.
While the great powers exploited the empire, they also staked out their claims in anticipation of its demise. France jockeyed for position in Syria and Palestine. Britain had interests in Iraq, both as a buffer for India and because of the discovery of oil: its first oil-fired battleship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, was laid down in 1912. Italy had already taken the opportunity of Turkey’s troubles in the Balkans to seize Libya and the Dodecanese in 1911-12. And although Rome’s hold in North Africa was shaky, its actions were condoned by Britain and France for fear of driving Italy back into the embrace of Germany and the Triple Alliance. Turkey’s most inveterate enemy, Russia, with which it had gone to war three times since 1828, lacked economic and maritime clout, but because it, too, was now linked into the security system of Europe through the Entente neither France nor Britain was likely to oppose it in its Ottoman policy. It wanted control of the Dardanelles, through which a third of its exports (and three-quarters of its grain) passed, and it seemed to sponsor the nation alisms not only of the Balkans but also of the Caucasus. Georgians, Armenians and Tatars straddled the frontier and threatened the stability of both empires: Russia’s solution, Russification, was defensive, but that was not how it looked to Turks, concerned for the survival and even promotion of Turkish culture.
Each of the main actors, with the exception of Russia, had managed to secure a holding position. The British became advisers to the Turkish navy in 1908, and the French administered the gendarmerie. The Germans had a military mission, although the defeats in the Balkans had dented its - and its parent army’s - reputation. But in the desperate circumstances of the Balkan wars, the Turks could not afford a change of style and ethos, and in 1913 they invited Germany to send a fresh military mission. Its head, Liman von Sanders, had been passed over for the command of a corps in Germany, but was determined that he would enjoy in Turkey the status and pomp which such an appointment would have conferred on him at home. Initially, he was not disappointed. He was asked to command Ottoman I Corps in Constantinople. The Kaiser told him to Germanise the Ottoman army, and to make Turkey an instrument of German foreign policy and a counterweight to Russia. The Russians were outraged. But they mistook the Kaiser’s rhetoric for the substance of German foreign policy. The purpose of the mission was to recoup the German army’s image of professional excellence and to secure the market for arms sales, especially Krupp’s quick-firing artillery. It was not to prepare the ground for Turkey’s entry to a European war as Germany’s ally. Hans von Wangenheim, Germany’s ambassador in Constantinople, saw an accommodation with Russia as a more important priority than an alliance with the Ottoman Empire. On 18 July 1914 — with the German foreign ministry all too aware of the Austrians’ designs for war in the Balkans - Wangenheim reported that, ‘without doubt, Turkey is still an unsuitable alliance partner. They only want their allies to take on their burdens, without offering the slightest gains in return ... The policy of the Triple Alliance must be to shape relations so that, if the Turks should after years finally become a major power, the threads will not have been cut.’3
If Turkey had any appeal as an ally it lay in its military prowess. The Janis saries had taken Islam into Europe and North Africa, but military excellence now seemed, on the evidence of the defeats in the Balkans, to be firmly in the past. Only weeks before the outbreak of the war, on 18 May 1914, Moltke concluded that ‘any expectation that Turkey will be of value to the Triple Alliance or Germany in the foreseeable future must be counted as entirely wrong’. Germany’s ambassador had just reported that recovery from the last Balkan war and the completion of the reforms required would take a decade to effect: a new war before then could only put the whole programme in jeopardy.4
Germany
did not want Turkey as an ally, but Turkey desperately needed an ally somewhere, to reconstruct its position in the Balkans, and it sought an alliance with Bulgaria in order to isolate Greece. It could not hope to achieve that without the patronage of one of the great powers. There was no obvious candidate. Each increasingly tended to subordinate its Turkish policies to its perceptions of the needs of the alliances of which it was a member. The French and British were pro-Greek, and yet the King of Greece was a Hohenzollern and so related to the Kaiser. Austria-Hungary was interested in establishing a new Balkan league around Bulgaria, to the extent that it risked war with Serbia to achieve it. Therefore Austrian and Turkish interests in the Balkans might converge. But Germany was opposed to Bulgaria. The fact that Russia did not possess a viable Black Sea fleet (not a single up-to-date battleship was ready to take to the water) did give Turkey some freedom of manoeuvre. It even sounded the Russians out as possible allies in May 1914. Sergey Sazonov, the Russian foreign minister, was so taken aback that he did not know how to respond. In July 1914, the Turkish naval minister, Ahmed Cemal, attended the French naval manoeuvres off Toulon, and took the opportunity to float an alliance with France. But the French were too conscious of Russian sensitivities to respond. Thus, in the months immediately before the war the Turks were more open to an alliance with a member of the Entente than of the Triple Alliance. Britain was not approached largely because Turkey had proposed the idea three times in recent years - in 1908, 1911 and 1913 - and been rebuffed on each occasion.
Some German officers (even if their concentration levels could be higher) make the effort to learn Turkish, but the language was not standardised and it was not common to the whole Ottoman army
Germany now began to look less unattractive than anybody else. Germany was not a major player in Asia Minor; it could not threaten Turkey’s coastline or its interior; and it had no Muslim colonies to create a clash of interests with Islam - at most about 2 million Muslims lived under German rule. Thus the initiative for a Turco-German alliance came from Turkey, not Germany, and the fact that the offer was made on 22 July 1914 - the day before Austria-Hungary delivered its ultimatum to Serbia - was fortuitous. It had no connection to the July crisis proper but it did have one feature in common with it: the driving force was the situation in the Balkans. The Ottoman Empire hoped that an alliance with Germany would boost its appeal to Romania and Bulgaria, and so provide the basis for a new Balkan bloc.
If Turkey’s aims were long-term, regional and unrelated to the war that was about to engulf Europe, Germany’s response most emphatically was not. Again, Wilhelm was the driving force. A Balkan grouping of the sort to which Turkey aspired would transform the position of Austria-Hungary and the balance of forces on the eastern front. Moltke’s military nonentity suddenly became capable of attacking Russia. Liman von Sanders reckoned that the Ottoman Empire would soon have four or five corps ready to take the field. On 2 August a deal was struck. But Turkey did not enter the war.
In 1908 a group called the Young Turks had staged a revolution in Turkey which in many respects was no revolution: the Sultan had stayed on his throne, and the Young Turks did not themselves seize power. They were in origin a group of westernisers and liberals, many of them émigrés, but within Turkey they were mostly army officers and civil servants. The two elements united under the umbrella title of the Committee of Union and Progress. The professional grievances of the army officers, motivated particularly by promotions from the ranks, were deepened in 1909 when a battalion based in Constantinople mutinied. The officers dressed up the rising as a counter-revolution. Under the guise of restoring order, the army, orchestrated by Mustafa Kemal (the future Atatürk), declared martial law, consolidated the hold of the Committee of Union and Progress, and replaced the Sultan.
The Committee of Union and Progress was an amorphous body, and the course of Turkish politics ran no more smoothly after 1909. By 1912 the Unionists seemed to be a spent force. They were saved by the crisis of the First Balkan War. As the army fell back towards Constantinople in December, it seemed that the government would accept the loss of Adrianople (modern Edirne) in a bid to get peace. On 23 January 1913 a thirty-one-year old officer, Enver Pasha, stormed into a cabinet meeting at the head of a group of soldiers. The minister of war was shot dead and the grand vizier forced to resign. Enver asked the Sultan to form a coalition government under a senior general, Mahmut evket. An attempted counter-coup and evket’s assassination in June allowed the Committee of Union and Progress to consolidate its hold on power. Adrianople, which had been lost in March, was recovered in July. Even success in foreign affairs seemed to flow from the Unionists’ assumption of power.
The Kaiser was as strong a supporter of the Turkish-German alliance as was Enver But Wilhelm’s belief in monarchy made him suspicious of a man who had challenged the powers of the Sultan
America’s ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, described Enver as ‘almost dainty and feminine ... but always calm, steely, imperturbable’.5 In January 1914 he became minister of war. During the course of the year he expanded the ministry’s responsibilities by placing under it the Committee of National Defence, which had interests in the state’s social and economic mobilisation, and ranged from industry to education. Enver had made his reputation in organising Libyan resistance to the Italian invasion, and from that experience he forged a secret service, the Tekilât-i Mahsusa, answerable only to him. It engaged in propaganda, subversion, sabotage, and terrorism. It was the agent of political conformity to his will at home and of revolution abroad. Enver joined Cemal and Mehmed Talât in government; these three constituted the triumvirate that took the Ottoman Empire into the First World War and guided its destiny during it.
The immediate beneficiary of the Unionists’ grasp on power was the army. The appointment of Liman von Sanders’s mission was part of a wider package of reform. Older officers were forced out in a major purge, and political unity imposed. New equipment was ordered from Germany. German methods were also evident in the adoption of a regional corps organisation and a new recruitment law which widened the obligations of military service to embrace all non-Muslims who did not pay taxes; in the past only Muslims had been required to serve. The size of the army was now projected to rise to 1.2 million. But this was a long-term programme: in February 1914 Enver reckoned it would take five years before the army was fit for war. And he meant a Balkan war, not a world war. The army lacked a common language and was short of 280 guns and 200,000 rifles. It lacked horses for its cavalry and pack animals for its transport. It was mobilised in August, following the alliance with Germany, but the process was still not complete in October. Reservists were sent home again because they could not be fed. But in the latter month the British military attaché, Francis Cunliffe-Owen, filed a report which suggested that Enver’s reforms had begun to take effect: ‘There is no doubt that very considerable progress is being made in [the Ottoman army’s] efficiency, and that it will be far superior to that in existence before the Balkan war. The continuous training ... and the time which has elapsed for the deliberate organisation of mobilisation and administrative arrangements must cause the Turkish forces to be now regarded as a factor ... to be taken seriously into account.‘6
What worried the British more than the Ottoman Empire’s army was its navy. The absurdity of Britain’s naval mission in Turkey was that, if it were successful, it would create a body to counter the Greeks and the Italians in the Aegean, and the Russians in the Black Sea. The former may not have been allies, but the British rather wished they were, and the latter most certainly were. The British advised the Turks to acquire torpedo boats for coastal defence, but, after the humiliations at the hands of the Italians and Greeks in 1911 and 1912, the Turks wanted super-Dreadnoughts. They ordered two from British yards. Legally, the terms of the contract allowed the British to take over the vessels, and they did so on 29 July 1914. Strategically the decision was the right one; politically the outcome was a gift to Young Turk propaganda,
because the purchase of the ships had been funded by a high-profile public subscription.
The significance of the British action was compounded by British naval incompetence. When the war broke out, Germany had two cruisers, Goeben and Breslau, under the command of Wilhelm Souchon, in the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean Fleet detached four armoured cruisers under Rear-Admiral Ernest Troubridge to track the Germans, but Troubridge’s guns could not match those of the Goeben, and, in tears, Troubridge broke off an action round Cape Matapan. He had instructions from the Admiralty not to engage ‘superior force’, which almost certainly meant not the Goeben but the Austro-Hungarian navy in case it sallied out from its Adriatic base to shepherd the German cruisers to safety. In the same vein the remainder of the Mediterranean Fleet failed to support Troubridge, but guarded against the Germans breaking back to the Adriatic or even the western Mediterranean. Only the light cruiser HMS Gloucester, although out-gunned, continued the pursuit. Goeben’s boilers gave her problems; ‘the coal-dust, irritating, penetrated the nostrils, caking the throat. The lungs only inhaled with great difficulty under the pressure of the frenzied effort. A crust of coal formed in the throat causing a dry cough.’7 Boiler tubes burst, sending scalding water over the stokers, and killing four of them. But as the German vessels entered the Aegean, Gloucester gave up. She was running out of coal, her crew was exhausted and the Greek archipelago provided too many opportunities for a German ambush. In London both the Admiralty and the Foreign Office knew by now that the eastward course plotted by the German cruisers was not a feint, but they did not correct the misapprehensions of their vessels in the Mediterranean. At 5 p.m. on 10 August the two German ships anchored off the Dardanelles and were then ushered into the safety of Constantinople.
