by Hew Strachan
In March 1916 August von Mackensen, fresh from his conquests of Poland and Serbia, was fêted in Constantinople He inspects the German crews of the Coeben and Breslau, now in Turkish service
Their arrival should have forced Turkey out of its neutrality. That was what the Germans hoped, not least because in some senses they replaced the two Dreadnoughts due from Britain. In practice the replacement was almost too direct, as they became Turkish ships and the German crews were taken into the Ottoman navy. The crew struck the German flag, put on fezes, and observed Friday, not Sunday, as their day of rest. Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, felt humiliated and treated the Turks as enemies henceforth. He told Troubridge to sink the Goeben and Breslau, whatever flag they sailed under. Britain’s respect for international law and for neutrality had its limits. It blockaded Turkey, which given the latter’s reliance on coastwise communication deepened its economic woes. The foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, tried to build a pro-Entente Balkan alliance around Greece, and its implicit enemy could only be Turkey. And the India Office worried about the Persian Gulf, where Arab revolution threatened the status quo and therefore the outer ramparts of the defence of India. An Indian division, or Indian Expeditionary Force D as it became, was readied for Mesopotamia from late September, ostensibly to secure the Admiralty’s oil supplies.
Ideally, Britain would still have preferred to keep the Ottoman Empire out of the war rather than push it in, but nothing it did served that aim. Those in Turkey’s government who espoused neutrality found little to support their policy. Although outnumbered in the cabinet, the triumvirate was eventually able to engineer hostilities. On 29 October the Turkish fleet, including the German ships, and commanded by Souchon, attacked the Russian Black Sea ports in obedience to secret orders from Enver. The Ottoman Empire had entered the First World War.
THE CAUCASUS
The Germans thought it had done so in order to pursue their agenda; in reality it had its own. The Young Turks, as remodelled and refined by Enver and his ilk, were modernisers. Their goals were administrative efficiency. What attracted them to Islam was not religion but expedience. The summons to holy war did not call on the Muslims under German or Austro-Hungarian rule to rebel; Italy, whose invasion of Libya and the Dodecanese had given the greatest recent offence to Ottoman interests, was not mentioned, in the hope that it would still honour its obligations to the Triple Alliance. Politics were more important than faith, and nationalism than Ottomanism. The loss of territory had modified the multi-nationalism of the Ottoman Empire. As Anatolia became more obviously the heartland of the state, so pan-Turkism flourished. Pan-Turkism defined nationalism in terms of culture and sentiment more than ethnicity or even geography. So a movement whose origins were linked to the contraction of frontiers became a voice for their expansion. Turkic peoples were identified in the Caucasus, Azerbaijan, Turkestan, Persia and Afghanistan. ‘For the Turks’, wrote Ziya Gokalp, professor of sociology at the University of Istanbul, ‘the fatherland is neither Turkey nor Turkestan; their fatherland is a great and eternal land: Turan.’8
The rhetoric of pan-Turkism pulled the Ottoman army towards the Caucasus. Across the mountain range lay a polyglot population of Georgians, Armenians and Tatars, whose shifting loyalties had generated Russia’s most persistent frontier problem throughout the nineteenth century. Russia’s solution was both military and political: conquest had been accompanied by Russification and by the forced repatriation of Osman Turks. Here the Ottoman army could pose as both the liberator of oppressed Turkic peoples and the instrument of jihad. Moreover, it would not only unite these ideological strands but would also fulfil its alliance obligations. Offensive operations here would prevent Russia redeploying its three Caucasian corps to the Central Powers’ eastern front.
In reality divisions between the allies were evident from the outset. The Germans sponsored Georgia’s independence, not its incorporation in the Ottoman Empire, and favoured a limited attack, not the advance on Afghanistan and India about which Enver was grandiloquently speaking by the end of November. ‘In December’, according to Felix Guse, a German staff officer with the Ottoman 3rd Army in the Caucasus, ‘there are heavy falls of snow, which last three to seven days, and which leave behind snow one to two metres deep in the valleys and three to four metres deep on the mountains, totally blocking many roads.’9 The Ottoman base for operations was Erzurum, almost 100 km from the frontier and ten times that from the railhead linking it to Constantinople. Guse favoured short leaps after careful preparations; Enver decided on deep envelopment with immediate effect. He argued that the more exposed the route, the more it would be swept clear of snow. His aim was to encircle the Russians at Sarikamish on Christmas Day 1914, and he directed his left hook on Ardahan, almost 100 km further on. His units were short of boots and groundsheets, and those with the deepest snow to traverse were instructed to leave their packs and greatcoats behind. The mildest temperature in the entire operation was -31°C. The Turks’ supplies ran out on 25 December. The Russians held Sarikamish and then counterattacked in the first week of the new year. The 3rd Army was shattered. Its total casualties were at least 75,000 men, and some estimates rise as high as 90,000. The majority fell not in battle but to the terrain, the climate, the supply situation and the lack of medical care. The blow to the notion of holy war, at least in this quarter of the Ottoman area of operations, was devastating, and that to pan-Turkism scarcely less so.
The Ottoman army mustered about 800,000 on mobilisation, or only 4 per cent of the total population The burden fell disproportionately on the Anatolian peasants, and the orphans of those killed were trained to carry on from their fathers
By 23 January 1915 the 3rd Army mustered 12,400 effectives, or possibly 20,000 in all. The Turks tried to recoup the situation by striking out to the east, towards Persian Azerbaijan and Tabriz, hoping to provoke the Kurds into rising against the Russians. But they, not their enemies, were to prove more susceptible to the uncertain loyalties of the region.
Russian intentions for the spring were limited: to push from Kars in a southerly direction, west of Lake Van, and so secure their Persian flank. Six provinces of eastern Anatolia contained populations which were Armenian and therefore Christian, although in none of them were they in a majority. Indeed, the forced migration of Turks from Russia had reduced their profile proportionately, while at the same time elevating the affront they presented to both militant Islam and pan-Turkism. In 1894 — 6 Armenian revolutionary activity had culminated in violence which had been bloody and protracted. Moreover, it was a movement which enjoyed Russian patronage. In 1914 both Sazonov, the foreign minister, and the governor-general of the Caucasus sketched out plans to foment revolt. At least 150,000 Armenians who lived on the Russian side of the frontier were serving in the Tsar’s army. Enver persuaded himself that his defeat at Sarikamish had been due to three units of Armenian volunteers, who included men who had deserted from the Ottoman side. The Ottoman 3rd Army knew of the Russian intentions and anticipated problems as early as September. Its soldiers began murdering Armenians and plundering their villages in the first winter of the war. On 16 April 1915, as the Russians approached Lake Van, the region’s Ottoman administrator ordered the execution of five Armenian leaders. The Armenians in Van rose in rebellion, allegedly in self-defence. Within ten days about 600 leading members of the Armenian community had been rounded up and deported to Asia Minor.
Armenian victims many photographs of the Armenian massacres were taken by Armin Wegner. a German medical officer, who took up Armenia’s cause after the war Unfortunately he was not precise as to places or dates
In the confused and uncertain situation on the ground, the issue of immediate responsibility for what followed is now almost impossible to unravel. The Ottoman army’s discipline, already weak, was not best served by defeat on the battlefield and inadequate supply arrangements. Looting and pillaging were aids to survival as well as instruments of terror. It was operating in conjunction wi
th Kurds, who were as ready to spill Armenian blood as any Anatolian Turk. On the other hand, any fears they may have had of an enemy in the rear, not uniformed and ready to operate in an underhand way, did not lack foundation. The best that could be said of the Armenians’ loyalty to the Ottoman Empire was that it was conditional. The responses of their community leaders in 1914 were characterised by attentisme, and the possibility of a rising in the Turkish rear was one which the Russians were ready to exploit. Significantly, the first note of international protest was prepared by Sazonov as early as 27 April, although it was not published until 24 May. In it he claimed that the populations of over a hundred villages had been massacred. He also said that the killings had been concerted by agents of the Ottoman government.
This became the crux. On 25 May 1915, Mehmed Talât, the minister of the interior, announced that Armenians living near the war zones would be deported to Syria and Mosul. His justifications for the decree were rooted in the needs of civil order and military necessity, and it was sanctioned by the Ottoman council of ministers on 30 May. The latter included provisions designed to safeguard the lives and property of those deported. But three days earlier the council had told all senior army commanders that, if they encountered armed resistance from the local population or ‘opposition to orders ... designed for the defence of the state or the protection of public order’, they had ‘the authorisation and obligation to repress it immediately and to crush without mercy every attack and all resistance’.10
British landing craft, designed for amphibious operations against Germany in the Baltic, were not released for the Callipoli landings on 25 April 1915. but were made available in August Most men went ashore by lighter
It is impossible to say precisely how many Armenians died. Part of the problem is uncertainty as to how many were living in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 in the first place. Calculations range from 1.3 million to about 2.1 million. The difficulty of dispassionate analysis is compounded, rather than helped, by the readiness of Armenians and others to use the word ‘genocide’. In terms of scale of loss such a word may be appropriate: estimates approaching a million deaths are probably not wide of the mark. In terms of causation the issue is more complex. The initial violence was not centrally orchestrated, although it was indirectly sanctioned by the pan-Turkish flourishes of Enver and others. Once it had begun, it did, however, provoke the very insurrection that it had anticipated. The violence of war against the enemy without enabled, and was even seen to justify, extreme measures against the enemy within. By this stage - late May 1915 — the Turkish leadership was ready to give shape to the whole, to Turkify Anatolia and to finish with the Armenian problem. It defies probability to suppose that those on the spot did not take the instructions from the council of ministers as carte blanche for rape and murder. The hit squads of the Tekilât-i Mahsusa set the pace. This was most certainly not a judicial process, and it did not attempt to distinguish the innocent from the guilty or the combatant from the non-combatant. The American consul in Erzurum, Leslie Davis, reported from Kharput, the principal transit point, in July that ‘The Turks have already chosen the most pretty from among the children and young girls. They will serve as slaves, if they do not serve ends that are more vile’.11 He was struck by how few men he could see, and concluded that they had been killed on the road. Many thousands of Armenians also succumbed to famine and disease. Mortality among the 200,000 to 300,000 who fled to the comparative safety of Russia rose to perhaps 50 per cent, thanks to cholera, dysentery and typhus. The Ottoman Empire, a backward state, unable to supply and transport its own army in the field, was in no state to organise large-scale deportations. The Armenians were put into camps without proper accommodation and adequate food. Syria, whither they were bound, was normally agriculturally self-sufficient, but in 1915 the harvest was poor and insufficient to feed even the Ottoman troops in the area. The situation worsened in the ensuing years of the war, the product of the allied blockade, maladministration, hoarding and speculation. By the end of 1918 mortality in the coastal towns of Lebanon may have reached 500,000.
Moreover, in 1915 eastern Anatolia was not the only area of the Ottoman Empire subject to invasion. Indian Expeditionary Force B had moved beyond Basra in a push up the Tigris towards Baghdad, and in the west the capital itself was under threat as the Entente mounted an attack on the Dardanelles. Suspect peoples were moved from other potential combat zones: the Armenian population in Cilicia, which was canvassed as the target of an Entente amphibious operation, and the Greeks along the Bosphorus were also deported. The Turkish army was engaged in a desperate defensive battle on three fronts. Ostensibly it had the strategic advantage of interior lines. Its enemies were approaching from different points of the circumference, were a long way from their home bases, and were having to operate on sea lines of communication. The Turks, by contrast, could move troops and supplies along the chords within the circle. But such logic assumed that the Ottoman Empire had a satisfactory system of internal transport. It did not. The Berlin-to-Baghdad railway was not complete. It had still to cross the Taurus and Amanus mountains in southern Anatolia, and the track from Aleppo to Baghdad had barely been begun. The Mesopotamian front was even more isolated than the Caucasian, and insurrection anywhere in the interior could only result in the collapse of the entire system. Desperate situations begat desperate responses.
GALLIPOLI
As the battle of Sarikamish had reached its crisis, on 1 January 1915, the Russians appealed to the British to launch a diversionary operation against the Turks. Lord Kitchener, the British secretary of state for war, was not optimistic, not least because the small British army, depleted by the fierce fighting at Ypres on the western front in November, was fully committed in France. But he recognised that if such an operation were to be mounted its best choice of target would be the Dardanelles, ‘particularly if ... reports could be spread at the same time that Constantinople was threatened’.12 Kitchener had opened a door wide enough for his counterpart at the Admiralty to force entry.
Winston Churchill had been chafing at the bit since the war’s beginning. Wireless telegraphy had enabled him to intervene in operational matters, not always with the happiest of results, as the fates of Cradock and Troubridge testified. But it had not abated his thirst for battle. To his chagrin, more action had come the army’s way than the navy‘s, and he felt particularly keenly the humiliation the senior service had suffered at the hands of the Turks. Here was an opportunity to right the situation. In its pre-war planning, the navy had considered the possibility of amphibious assaults against Germany on the Baltic coast; to apply these principles to Turkey and the Dardanelles seemed logical not only to him but also to Jackie Fisher, restored in August 1914 as First Sea Lord.
Unable to penetrate inland at Gallipoli, British troops perched on the cliffs close to the sea The scene at Gully Ravine, on the Aegean side of the peninsula in September 1915, is of a military shanty-town
In operational terms the project was guided by a great deal of wishful thinking. When he was commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean in 1904, Fisher had concluded that storming the straits was ‘mightily hazardous’. In 1906 the army’s general staff had studied the problem and the then war minister, Richard Haldane, had reported that ‘there would be a grave risk of a reverse, which might have a serious effect on the Mohammedan world’.13 And in 1911 Churchill himself wrote that ‘it is no longer possible to force the Dardanelles, and nobody should expose a modern fleet to such peril’.14 Neither the navy nor the army held the key to success. The navy would depend on a sizeable landing — estimates ran between 75,000 and 100,000 men — to deal with the shore defences and so open up the narrower part of the channel, and the army would be reliant on the navy’s big guns to provide it with the fire support it would need to effect a lodgement in the first place.
The operational difficulties did not, however, invalidate the powerful attractions of the scheme in terms of grand strategy. It was an undertaking suited to
Britain’s military capabilities — a large navy and an army ill adapted to the mass warfare being played out in western Europe. Kitchener was right: for a diversion to have maximum effect, the Gallipoli peninsula was the place. It was home to the Ottoman 1st Army, essentially the empire’s strategic reserve, and a landing would prevent those troops’ redeployment elsewhere. Moreover, his suggestion that success might open the way to Constantinople with further wide-ranging consequences was not as far-fetched as some of the campaign’s critics have contended. Grey, the British foreign secretary, thought military action might provoke a coup d‘état in the Ottoman capital: given the instability of Turkish politics in the years preceding the war, as well as the divisions on the issue of entry to the war itself, this was hardly an unreasonable expectation. British intelligence offered a bribe of £4 million. Offering cash was not in itself misplaced: the Ottoman public debt was evidence of that. The real difficulty was that the Germans had just handed over £5 million.
Moreover, success at Gallipoli might have repercussions in two directions. Both the Central Powers and the Entente were actively competing for allies in the Balkans. Indeed, the possibility that Greece might side with the British in August 1914, and that therefore its army would be available for use against Turkey, was what had first triggered the Gallipoli idea in Churchill’s mind. Victory in the region would give substance to British approaches to Bulgaria and possibly Romania. For the first time in the war, therefore, the Western allies would give real succour to the hard-pressed Serbs. To the east, forcing the straits would open a warm-water route to Russia. Both the British and the French were convinced of the latent power of the ‘Russian steam-roller’. It seemed to them that Russia had the men to mount the more effective challenge to the Central Powers if only it had the arms with which to equip them. Britain could either provide munitions direct or use its credit in the international market to buy them overseas. Little wonder, then, that many Germans thought the Dardanelles campaign was the most important of the war in 1915. The Foreign Ministry was particularly concerned that its ambitions in the Balkans and Germany’s route to the wider world via the Ottoman Empire would be forfeit. But its worries were shared by some members of the army, even if their focus was more Eurocentric: ‘It seems to me’, Wilhelm Groener wrote in his diary on 9 March 1915, ‘not impossible that the Dardanelles question could give the whole war a different direction.’15 Groener was the general staff’s head of railways. He thought that, if the allies’ supply route to Russia was opened, Romania would join the Entente, and Russia would defeat Austria-Hungary.
