The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  One of those who turned decisively against the Turks was Winston Churchill, now First Lord of the Admiralty. The prime minister, Asquith, noted on 21 August that Churchill was ‘violently anti-Turk’. Yet underneath his rhetoric there lay a distinctive and bold policy. Victory over the Ottoman Empire would ensure the safety of British interests not simply in the Mediterranean, but within the Indian Ocean, where Persia was emerging as an important source of oil, shipped through the Suez Canal. Once Russia joined the war against Germany, the Dardanelles became a vital passage-way through which Russia could be supplied with arms and through which it could export Ukrainian grain, which was important for its balance of payments.7 In March 1915, fearful of a Russian-German truce, the British government accepted that Russia should be allowed to control Constantinople, the Dardanelles, southern Thrace and the Aegean islands closest to the Dardanelles.8

  Churchill’s impassioned advocacy of a campaign to force the Dardanelles resulted in the most important naval offensive to take place in the Mediterranean during the Great War. This war, unlike the Second World War, saw relatively limited action within the Mediterranean, and the Austrian fleet, as will be seen, made few ventures beyond the Adriatic, which it was determined to defend. Around the edges of the Mediterranean, though, some important land campaigns took place, notably in Palestine and north-eastern Italy. A Turkish military threat to the Suez Canal was enough to make the British impose their own nominee as khedive of Egypt and to denominate the country as a British protectorate – from now on, both here and in Cyprus, the fiction that these lands still lay under the sultan’s umbrella was forgotten.9 The surface of the Mediterranean remained rather unruffled, even though beneath it there now lurked increasing numbers of submarines, whose capacity for doing harm to imperial navies was most clearly demonstrated out in the Atlantic. Part of the explanation for this relative quiet was that British and German ships were required for what were seen as more important duties in northern seas.

  The highly controversial exception was the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. In January 1915 Fisher, the First Sea Lord, complained to his colleague Lord Jellicoe:

  The Cabinet have decided on taking the Dardanelles solely with the Navy, using 15 battleships and 32 other vessels, and keeping out there three battle cruisers and a flotilla of destroyers – all urgently required at the decisive theatre at home! There is only one way out, and that is to resign! But you say ‘no!’, which simply means I am a consenting party to what I absolutely disapprove. I don’t agree with one single step taken.10

  And, even when Fisher had given way, he sent a message to Churchill saying: ‘the more I consider the Dardanelles the less I like it!’11 He firmly believed that the naval conflict had to be resolved in the North Sea. The Gallipoli campaign is best remembered for the bitterly fought battles in which the Turks confronted British, Australian and New Zealand troops on the tongue of land commanding the European flank of the Dardanelles. The original plan had been for British ships, supported by the French, to force the passage. When it became obvious that this could not be done, the decision was made to ferry 50,000 troops to the bay of Mudros, a massive natural harbour on the south side of Lemnos, suitably close to the Gallipoli peninsula. Mudros lacked the harbour installations the Royal Navy needed, and there was neither sufficient water for the troops nor anywhere to accommodate them. Since they arrived in February, they had to endure unpleasant winter conditions.12 A British naval attack on the entrance to the Dardanelles on 18 March 1915 resulted in the loss of three British battleships, though the Turks firing down on the fleet used up all their ammunition, and mines in the straits proved a greater danger.13 The British had been hoping that the Russian Black Sea fleet would head for Constantinople with 47,000 troops, but the Russians did no more than bombard Turkish positions at the mouth of the Bosphorus from a safe distance. They could see that the time for the recovery of Constantinople by Orthodoxy had not come.14 Further disasters resulted in the sacking of Churchill from the Admiralty, but by then the troops were bogged down in impossible positions:

  Upon the margin of a rugged shore

  There is a spot now barren, desolate,

  A place of graves, sodden with human gore

  That Time will hallow, Memory consecrate.

  There lie the ashes of the mighty dead,

  The youth who lit with flame Obscurity,

  Fought true for Freedom, won through rain of lead

  Undying fame, their immortality.15

  Total losses were 265,000 troops from Britain, the British Empire and France, and perhaps 300,000 on the Turkish side; but, despite their dreadful losses, it was the Turks who held the ground, and after less than nine months the attacking forces retreated. Gallipoli had some positive effects from the British perspective: the Turks were forced to withdraw many of their best troops from Palestine, taking pressure off Egypt and the Suez Canal.16

  III

  During the Great War, large parts of the Mediterranean remained quiet. On the eve of the conflict, the British and French hoped to draw King Alfonso of Spain into an alliance, and the British Admiralty eyed Ceuta as a base suitable for submarines and torpedo boats, while the French hoped that the Balearic islands could be used as a way-station for troops transferring from French North Africa. Perhaps negotiations would have gone further had the Spanish king not recklessly raised the possibility of receiving the disordered republic of Portugal as compensation for any support he might offer France and Britain.17 But at least he stayed neutral, and Spanish waters remained safe for shipping. In the centre the main focus of naval activity was the Adriatic, where the Austrian fleet was stationed. Italian irredentists were casting covetous eyes on the coasts of Istria and Dalmatia, and the Austrians saw Kotor as the vital naval station on which their ability to hold the eastern Adriatic shores depended. A mutiny at Kotor in February 1918 proved that more thought should have been given to the conditions under which sailors had to work while they were deployed there. Sailors complained that officers lived in some style, often accompanied by their wife or mistress, and one sailor claimed that he was expected to use up his soap ration washing the captain’s dog. Worse still, ratings had to make do with threadbare clothes and suffer an evil diet of rotting meat and underweight loaves, while officers were properly fed with good-quality meats, vegetables and fruit. Given the novelty of flying, it is no surprise that officers who wanted to impress young nurses would take them on plane trips, or that seaplanes occasionally carried Austrian officers to an elite brothel in Dubrovnik. Once the mutiny was suppressed, the authorities shot only the obvious ringleaders, realizing that the time had come for serious reorganization of the navy (under the newly promoted Admiral Horthy, who years later continued to wear his title with pride even as ‘regent’ of the landlocked state of Hungary).18

  At the start of the war conditions at Kotor were not as bad. The harbour lies deep within its fjord, beyond the narrows of the Bocche di Cattaro; behind lie the precipitous mountains of Montenegro. To ensure maximum safety, the Austrians would need to tame Montenegro, whose ruler, out of sympathy for his fellow-Serbs, had declared war against Austria-Hungary soon after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. In late summer 1914 the Austrian navy started to bombard the Montenegrin port of Bar, and the French responded with a sizeable fleet sent out from Malta: fourteen battleships and several smaller vessels. The French fleet cleared the Austrians away from Bar and bombarded the outer fortifications of the Bocche di Cattaro, without denting Kotor. But it was a parlous situation: until Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary in May 1915, the French had no closer base than British Malta, and French troops were fully committed fighting on the Marne, far to the north.19 Then the Austrians became bolder, brazenly attacking Italian coastal towns such as Senigallia, Rimini and Ancona, where they wreaked havoc by destroying the railway station and stores of coal and oil, and damaging several public buildings, including a hospital; there were sixty-eight deaths. Even so, the Austrians kept well clear of Taranto, which
was the main Italian naval base. They were not seeking a sea battle. The Italians responded by sending their navy from Apulia to southern Dalmatia; they broke the railway line from Dubrovnik to Kotor. This game of tit-for-tat continued with torpedo attacks by German U-boats on Italian shipping; since Italy was not yet at war with Germany, only with Austria, the U-boats shamelessly flew the Austrian flag. In November 1915 the surreptitious German presence had ugly consequences: a German U-boat sank the Italian liner Ancona, with heavy loss of life, off the coast of North Africa, while it was heading from Sicily to New York, and the American president protested volubly to Austria about an act the Austrians were, of course, only too keen to blame on the Germans.20 Finally, after renewed bombardment from the sea, Austrian troops ascended the heights of Montenegro and captured Cetinje, the capital, early in 1916.21

  This was, then, a struggle for mastery of just one corner of the Mediterranean. In spring 1917 action was concentrated on the narrow passage-way between Otranto and Albania, where the Austrians now held Durazzo. All the new technology that was to hand was put to the fullest possible use. Each side mobilized seaplanes that lobbed bombs at enemy ships without doing any noticeable damage, and the British established a new base for seaplanes at Brindisi. Nets were deployed against the Austrian and German submarines, but, even if they could stop a submarine, they could not stop a torpedo. Reinforcements arrived, in support of the British, Italians and French: fourteen Japanese destroyers and one cruiser played an especially significant role in defeating German submarines; six Australian cruisers also arrived, and, once Greece tardily entered the war, in July 1917, a respectable Greek fleet became available.22 The importance of the relatively limited conflict with the Austrians lies in the appearance of new methods of fighting for control of the sea: aeroplanes, which still had to prove their worth, and submarines, which rapidly did so. Some new dangers had become obvious: merchant shipping was at risk from enemy submarines, and by 1917 the British and French had introduced an effective system of convoys to accompany vessels eastwards from Gibraltar.23 In time of war, a more insidious enemy than the Barbary corsairs had arrived, after a century of relative peace: invisible, deadly and wantonly destructive in a way that the corsairs, who sought booty and captives, had never been.

  4

  A Tale of Four and a Half Cities,

  1900–1950

  I

  From a Mediterranean perspective, the First World War was only part of a sequence of crises that marked the death throes of the Ottoman Empire: the loss of Cyprus, Egypt, Libya, the Dodecanese, then the war itself with the loss of Palestine to British control, soon followed by a French mandate in Syria. All these changes had consequences, sometimes drastic, in the port cities where different ethnic and religious groups had coexisted over the centuries, notably Salonika, Smyrna, Alexandria and Jaffa. At the end of the war, the Ottoman heartlands were carved up between the victorious powers, and even Constantinople swarmed with British soldiers.1 The sultan was immobilized politically, providing plenty of opportunities for the Turkish radicals, in particular Mustafa Kemal, who had acquitted himself with great distinction fighting at Gallipoli. Allied mistrust of the Turks was compounded by public feeling: the mass deportation of the Armenians in spring and summer 1915 aroused horror among American diplomats based in Constantinople and Smyrna. Marched across the Anatolian highlands in searing heat, with harsh taskmasters forcing them on, men, women and children collapsed and died, or were killed for fun, while the Ottoman government made noises about the treasonable plots that were said to be festering among the Armenians. The intention was to ‘exterminate all males under fifty’.2 The worry among Greeks, Jews and foreign merchants was that the ‘purification’ of Anatolia would not be confined to persecution of the Armenians. In its last days, the Ottoman government had turned its back on the old ideal of coexistence. In Turkey too, as the radical Young Turks often revealed, powerful nationalist sentiment was overwhelming the tolerance of past times.

  Smyrna survived the war physically intact, with most of its population protected from persecution, partly because its vali, or governor, Rahmi Bey, was sceptical about the Turkish alliance with Germany and Austria, and understood that the prosperity of his city depended on its mixed population of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, European merchants and Turks.3 When he was ordered to deliver the Armenians to the Ottoman authorities, he temporized, though he had to despatch about a hundred ‘disreputables’ to an uncertain fate.4 The Greeks formed the majority in Smyrna; indeed, there were more Greeks there than in Athens, and they remained very attached to Orthodoxy, which played an important role in the Greek school system and in public festivals, while nationalist ideas from Greece had also begun to filter into the community. The Greeks were very active in the trade in dried fruits, and the arrival of the fig harvest from the interior was a great event on the quayside of Smyrna. The Ladino-speaking Jewish community was less prominent than in Salonika, but in Smyrna as in Salonika western fashions were gaining hold. The governor once visited the school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and commented that he wanted the Jews to wear fezzes, not the western-style hats they were now adopting: ‘You are not in France or Germany, you are in Turkey, you are subjects of His Majesty the sultan.’5

  Smyrna possessed an excellent harbour and had continued to flourish from the late eighteenth century onwards, when other Ottoman ports found business was contracting. France dominated Ottoman trade with Europe around 1800, and supplied the city not just with European cloths but with colonial products such as sugar, coffee, cochineal and indigo. The Turks of Smyrna actually bought fezzes made in France.6 Among the Europeans, there was a lively community of business families of British, French and Italian origin, who helped keep Smyrna’s business alive throughout the nineteenth century, when families such as the Whittalls, major fruit exporters, and the Girauds, whose carpet factories employed 150,000 people, dominated economic life. Among newer arrivals were the Americans, who used Smyrna as a staging-post for the traffic of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey.7 Spacious suburbs containing the grand houses of the Levantine families, such as the aptly named Paradise, were laid out a few miles from the city, connected by railway line or boat services to the heart of Smyrna.8 Even during the war, these ‘Levantines’, as they were known, managed to continue their life of ease, since Rahmi Bey saw no reason to treat the foreign merchants as enemy aliens – most had been born in Smyrna and had never visited the country whose passport they carried.

  Back in London, the victorious British government was blind to the interests of the Levantine merchants of Smyrna. There was bitter hostility to the Turks: Lord Curzon, the foreign secretary, described the Ottomans as one of Earth’s ‘most pestilent roots of evil’, and Lloyd George, the prime minister, had for several years been enthusing about the noble achievements of ancient Greek civilization, in contrast to the miserable failings of the Turks – in the wildest of misjudgements, he dismissed Kemal as ‘a carpet seller in a bazaar’. This led him to embrace Venizelos’ dream of a restored Greek dominion that would stretch across the Aegean to include the coast of Asia Minor. For Venizelos this was the very heartland of Greek civilization: ancient Ionia, whose Greek inhabitants, he insisted, ‘constitute the purest part of the Hellenic race’, optimistically numbered at 800,000 souls.9 Great Britain valued Greek military support during 1919 in the struggle against the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia. These Greek freedom-fighters surely needed to be rewarded. The British were happy to offer the Greeks Smyrna and its hinterland, though the Americans and the continental powers, gathered for their Peace Conference in Paris in 1919, were less sure, and the Whittalls of Smyrna submitted evidence that the inhabitants of the city did not want to be ruled by the Greek government, for all of them, Greek, Turk, Jew, Armenian, valued the harmony that existed within the city and wanted no more than local self-government. Lloyd George convinced most of his allies that Smyrna and its hinterland should be granted forthwith to Venizelos, who should be urged
to send Greek ships there and occupy the Ionian coast without delay. Among those who bitterly opposed these developments was the American High Commissioner in Constantinople, Admiral Bristol, a man whose prejudices hardly suited him for the tasks ahead: he asserted that ‘the Armenians are a race like the Jews; they have little or no national spirit and have poor moral character’, but he reserved his greatest anger for the British, for he did not believe that Lloyd George was motivated by high moral concerns – it was all about competition for oil.10

  In May 1919 13,000 Greek troops arrived. After a quiet start, incidents began to multiply: Turkish villages were ransacked and about 400 Turks and 100 Greeks were killed within Smyrna alone. The new Greek governor, Aristides Sterghiades, was a remote figure who preferred to stand above the social life of the Smyrna elite. He tried to be fair and would often favour Turks over Greeks in disputes; the price he paid was the contempt of the Greeks, whose triumphalism threatened all that was special about the city. On the other hand, his policies brought trade back to Smyrna. It was in the hinterland that problems became ever more serious; the Red Cross collected evidence of the ethnic cleansing of Turkish-inhabited areas by Greeks. One Greek officer was asked by the Red Cross why he let his men kill Turks, to which he replied, ‘because it gave me pleasure’. In fact, violence was the trademark of both sides. But Mustafa Kemal was gathering his forces, and, when, in 1921, the Greeks attempted to penetrate into the highlands to the east, in the hope of drawing a frontier between Greece and Turkey in the western plateau, early successes were met with a dramatic Turkish counter-attack – the Greeks had allowed themselves to be drawn far too deeply into Anatolia. The rout of the Greeks brought Turkish armies cascading westwards towards Smyrna, which they entered on 9 September 1922, but not before about 50,000 defeated Greek soldiers and 150,000 Greeks from the interior began to converge on the city.