by Hew Strachan
Broadly speaking, Germany was willing to provide its ally with coal and munitions. But with Serbia undefeated, the Berlin-Constantinople line passed through Romania and Bulgaria, both still neutral. The route was mostly single track, and at Giurgevo goods had to be unloaded, taken across the Danube by barge, and reloaded at Rustchuk. However, the technical difficulties were second to the political. Initially Romania co-operated with Germany, albeit with restrictions, allowing no more than eight freight cars a day. In September the Romanian attitude became stickier, and by 17 September only thirty-three of 116 cars sent by Krupp had passed through Romania. On 2 October the Romanian government finally stopped all shipments to Turkey.99 The Germans tried every possible way of reopening the route; they considered shipments down the Danube in the teeth of Serb artillery; plans to airlift goods by Zeppelin foundered on the weight of the load and on the lack of facilities for airships in Turkey; one scheme suggested the release of forty balloons in south Hungary when the wind was favourable.100 Ultimately there was no real solution other than the defeat of Serbia. Not until 17 January 1916 would the first train from Berlin pull into Constantinople. By and large Turkey conducted its first year of operations with its own resources.
The victories which the Ottoman army secured at Gallipoli and at Kut, therefore, provide further confirmation that material exhaustion after the Balkan wars was not such a major factor affecting Turkey’s fighting capacity. Even the railway problems of the southern parts of the empire should not be exaggerated—at least for 1915: the inhospitability of the terrain, the problems of water and of supply, kept armies in those regions relatively small irrespective of the limitations imposed by railway capacities. Much more important was the fact that the Turkish army, thanks principally to Sevket and Enver, had been reforged in 1913 and 1914 sufficiently to sustain major operations with success in 1915.
Virtually lost amidst a welter of damning evidence gathered by British military intelligence was the report filed by Cunliffe-Owen, the British military attaché, on 10 October 1914:
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.101
Moltke’s sudden enthusiasm for the Turkish army had some basis in military reality, rather than solely in political opportunism. Moreover, the early defeats in the Balkan wars, when Turkey had fought offensively, had obscured the later successes in defensive battles. These were the qualities—the hardiness, the doggedness of the Anatolian peasant—on which the Turkish leadership was able to build, and which made Turkey a worthy ally of the Central Powers.
9
GERMANY’S
GLOBAL STRATEGY
HOLY WAR
Both the British and the French official histories described the First World War as the Great War. In English that remained the common practice until 1939; in France even today ‘la grande guerre’ is used more frequently than ‘la première guerre mondiale’. But from its outset the German official history was dubbed, simply and massively, Der Weltkrieg, ‘the world war’. The distinction is of more than verbal significance.
France and, even more, Britain possessed colonial empires. During the course of the war they used their overseas resources to conquer the Central Powers. But their principal objective, to defeat Germany within Europe, shaped their conception of the war’s military dimensions. Although global in their dominions, they did not embark on world war. Britain’s efforts outside Europe in 1914 were designed to restrict the war, to eliminate Germany as a global force, to drive its cruisers from the seas, to close down its African and Pacific colonies.
It was not the Entente but the Central Powers that broadened the war in 1914; it was not Britain but Germany that pursued a peripheral strategy and aimed to strike its opponents at their weakest points in Africa and Asia. Der Weltkrieg was therefore not simply a title adopted in the 1920s; it was current in Germany throughout the war; it was even coined before it. In some cases the pre-war use of Welt lacked geographical precision; it was a synonym for ‘great’.1 Friedrich von Bernhardi’s Deutschland und der nächste Krieg (1912) used Weltkrieg in this way, and so too did the luminaries of the centre and left, Matthias Erzberger and August Bebel.2 Others employed it to warn of the danger that a local Balkan conflict could escalate, because of Russia’s intervention, into a general European war. Thus, Franz Joseph spoke to Conrad of Weltkrieg in January 1913.3 Four months later Bethmann Hollweg said: ‘If there is a war, it will be a world war, and we will have to fight on two fronts . . . It will be a battle for existence.’4 But in Germany (as opposed to Austria-Hungary) Weltkrieg also implied a war that went beyond the confines of Europe. Bethmann Hollweg’s predecessor as chancellor, Bülow, reckoned that Germany’s great-power status within the continent was conditional on its activity in the wider world.5 The Anglo-German antagonism, which Bülow’s Weltpolitik fomented, prompted naval planners to speak of world war by 1905.6 And it was the prospect of Britain’s intervention which, on the night of 30/1 July 1914, led Moltke to say to his adjutant, Hans von Haeften, ‘This war will grow into a world war’.7 Moreover, in this context a world war could carry precise strategic meaning. In 1913 Friedrich Grautoff published a fictional account of a war in Europe, in which only a Muslim rising and then revolution in Africa brought Britain and France to the peace table.8
The obvious land bridge to the implementation of a German global strategy was the Ottoman empire. Its potential was evident to German Turcophiles from the 1890s. A strong Turkish army could, in Colmar von der Goltz’s view, do two things. The first, primarily European in orientation, was to create a threat in the Caucasus sufficiently great to force the Russians to divert troops from East Prussia. The second was much more ambitious. The Turks, launching themselves from southern Syria, could seize the Suez Canal, become once again masters of Egypt, and so cut Britain’s communications with India. Indeed, given Germany’s naval inferiority, an alliance with Turkey seemed to be the only means by which to administer a direct blow to Britain’s vital interests.9
The ramifications of such a coup were tantalizingly broad. Paul Rohrbach, writing in 1902, anticipated the collapse of Britain’s position in Central and East Africa.10 More influential, at least with the Kaiser before the war and with the foreign office during it, were the opinions of Max von Oppenheim, an archaeologist, a Christian convert from Judaism, an expert on Arabic and Islamic affairs, and a former adviser to the German consul-general in Cairo. In 1908 he told Bülow that, in the event of a great European war, especially if Turkey participates in it against England, one may certainly expect an overall revolt of the Muslims in the British colonies... In such a war, those colonies would be, along with Turkey, the most dangerous enemy of an England strong on the seas. British soldiers would be unable to invade Inner Turkey, and, in addition, England would need a large part of its navy and almost its entire army in order to keep its colonies.11
Thus, German rejection of revolutionary warfare in sub-Saharan Africa was the exception, not the rule. Elsewhere the horror of revolution at home was turned inside out, to become the agent of warfare abroad. Relatively unfettered by colonial responsibilities of its own, and comparatively secure in its ethnic homogeneity, Germany agitated among the subject peoples of Britain, France, and Russia; not only Muslims (although they constituted the largest single group), but also Irish, Jews, Poles, Finns, Estonians, Letts, Balts, Ukrainians, and Georgians. It was a process that, in its final form, aligned Hohenzollern with Bolshevik. Furthermore, this use of revolution was not, at least in the first instance—and in some areas of the world not ever—directed at creating German global domination.12 The pillars of the world order were to be shaken with no idea beyond the collapse of the existing edi
fice. Political objectives were subordinated to military necessity; revolution was an unguided missile, its purpose to turn Germany’s encirclement and its naval and colonial inferiority to good account. On 30 July the Kaiser wrote of Britain:
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 Moslem world into wild rebellion against this hateful, mendacious, unprincipled nation of shopkeepers; if we are going to shed our blood, then England must at least lose India.13
This was not the Schlieffenesque stuff of pre-war military planning. Von der Goltz’s brushstrokes of 1899 had not been transmogrified into alliances, mobilization procedures, and deployment areas. On 2 August 1914 Moltke wrote to the foreign office demanding revolution in India and Egypt, and pressure on Persia to expel the Russians and make common cause with Turkey. Like the Kaiser, he was mouthing the pan-Islamic rhetoric of press and propaganda; like the Kaiser, he was short on specifics. On 5 August he added the Caucasus to his Islamic revolutions, and on the 20th Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Afghanistan.14 By now, too, he was ranging Zionism alongside Islam. On 7 August Dr Otto Sprenger told the political department of OHL that 4 million of the 7 million Jews in Russia were Zionist in sympathy, and that the Zionists were permeated with German influences; he imagined a Jewish network operating in the rear of the Russian army, collecting intelligence, preparing supplies for the advancing Germans, and ultimately carrying revolution, sabotage, and terror into Russian ranks. A precondition of such a movement was Turkey’s acceptance of Germany’s protection of the Jews in Palestine, a subject on which Talaat had given assurances to the German ambassador.15
In just over two weeks Moltke had drawn up a shopping list that embraced, as the Kaiser told Enver on 15 August, Asia, India, Egypt, and Africa. But, to continue the metaphor, he had no money with which to purchase his wants. Most obviously, the army’s prior commitment to Europe left it without men and munitions for other theatres. Overland communications between Germany and the Near East were rudimentary, if not non-existent. The insulation of the German army from the rest of the world had left it deficient in expertise in the areas in which it was now to seek influence. Broadly speaking, Moltke was looking to diplomacy to create a myriad revolutionary armies. And yet, while he required the foreign office to conjure up the troops, he was determined to retain control of the objectives which these troops were to pursue.16
Thus, a course was set which was bound to generate friction between OHL and the foreign office. Jagow’s deputy, Arthur Zimmermann, embraced with enthusiasm the idea of a revolutionary strategy, pivoting on Constantinople and pan-Islam. Zimmermann’s keenness was buttressed by Oppenheim, who joined the foreign office on 2 August. Other apparent experts, notably Ernst Jäckh, Professor of Turkish History at Berlin University but recruited by the foreign office in 1912, aided and abetted. From Constantinople, Wangenheim, while realistic in his assessment of Turkey’s military capacities, reported on Enver’s plans for revolutions throughout Central Asia and North Africa, so confirming Berlin in its grandiose schemes. By November 1914 Zimmermann was the outstanding spokesman in government of von der Goltz’s strategy. Turkey, he argued, was the key to the rest of the world. The Near East and the Balkans should therefore be the crux of Germany’s effort in the war. But, while Zimmermann wanted troops diverted to Serbia to open the direct route between Berlin and Constantinople, Falkenhayn was still locked in a desperate battle on the western and eastern fronts.17 OHL, having given birth to the global strategy, now insisted that its execution was the task of the foreign office. Foreign office exasperation was increased by the anomalous position of the political section of the general staff. Stationed in Berlin, remote from OHL, headed by a career diplomat, Rudolf Narodny, rather than a professional soldier, it manufactured an independence that in the field cut across the work of the foreign office, preferring military action to negotiation, directness to diplomacy.
German policy was therefore riven with internal divisions. It was also built on a fundamental contradiction. Moltke’s initiatives in August 1914 depended on the Turkish alliance for their legitimacy; and yet all too frequently they were launched as German projects without regard for Turkish national sensibilities. Turkey entered the war to secure its freedom from great-power involvement. It had no intention of becoming Germany’s proxy. In North Africa, Central Asia, and the Near East Turkey had its own foreign-policy objectives. For much of the war they coincided with those of Germany, but there was no necessary congruence. And, as the war went on, Turko-German relations deteriorated, the former gaining in self-assurance, and the latter all too frequently insensitive to emergent national feeling.
Moltke’s memorandum of 2 August suggested that the prime objective of German strategy through Turkey was to be Britain. In fact, however, Britain was not yet in the war. Some—possibly including Moltke, for all his realism about Britain’s position—perhaps hoped that a German-Turkish alliance would compel the latter’s neutrality at the eleventh hour. Germany accepted the alliance to meet immediate military needs, not distant and grandiose objectives. Its purpose was to engage the Turkish army not with the British empire, but with Russia.
On 1 August Enver and Liman von Sanders assured Wangenheim that within thirty days of mobilization 120,000 Turkish troops could be in Thrace for a joint advance with Bulgaria and Romania against Russia; a further 90,000 could follow a month later.18 The Turks’ initial task, therefore, was not global revolution but direct support for the Austrians in Galicia. Romania’s subsequent neutrality lessened the Turks’ enthusiasm while increasing the Austrians’ needs. At the end of August Conrad proposed that 50,000 men be landed at Odessa. Turkey was still not even in the war. Pomiankowski, the Austrian military attaché, to whom Conrad looked for support, poured large doses of realism onto the scheme. Turkey had not got 50,000 men assembled; even if it had, lack of transport vessels would mean that it would take eight to ten convoys and up to three months to ship the troops across the Black Sea. Pomiankowski convinced Liman, but Conrad continued the hunt for naval support. His frustration might have been better founded if the Austro-Hungarian fleet had responded to the German appeal and quitted the security of the Adriatic for the Black Sea. But Haus set impossible conditions. The supply needs of a full fleet, particularly of coal and oil, could not be met, and he demanded an intermediate base between Pola and Constantinople.19 So Conrad’s hopes were pinned on Souchon. But Souchon was as cautious as Pomiankowski. He was sufficiently Tirpitzian to believe that Goeben and Breslau achieved their objectives as a fleet in being; their use in war should be confined to attacks on isolated Russian vessels. By insisting that Russia’s Black Sea ports be blockaded before the expedition got under way (a task beyond the capacity of the Turkish navy), he scuppered the proposal.20
Conrad remained fixed on Turkey’s role in the war with Russia. In September and October he hatched a plan to send 50,000 Turkish troops and 500 Ukrainians under an Austrian officer who was the brother of the Metropolitan of Halyc to rouse the Kuban Cossacks in revolution against the Tsar. Desperation had forced him into the realms of cloud-cuckoo land. The Turks still had not got 50,000 men available, nor had they control of the Black Sea; Austrian command, even if its purpose was to undermine German influence in the Ottoman empire, was not congenial to Constantinople; Ukrainian volunteers came forward in insufficient numbers and on terms incompatible with Conrad’s aims; the confusion of Orthodox and Islamic objectives created tension; and the Kuban Cossacks remained loyal to Russia.
The effective focus of the Central Powers’ designs for Turkish attacks on Russia was now the Caucasus. At the beginning of August Moltke, reflecting Liman’s advice, had eliminated the Caucasus as a possible theatre for offensive operations. He was apprehensive about the Turks operating in isolation against the Russians. Neither the terrain nor the communications favoured anything more than an active defence to tie down such Russian
forces as held the Caucasian frontier.21 But in the course of August and September the other options fell away. At the same time both the Austrian and German ambassadors in Turkey reported risings against the Russians by the Muslim populations of the area, and the preparation by Enver of the 3rd Turkish army for an offensive. By November mobilization on this front at least was complete.22 For those in Berlin looking for signs of pan-Islamic fervour, and for its conjunction with Turkey’s belligerence, the Caucasus seemed to be about to deliver. Furthermore, while not exactly a southern front against the Russians in Galicia, operations in the Caucasus would certainly go some way to meet Conrad’s desiderata.
