by Hew Strachan
The British ambassador in Teheran, Sir Walter Townley, was infuriated by Russia’s forward policy. Britain’s high moral stance, that it had entered the war to defend the neutrality of small states, was being undermined by the behaviour of its ally. Even more importantly, by encouraging Armenians to set on Kurds, Russia was stoking hatreds between Christians and Muslims. Britain, as a ruler of both (as, for that matter, was Russia), was determined to deny, not to affirm, that the war was a holy war. The effect of Russian policy might be to drive Persia into the hands of the Central Powers, and so help construct an Islamic bloc from Constantinople to Kabul. Such an alliance would increase the pressure on India’s Muslims to challenge British rule. Certainly the Persian democrats, encouraged by the German chargé d’affaires, attributed to Entente intervention the problems of Persia and began in January 1915 to use their majority in the Majlis to topple the cabinet. Finally, Townley saw in Russia’s behaviour a direct bid to extend Russian control into southern Persia.
In London Grey, with his determination that diplomacy should now serve the needs of the war, was able to take a somewhat broader view. The survival of the Entente was not to be prejudiced by the particularisms of Persia. In April Townley was replaced by Charles Marling. Simultaneously, Sazonov relieved Russia’s minister in Teheran. The personal animosity between the two allied representatives was thus quashed. At the same time the Persian policy of the two powers was put on a new footing. In March 1915 Britain and France agreed that Russia should have control of Constantinople and the straits after the war.
MAP 30. PERSIA AND AFGHANISTAN
In exchange, Grey secured a tightening of British control in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, hoping in the short term to minimize Muslim tensions. The partition of Persia was thus complete: Russia was given a free hand in its northern zone, but all the rest, including the erstwhile neutral belt in the centre, was allocated to Britain. It would be wrong to say that Russian and British policy in Persia then proceeded in tandem, but direct competition and covert hostility were ended.162
However, Azerbaijan had not only revealed tensions between the Entente powers, it had also exposed differences between Germany and Turkey. The latter were to prove more intractable.
The Caliph’s summons to holy war, although welcomed by the Persian colony in Constantinople and by the Kurds on the Turko-Persian border, had little impact in Persia as a whole. The Sunni-Shi’ite division remained too fundamental to be glossed over by Turkey’s pan-Islamic appeals. The Committee of Union and Progress, therefore, employed the other weapon in its propaganda armoury, that of pan-Turanianism. But in so doing it shed the appeal of religious brotherhood in pursuit of a more naked annexationism. The nationalists, as the opponents of Britain and Russia, were the natural allies of the Central Powers in Persia. But Halil’s thrust into Azerbaijan suggested that Turkey’s aims were no more altruistic than Russia’s. Furthermore, the rout at Sarikamish hardly argued that Enver and his colleagues would be militarily effective. In looking to Germany as a disinterested party, the nationalists therefore specifically rejected Turkey. Thus, by January 1915 the two powers were on divergent courses. Germany was increasingly prepared to curry favour with Persian nationalism, but only in pursuit of its more distant objectives in Afghanistan. Turkey, on the other hand, was bent on the extension of its immediate frontiers and was therefore no friend to the nationalists.163
The split in policy was not immediately evident at the highest levels. Enver’s military pretensions in Central Asia had received an enormous setback in the Caucasus; Falkenhayn had no resources to pump into the area. As elsewhere, each could pursue his own strategy under the pretence that in conjunction the two were complementary. At a meeting in Constantinople in January the Austrian and German representatives en route for Teheran hammered out a proposal with the Persian ambassador in Constantinople to activate Persia with propaganda, money, and weapons: ‘Persia for the Persians’ was the cry. At the same time Enver proposed Turkish invasions across Persia’s western frontier in the north and south, and Falkenhayn agreed.164 The contradictions in all this manifested themselves at the local level.
Enver’s proposal in February was to renew the attack in Azerbaijan first. Colmar von der Goltz, who had just arrived in Constantinople, supported him: Azerbaijan was the key to Persia and commanded the route to Teheran. Halil’s force of 12,000 men concentrated on Bitlis, south of Lake Van, in April, and took Dilman, at the northern end of Lake Urmia, on the 29th. But a rising of Armenians at Van to their rear, and the overawing of the Kurds by the Russians to their front, compelled the Turks to fall back.165 Subsequent activity in the region in 1915 was sustained not by Turkish force of arms but by Omar Nadji and his contacts with Emir Aslan Khan Choiski. However, Aslan’s concerns were with the eastern Caucasus and a raid on Baku; the direction of these negotiations was therefore to the north, into Russia, not to the southwest, into Persia.166
Setback in the north meant that the weight of Turkish efforts for 1915 lay less in Azerbaijan and more in Luristan and Arabistan. In Baghdad, however, the 6th army was facing in two directions at once. The British force that had been landed in Mesopotamia on the war’s outbreak occupied Basra and Qurna by the year’s end. The primary threat was therefore to the south. But the principal opportunities lay to the east. In January 1915 two groups of Germans reached Baghdad. The first was Niedermayer’s, compelled by Russian presence to take a route through central or southern Persia to Afghanistan. The second was under the command of Fritz Klein, a former military attaché in Teheran, who had been given the task of seizing the oil refinery at Abadan and of rousing the Shi’ite tribes to holy war.
This German activity in what they saw to be their theatre of operations unnerved the Turks. They imputed to Niedermayer and Klein those same imperialist ambitions which they nurtured themselves. Enver saw Klein’s plan, which would allow the Central Powers to operate the oilwells for their own needs, as evidence not of wartime priorities but of a long-term German ambition to replace Britain and Russia as the arbiter of the Middle East. The fact that the Germans opposed his idea of destroying the pipeline and using a block-ship to close the Shatt-el-Arab confirmed his suspicions. He therefore worked to have both Klein’s and Niedermayer’s expeditions subordinated to Turkish command, justifying the arrangement by allocating a division to their support.167
Defeat in the Caucasus deprived Niedermayer and Klein of their division. Thus, the Turks once again confronted the possibility that the Germans alone would carry the cause of the Central Powers into Persia and Afghanistan. When Suleyman Askeri Bey, commanding the 6th army, announced that he needed the services of the Germans in his preparations for an offensive against the British in Mesopotamia, Niedermayer was irate. The Turkish abandonment of the Afghanistan expedition despite the slender resources it required; orders that his personnel should be redistributed among the Turkish supply services and that they should help with training; the fact that in January he and his colleagues were effectively confined to Baghdad—these led him to suspect that not military necessity but competition for political primacy in Persia was the issue. His views were confirmed when it transpired that Hassan Rauf Bey, the Turk originally named to command the joint undertaking to Afghanistan, was secretly pressing ahead with independent Turkish operations into Persia. Rauf believed that the appeal of pan-Islam would draw in the border tribes of Luristan and open the way to Kermanshah.168
Wangenheim told the Germans in Baghdad to co-operate with the Turks, and Klein was disposed to comply. But Niedermayer’s inclination to press on regardless of Turkish obstructionism was confirmed from two directions. Reconnaissances into Persian territory showed that the Turks were not trusted, but that the Germans would be welcomed. From Berlin came word that Nadolny was increasingly supportive of a line independent both of Turkey and of the German foreign ministry. Nadolny used his position in the political section of the general staff to bypass the ambassadors in Constantinople and Teheran, and to communicate
directly with the military attachés in both places. By the end of March he hoped ‘to light a torch from the Caucasus to Calcutta’.169
These arguments were not in themselves responsible for Klein’s failure to secure the Abadan oilfields before the British did. But the fact that the latter had accomplished that objective by early November meant that Klein’s task became one of destruction and demolition. On 5 February 1915 his group, operating in conjunction with two Turkish regiments, succeeding in damaging the Karun pipeline. On 22 March and several times in April Hans Lühr blew up the pipeline, claiming that 290,000 tonnes of oil had been destroyed. The effect of these attacks was to justify the British in more direct efforts to protect their interests in south Persia. In 1912 the daily output from Persia’s oilfields was 1,600 barrels; by 1918 it would be 18,000 barrels.170 Klein astutely accepted his subordination to Turkey’s military command in Iraq, and joined with the Turks in agitating for holy war in Arabistan. Simultaneously, Wassmuss, profiting from the temporary break-up of the Afghanistan expedition, and glad to escape its bickering, set off on an independent mission as German consul in Shiraz. Finally, Niedermayer, breaking his command into separate components to escape Turkish attention, sent advance parties forward to secure his communications through Kermanshah and Hamadan to Isfahan. Further delay, he was convinced, would only allow Russia and Britain to tighten their hold on Persia.
At the beginning of 1915, therefore, Germany’s desire to reach Afghanistan, and Turkish obstacles to that aim, forced the Germans to develop their own policies for Persia rather than simply follow those of Constantinople. But in the process they had engendered not one design, but several.
Niedermayer’s plan was to create a line of communications across central Persia to Afghanistan, so exploiting the corridor between the Russian and British zones. On 13 April he entered Kermanshah; on 6 May Seiler arrived in Isfahan; Erich Zugmayer (a professor of natural history) and Walter Griesinger left Isfahan in June and reached Kerman on 4 July. To the south Wassmuss, who nurtured hopes of eventually reaching India, suffered an initial setback. Wrongly told that the British would respect Persian neutrality, he and his caravan were ambushed by Indian troops and local tribesmen at Bandar Rig on 7 March. Wassmuss lost his maps and codebooks; the British gained valuable intelligence on the composition of Niedermayer’s group and its intentions. But Wassmuss himself escaped. The result was to reorientate and harden his resolve. By May he had rallied the Tangistani tribe, establishing a dominance in the interior of southern Persia which boxed the British in at Bushire. Germany’s consuls in the towns of central and southern Persia cast off their diplomatic credentials and openly agitated on behalf of the Central Powers. A wireless station, able to communicate with Nauen, was erected at Isfahan. Only in east Persia, in Baluchistan close to the Indian border, did the Germans encounter difficulties. The British consuls were driven out of Kermanshah, Shiraz, and Isfahan in August and September, and from Kerman in December.171
The German consuls’ military clout rested on two bodies of support. First, von Kardoff, the German chargé d’affaires in Teheran, had won over the gendarmerie. The thirty-four Swedish officers both admired the Prussian army and believed that Sweden would side with Germany; the 120 Persian officers belonged to the educated and liberal classes predisposed to nationalism; nobody had been paid since the summer. In December Sweden recalled its regular officers from Persia, but the result was to leave the command in the hands of an actively pro-German reserve major. In February 1915 a scheme was devised to enable twenty Swedish reserve officers secretly to join the German army; their tasks were to increase the size of the gendarmerie from 6,000 men to 12,000, and to win over and lead the Persian tribes whose independence they had so recently been endeavouring to curb.172
The tribes were, therefore, the second and potentially more numerous component of Germany’s secret army. But their local effectiveness as guerrillas could be deceptive. In defence of their own grazing areas, commanded by a leader such as Wassmuss whose personal influence could be felt in small bodies of men, their contribution was vital to the German consuls of the central and southern towns. But they demanded money for their services. One cynic reckoned it cost 10 gold marks a day to keep a tribesman in the field, despite the fact that he was totally untrained for modern war; Germany disbursed about 50 million marks in Persia and Afghanistan.173 The tribesmen were not nationalists, and they had little enthusiasm or capacity for operations outside their own territory. Nonetheless, Graf Kanitz, who arrived as military attaché in Teheran in February, argued that cash would unlock weapons already to be found in Persia, and that the revolutionary eddies would be felt as far north as the trans-Siberian railway. He believed that with £ Turkish 100,000 and 1,000 kilos of explosives he could raise 50,000 tribesmen, drive the Russians out of Azerbaijan, and then turn on India and Afghanistan. The foreign office disliked the scheme; after all, the route through the Balkans to Constantinople was still closed, and Germany could not get arms to Turkey, let alone Persia. But Falkenhayn nonetheless endorsed it on 25 July. And Nadolny undermined foreign office opposition by going direct to Austria-Hungary for its approval and half the costs.174
All that Niedermayer, Nadolny, and Kanitz proposed rested on bluff, and therefore speed. The Russians and the British were both potentially stronger in the region than Germany could ever be, and yet in the first half of 1915 there seemed to be an opportunity to make something out of nothing and pass the point where the Entente powers could recall the situation. The need to act quickly was also generated by the fear that hostility towards the Turks in west Persia could undermine the German advantage almost as fast as it was built up. Wangenheim put pressure on Enver to stop Rauf. He failed. In the summer of 1915 Rauf’s advance into western Persia triggered Shi’ite risings; forced to retreat, and no doubt ill-supplied, the Turks resorted to plunder, looting, and devastation. Rauf’s men even ruptured German communications by destroying the Teheran-Baghdad telegraph line at Karind.175
Niedermayer’s and Nadolny’s strategy was also revolutionary. In subverting the gendarmerie and in fomenting the tribes, it struck at the roots of the Shah’s authority. Niedermayer’s concern, after all, lay not with the stability of Persia but with the security of his route to Afghanistan; Nadolny and Kanitz focused more on Persia itself, but their methods for bringing it into the war were direct, not diplomatic.
The army’s methods were not the foreign office way. Germany’s representation in Teheran from August 1914 to April 1915 was weak and inexperienced. Prince Heinrich XXXI Reuss, the ambassador, was on leave; when war broke out, so unimportant did Persia seem that he was diverted to Belgium. Kardorff, only 33 and with little experience of the region, while responding to approaches from Persian nationalists, thought also that negotiations should be continued with the Shah. He did not despair of being able to construct a nationalist, pro-German government that would then encourage the Shah to seek an alliance with Germany. Such a policy was abetted by contacts between Wangenheim and the Persian ambassador in Constantinople. When Reuss returned to Teheran in April 1915 the possibility of a Perso-German alliance received fresh impetus. But while he patiently and soberly worked to create a pro-German Persian government, Germany’s consuls in the south were systematically destroying the authority of that government. The fact that the wireless station at Isfahan was in Niedermayer’s territory, not his, increased Reuss’s frustration. In July Niedermayer suggested that the Shah shift his capital to Isfahan. Reuss protested (rightly) that Niedermayer was becoming too involved in Persia and neglecting Afghanistan.176
Reuss’s policy began to bear fruit in August. Germany’s stunning victories against the Russian armies in Poland offset the impact of the British advance on Baghdad. In a cabinet crisis spanning all July and August, the contenders for power in Persia, although tacking between the two opposing alliances, recognized that a treaty with Germany could bolster their standing with the democrats in the Majlis. But in Berlin the foreign office warned th
at Persia, while weak and divided, would be a liability, not an asset. The continued closure of the Berlin-Constantinople railway meant that arms could not be delivered; the Germans tried to ship money through Bombay, but the negotiations and the passage were slow, and while the pay of the gendarmerie could not be guaranteed nor could its loyalty. On 18 August Mustaufi ul-Mamalik formed a government. His reliance on democrat support obliged him to ask Germany for an alliance, and specifically for a guarantee of Persia’s integrity and independence, as well as for gold and munitions. Germany could not provide such a guarantee unless Persia was in a state to defend itself. And yet, as Reuss appreciated, if Germany rebuffed the Persian approach the chances of an alliance would be gone for ever. Jagow therefore reversed the Persians’ priorities. Germany promised the money and the weapons as soon as the route through Turkey could be opened. If Germany won the war, it would guarantee Persian sovereignty.177
Germany’s negotiations with Teheran were unilateral. But Berlin could not give effect to any alliance without the co-operation of Turkey. By October 1915 the rivalry between the two powers seemed to make that impossible. The Persians did not trust the Turks, the Turks did not trust the Germans. The Persians wanted a senior German officer appointed to Persia, the Turks insisted on retaining the primary role in the Islamic world. Enver cut through the impasse. He proposed that Colmar von der Goltz be sent to Persia. On 5 October Falkenhayn agreed, and added the suggestion that von der Goltz also take over the Mesopotamian command so that Iraq and Persia could be treated as one theatre.
It was an inspired move. Von der Goltz, now aged 72, enjoyed a respect in the Ottoman army accorded to no other German office. He had been summoned to Constantinople in December 1914, in a bid by Wangenheim to oust Liman von Sanders and to heal the divisions generated by the latter’s egotistical behaviour. But Wangenheim had failed; his hopes had rested on Liman accepting the command of the 3rd army in the Caucasus, thus leaving a vacancy as head of the German military mission in Constantinople. Although Enver, on his return from the Caucasus in February 1915, had employed von der Goltz as an adviser at his headquarters, and had later given him the command of the 1st army, the latter was frustrated to find himself ‘the fifth wheel to the coach’.178
