Technological change is impelled by war. Winston Churchill helped to make WW1 the first war of the petroleum age. Although 1.5 million grass-eating bullocks, camels, donkeys, horses and mules laboured for the British from 1914 to 1918 (and some half a million animals perished), this was the first war in history when machines with internal combustion engines began to take the strain. The British Army started the war with fewer than 900 motor vehicles, but had over 120,000 by its end in November 1918. As First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911–15, Churchill revolutionised ‘bunkering’ by changing the fossilised-sunlight diet of the Royal Navy’s vessels from native coal to foreign oil. Virtually all the new Royal Navy warships built in 1912, 1913 and 1914 were oil-fuelled. To guarantee those Royal Navy oil supplies, the British government spent £5 million in 1912 to gain the controlling interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later British Petroleum) which first struck black gold in the Persian Gulf in 1908. Its refineries were at Abadan, close to Basra. This shrewd investment paid for the mighty British fleet in a decade, but it gave oil – and oil-rich regions – a strategic importance they had not previously enjoyed as Britain fought Ottoman Turkey first in Iraq, then Gallipoli, and then in the region’s holy lands.
The genesis of Britain’s WW1 foray into the Middle East lay in Ottoman Turkey’s decision to join forces with Imperial Germany and to attack Russia on 31 October 1914. Germany wanted to stir up the Islamic world and when, on 14 November, the Sheikh-ul-Islam in Constantinople declared a jihad on the Triple Entente of Britain, France, Russia and their allies, this conflict became truly a world war.
The hundred-mile-long Suez Canal had been built in 1869 with French and Egyptian money, but Britain had bought its way to majority share-holding in 1875. Constitutionally, Egypt was still under the notional suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire, and was ruled by a Khedive or governor alongside an Egyptian prime minister, but it had been effectively under British administrative control since July 1882, when the Royal Navy shelled Alexandria and the British army defeated the Egyptian nationalists at Tel-el-Kebir.
Ottoman Turkey’s new military alliance with Imperial Germany directly threatened the Canal. So, on 18 November 1914, Egypt was formally annexed as a British Protectorate, with a British high commissioner; the Ottoman Khedive was deposed, and a new Sultan imposed. Britain’s once ‘veiled protectorate’ of Egypt now stood revealed in uniform, its garrisons reinforced by Imperial and Dominion troops, both Indian and Anzac, en route for the trenches of Europe and Asia Minor.
The Ottoman Turkish army tried to approach through the Sinai desert and seize the Suez Canal early in February 1915, but the attack was thwarted on the east bank. Their objective was to sever the Imperial lifeline of the canal. The German Field Marshal von der Goltz’s mission in Baghdad was to clear the British and Russians out of modern-day Iraq and Iran, then invade India from Afghanistan. As Sir Walter Bullivant briefs Dick Hannay in Greenmantle:
‘There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses await the spark. And the wind is blowing towards the Indian border … We have laughed at the Holy War, the Jehad that old von der Goltz prophesied. But I believe that stupid old man with the big spectacles was right. There is a Jehad preparing.’
Once the great game began again, the British thought that two could play at making mischief among the other fellow’s natives. If the Turco-German alliance was going to foment Islamic discontent in the British Empire, then the British would cynically encourage Arab Nationalism inside the crumbling Ottoman Empire. An Arab, Sharif Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, ruler of the Hijaz, the Red Sea coast province of the Arabian Peninsula, and great-grandfather of the current King of Jordan, now played the first significant hand.
When Turkey summoned the faithful in 1914 for a pan-Islamic jihad against Britain, France and Russia, Sharif Hussein declined to take part. Since the Hijaz was the holy land for Muslims and the birthplace of their faith, this mattered. Hussein was called sharif because he was a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Hussein, installed as the legitimate Amir of Mecca in 1908, thus began to prove an independent-minded presence inside the Ottoman Empire. An ‘honourable, shrewd, obstinate and deeply pious’ man according to T. E. Lawrence, but a two-faced schemer according to his enemies, he was also a new kind of pan-Arabist. He was in touch with the Syrian secret societies of urban intellectuals and army officers, al-Ahd and al-Fatat, who were beginning to think politically of nationalism, as well as with the old-style Bedouin chieftains of Arabia whose first loyalties were to family, clan and tribe. However, Hussein was based in the Hijaz, a hot desert region that could not feed itself and which drew most of its income from Islamic pilgrims on the Haj. If the maritime blockades of the Great War stopped the pilgrims coming, the Hijaz would have to become even more dependent on Ottoman Turkey. Sharif Hussein needed a powerful external ally, able to supply guns and money and keep the trade and travel routes open. Germany and Britain both fitted this bill, but Hussein’s first approaches were to the British.
In April 1914, four months before the war started, Hussein’s second son Abdulla came to make a private request of the British ruler of Egypt, Earl Kitchener of Khartoum. He enquired whether, if the Hijaz Arabs ever rose up against their Turkish masters, the British might possibly assist with a few little machine guns. At this stage, however, Kitchener informed Abdulla that the British government’s only interest in Arabia was the protection of British Indian pilgrims going on the Haj to Mecca. But all that changed when WW1 broke out.
In late September 1914 Kitchener sent a secret messenger to ask whether ‘the Arabs of the Hejaz would be with us or against us’. On 31 October, Kitchener sent his salaams to Hussein’s son Abdulla and also requested help against the Germans and Turks, in a telegram: ‘If Arab nation assist England in this war England will guarantee that no intervention takes place in Arabia and will give Arabs every assistance against external foreign aggression.’ Negotiations on what Britain might concede politically to gain Arab support continued in 1915 in a somewhat ambiguous correspondence between Hussein and the British high commissioner who had replaced Kitchener in Egypt, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry McMahon.
Sharif Hussein said he wanted a single independent state carved out of the Ottoman Empire, an Arab bloc that would embrace today’s southern Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Oman. The letters between McMahon and Sharif Hussein never quite agree on the vital topic of what territory was to be excluded from the plan. Prominent in the area of disagreement is the region of southern Syria between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean that the British called ‘Palestine’. High Commissioner McMahon knew northern India better than the Middle East; he spoke no Arabic, just signing what his advisers put before him. His Oriental Secretary, Ronald Storrs, admitted his side of the correspondence was prepared by ‘a fair though not a profound Arabist’ and checked by him in haste or not at all, and that Hussein’s letters were in ‘obscure and tortuous prose … tainted with Turkish idioms and syntax’. It was not a recipe for clarity.
Not all the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula supported Hussein, the Hashimite Sharif of Mecca. At Riyadh to the east there was a rival dynasty, the House of Saud, whose descendants still rule Saudi Arabia. Their leader was the tall and fierce desert warrior, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, who had military strength but lacked the moral power that the control of Mecca and Medina gave to his rival Sharif Hussein.
Ibn Saud, opposed to both the Hashimite Sharif and the Ottomans, could see the usefulness of an alliance with the British. But which British? Those in London, Cairo or Delhi? British Imperialism was never as wholly coherent as its enemies imagined. Arabia came within British India’s sphere of influence, and in the end Sir Percy Cox of the Indian Political Service and his new agent Harry St John Philby (the Muslim convert father of the spy Kim Philby) spent the rest of 1915 concluding a deal with Ibn Saud. Regular supplies of guns and ammunition and a £5,000-a-month subsidy kept the Saudis onsid
e with the British, neither attacking their allies nor helping their enemies, for the rest of WW1.
Another consideration was Mesopotamia, which we now call Iraq, of strategic interest in 1914 again because of proximity to India. From Bombay it was a short sea voyage west to Basra, the entrance to the Fertile Crescent, which the Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, saw as a potential granary and a good place to resettle surplus Indians of the densely populated British Empire.
Hardinge was not in favour of supporting Arab revolts against their Turkish overlords because he did not want to upset Sunni Muslims in India, and he disliked native nationalists who had tried to kill him. He agreed to use Indian army troops to secure the Anglo-Persian oil installations at Abadan island on the Persian Gulf.
The ‘Mespot’ campaign of Indian Expeditionary Force ‘D’ turned into D for Disaster. Lloyd George later excoriated it as ‘a gruesome story of tragedy and suffering resulting from incompetence and slovenly carelessness on the part of the responsible military authorities’. Force ‘D’ in Iraq did manage to secure the oil regions of Basra and the Shatt-al-Arab in the south, but then became overconfident and thought they could also take Baghdad, on the cheap. They had no planes, few heavy guns, inadequate river transport; few tents, mosquito nets, ambulances, medical supplies, blankets, clothing. The initial advances were checked at Ctesiphon in November 1915 by tougher Anatolian Turkish troops, under German direction.
The surviving Indian Expeditionary Force retreated to Kut-al-Amara where they were besieged for five months from December 1915; they sickened and were never relieved, though attempts to reach them cost 23,000 casualties. Inadequate air drops only prolonged their agony of hunger, dysentery, scurvy, cholera, malaria, heat, filth and flies.
Arabic-speaking Captain T. E. Lawrence was sent to what he called ‘blunderland’ with Turkish-speaking Aubrey Herbert at the end of April 1916, on a mission to bribe the Turks up to £2,000,000 to let the British forces go. The attempt failed, and Lawrence was appalled at the wastage: ‘All the subject provinces of the Empire to me were not worth one dead English boy,’ he wrote later, when the British casualties mounted to over 92,000 in Mesopotamia. Of the 14,000 British and Indian soldiers who finally surrendered to the Turks at Kut, over a third died as prisoners of war in the Iraqi desert or as chain-gang labourers on the German railway that was destined to link Berlin to Basra, Prussia to the Persian Gulf.
T. E. Lawrence knew about the Middle East. In 1909, he wrote a BA thesis on the influence of the Crusades on castle-building in Europe which, together with four seasons’ work on Hittite archaeology at the British Museum’s excavations at Carchemish, had taken him through large tracts of Turkish-administered Lebanon and Syria. His scholarly interests were used as camouflage for military intelligence work in the winter of 1913–14 when his supposedly archaeological exploration of ‘the Wilderness of Zin’ saw the light of day as the Military Report on the Sinai Peninsula, a survey commissioned by Lord Kitchener from the Royal Engineers. After the outbreak of war, Lawrence served with the General Staff Geographical Section (MO4b) Asia Sub-Section in London, and at the end of 1914, aged 26, he became the youngest member of the Department of Intelligence run by Gilbert Clayton in Cairo, whose mission was to keep an eye on the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence’s varied intelligence duties in Egypt included making maps from aerial reconnaissance photographs and continually updating the Turkish Order of Battle with evidence collated from agents’ gossip, travellers’ notes, prisoners of war, captured documents and photographs, newspapers and radio intercepts, which he contributed to the Handbook on the Turkish Army, edited by Philip Graves.
Lawrence was particularly interested in those Turkish army units whose Arab officers might not be wholly loyal to the Ottoman Empire. While in Cairo, he claimed to have learned from a defector from the Turkish side at Gallipoli, Lieutenant Muhammad Sharif al Faruki, that there were other members of Syrian secret societies dedicated to Arab nationalism among the Turkish soldiers sent to reinforce the Caucasus front against Russia at the end of 1915. Robert Graves stated in Lawrence and the Arabs that the fall of Erzerum in eastern Turkey to Russian forces was somehow ‘arranged’ by Lawrence, and Lawrence himself claimed that he had ‘put the Grand Duke Nicholas [of Russia] in touch with certain disaffected Arab officers in Erzerum. Did it through the War Office and our Military Attaché in Russia.’ In his biography of Lawrence, B. H. Liddell Hart wrote:
In the spring of 1916 [Lawrence] had a long-range hand in a more important matter, the ‘capture’ of Erzerum by the Russian Caucasus Army after a curiously half-hearted defence – readers of John Buchan’s subsequent novel, Greenmantle, may find it worthwhile to remember that fiction often has a basis of fact.
It is hard to establish what the facts of the matter were. Both Graves and Lawrence were prone to exaggeration and romancing.
1916 was a year of rebellions; the Irish rose at Easter in Dublin and were hanged; the Arab Revolt flared up early in June. Sharif Hussein, fearing he was about to be deposed by the Turks, gave the signal for his four sons, Ali, Abdulla, Feisal and Zeid, and thousands of Hijaz tribesmen to attack the Turkish garrisons in the west of the Arabian peninsula. Mecca, Jeddah, Rabegh and Yenbo eventually fell to the Sharif’s forces, with help from British Royal Navy ships and seaplanes. But the rebels did not gain the support of all Arabs; most chose to stay loyal to the Ottoman Sultan. There were no desertions from the Turkish army, and the Sharif’s rival, Ibn Saud, did not join in. Nor were the rebels able to take the holy city of Medina, which was the terminus of the Hijaz railway.
This German-engineered, solidly made, 42-inch permanent track (completed in 1908) ran along the old Derb el-Haj, the pilgrims’ camel route over 800 miles south from Damascus to Medina via Deraa and Maan, traversing some 2,000 bridges and culverts that were cut and dressed from the local stone. When the railway was built, the pious might have believed that the shining rails were, as they were told, the Turkish Sultan’s generous gift to the Arabs of the Caliphate, providing them with easier transport for the Haj. But the more cynical noticed that the railway stations, set about eleven miles apart, were fort-like blockhouses with rifle-slot windows and water towers that doubled as look-out posts. In fact, the pilgrim-route railway line was the Ottoman military’s direct way of shifting troops and supplies down from Damascus, Aleppo and Istanbul. The Turks, wrote Lawrence,
moved an army corps to Medina by rail, and strengthened it beyond establishment with guns, cars, aeroplanes, machine guns, and quantities of horse, mule and camel transport.
In late September 1916, a Turkish expeditionary force set out from Medina to march the 250 miles down the main western road to recapture Mecca, and began pushing the Sharif’s rebel Arabs back. The British feared that if the Turks succeeded in recapturing Mecca, the German message – Gott strafe England – would be in all the Friday prayers in every mosque around the world. Old British Empire hands like General Sir Reginald Wingate were genuinely alarmed by the dangers of jihad. Wingate, soon to become High Commissioner in Egypt after seventeen years as Governor General and Sirdar of the Sudan, had run a formidable intelligence service there since 1887, and written a case study of Islamist fundamentalism, Mahdiism and the Egyptian Sudan.
There seemed to be some evidence for Wingate’s fears. Across the Arabian Gulf, the Turks had invaded Aden Protectorate, threatening the British naval station there. The Germans had sent Major Freiherr Othman von Stotzingen to Yemen, to set up a wireless station to communicate with German troops in German East Africa, and spread propaganda among Muslims in the Horn of Africa. Also, Lij Iyasu in Abyssinia wanted to turn that Christian state into a Muslim one. Lij Iyasu and the Muslim Somalis might well lend support to the Germans running rings round the British in Tanganyika. There were Muslims in the Sudan like the troublesome Sultan Ali Dinar of Darfur and among the rebellious Senussi in western Egypt, men whose disaffections could easily be stirred up. Further east, the Germans had crossed Persia to Kabul in order to persuade the neutral
Emir of Afghanistan to raise an army to invade India where there were millions of Muslims. Weren’t the ‘Hindustani fanatics’ of the North-West Frontier of India already known to be under the influence of Wahhabi mullahs from Arabia? The discovery by Indian Intelligence in 1915 of letters urging Jihad from a known troublemaker with contacts in Jeddah, Maulana Obaidullah Sindhi, written on yellow silk and sewn into the coat of a student called Abdul Haq, travelling from Kabul, led to the arrest of over 220 Islamists in northern India. It seemed to people like Wingate that Jihad could erupt, right across Africa and Asia, stirred by German troublemaking.
So, to prevent Deutschland über Allah, it was vital that Mecca should not be recaptured. The British wanted to reinvigorate the Arab Revolt against the Turks without committing Christian troops to the Muslim heartland. There were disagreements between the Foreign Office and the War Office: should soldiers be sent to save face, or was the whole thing just a minor sideshow? In the end the Arab Bureau in Cairo took charge of things. The Arab Bureau, a ‘hybrid intelligence office’, was set up by the director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, in 1916 with Gilbert Clayton as its chief, the Arab Bulletin as its restricted-circulation intelligence journal and T. E. Lawrence as one of its junior members. Located in the Savoy Hotel, Cairo, the Arab Bureau was a jangling place of ‘incessant bells and bustle and running to and fro’ that another member, Aubrey Herbert, likened to ‘an oriental railway station’. It was Hall who dispatched Gertrude Bell, the celebrated Arabist who had made six desert journeys and knew about the tribes of Syria, Mesopotamia, northern and central Arabia, to join the Arab Bureau. Hall also recruited to the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve the calm and impressive Oxford archaeologist David Hogarth, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and Fellow of Magdalen College (described by Lawrence as ‘Mentor to all of us’). Reginald Hall saw the strategic and naval importance of the Hijaz: if the Germans and Turks managed to set up a submarine base on the Red Sea coast, they could harry the British Empire’s vital marine traffic to and from the Suez Canal.
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