Now all Muslims could fight back. When the jihad was publicly proclaimed in Aleppo in June 1915, listeners heard that henceforward ‘The killing of infidels who rule over Islamic lands has become a sacred duty.’2 Any doubts which believers may have had about Turkey’s alliance with Germany were dispelled by the simultaneous announcement that the Kaiser had been converted. His new name, Gulliam Haji, revealed that he had already made his pilgrimage to Mecca, presumably incognito. This news and the proclamation of the jihad were widely welcomed by Muslims throughout the Ottoman empire. Many Turkish and Arab conscripts copied Enver Pasha and grew bristly kaiserlich moustaches in honour of Islam’s new champion.
Jihadic propaganda had two general aims. Inside the Ottoman empire, Turks and Arabs were exhorted to forget racial and political differences and draw together as brothers in the faith, a process which would make it easier to enforce the unpopular conscription laws. Muslims outside the empire faced a dilemma. Did they stay loyal to their infidel British, French and Russian rulers or did they rise up against them as the Caliph had demanded?
Properly directed by German and Turkish intelligence, the jihad had enormous potential as a source of mischief. The effects of what Wingate called ‘the Turco–German poison’ were soon apparent: in January 1915 there was an antv-British revolt by 3,000 Arab tribesmen in Muscat, and more ominously a serious mutiny by Muslim sepoys at Rangoon in November 1914 and another at Singapore the following February. In Cairo, Lawrence felt the ripples of these disturbances for, in March 1915, he wrote to Hogarth that British troops were being sent to Iraq to stiffen ‘shaky Indian units. During 1915 and 1916 there was a disturbing trickle of desertions to the Turks, self-inflicted wounds and malingering, all of which indicated that Indian Muslim troops were deeply unhappy about fighting their coreligionists. 3 Even more alarming for the British was the fact that these were spontaneous outbursts and not the result of direct enemy propaganda or subversion.
In fact the Turco-German campaign of subversion got under way slowly. From the start it was hampered by Turkish suspicions that the Germans were conducting undercover operations in furtherance of their own rather than the Alliance’s interests. This apprehension was symptomatic of the wider unease felt by many Turks about their country’s growing subjection to Germany, which was expressed by Constantinople wits as ‘Deutschland über Allah’.4 What General Liman von Sandars called ‘German order and control’ were resented by Turks at all levels. Proposals for the distribution of German bribes among Arabian sheiks and the establishment of a German propaganda newspaper at Medina were blocked in March 1916 by Enver Pasha, who suspected that their real purpose was to prepare the ground for post-war German influence in the region.5 These Turco-German tensions were, paradoxically, similar to the Franco-British bickering during 1916 and 1917, when the French believed that their ally was directing the Arab revolt solely in her own interests.
General direction of the Turco-German programme of subversion was in the hands of Max von Oppenheim, the Bavarian archaeologist whom Lawrence had encountered at Karkamis before the war. As an adversary, GHQ intelligence in Cairo did not rate him very highly. According to a report on his activities sent to the War Office early in 1916, von Oppenheim was out of touch with the Syrian population, preferring to keep the company of tradesmen and ‘Mahomedan paramours’. 6 Aware that Britain was bidding for Arab friendship, he had set up an anti-British news agency in Aleppo and was doling out bribes, but his converts were confined to the educated, urban Syrians. Lawrence’s beloved villagers appeared to have been untouched by German efforts to keep Muslim fervour at a high pitch. The Kurds were a different matter and intelligence reported that the Germans had enjoyed some success in whipping up their fanaticism. At the end of December 1916, Lawrence heard further details of von Oppenheim’s propaganda machine from the Amir Faisal, who had visited Damascus the previous March. What had struck him particularly had been a film which opened with a view of the Pyramids surmounted by a Union Jack. Below Australians knocked down Egyptians and raped their wives, while far away Turkish columns advanced towards the Suez Canal. In the final scene the Turks suddenly appear, trounce the Australians, tear down the flag and receive Maxwell’s surrender. The Australians’ reputation was a bonus for von Oppenheim’s propagandists who, during the spring of 1916, were broadcasting a tale in which Indian Muslim soldiers mutinied in thousands after a brutal Australian officer had shot his Indian servant.7
India, with its 57 million Muslims, was the area where Britain was most vulnerable to Pan-Islamic subversion, although Berlin’s Eastern Intelligence Section also encouraged Bengali and Sikh nationalist revolutionaries. It was von Oppenheim’s task to convince Indian Muslims that Germany was the friend of their faith and to raise an anti-British jihad on the North-West Frontier, where Islamic resistance to British rule was traditionally strong. Unrest on the North-West Frontier would distract the government in Delhi and beat the drum for Muslim uprisings across northern India. By the summer of 1915 preparations for this ambitious project were in hand. A team of twenty–five Austrian and German officers had assembled in Constantinople; some were detailed to make contact with the Amir of Afghanistan and bribe him to join the jihad, while others were ordered to assist colleagues who were spearheading a tribal revolt in Persia. There were also a handful of Afridi tribesmen, deserters from the Indian army, who were to return to the Tirah and sound the jihadic trumpet there.8
Intelligence reports of the mission created near panic in Delhi. Faced with the prospect of unrest among native troops and a recrudescence of warfare on the North–West Frontier, the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, had cabled Kitchener in March 1915 with the plea, ‘I want every white soldier I can get.’ A further spasm of viceregal nervousness made itself felt in the Cabinet, which in April 1916 agreed to earmark two divisions of British troops, then stationed in Egypt, for service on the North–West Frontier.9
Covert German operations were also panicking the generals in Iraq. By exploiting local resentment against Anglo-Russian domination, German agents had contrived a series of tribal uprisings in Persia. The long-term aim was to push the country into an alliance with Germany and provide a safe springboard for sedition in India. The spadework was largely in the hands of Wilhelm Wassmüss, a former consul, who by May 1915 had gathered an army of over 3,000 tribesmen and deserters from the gendarmerie with which he harassed centres of British and Russian control. Wassmüss was an inspiring and resourceful commander whose spectacular coups earned him the title the ‘German Lawrence’. Yet his successes were deceptive. He made a nuisance of himself and led British and Russian forces a dance, but his ability to do lasting harm in Persia was limited because he was starved of arms and cash.
All von Oppenheim’s schemes suffered from one fundamental flaw, which had been recognised by Liman von Sandars when the Kabul mission reached Constantinople. It seemed, to the professional soldier, wasteful to send men, arms and money over vast distances into regions where they were cut off from any hope of further assistance. Enver Pasha was also unhappy about the plans because he thought the German and Austrian officers were all skipping front-line service and drank too much. Von Sandars knew that British and Russian control over Central Asia and Persia was too tight to allow the unhindered flow of the supplies of arms and cash in the amounts which would be needed to keep tribal revolts alive. Moreover, like his British counterparts later, he was sceptical about the value of tribal armies without a stiffening of trained, regular troops.
In essence, von Sandars was correct. Wassmüss’s gadfly campaign was a war waged in isolation by unsupported forces which, in the end, could be contained by local British and Russian units. The Amir of Afghanistan warily set a high price on his co-operation. Jihads preached by local holy men broke out on the North-West Frontier in 1917 and spluttered on for four years but, without direct assistance from Turkey, their suppression presented no serious problems for British forces.
At GHQ intelligence, Lawrence and his colleagues trac
ed the fortunes of the Kabul mission. On 12 February 1916 they received details of the interrogation of one of its members, Lieutenant Winckelmann, who had been taken prisoner in Persia. Once employed by von Oppenheim as a propagandist in Aleppo, Winckelmann told British intelligence how he had taken eight boxes of gold to Kirmanshah, the centre of Turco-German subversion in Persia, and there had witnessed a quarrel between Raouf Bey and German officers over what were their exact orders. In acrimony the party fragmented into five units which dispersed into Persia and Azerbaijan.10 It all added up to a missed opportunity thanks to muddled staffwork, and it could have been no comfort that von Sandars had predicted this kind of outcome when the officers had been in Constantinople.
In spite of faulty planning and confused objectives, the Turks and Germans had made the running in the secret war of subversion. They had shown their enemies what could be achieved by determined and imaginative officers able to exploit latent Muslim passions. In terms of military objectives achieved, the net gains had been negligible: nowhere did the Allies lose territory or suffer serious setbacks. Still, von Oppenheim’s operations had panicked the government of India and, most importantly, had forced Britain to divert forces urgently needed on the battlefronts in France to colonial garrison duties.
GHQ intelligence Cairo learned further lessons in the value of sedition as a weapon of war during the winter of 1915-16. After nearly twelve months of coaxing, Turco–German agents persuaded the Sanussi of Libya to invade Egypt in November 1915. A month later, Lawrence wrote off their incursion as ‘a damp squib’, although it took until the following spring to bring the Sanussi to heel and British forces had to guard Egypt’s western border until the end of the war. Some Egyptians had deserted to the invaders, and in May Clayton had to deal with a new anti–British conspiracy, this time involving Egyptian army officers. There was trouble further south in the Sudan in June 1916 when, after nearly a year of procrastination, Ali Dinar, the Sultan of Darfur, rebelled in the name of the jihad. Local forces supported by aircraft ruthlessly crushed the uprising. Wingate was full of trepidation; it was less than twenty years since an Anglo-Egyptian army had overthrown the Islamic Mahdist state, there had been a mutiny by Sudanese troops at Khartoum in 1900, and eight years later a small-scale Mahdist rebellion. The Sudan was an unstable region where British control was neither fully effective nor totally accepted. Not surprisingly, Wingate badgered Cairo for European troops to be held in readiness in case of a local emergency. 11
Wingate was soon disturbed by fresh alarms from an unexpected quarter. In Ethiopia, the twenty-year-old Emperor, Lij Eyasu, had converted to Islam, proclaimed himself a descendant of Muhammad and not of Solomon and Sheba, and made public overtures to the Turkish Sultan. German consular officials were quick to offer him their country’s friendship and during February and March 1916 Italian sources informed GHQ intelligence Cairo of a mission to Ethiopia by six German agents, whom they claimed, somewhat improbably, had been landed from a U-boat.12 Other visitors to Lij Eyasu included emissaries from Abdullah ibn Hassan, the ‘Mad Mullah’ of Somaliland, who was given arms with which to reopen his twenty-year-old war against the British. In Cairo and Khartoum there were fears that the Emperor, egged on by Turkish and German agents, would make himself a figurehead for an Islamic revolt in the Sudan.
Unsubstantiated rumours which later circulated in Ethiopia linked Lawrence’s name with propaganda devised in Khartoum to blacken Lij Eyasu in the eyes of his Christian subjects. These included the printing and circulation of lewd postcards which showed the Emperor in sexual poses with his several wives.13 These and other forms of propaganda helped prepare the ground for the rebellion by Zauditu and her son, Ras Tafari (Hailie Selassie), which toppled Lij Eyasu in December 1916. French machine-guns, smuggled through Djibouti, helped Ras Tafari, who had unsuccessfully approached Wingate for aircraft.14
Lij Eyasu’s apostasy was an unlooked-for piece of good luck for von Oppenheim which he was quick to exploit. In December 1915, the German High Command was keen to seize the initiative in the Middle East before the Allies had time to recover from the Gallipoli debacle. On 21 December 1915, Enver announced a new offensive against the Suez Canal, but GHQ intelligence believed that it would take Turkey at least a year to muster the necessary men and logistical support. The invasion of Egypt was scheduled to coincide with a series of diversions in the Red Sea area which, if successful, would drain British manpower.
A mission commanded by Major von Stotzingen arrived at Damascus on 26 March 1916 under orders from Berlin to extend jihadic propaganda into Arabia and to make contact with anti-British elements in Ethiopia. This was the task of Karl Neufeld, ‘a very lowdown individual’ according to GHQ intelligence in Cairo, whose older members were probably well aware of his bizarre career.15 A sometime trader, he had fallen prisoner to the Mahdi in 1885, turned Muslim, and before his release in 1898 had helped the Dervishes manufacture bullets. On his way to Arabia in 1916 he married a third wife. Wireless technicians attached to the German party were detailed to build a transmitting station at Sana in the Yemen to make contact with German forces in East Africa. Von Oppenheim hoped that the mission’s eventual base at Medina would become a powerhouse for Pan–Islamic subversion in the Sudan and Somaliland. At the same time it was hoped that the German presence would put some ginger into the Turkish offensive against Aden.
As in Persia and Afghanistan, von Oppenheim was hindered by fragile lines of communication since the Royal Navy’s control of the Red Sea made gun–running to the Sudan and Ethiopia risky. Still, there were German plans to distract the navy by a campaign of mine-laying from bases at Aqaba and Jiddah. News of this and of German efforts to build small mine-layers began to filter through to Naval and Military Intelligence during the spring of 1916 and created new alarms.16
So far the British response to the Turco–German initiative had been fumbling. Each disturbance and the expectation that others were imminent made local administrators clamour for more troops, usually British battalions whose loyalty was beyond question. Half-buried in the minds of many men on the spot was the dread of a general Muslim uprising which, gathering irresistible momentum, would become uncontrollable. Their fears were voiced by Bullivant, the intelligence chief in John Buchan’s 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.’
The War Office’s response to this sort of scare-mongering was cool. Giving way to demands for extra troops depleted vital reserves which were needed to hold the line in France. This was the view held by General Sir William Robertson, who had become Chief of the Imperial General Staff on 23 December 1915. His influence was soon felt in every theatre of war, while that of Kitchener, discredited by the Gallipoli shambles, waned. Robertson’s rise marked the ascendancy in London of the ‘Westerners’, those politicians and commanders who were convinced that the war would be won only when the German army in France and Belgium had been decisively beaten. Their logic seemed unanswerable; Germany was the keystone of the Central Powers, all of which depended upon her manpower, money (by November 1918 Germany had loaned Turkey 50 billion marks) and industry. As the War Office criticism of the Alexandretta scheme insisted, even the heaviest blows against Turkey did nothing to weaken the German army. Rather, the Westerners’ philosophy ran, such offensives indirectly assisted Germany because they deflected manpower and resources away from France and Belgium: Lawrence was never converted to this view and, even towards the end of the war, remained certain that Turkey’s defeat would fatally undermine Germany.
One of Robertson’s first duties at the War Office was to fend off demands for extra men in the Middle East. He attached little importance to arguments based upon prestige. ‘Prestige,’ he wrote later, ‘no doubt carries much weight in eastern countries, but in war it is apt to become a bogy.’ He deplored the hitherto supine response of the authorities in the Middle East, who, it seemed to him, had taken ‘no effective step
s’ to scotch Turco-German subversion. The remedy was clear to him and his staff. ‘What was needed was to despatch to centres of intrigue and disaffection a few Englishmen of the right type to give our version of the state of affairs, and furnish them with money to pay handsomely for intelligence and other services.’17
There was nothing novel in this. ‘A few officers who could speak Arabic’ were all that Lord Cromer, a sometime consul–general in Egypt, thought necessary to raise Arabia in arms against the Turks. In October 1915, Kitchener had asked Cairo to consider recruiting and training Armenian exiles as guerrillas for use in Syria and his idea was later revived by Admiral Wemyss.18 Intelligence in Cairo had come up with ideas along these lines, and in March 1915 a plan was in hand to send Newcombe and Lawrence to the Yemen as military advisers to the insurgents there. This fell through since the India Office claimed that the area was under its jurisdiction, but, soon after, Wyndham Deedes had formed small guerrilla units for some behind-the-lines forays during the Gallipoli campaign.19
Cairo could not be blamed for its concentration on defensive, preventative measures against Turco–German subversion. Professional soldiers were never altogether happy with such projects and were always quick to point out the drawbacks of guerrilla warfare by loosely disciplined irregular units. Moreover, as long as there was a chance of success for the Gallipoli campaign, there was no immediate need to give serious consideration to active subversion. Beneath the surface, many officials found the concept of this kind of warfare distasteful. Until 1914, the imperial powers had shared a common front when it came to facing resistance to their rule; for instance, in East Africa, Britain, Germany and Italy had helped each other out in the suppression of native revolts. There were practical as well as moral reasons why Britain, an imperial power, should be cautious about the promotion of unrest within the Turkish empire. As officials in India repeatedly pointed out, even limited encouragement offered to Arab separatists could have unlooked–for repercussions after the war. Indians might justifiably contrast the treatment accorded to the Arabs with their own government’s coolness towards demands for self-determination.
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