One truly odd feature of that map had undoubtedly long since occurred to him: despite its enormous size and tenuous political cohesion, from the standpoint of geography that empire was astoundingly well protected.
The political and spiritual core of the Ottoman world was of course the ancient city of Constantinople, along with the mountainous region of Anatolia, the ancestral heartland of the Turks, that lay to its east. This concentration inevitably conjured a tantalizing prospect to British war planners, the chance to “decapitate” their enemy: if that city and that region could be seized, there was little doubt that all else would quickly collapse.
Except that any possible path to doing so presented enormous obstacles. With both of Turkey’s European neighbors, Greece and Bulgaria, still neutral in the war, there was little maneuvering room to try an overland approach on Constantinople from the west. In theory, Britain’s Russian allies could attempt an eastern advance from their position at the far end of Anatolia, but already being bled white by the Germans on the Eastern Front, the Russians were likely to exhaust their available manpower and matériel before getting very far in the mountainous terrain. As for a southern approach, that meant either a ground force trudging up through the Anatolian heartland where local resistance would be fierce—and, again, the mountains—or a naval flotilla running the gauntlet of Turkish forts lining the three-mile-wide Dardanelles strait. There was simply no easy way.
But the alternative, to start at some point on the Ottoman Empire’s periphery, looked even worse. British Indian forces had seized the oilfields of southern Iraq in the first days of the war, but an overland march from there meant a seven-hundred-mile slog through river swamplands and desert before the Anatolian frontier was even reached. Likewise, an advance from Egypt meant first crossing the desolate Sinai Peninsula, then crashing up against Turkish forces massed in the narrow chokepoint of southern Palestine.
But amid this whole great expanse, there did exist one exquisitely vulnerable point in the Ottoman Empire’s wall of natural defenses. It was the Gulf of Alexandretta, at that spot in northwest Syria where the long north-south coastline of the eastern Mediterranean shore bumps up against the far more rugged coastline of Anatolia. Not only was Alexandretta possessed of the best deep natural harbor in the eastern Mediterranean, a critical asset for amphibious operations, but the relatively flat landscape just to its east afforded ample room for ground troops to maneuver for a push farther inland.
But these were military considerations, ones that a number of senior British officers in Egypt had cottoned to even before Lawrence’s arrival. What Lawrence uniquely saw, both from his familiarity with the region—Jerablus lay just one hundred miles east of Alexandretta—and his firsthand view of Ottoman society, was the political.
One of the great hidden dangers for any empire going to war is that within its borders are often large communities of people who want absolutely nothing to do with it. And the longer a war and its deprivations continue, the more resentful these communities become, and the more susceptible to the promises and propaganda of one’s enemies. Most of the dueling empires of Europe were grappling with this internal danger as their war stretched on, but whatever problems the Europeans faced in this regard—and in some cases they were considerable—paled to insignificance next to those facing the Young Turks in Constantinople. Quite simply, given the extremely polyglot nature of their realm, most any course of action they might take that would win the support of one segment of the population was all but guaranteed to alienate another. This quandary had been illustrated by the mixed results of the call to jihad in November. While that call had momentarily excited the Muslim youth, it had terrified the empire’s non-Muslim populations. At the same time, many conservative Muslim Arabs, already mistrustful of the Young Turks’ perceived favoritism toward ethnic Turks, viewed it as a cynical attempt by an increasingly secular regime to play the religion card.
But if the Ottoman Empire was a mosaic, it was also one of distinct patterns, where various “colors” predominated or diminished across its expanse. And if one studied this mosaic from a slight remove, there was one spot on this great expanse where many of these patterns came to a confluence, creating a kind of ethnic and religious ground zero: Alexandretta.
Already, for reasons of distance and the relatively scant resources being allotted to it, Lawrence was convinced that a conventional war against Turkey wouldn’t work. Instead, the British needed to pursue a so-called irregular strategy. That meant taking advantage of the internal fissures of their enemy’s society, forging alliances with its malcontents. The Alexandretta Basin was the demarcation line between the Turkish world of Anatolia to the north and the great Arab world to the south—and as Lawrence well knew from his years at Jerablus, the Arabs of northern Syria had grown to deeply resent their Turkish overseers. Alexandretta also stood at the edge of the heartland of the Armenians, a people who had suffered periodic massacres at the hands of their Turkish neighbors; surely no people had more reason to rebel against Constantinople than they. In Lawrence’s view, quite aside from its purely military advantages, a British landing at Alexandretta was almost certain to spark uprisings of both Syrians and Armenians against the Turks, uprisings that would naturally complement the British effort.
But Lawrence also had firsthand information that made the idea even more enticing. The principal highway linking Anatolia to the south passed through the Alexandretta Basin, and as Lawrence knew from his time in the region, that highway was in terrible condition. In addition, the Hejaz Railway that linked Constantinople to its Arab realms passed through the basin—or, to put it more accurately, partially linked, because what Lawrence also knew, courtesy of his journey through the region six months earlier at the behest of Stewart Newcombe, was that two crucial spans of that railway in the Taurus and Amanus Mountains north of Alexandretta were nowhere near completion. This meant that the Turks would have no way of responding quickly if an invasion force took control of the basin, and in the slowness of their response, all points to the south, cut off from resupply or reinforcement, might quickly fall. With just a comparative handful of soldiers in Alexandretta, then—Lawrence estimated a mere two or three thousand would be needed—the British had the potential of not only splitting the Ottoman Empire in two, but of taking one-third of its population and over half of its land area out of the war in one fell swoop.
Lawrence wasn’t alone in identifying Alexandretta’s extraordinary vulnerability; the Turks were keenly aware of it too—so keenly, in fact, that it had already caused them to submit to one of the more humiliating episodes of World War I.
On December 20, 1914, a lone British warship, HMS Doris, had appeared off Alexandretta and, in a brazen game of bluff, issued an ultimatum to the local Turkish commander: release all foreign prisoners in the town, as well as surrender all ammunition and railway rolling stock, or face bombardment. In desperation, for they had no guns to resist such an attack, the Turks had threatened to kill one British prisoner for every one of their citizens killed in the bombardment. That threat, in blatant violation of the Geneva and Hague war conventions, had sparked outrage within the diplomatic community and been quickly countermanded by the Young Turk leadership in Constantinople. Instead, a bizarre compromise was reached: in return for the British not shelling the town, the Turks agreed to destroy the two train engines that were sitting in Alexandretta station. Except, the embarrassed Turks were soon forced to admit, they had neither the explosives nor the expertise to uphold their end of the deal, so on the morning of December 22, a demolitions expert from the Doris was given safe passage to come ashore and blow the trains up. Understandably, the British government’s attention to the Doris affair largely centered on the death-threat aspect, but to Lawrence the incident laid bare just how panicked the Turks were of what could be done to them in Alexandretta.
Although a mere second lieutenant relegated to collating maps, by virtue of his attachment to the military intelligence unit Lawrence was in
the unique position of having his ideas disseminated to the highest levels of the British war-planning structure. It is surely no coincidence that while an Alexandretta landing had been discussed before, the scheme took on new urgency shortly after his arrival in Cairo. Judging by its telltale idiosyncratic approach to grammar, Lawrence was almost certainly the author of a crucial January 5, 1915, military intelligence memorandum on the subject: “We have been informed from two good sources that the Germans in command in Syria dread nothing so much as a landing by us in the north of Syria—they say themselves that this would be followed by a general defection of their Arab troops. There is no doubt that this fear is well founded, and that a general Arab revolt, directed by the Pan-Arab military league, would be the immediate result of our occupation of Alexandretta.”
The lobbying had an effect. On January 15, 1915, just one month after his arrival in Cairo, Lawrence sent an update to his old mentor in Oxford, David Hogarth. Because the letter had to clear military censors, he adopted a deliberately vague tone: “Our particular job goes well. We all pulled together hard for a month to twist ‘them’ from what we thought was a wrong line they were taking—and we seem to have succeeded completely, so that we today have got all we want for the moment, and therefore feel absolutely bored.”
The “them” he alluded to were senior British war planners in Cairo and London, while the “job” was an amphibious landing at Alexandretta. The only holdup now, it seemed to Lawrence, was for the long-awaited Turkish assault on the Suez Canal to be put safely in the past.
SO GREAT WAS his men’s morale that for a brief time even Djemal Pasha was stirred by the thought that it just might work out after all. “Everyone was absolutely convinced that certainly the Canal would be crossed,” he recalled, “that we should dig ourselves in securely on the further bank, and that the Egyptian patriots would then rise and attack the English in the rear.”
One source of this soaring optimism within the ranks of the Ottoman Fourth Army at the end of January 1915 was the extraordinary fortitude they had shown in crossing the Sinai, a shining example of what was possible when Turkish doggedness was joined to German organization. Making that 120-mile crossing had been months in the planning and involved almost superhuman logistical arrangements. Overseen by German officers, engineering units had fanned out across the desert beforehand, tapping wells for the oncoming troops, building rainwater reservoirs, and laying in depots of ammunition. Great teams of oxen had hauled the disassembled pontoon bridges needed to ford the Suez Canal, as well as the army’s heavy artillery, while some twelve thousand camels had been gathered up from as far away as central Arabia to ferry supplies. In early January, the army of thirteen thousand men set out along three different paths through the desert, and despite the deprivations of that march—each man’s daily food ration consisted of just a half pound of biscuits and a handful of olives—by the end of the month the attack force was encamped just a few miles east of the canal, ready to strike. Certainly the British in Egypt knew an attack was imminent—their spotter planes had photographed and occasionally shot at some of the Turkish formations—but they seemed to have no idea how large the force might be or where along the hundred-mile length of the canal it would come. It was this that had put Djemal’s troops in such good spirits.
“I used to talk to the troops every night about the victory in store,” he wrote, “and what a glorious victory it would be. I wanted to keep the sacred flame alive in the whole force.… If, by some unanticipated stroke of good fortune, this enterprise … had brought us success, we should naturally have regarded it as a good omen for the final liberation of Islam and the Ottoman Empire.”
One man who little shared in these high hopes was Major Curt Prüfer. Along with a small contingent of other German junior officers, he had endured the hard rigors of that desert crossing, and attributed all its success to the meticulous planning of the chief German military advisor to Djemal, a lieutenant colonel with the colorful name of Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein. Still, planning had its limits, and even if Prüfer wasn’t a professional soldier—just like T. E. Lawrence, he had received his officer’s commission with no actual military training—he appreciated that the changed face of modern war almost surely meant problems for the coming offensive. In particular, in the age of aerial reconnaissance, then just in its infancy, the British undoubtedly had a far better idea of their enemy’s strength and intentions than the Turks imagined.
This was confirmed to Prüfer by his own reconnaissance missions to the canal. The plan of attack called for the Turkish army’s flanks to make diversionary feints at the north and south ends of the waterway, while the main force of some sixty-five hundred men stormed across near its midpoint, just above the Great Bitter Lake. When Prüfer joined a forward scouting party that crept close to the canal on the morning of January 25, he observed just two British dredgers and a handful of small lighter boats in the lake. Three days later, however, the British presence had grown to several transport ships and two cruisers, a number that expanded to some twenty ships by January 30. In the meantime, Prüfer had experienced a close call when a British warplane dropped two bombs on the main headquarters encampment.
“I confess that the hammering of the bombs, the powerful explosions and the black billowing smoke, frightened me,” he noted in his diary, “although I did my best to hide it. In the camp, everyone ran pell-mell.”
To Prüfer, it all pointed to a coming disaster. “The enemy cruisers in the lake control the situation,” he wrote upon returning from the January 30 scouting mission. “We will be destroyed before we have actually come into the vicinity of the channel.” That night, he ate his “hangman’s meal,” asparagus and French toast.
The assault finally came in the early-morning hours of February 3, 1915. Taking advantage of a brief sandstorm that screened their actions from view, Turkish engineers hastily assembled their ten pontoon bridges at the water’s edge as the foot soldiers massed behind, ready to charge across. At a crucial moment, however, a British searchlight picked up the activity; in a barrage of rifle and artillery fire, seven of the pontoon bridges were quickly destroyed. That may have been a blessing in disguise for the Fourth Army, for it limited the slaughter. As it was, the approximately six hundred Turkish soldiers who had managed to reach the far shore before their escape routes were cut off were all either soon killed or compelled to surrender.
Prüfer had been given the quixotic task of leading forward a long wagon train hauling sandbags; the plan called for the sandbags to be used both to block the canal and to create a bridge to the far shore. Instead, he spent most of the day scrambling from one point of chaos on the front lines to the next as British naval shells exploded all around.
By nightfall, Djemal and his senior German advisors concluded that the situation was hopeless, and a general retreat back across the Sinai desert began. To most everyone’s surprise, the British made no attempt to pursue the fleeing army, enabling its withdrawal to be as orderly and disciplined as had been its advance.
Despite his own bleak assessment on the eve of battle, the setback on the canal seemed to cast Curt Prüfer into despondency. Nursing a slight arm wound—he’d apparently been hit by shrapnel during the assault—he holed up in Hafir el Andscha, an oasis town at the eastern edge of the Sinai, to file dispatches to Max von Oppenheim and Hans von Wangenheim, the German ambassador to Turkey. He was blunt, even derisive, over the campaign’s failure to trigger an Egyptian uprising.
“Despite all our agitation,” he wrote Oppenheim, “despite the thousands of [jihadist] pamphlets, we did not have any deserters.… The Egyptians are even cowardly in desperation, and lack any genuine love of fatherland.”
But his disappointment clearly had deeper roots. Ever since teaming up with Max von Oppenheim, the former Oriental scholar had fervently embraced the notion of a pan-Islamic jihad against Germany’s imperial enemies. Not just the battle but the entire Sinai campaign gave the lie to that. From the very outset,
tensions were evident between the Turkish and Arab components of the assault force, and these had only worsened with time. Many of the Arab units fled as soon as the shooting began, or never deployed in the first place, while some went over to the enemy. Prüfer heaped particular scorn on the Bedouin nomad warriors, many of whom he had personally recruited to act as scouts and who similarly melted away on the decisive day. Indeed, just about the only unifying element detectable among this fractious lot was antipathy for their German advisors; even many Turkish officers had adopted a policy of “passive resistance” to any direction offered by the Germans throughout the campaign.
“The holy war,” Prüfer informed his old mentor from Hafir el Andscha, “is a tragicomedy.”
Djemal Pasha had a rather more upbeat assessment. While the assault obviously hadn’t led to the Egyptian uprising he had hoped for, the action would cause the British to keep more troops in reserve in Egypt, making fewer available to fight elsewhere. Moreover, by his calling off the engagement when he did, his army was still largely intact. At the same time, as they made their respective ways back across the Sinai, Djemal and Prüfer undoubtedly shared a mounting sense of unease. Given the tit-for-tat nature of the war, a British retaliatory offensive would come soon. The only question was where, and from their own recent difficult journeys across Syria, both knew the likeliest spot: the Alexandretta Basin.
It wasn’t just the broken railways and “canal” roads of that chokepoint that were cause for worry. In the nationwide scramble for reliable frontline troops, the Turks had been forced to leave the safeguarding of the Alexandretta region to two second-rate divisions composed almost exclusively of Syrian Arabs. Resentful of their Turkish overseers at the best of times—and these weren’t the best of times in the Ottoman world—it was highly probable that these Arab units would quickly collapse at the first sign of an Allied landing, perhaps even switch sides.
Lawrence in Arabia Page 14