In fact, Djemal Pasha’s anxiety over Alexandretta had already led him to commit a singularly reckless act. Desperate to mask the city’s abject vulnerability, it was he who had issued the threat to execute British prisoners back in December when HMS Doris stood offshore. Now, in the wake of Suez, the Syrian governor was sure the British would turn to Turkey’s Achilles’ heel once more, and this time there would be no negotiating, no way to stop them.
THROUGHOUT HISTORY, THERE have been occasions when a vastly superior military force has managed, against all odds, to snatch defeat from all but certain victory. The phenomenon usually has root in one of three causes: arrogance, such a blinding belief in one’s own military or cultural superiority as to fail to take the enemy seriously; political interference; or tunnel vision, that curious tendency among war planners and generals to believe a flawed approach might be rectified simply by pouring more men and firepower into the fray. In early 1915, the British military would navigate its way to a fiasco of such colossal proportions as to require all three of these factors to work in concert.
With the brushing back of the Turkish assault on the Suez on February 3, Lawrence and other members of the intelligence unit in Cairo assumed that plans for a landing at Alexandretta would immediately get under way. Instead, the war strategists in London had already begun focusing on a different spot on the Ottoman coastline: the Dardanelles strait below Constantinople.
One of the earth’s more peculiar natural formations, the Dardanelles is a narrow, fjordlike waterway flanked by the Turkish Asian mainland on its eastern bank and the mountainous Gallipoli peninsula on its western. After a twisting thirty-mile-long course between the mountains, the gorge opens up at its northern confluence to the inland Sea of Marmara, at the far end of which lies Constantinople, or modern-day Istanbul. For obvious reasons, the southern entrance to the Dardanelles, letting onto the Mediterranean, has always been regarded as the maritime gateway to that city, and since ancient times every civilization that has controlled the region has maintained fortifications there. The Ottoman forts that dotted the high slopes above the strait in early 1915 had been erected on the ruins of Byzantine forts, which in turn had been built on the ruins of Greek and Roman ones.
“Forcing the Narrows” had been an alluring notion for British war planners ever since Turkey came into the war, and for none more so than the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill. As he repeatedly pointed out to the British cabinet—often to the point of tiresomeness, as was his style—with a defenseless Constantinople lying just to the north of that strait, here lay the chance to swiftly decapitate their Turkish adversaries and take them out of the war. Further arguing for a Dardanelles breakthrough was an appeal for aid from Russia, hard pressed by German and Austro-Hungarian forces in the north. With Russia’s northern ports either iced in or patrolled by marauding German U-boats, the only possible maritime route for such aid, Churchill argued, was from the south.
As consensus for a Dardanelles naval operation grew in London, those in Cairo advocating an Alexandretta landing found themselves increasingly outmaneuvered; with the Royal Navy focused on the former, they were told, it would be spread too thin to support an operation in the latter. On its face, this contention was absurd. Even the most pessimistic War Office assessment had concluded that Alexandretta could be seized by about 20,000 troops—far more than the two to three thousand envisioned by Lawrence, but still a pittance compared with the numbers idly staring across no-man’s-land on the Western Front. The real issue was institutional myopia. Since the Dardanelles had now become the first priority in the Near East, any action at Alexandretta fell under the classification of a diversion, and among senior British war planners, with their nineteenth-century notions of massing all available force at a single point, diversion was shorthand for distraction.
Joined to this was stone-cold arrogance. Turkey was a third-rate power, its soldiers ill-fed, ill-trained, poorly armed, and mutinous. In just the past five years, they had been beaten by the Italians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Serbs, and the Montenegrins. Most recently, they had been swatted away from the Suez Canal and slaughtered by the Russians at the battle of Sarikamish in eastern Turkey. “Taking the Turkish Army as a whole,” one British officer had reported to his superiors in November 1914, “I should say it was [a] militia only moderately trained, and composed as a rule of tough but slow-witted peasants as liable to panic before the unexpected as most uneducated men.” Just what chance did this rabble have against the might of the British Empire? Ergo, why nip at their heels at Alexandretta when they could be beheaded at Constantinople?
But there was an altogether different issue at play as well, one that had nothing to do with military strategies or hubris and everything to do with politics. Since the start of the war, the French had laid claim to Syria, a spoils-of-war prize that it would take possession of once the conflict ended. Even though the Alexandretta enclave fell just outside the generally recognized borders of greater Syria, all the British talk of the Syrian uprising that was sure to follow an Alexandretta landing—talk, ironically enough, that Lawrence himself had done much to generate in his reports to London—made the French extremely edgy. Put simply, if there was to be an Allied move into the Syrian region, the French wanted to be in on it from the outset in order to take control of the situation. That was understandable as far as the argument went, perhaps, but then came the kicker: since France, hard pressed on the Western Front, had no troops to spare for such an enterprise, it meant that the entire region, including Alexandretta, should be militarily off-limits even to its allies.
Whether justified or not, in Lawrence’s mind it was this French objection, far more than British War Office shortsightedness, that scuttled the Alexandretta plan. In mid-February, as word of the French position circulated among the stunned Savoy Hotel intelligence staff, he wrote a short letter to his parents in which he bitterly noted, “So far as Syria is concerned, it is France and not Turkey that is the enemy.”
Initially, however, it appeared that Lawrence’s indignation might be misplaced, and the Dardanelles gambit a success. On February 19, a joint British and French flotilla appeared off the southern entrance to the strait and with their long-range guns proceeded to shell the Turkish fortresses there at will. With the Turks able to muster only token return fire, most of their outer forts were soon pounded to rubble, leading the British fleet commander to confidently predict that by methodically working its way up the strait and destroying whatever Turkish fortifications remained, his armada might reach Constantinople within two weeks’ time. That city’s residents clearly agreed with him. As the Allied fleet sailed off to resupply for the big push, Constantinople’s imminent fall seemed such a foregone conclusion that the nation’s gold reserves were rushed to a safe haven in the Turkish interior, and many senior government officials quietly hatched personal contingency plans to flee.
One who didn’t share this view was T. E. Lawrence. To the contrary, holding out hope that until the Dardanelles operation got under way in earnest there might still be a chance to overrule the French, he used the lull after the February 19 bombardments to continue pushing for an Alexandretta landing, but to little avail. With the senior British military command now deaf to his arguments, he finally reached out to the one person he knew who was well connected to the British political hierarchy, David Hogarth.
Although Lawrence had always assumed an informal, collegial tone with his mentor, his letter to Hogarth on March 18 was of a very different order: beseeching, even demanding. After outlining the crucial importance of taking Alexandretta—“the key of the whole place, as you know”—and warning of the danger should it fall into the hands of any other power, he all but gave Hogarth a set of marching orders to combat the various forces lined up against the plan: “Can you get someone to suggest to Winston [Churchill] that there is a petrol spring on the beach (very favourably advised on by many engineers, but concessions always refused by the Turks), huge iron deposits
near Durt Yol 10 miles to the north and coal also.… Then go to the F.O. [Foreign Office] if possible. Point out that in [the] Baghdad Convention, France gave up Alexandretta to [the] Germans, and agreed that it formed no part of Syria. Swear that it doesn’t form part of Syria—and you know it speaks Turkish.… By occupying Alexandretta with 10,000 men we are impregnable.”
Whether or not Hogarth actually had the clout to execute such instructions, it was already too late. On the very day Lawrence sent his letter, March 18, the Allied fleet returned to the mouth of the Dardanelles to resume their bombardment campaign. This time, matters didn’t go at all as planned.
For the first three hours, the Allied armada pounded away at the coastal forts with much the same ease as in February. The trouble started when the first line of ships was commanded to fall back to make room for the second. During the February bombardment, the Turks had taken note of an odd habit of the Allied fleet, that when reversing course they almost invariably turned their ships to starboard; on the chance that this tradition would continue, they had recently laid a single string of mines in an inlet the Allies would traverse on a starboard turn. Sure enough, at about 2 p.m. the retiring Allied first line steered directly into the minefield. In quick succession, three warships were sunk, and three more heavily damaged.
Although the term “mission creep,” with all its negative connotations, didn’t exist in 1915, it probably should have. In analyzing the March 18 minefield fiasco, British war planners came to the reasonable conclusion that the Dardanelles couldn’t be cleared by sea power alone. What they failed to conclude was that the campaign should be abandoned in favor of something different. To the contrary, the Allies were now going to double down, with the naval effort at the strait to be augmented by a ground offensive.
It would be some time before anyone realized it, but that decision was to be one of the most fateful of World War I, ultimately extinguishing any hope that the conflict in the Middle East—and by extension, that in Europe—might be brought to an early end. In the interim, the regime in Constantinople, which just days earlier had been flirting with abandoning the capital, was given a new lease on life as the Allies again paused operations in order to cobble their ground force together.
IN THE MIDWINTER of 1915, the Standard Oil Company of New York finally decided what to do with William Yale. Releasing him from Cairo, that modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah so assaultive to his Yankee sensibilities, he was ordered to return to Constantinople.
With greater cunning than perhaps any other international corporation, Socony had looked upon the unfolding tragedy of World War I and been determined to play it to their advantage. In fact, in the very first days of the war it had come up with a plan whereby it might supply the petroleum needs of both warring European blocs by reflagging its tankers to the registry of neutral nations. While that scheme had been exposed, Yale discovered that Socony had now devised an ingenious new system to smuggle oil to Turkey through neutral Bulgaria. But this was minor compared with what Standard was planning next, and it was to achieve that greater plan that Yale had been brought back to Turkey.
What the bosses at 26 Broadway had come to realize was that so long as the Europe-wide war continued—and, just as crucially, so long as the United States kept out of it—they had the vast territories of the Ottoman Empire practically to themselves. With their British, French, and Russian competitors boxed out until the war ended, they now had a golden opportunity to grab up as many oil concessions in the Near East as they desired—and since they were the only major company still in operation in the region, they could do so at rock-bottom prices. The scheme traded on Turkey’s desperate need for oil, a vital commodity if it was to have any hope of competing militarily. The oil coming through Socony’s Bulgarian smuggling operation was a pittance compared with what was needed, and to meet this need Standard held out a possible solution: Palestine.
In various geological studies going back to the late 1800s, data suggested that central Palestine might well be the site of one of the world’s great untapped oil reservoirs. The mapping team that William Yale had been a part of in 1913–14 had examined only a tiny portion of that area, some forty-five thousand acres, limited as it was by the boundaries of the concessionary zones. Standard wanted to massively increase its Palestine holdings, and it now saw a way to make that happen.
Just prior to Yale’s return, Socony officials in Constantinople had told the Ottoman government that after careful consideration, they had regretfully concluded that the area covered by their seven concessions in Kornub was simply too small to be financially viable to exploit. If such a conclusion seemed odd coming so soon after Socony had embarked on a massive effort to develop those concessions, a naturally more pressing question for an oil-starved regime in the midst of a war was, just how many more acres did Standard feel they needed? The answer: a half million more, or, put in more tangible terms, pretty much the entire breadth of central Judea from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean, an area covering about one-tenth of the current state of Israel.
Except there was a key detail in all this that Socony saw no reason to trouble the Turks with. It had no intention of actually drilling for oil, let alone refining it, until after the war was over. Its sole goal was to use the “golden hour” that the war afforded to lock up those 500,000 acres for the future, a future that, provided the right pressure was brought to bear on the right diplomats and politicians, wouldn’t depend in any way on which side eventually won.
As the Socony employee with the most experience in Palestine, William Yale was to be the point man for getting control of that land. The first job at hand, though, was to change Turkey’s mining laws; these were archaic and complex and an impediment to the kind of land grab Standard was hoping to achieve. To this end, the Constantinople Socony office set to work compiling a comprehensive set of new mining-law recommendations for the Turkish parliament—an undertaking eased by their having put the secretary of the Turkish senate on their payroll—and also placed Yale on the drafting committee. In just this way, the twenty-seven-year-old Yale, less than eighteen months removed from his roustabout duties in an Oklahoma oilfield, became instrumental in rewriting the commercial laws of a foreign empire.
THE GERMAN HOSPICE is a magnificent building of yellow stone and slate that sits on the ridgeline of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Today its austere lines are softened by the cypress and pine trees that surround it, but when it was constructed in the early 1900s, under the orders and specifications of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, its bare grounds and prominent position on the ridge gave it more than a passing resemblance to a Bavarian castle.
Built to accommodate German pilgrims and clergy visiting the Holy Land, the hospice has the feel of a particularly pleasant medieval monastery, rough-stone stairways connecting its different floors, open internal passageways giving onto views of its cloistered gardens. On the ground floor is a great chapel made of stone, its fusion of stained glass windows and Moorish-style archways reminiscent of the Great Cathedral in Córdoba. So grand is the hospice that Djemal Pasha chose to make it his Jerusalem headquarters during World War I, the city where he and his German liaison officer, Curt Prüfer, returned after their ill-fated Suez sojourn in February 1915.
In Jerusalem, the governor quickly became known for exhibiting a degree of irritability in the administration of his office. His new personal secretary, a twenty-one-year-old reserve officer named Falih Rifki, caught a glimpse of this on the first day he showed up for work at the hospice in the winter of 1915. Ushered into Djemal’s inner sanctum, Rifki watched as the governor briskly signed his way through a high stack of papers placed before him and then taken away by three attending officers, oblivious to the twenty or so other men who stood in one corner of the room, pale and trembling with fear. When Djemal at last finished with his paperwork and turned to the clustered men, elders from the Palestinian town of Nablus, it was to ask if they understood the gravity of their unspecified crimes. The Nablus elder
s, apparently not appreciating that the question was meant to be rhetorical, began to protest their innocence and plead for mercy.
“Silence!” Djemal thundered. “Do you know what the punishment is for these crimes? Execution! Execution!” He let that news sink in for a bit, before continuing in a calmer tone, “But you may thank God for the sublime mercy of the Ottoman state. For the moment I shall content myself with exiling you and your families to Anatolia.”
After the men had offered their profuse thanks and been hustled out, Djemal turned to Rifki with a shrug. “What can one do? That’s how we get things done here.”
The episode rather exemplified Djemal Pasha’s managerial style, a man for whom the term “mercurial” might have been coined. Forever oscillating between raging severity and gentle magnanimity, often within the same conversation, he kept everyone around him permanently off balance, incapable of predicting his likely response to a situation. Howard Bliss, the president of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, recalled a meeting between Djemal and a favor-seeking Briton at which the governor bluntly refused every request made of him, until a sealed envelope was opportunely delivered by an aide. Reading the contents, Djemal broke into a broad smile.
“I now can grant all your requests,” he announced. “I have just received a decoration from the Czar of Bulgaria, and at such times I always grant the first favors presented.”
One effect of this style, of course, was that issues were never truly resolved; knowing that most any harsh edict might be countermanded or, conversely, a granted favor soon rescinded, petitioners learned to beseech Djemal for consideration when he was reported to be in a good mood—or, trusting in the law of averages, to simply beseech him repeatedly.
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