Guerrilla Leader

by James Schneider

  Lawrence explained the timing to Feisal later in June. It would take a month for the Turks to stifle Nasir’s actions around Maan and to the north. It would take two months more before the Turks were ready to attack south and recover the plateau around Aba el Lissan and strike at Aqaba. By then Allenby’s riding camels would be ready for action. It was then that Lawrence suggested perhaps King Hussein would agree to transfer north the regular Arab units that had been operating with Ali and Abdullah for over a year. This would give Arab regular forces in the north a strength of nearly ten thousand rifles, which could be organized in three separate mobile groups. The first and largest group, perhaps six to seven thousand men, would operate as a covering force to maintain the siege of Maan. The second column of a thousand camels would strike the railway in the Deraa-Damascus sector. The third column of two to three thousand infantry, along with major reinforcements of Beni Sakhr, would try to link up with Allenby near Jericho.

  When the idea was first floated past the king, jealousy toward Feisal poisoned his judgment and he refused to support the redeployment of the regulars from the south. Lawrence then went to see Allenby to seek his direct intervention in the matter. He arrived at GHQ on June 18 and found a very different command climate. William H. Bartholomew was now Allenby’s chief of staff, and Lawrence laid before him the Arab plans. The chief smiled and said he was “three days too late.” A major campaign scheme was in the making that would require the whole summer to develop. The Arabs would have to muddle through on their own in the meantime until the main army was ready. In the larger sense, the two plans simply moved to a state of hiatus. Allenby had approved the redeployment of Ali’s and Abdullah’s men, and it would take the whole summer to convince Hussein of its merits in any case. Lawrence would have plenty of time to recover and rest for the final push in the autumn.

  OWING LARGELY TO Lawrence’s leadership, the beginning of June found Turkish fortunes along the Hejaz railway again in dire straits. Rail service south of Amman was hanging by a seventy-five-mile thread of a shuttle service down to Al Hasa. During the period May 1 to 19, Lawrence, Young, Peake, Hornby, and others had destroyed twenty-five bridges. Rail operations were compounded by a severe fuel shortage that limited the number and speed of train movements. Virtually all coal supplies had been diverted to the western front, placing a greater burden on wood fuel. Steam engines often required as much as fifteen tons of wood a day, and the destruction of rail lines meant that more fuel had to be diverted to wooden-tie replacement. The Arab incursion onto the Maan plateau denied access to large stands of timber, while wide-ranging British bomber strikes drove off local woodchoppers. By the end of summer, olive trees and vineyards were being destroyed to feed the hungry iron monsters.

  Water shortages were another problem affecting the thirsty trains. Lack of water affected train schedules. Drought and attacks on the railway also meant that more freight had to be carried as potable water rather than as critical military stores. Timetables were thrown out of whack as train movements became dependent on communications between the departure station and the arrival station. Trains were not cleared for departure until an all-clear message had been received from the receiving station. This could take several hours of coordination. If the message traffic was delayed or impeded, a security detachment had to be sent to clear that portion of the line, adding further inefficiencies.

  Allenby was facing problems of a different kind. By June, stories floated around that King Hussein was becoming increasingly concerned about ibn Saud’s threat to his hegemony in the region and that the king would sue for a separate peace and begin a private war of his own. Turkish and German propaganda was making the most of Allied losses and German gains in France. Rumors circulated that the British were about to evacuate Egypt and were planning to use Indian troops, many of whom were Muslim, as a sacrificial rear guard during the withdrawal. In mid-June, a detachment of Indian troops surrendered to the Turks, causing Allenby greater anxiety as he anticipated the long hot summer ahead. It was now clear to all sides that the culmination of the war in the Middle East was finally at hand. Every effort, every resource—material and mental—was being mobilized for the final struggle. No one was more aware of this than Lawrence, who was mobilizing the last measure of his personal will and stamina and wishing it were all over, finished for good.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Hovering Dead

  A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.… You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.

  —TIM O’BRIEN, The Things They Carried

  By the end of May, sixty thousand troops had been redeployed to France from the Middle East, and these had been largely replaced by raw Indian drafts. Allenby was in the long process of integrating these new forces into his army. In his assessment, the quality of the infantry was thus degraded. The foot soldiers also took the brunt of the constant struggle against sickness and disease. By the high summer, malaria was approaching epidemic proportions, disrupting the army’s training schedules. The general’s cavalry, however, had been reorganized in a fashion that actually improved their quality by enhancing combat mobility and hitting power. Allenby’s final stroke would rely, in the end, on his cavalry forces. Logistically, the situation had vastly improved since the winter. The Sinai railway was able to move two thousand tons of supply a day into Palestine, while tactical transport was able to efficiently and rapidly redistribute the matériel from the railhead throughout the army.

  The long delay in reorganizing the force caused Allenby and Lawrence significant concern on two counts. First, the stalemate on the Maan plateau gave the Turks the opportunity to recover their strength and launch a decisive counterattack at the appropriate moment. Moreover, the ongoing stalemate could only sap the momentum of the entire Arab Revolt, which had been so painstakingly developed. Second, as time passed rumors began to circulate about the shape of the postwar Middle East. Knowledge of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration was being used by the enemy for propaganda purposes and seemingly with some success. This placed great pressure on Lawrence to act and break the stalemate at Maan.

  It was evident by the beginning of July that the great German spring offensive had collapsed, with the arrival of large American contingents having helped tip the scales. Despite the German failure, Allied strategists feared that the war in Europe would last well into 1919. Lloyd George, therefore, urged decision on the Palestine front and suggested British troops be sent there for a grand offensive during the forthcoming winter. This view was rejected as unrealistic: Allenby would have to make do with the troops he already had at hand. From the Turkish perspective, the activities east of the Jordan had convinced them that the next British strike would come there, and they continued to move troops from Palestine to address that eventuality. However, the collapse of Russia and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918, drew Turkish strategic interests elsewhere, to the Caucasus.

  Here there were old scores to settle with the Russians, who had seized Turkish territory after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. These old territories were occupied, as were locations in northern Persia, initiating a new wave of pan-Turkish enthusiasm. While the acquisitions may have temporarily slaked Turkish regional ambitions, they were strategically meaningless. Worse, Turkish forces in Palestine were tapped to oc
cupy some of these distant posts. At the same time, the Germans were pulling out their national troops from the region and sending them back to the western front. The last major German combat unit was withdrawn on June 11, though German staff contingents and smaller detachments remained until the end of the war, typically operating at odds with their Turkish counterparts. As for the Turks, entering the fifth year of the war found their morale again virtually exhausted. Although they numbered a hundred thousand men along the front south of Damascus, these numbers were deceptive. In reality, the effective combat strength of these troops was much closer to thirty-two thousand infantry, four thousand cavalry, and 402 guns. Allenby’s army had an effective advantage of over two to one: fifty-seven thousand infantry, twelve thousand cavalry, and 540 guns.

  To conform with Allenby’s deployment, the Turks had to spread their forces across a seventy-five-mile front running from the Mediterranean Sea east to Amman. When Liman von Sanders arrived, he sought to strengthen both the eastern and western flanks. Even as early as the middle of January 1918, it was evident to German planners that the Turks were unable to defend in depth anywhere along this front. Their best chance was to conduct a series of delaying actions all the way to Aleppo, if necessary, in order to maintain an army in being. By July, Liman, commanding from his headquarters still formed in the Yilderim “Lightning” Army Group at Nazareth, had reorganized his forces into the same three armies that had fought virtually from the beginning: the Seventh and Eighth Armies manned the line west of the Jordan, with the Fourth Army still standing fast about Amman as the nemesis of the Arabs east of the river. The two former armies defended a box some fifty-five miles wide and only twelve miles deep. In August, the Seventh Army received a new commander, General Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Pasha, “the greatest soldier and man that Turkey had produced in recent years.” Liman had a small reserve in the so-called Asia Corps. Initially, Liman considered the possibility of withdrawing the Fourth Army to the Yarmuk Valley and around Deraa, but after careful consideration he rejected the idea in the belief that the already shaken army would utterly collapse if ordered to retreat.

  Allenby’s plan was wholly his own, unlike the inheritances of his last major operations. In the design of the campaign, there were several factors that he considered. First, he would have to launch the attack before the autumnal rains began. The likely date would be sometime in September. Second, he believed that creativity and novelty could enhance his general superiority of forces. Third, he knew the Turks could never achieve the kind of troop densities that the Germans had achieved on the western front. This meant he could achieve a significant breakthrough virtually anywhere he chose. Fourth, much of the enemy’s rear area was in excellent cavalry country that could be exploited by his best arm, the Desert Mounted Corps, comprising three cavalry divisions. Finally, he anticipated that Liman would not withdraw any troop at the last moment but attempt to hold every inch of ground.

  In the conceptualization of the campaign, Allenby was always concerned with joining up with Feisal’s army east of the Jordan. In Allenby’s record of the campaign, he wrote: “I was anxious to gain touch with the Arab forces east of the Dead Sea, but the experience, gained in the raids which I had undertaken against Amman and Es Salt in March and May, had proved that the communications of a force in the hills of Moab were liable to interruption, as long as the enemy was able to transfer troops from the west to the east bank of the Jordan. This he was in a position to do, if he controlled the crossing at Jist ed Damieh. The defeat of the Seventh and Eighth Turkish Armies, west of the Jordan, would enable me to control this crossing. Moreover, the destruction of these armies … would leave the Fourth Army isolated, if it continued to occupy the country south and west of Amman. I determined, therefore, to strike my blow west of the Jordan.”

  Naturally, Allenby recalled the vulnerability of the two westernmost armies to severed communications, as when Lawrence tried to destroy the Yarmuk bridges the previous fall. The linchpin of the Turkish railway was still located at Deraa station. Here one portion of the line veered south to become the Hejaz railway, and the other bent west, crossing the Jordan at Jist el Mejamie, continuing parallel in the rear of the Turkish front, and dropping down at Beisan in the Jezreel Valley, then jogging west again to El Afuleh in the plain of Esdraelon, where there was a feeder line down to Haifa. Larry Addington had written that railroads are the “bones of strategy.” This idea helped structure Allenby’s use of his cavalry and mounted troops, including Lawrence’s guerrilla forces. If the British could effect a wide enough penetration, they could slip through their mounted troops and seize El Afuleh and Beisan, trapping the Turkish Seventh and Eighth Armies against the Mediterranean Sea. Since both towns were within a day’s march of the cavalry, it meant that the Turks would have to react immediately before the trap was sprung. If Allenby could develop an effective deception plan, this might prove successful enough to delay the Turkish decision making until it was too late. Lawrence’s role, of course, would be crucial. In this case, rather than just seize Deraa or destroy bridges, his raiders would also demonstrate and harass along the area to fix and befuddle the Fourth Army.

  On July 11, Lawrence met with Dawnay at Allenby’s headquarters to discuss the planning concepts and the Arab role in the attack. Lawrence was impressed with Allenby’s confidence, which he said was “like a wall.” The deception plan was already in development. Again, Meinertzhagen would be the grand master of deceit. After his success at Gaza, Allenby began to appreciate “Meiner’s” contribution to strategy. The plan was to set up near Jericho every useless tent and canvas remnant that could be found in Egypt. The veterinary and field hospitals would be relocated there to look like ordinary camps. Mock horses, camels, and troops would go through a daily charade of drills, creating clouds of obscuring dust. Bridges would be thrown up and taken down and thrown up again, all to create a great illusion of activity. At the precise moment, the Royal Air Force would launch an impenetrable cloud of counterreconnaissance formations to blind the Turkish high command. In all this, the Arabs would contribute as part of the deception plan.

  Meanwhile, as Lawrence and Dawnay went back to Cairo for further deliberations, they learned that the Turks had just turned Nasir out of his position at Hesa, a train depot about fifty miles north of Maan. Turkish success here meant a likely strike at Aba el Lissan toward the end of August, just about the time that Lawrence’s raiders would drive north to Deraa. This meant that the Turks would have to be delayed by at least two weeks. The only reserve available anywhere was a remnant of the disbanded Imperial Camel Brigade that had been consumed for its riding camels and offered up to Feisal. The one remaining battalion was under the command of Major Robin Buxton. He would take his three hundred men and destroy a bridge and tunnel near Amman and have enough time to return to Palestine and aid Allenby’s preparations. This would provide the Arabs with a solid month with which to prepare their own two thousand camels for the final push. GHQ presented one difficult proviso for employment, however: Buxton’s detachment must not incur any casualties.

  Coincidentally, Young and Joyce had developed an elaborate logistics scheme that seemed divorced from the reality of Allenby’s overall campaign design. As Lawrence saw it, the plan relied too much on chance, and its complexity made it that much more vulnerable to the vagaries of fate: “Allenby meant to attack on September the nineteenth, and wanted us to lead off not more than four nor less than two days before he did. His words to me were that three men and a boy with pistols in front of Deraa on September the sixteenth would fill his conception; would be better than a thousand a week before or a week after. The truth was, he cared nothing for our fighting power, and did not reckon us part of his tactical strength. Our purpose, to him, was moral, psychological, diathetic; to keep the enemy command intent upon the trans-Jordan front.” But as a cross-cultural leader, Lawrence held views that were fundamentally divided: “In my English capacity I shared this view, but on my Arab side both agitation and b
attle seemed equally important, the one to serve the joint success, the other to establish Arab self-respect, without which victory would not be wholesome.” The Arabs would have to fight in order to claim a hegemonic position in the Middle East.

  As Lawrence continued to discuss it with Dawnay, the Deraa plan crystallized in his mind: “To reach Deraa from Aba el Lissan would take a fortnight: the cutting of the three railways and withdrawal to reform in the desert, another week. Our raiders must [therefore] carry their maintenance for three weeks. The picture of what this meant was in my head—we had been doing it for two years—and so at once I gave Dawnay my estimate that our two thousand camels, in a single journey, without advanced depots or supplementary supply columns, would suffice [along with] five hundred mounted infantry, the battery of French quick-firing ’65 mountain guns, proportionate machine-guns, two armored cars, sappers, camel-scouts and two airplanes until we had fulfilled our mission. This seemed like a liberal reading of Allenby’s three men and a boy.”1

  Lawrence still had to deal with Young and Joyce, who were furious at having their “top-heavy” plans ripped to shreds. Lawrence carefully argued that changes in Allenby’s scheme had necessitated a change in their own plans, “competent” as they were. In particular, Lawrence’s plan considered the role of Buxton’s detachment in a spoiling attack that would buy time for the preparation of the Arab offensive on Deraa. Young and Joyce had made no consideration for Buxton. A heated debate ensued. “Lawrence,” said Joyce, “you’ve clearly made a mistake. To introduce foreigners will only unman the Arabs; and to let Buxton go a month later will be even worse.”