Engines of War

by Christian Wolmar

  The leading Western powers, together with Japan, saw the Czech move as an opportunity to defeat the revolution but in reality, exhausted after the First World War, they did not have the capacity to mobilize the huge armies this would have required. Instead, token forces were sent to Vladivostok, including a small British detachment under Lieutenant-General Sir Brian Horrocks. A remarkable man who later competed in the 1924 Olympics and became Black Rod in the House of Lords, Horrocks was given the task of guarding a train carrying ammunition for the White Army in Omsk in the spring of 1919. The journey took more than a month, and Horrocks, a fluent Russian-speaker, had to negotiate at virtually every station to prevent the stationmasters stealing his cargo. At one point, in Manchuli, the British officer’s presence provoked a duel between two Cossack officers and Horrocks even accepted an invitation to act as a second, but the pair were arrested before the duel could take place. The British forces were ordered home shortly afterwards.

  The support of the war-weary Western governments was never more than half-hearted and consequently Kolchak’s White regime collapsed in November 1919, undermined by the lack of support from the Allies and its growing reputation for being as bloodthirsty as its Bolshevik enemy. (My father, Boris Kougoulsky, a Russian officer who deserted when he realized that the Communists were taking over, had personal experience of this. He fled to Odessa, where the Whites asked him to join their fight. He went to Yekaterinburg, where one of Denikin’s aides showed him around, proudly pointing to the dead Bolsheviks hanging from every telegraph pole. My father thought better of signing up and thankfully fled to Paris instead.)

  The armoured train proved to be the decisive weapon in the Civil War. The Whites themselves gathered together a fleet of around eighty armoured trains but the Bolsheviks proved more adept at exploiting their advantages. While the mission of the armoured trains was not to engage in set pieces against each other, this did happen on several occasions, resulting in spectacular dogfights. They were the ‘shock and awe’ weapon of the age, as a contemporary Polish account outlined: ‘Armoured trains were the most serious and terrible adversaries. They are well-designed, act shockingly, desperately and decisively, have large amounts of firepower and are the most serious means of our enemies’ tactics.’ The Bolsheviks learnt to exploit them to the full by turning them into a kind of mini-army, with infantry and cavalry sections, not unlike the British methods in the Boer War. According to the history of these behemoths, ‘armoured train tactics reached their maturity during this conflict’.13

  The 165-strong infantry section was used to carry out attacks on enemy trenches or provide protection for the train when travelling through hostile territory. The infantry section was supplemented by a fifty-strong cavalry troop who acted as reconnaissance teams, and, supported by machine-gunners, ensured the track ahead had not been sabotaged. When the train was stopped, they would protect it and at times men would be sent up in balloons attached to the train to spot any nearby artillery. This combination of men and machine proved highly effective both in offensive and in defensive actions and ‘the Red Army officers concluded that an armoured train with such a raiding party was five times more effective than a train without one’.14 Indeed, a train on its own was vulnerable to attack – and woe betide the poor soldiers caught in a broken-down train who were sitting ducks for the enemy and invariably summarily despatched while the train itself would simply be taken over for use against its former owners. The story of Zaamurets is the most remarkable of these adventures, rather like a fantasy in a Boys’ Own annual. The train, which first saw service against the Germans in Poland in 1916, was despatched to fight the Czechs, who promptly captured it, helping them to gain control of the line. They used the train, which they renamed Orlik, to protect the railway against Bolshevik raids and, when they finally retreated, used it to bring up the rear, at which point it was briefly captured and then released by Japanese troops. Just before Vladivostok finally fell to the Red Army in 1922, Orlik was taken by the White Russians to Manchuria, where it was used by the Chinese in their wars against the Japanese until its eventual capture in 1931.

  Churchill had been so excited by the Czech takeover of the line that he wrote later: ‘The pages of history recall scarcely any parallel episode at once so romantic in character and so extensive in scale.’15 Indeed, there is often an element of romanticism about battles fought around railways such as the legendary Andrews Raid in the American Civil War and Churchill’s own adventures, and which are epitomized in T. E. Lawrence’s attacks mentioned later in this chapter. The brutal reality of Kolchak’s war was rather different, especially once the White counter-revolution began to collapse. As Peter Fleming, the brother of the James Bond author Ian, points out in his book on Kolchak, ‘by the winter of the following year [1919], romance had ceased to be a leading characteristic of the Legion’s activities’.16 The retreat of Kolchak’s beaten forces along the railway, pursued by Trotsky’s armoured trains, was on a par with the ghastly events on the line at the time of the Russo-Japanese War described in Chapter Six, but on a far greater scale. It was a miserable retreat undertaken at the worst possible time of the year and resulted in countless deaths from exposure and disease, particularly typhus spread by the lice in the soldiers’ clothes. The White Russian administration had made the mistake of failing to pay the workers on the Trans-Siberian for the previous three months – although they had plenty of gold and other valuables looted from the old regime, reckoned at a conservative estimate to be worth £50m at the time and which was travelling in one of Kolchak’s seven trains – and the condition of the line had consequently greatly deteriorated. Kolchak and his retinue were allowed to use the line normally used for Moscow-bound trains, as the Trans-Siberian was double-tracked on this section, because nothing was heading westwards while the Reds were advancing. On the other track, a nightmarish scenario was being played out as the badly maintained trains broke down because of insufficient coal and had to wait at remote stations until stocks arrived. Their occupants suffered untold misery in the intense cold, many perishing in the stalled trains, as the locomotives were put out of commission by the plunging temperatures. The water in the engines which had run out of fuel soon froze and burst the pipes, requiring lengthy repairs. Even then, the only available source of water was snow, which would be used to refill the boiler, no easy task. Alongside the railway, there was the Trakt, the old road to Siberia on which a stream of bedraggled humanity, both soldiers and civilians, flowed sluggishly eastward, sometimes progressing faster than the trains held up on the slow line. No one knows how many died in this retreat but the corpses, which froze rapidly, were stripped and piled up like logs, awaiting the spring for disposal. Fleming describes eloquently how the Trans-Siberian, this mighty railway barely twenty years old and arguably the greatest engineering achievement of the nineteenth century, had deteriorated into a ‘via dolorosa, a long narrow stage on which countless tragedies were enacted… in the strange and terrible scene, spread out across hundreds of miles of desolate country, there were no redeeming features… only the crows, perched in unusual numbers on the trees along the track, their feathers fluffed against the frost, had cause for satisfaction as they watched the trucks jolt past’.17

  Kolchak’s trains took nine days to travel the 1,500 miles to Irkutsk, but after that he was forced onto the slow line by the Czechs, with whom he had fallen out, and consequently made little progress until the Reds caught up with him. He was arrested, briefly imprisoned and summarily executed. The Whites were defeated but the Czechs got away, leaving Siberia in the hands of a semi-independent republic which later Stalin managed to incorporate fully under his control. The Trans-Siberian’s second war was over.

  Another long railway line stretching into barren country played a rather different role in the closing stages of the First World War. The Hejaz railway connecting Damascus with the Holy Cities of what is now western Saudi Arabia had been built by the Ottoman rulers, and financed by subscriptions from Muslim
s, in the early years of the twentieth century to ease the difficult journey across the desert for the huge numbers of pilgrims on the annual hajj. Although originally intended to reach as far as Makkah (Mecca, the birthplace of Mohammed), opposition from local tribes – who made an excellent living transporting the pilgrims across the last section of desert – prevented the final leg from being built. Consequently, the line ran from Haifa, on a branch line on the Mediterranean coast, to Damascus, the capital of what is now Syria, and south through the desert to Madinah (Medina), nearly 1,000 miles away. The terminus was still 300 miles short of Makkah but nevertheless made it much easier for Muslims to reach their two holiest cities. The journey to Makkah took a couple of weeks using the railway rather than the arduous five- or six-week journey by caravan.

  While the religious reasons for its construction were emphasized by the Ottoman ruler, Abdulhamid II, the railway, like so many others, also had both an imperial rationale, as it was a way of cementing together the disparate elements of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and an economic one, since there was the hope that the desert would yield up valuable minerals. It was, therefore, vital for the Turks to protect and maintain the line after the outbreak of war, which they had joined on the German side in October 1914. In 1915, the British decided to open up a second front, in the Middle East, to take pressure off the Western Front, landing at the Dardanelles to force the Germans to divert resources there. It was a disastrous failure, with delays and uncertainty allowing the Turks to reinforce their positions over the beaches, resulting in the abandonment of the attack by the end of the year. Britain was left with two armies in the Middle East, in Palestine and Mesopotamia (in what is now Iraq). In Palestine their main role was to guard the vital Suez Canal but in Mesopotamia the war against the Turks, which was primarily about protecting oil supplies from the Gulf, had initially resulted in a humiliating defeat for the British at Kut Al Amara in April 1916. The British had over-extended themselves by trying to occupy Baghdad, running too far ahead of their largely river-based supply lines, a problem which was eventually remedied through the construction of a large network of narrow-gauge railways. Kut was retaken from the Turks early the following year and Baghdad was seized in March 1917, finally giving the initiative to the British in the Mesopotamian campaign.

  By the summer of 1916, the British saw that the best way of putting extra pressure on the Ottomans would be through encouraging the Arab tribes, led by Ali, Abdullah and Feisal, three sons of Sherif Hussein, the Emir of Makkah, to rise up against Turkish rule.18 With tacit encouragement from the British through diplomatic channels, the Arabs started harassing the Turks in June, targeting the Hejaz railway as the focus of their attacks. Initially their efforts were crude, involving ‘tearing off lengths of the metals with their bare hands and tossing them down the bank’.19 Since the Turkish army had efficient repair teams and large reserves of track, these attacks did little to hinder their war effort.

  The Arabs needed explosives and better organization. Enter T. E. Lawrence. Captain – he later became a colonel – Lawrence arrived on the Arabian Peninsula in October with no official mandate but his timing proved perfect. An Arab-speaker who had travelled extensively in the Middle East, Lawrence had only managed to take time off his desk job in Cairo (Egypt was a British colony at the time ) by applying for leave. He never went back to the paperclips. Instead he was sent unofficially by the British military to meet Prince Feisal in the desert, because the Arabs’ attacks had petered out, and came back convinced that with supplies, especially guns and ammunition, and support the Arabs could make a significant difference to the war in the Middle East. An overt all-out attack on the Turks was ruled out by the British high command, but the idea of a war conducted cheaply and with little direct British involvement by offering support to the Arabs proved appealing. The British Army was so taken with the suggestion that it funded Lawrence to the tune of £200,000 per month, which he used to buy supplies and camels and to enlist the support of the Bedouin tribes.

  Lawrence returned to Cairo and, having persuaded his superiors of the value of supporting the Arabs, rejoined Feisal’s irregular army as liaison officer in December 1916 to launch a series of attacks on the Hejaz Railway. In January 1917, the British seized Wejh, a port on the Red Sea, to use as their base for attacks further inland on the Arabian peninsula. The takeover of Wejh was crucial not only in ensuring that the anti-Turkish forces could be supplied, but also in thwarting any Turkish notion of further attacks on the Egyptian side of the Red Sea, and from this point their military ambitions were limited to retaining control of the Hejaz Railway in order to keep Madinah supplied.

  The first attack on the railway was actually carried out not by Lawrence but by Herbert Garland, an eccentric major (bimbashi) attached to the Egyptian Army, and a party of fifty tribesmen, who blew up a troop train in February at Towaira. The gang had been fortunate as the guides had taken them close to a blockhouse protecting the line but they had not been overheard as they laid their charges. Indeed, the railway was well protected by a series of blockhouses at key structures such as bridges and tunnels, and therefore the attacks were focussed on remote areas of the line. Simply blowing up the track was futile as the repair work could be effected quickly, especially as there were plenty of spare rails in Madinah that had originally been intended for the extension of the line to Makkah which was never built. As he explains in his classic Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence instead devised tactics that were designed to cause maximum disruption to the Turks while avoiding an all-out confrontation and he deliberately targeted trains with specially devised mines that he normally laid himself.

  By the time Lawrence arrived, the Arabs had already taken over several towns in the Hejaz, including Makkah, but the Turks still held Madinah at the end of the line which could only be supplied by the railway. Lawrence ruled out the idea of trying to take the town because the Arab irregular forces were no match for the well-organized Turks in set-piece battles. Instead, the tactic was to launch a series of raids along the length of the railway, similar guerrilla methods to those employed by the Boers against the British in South Africa: ‘Our idea was to keep his railway just working, but only just, with the maximum of loss and discomfort… The surest way to limit the line without killing it was by attacking trains.’20 Lawrence led his first raid on the railway at Abu Na’am in March and there were some thirty more attacks in the following months, most carried out by Arab forces led by Prince Abdullah and supported by forces of the Egyptian Army and a small French contingent. They were supplemented by a few bombing raids by aeroplanes on the railway, which was at the limit of their range from their base in Egypt. Lawrence’s attacks took a disproportionate toll on the Turkish forces. Very few of the attackers were killed in these engagements, while the Turks usually lost dozens, if not more, each time. The attacks kept the Turks on the defensive and prevented Fakhri Pasha, the commander of the Turkish garrison at Madinah, from launching an attack to try to regain Makkah. This was vital since the fact that the Turks had lost control of the holiest of cities, after 600 years of Ottoman rule, was a great spur to the continuation of the Arab Revolt. While the railway was rarely closed for more than a day or so by the attacks, the number of trains was reduced from the peacetime level of two daily to two every week, which created food and fuel shortages in Madinah, stimulating internal dissent. About half the population fled northwards on the railway – one train of such refugees, mainly women and children, would have been blown up by Lawrence but for the good fortune that his mine did not go off.

  Meanwhile Lawrence turned his attention to the Port of Aqaba. His little army left Wejh in July 1917 and cleverly attacked the railway on several occasions as he headed north to fool the Turks into thinking that was the purpose of his mission. The Turks expected that any attack on Aqaba would come from the sea. Instead, Lawrence and Feisal, with a force of 2,000 men, mostly on camels, for once took on a static army head on but triumphed easily thanks to the element of sur
prise and the lack of proper defences in what was then a small fishing village. The Turks put up little resistance and the bloody side of this desert war was exposed by the subsequent massacre of more than 300 Turkish soldiers by the vengeful Arabs, the kind of incident which, as Lawrence relates in his book, was repeated several times during this campaign. There were virtually no casualties on the Arab side, though Lawrence nearly killed himself by accidentally shooting his own camel in the head and being thrown off at full speed, but suffered only cuts and bruises.