Engines of War

by Christian Wolmar

  Now the focus of the revolt turned north, with the idea of chasing the Turks out of what is now Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The capture of Aqaba helped protect the British right flank in Palestine, where a different type of war was taking place, one which involved building a railway rather than destroying it. Having initially only sought to defend the Suez Canal, the British, led by Lawrence’s hero, General Edmund Allenby, decided to go on the offensive across the Sinai towards Palestine but they needed a railway to supply them, just as Kitchener’s army had when reconquering Sudan. The aim was to push through from Egypt to Palestine, and chase the Turks out of Gaza, and then Jerusalem, with the ultimate goal of Damascus. The railway was started at Kantara, on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, and was gradually extended eastwards during 1916 and the early part of 1917. It made slow but steady progress, reaching the front at Gaza, 125 miles from its terminus, where the Turks were entrenched, supplied by their own railhead at Beersheba and later a specially built branch just out of range of the British guns. It would take Allenby three attempts to dislodge the Turks from Gaza, but when he finally did, and marched on to capture Jerusalem at the end of 1917, it was celebrated as one of the few genuine victories by British forces in the war.

  Lawrence had used Aqaba as a base for repeated attacks on the Hejaz railway until the winter, when there was a lull in the fighting. Allenby’s progress towards Damascus was delayed, too, as two of his divisions (around 25,000 men) were redeployed to the Western Front. In the spring, when the drive to Damascus finally began, the policy towards the railway changed. It was imperative to cut off the line up from the Hejaz so that the Turks could not use it to bring reinforcements from Madinah against Allenby’s forces. Consequently, Lawrence’s group attacked the railway in various places, having developed a more sophisticated type of mine inappropriately called ‘tulip’. This was a much smaller charge, a mere 2lb of dynamite compared with the 40lb or 50lb ones used previously, and involved placing the charge underneath the sleepers, which would blow the metal upwards ‘into a tulip-like shape without breaking; by doing so it distorted the two rails to which its ends were attached’,21 which was impossible to repair and consequently forced the Turks to replace the whole section of track. In early April 1918, the last train between Madinah and Damascus made it through but after that the line was blocked by successive attacks which left more Turkish troops stuck in the Hejaz protecting a line that was now of no strategic use than were facing Allenby in Palestine. In the decisive attack at Tel Shahm, led by General Dawnay, Lawrence showed his regard for the railway by claiming the station bell, a fine piece of Damascus brass work: ‘the next man took the ticket punch and the third the office stamp, while the bewildered Turks stared at us, with a growing indignation that their importance should be merely secondary’.22 The Turks had clearly never met any British trainspotters with their obsession for railway memorabilia.

  Attacks against the northern part of the railway continued, and the line was cut off in several other places, either by Lawrence or the British forces coming from Palestine. The attacks on the Hejaz railway had been an exemplary case history of guerrilla warfare. It was not all about Lawrence, as he readily admits in the Seven Pillars, but without his ability to stimulate the Arab revolt, General Allenby’s task in sweeping through Palestine would undoubtedly have been harder. Although in the later stages some armoured vehicles and even air support became available, the basic tactics remained the same throughout: ‘The campaign remained dependent on the speed and mobility of the irregular Bedouin forces, and on the inability of the better trained, well-equipped Turkish troops to follow the raiding parties into the desert… As Glubb Pasha (of later Trans-Jordanian Arab League fame) remarked: “the whole Arab campaign provides a remarkable illustration of the extraordinary results which can be achieved by mobile guerrilla tactics. For the Arabs detained tens of thousands of regular Turkish troops with a force scarcely capable of engaging a brigade of infantry in pitched battle”.’23

  The Turks, too, were equally courageous and in their stubborn defence of the line there is another side to the more famous Lawrence story, which is the difficulty of putting a railway permanently out of action. There was no shortage of difficulties for railway operations. Fuel was a constant worry and by the end of the war the houses in Madinah had been stripped of all timber and even the city gates and wooden sleepers from the track had been removed to keep the locomotives running, which required constant improvisation in the face of the constant attacks. While even today a few wrecked locomotives can still be seen in the desert, for the most part the Turks rescued damaged engines and repaired them in their works yards. The historian of the lines, James Nicholson, remarks that the foot soldiers were genuinely heroic: ‘Confined to their stations and a narrow strip of land, they were cast adrift in a vast and hostile country, far from the main centres of command.’24 They were dependent on the railway for all their needs and therefore by 1918 ‘many were close to starvation, clothed in rags and ravaged by scurvy’.25 And yet, despite that, they managed to keep the railway operating until nearly the end of the war.

  It was fitting that the Arab irregular forces under Feisal and Lawrence should join up with Allenby for the final assault on Damascus. The task for Prince Feisal’s army, which included Lawrence and several other British liaison officers, inevitably centred around the railway. He was asked to cut off the vital junction town of Deraa to prevent Turkish reinforcements coming up from Amman, a task that Lawrence, now in an armoured car rather than on a camel, and his explosives expert, Major Peake, achieved with the loss of only one Arab fighter on 17 September, two days before the launch of Allenby’s final offensive. The Turks, desperate to bring up reinforcements from the south, took ten days to repair the line, but then Lawrence blew up a two-mile section of track, using his cunning tulip-mines, and the Arab forces followed up his attack by capturing a train and the station at Ghazala. This was Lawrence’s final railway attack and he reached Damascus a few days later, where the fleeing Turks had blown up the railway which they had constructed with such pride barely a decade before, burning down Damascus Qadem station. Allenby’s forces had marched along a series of railway lines in order to move quickly across Palestine and he had made heavy use of his cavalry, which at one stage outflanked the Turks with a charge consisting of both horses and camels. The railway he had built as a supply route from Egypt eventually stretched more than 250 miles from the Suez Canal across the Sinai and along the coast through Palestine to the port of Haifa, and after the war a bridge over the canal connected the line with Egyptian railways. For a time, the line even boasted a couple of bizarre petrol-driven armoured trains. These were deployed on patrols whose personnel were issued with a strange set of orders, including: ‘no one except officers and Royal Engineers are allowed on the roof of the train when it is moving’ and ‘men sleeping under the train [presumably to keep cool at night] and standing on the buffers when the train is in motion, or displaying culpable ignorance of the other dangers of a railway, will have no claim on the government for compensation’. Clearly, these trains were not being operated by experienced railway personnel.

  The seizure of Damascus has an almost legendary status among military historians as a tactical masterpiece by Allenby because of the speed with which the Allied forces overwhelmed the well-entrenched Turkish defences. Prince Feisal was allowed to take control of the town, overturning the centuries-long Ottoman rule, and become King of Syria, while Lawrence, after organizing the clean-up of the hospital where the dying and sick had been left without food for several days, returned to Britain. Oddly, in what was arguably the last remaining combat in the First World War, the Fakhri Pasha, the commander of the Madinah garrison, refused to surrender to the Egyptian Army and held out until 10 January 1919, when his officers mutinied and handed him over to the British. It marked the end of the Ottoman Empire, with the result that the lands through which the railway ran were formed into three new states: Syria, a French-mandated territor
y, Trans-Jordan, a British-mandated territory with Abdullah as Emir, and Saudi Arabia. The Hejaz was an imperial railway that, ironically, contributed to the destruction of the empire which had created it. However, while the Ottoman Empire was no more, the Arabs did not obtain the promised independence for which they had fought. Lawrence had only been able to attract support among the desert tribes because he told them that the British had informed him that the Arabs would obtain the freedom to rule their own land. In fact, Lawrence’s superiors were lying and he was betrayed. A carve-up between the British and the French, enshrined in an agreement signed secretly back in 1916, had created a series of dependencies with Britain given responsibility for Jordan, Palestine and Iraq, while Syria and Lebanon went to the French. It was a shabby deal that sowed the seeds for today’s conflicts in the Middle East.

  The Lawrence episode demonstrates the extent to which what had started as a European conflict in 1914 gradually developed into a genuine world war. There were numerous theatres of the war which have attracted far less attention than the Western Front, and in virtually every one of these the railways played a significant part. Light railways, in particular, were found to be almost universally useful. The most substantial example was on the Macedonian front after Allied troops landed in Salonika in November 1915. Originally the Allies had promised to provide protection for Serbia but this proved impossible because of the lack of available forces and the Germans invaded the country. The Allies subsequently sent a substantial force to try to reclaim Serbia but the offensive soon became bogged down in the winter conditions and the difficult terrain, which was rocky and largely impassable for motor vehicles, leaving mules as the mainstay of the line of communication. In the spring of 1916, some progress was made but the campaign had settled down to a Western Front-type stalemate by the summer and remained stable for the next two years. Given the lack of roads, a huge network of 60cm railways was built, with lines that were far longer than its equivalent on the Western Front. Most served the front lines by running through the hills from a railhead and the longest, stretching fifty-five miles from Thessaloniki to the battle zone, was built in great haste by a force of 4,000 Turkish prisoners just in time for the final assault against the Central Powers in September 1918. Unlike the light railways on the Western Front, the line was operated as a conventional railway with a signalling system, proper stations and copious sidings.

  This was part of the process of innovation that had been stimulated by the First World War, the apogee of the use of railways in warfare. They were not only the principal means of long-distance transport, and with the development of networks of 60cm railways ubiquitous, but the war stimulated the use of rail for all kinds of purposes, ranging from carrying huge guns to ambulance trains. Nevertheless, the key problem with railways was that, obviously, they could only go where there were tracks and while the far more flexible 60cm railways could be laid down in great haste, they could not carry the huge artillery. The military love big guns and it was always something of an ambition to fit them to a railway in order to make them mobile. Before the 1914 war, there had been limited use of this type of artillery, notably by the French when trying to regain control of the capital during the Paris Commune, and early in the war it was again the French who tried hardest to exploit the potential of the combination of trains and artillery by mounting huge 320mm guns on rails. The guns had a range of seventeen miles but, like other such massive guns mounted on rails, the barrel could only be elevated and not moved sideways, and thus the whole weapon had to be on a curved section of rail track to enable it to be aimed with precision, greatly limiting its potential. Towards the end of the war, the Germans devised a far bigger gun with the aim of creating panic in Paris. The Paris Gun, the Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz, had a 34-metre-long barrel based on naval technology and was rail-mounted on a special carriage, which was shunted into a special turntable from which the gun was fired. Operated by navy personnel from a forest seventy-five miles from Paris, it was first used in March 1918 and over the next few months fired around 350 shells, killing 256 people – eighty-eight of whom were in a church congregation on Good Friday – and causing many Parisians to flee the city. Its shells were the first man-made objects to reach the stratosphere, but despite the panic they caused the gun was not a great success as it required constant maintenance, limiting its daily capacity to just twenty shells, which had a relatively small payload of explosives. Mystery surrounds the precise details of the gun26 because the Germans took it with them when they retreated and destroyed it, leaving no working drawings behind. On the Eastern Front, two 380mm rail-mounted guns were built by Skoda in 1916 and used by the Germans. Again, they enjoyed little success and one was captured by Romanian forces (and can now be found in the Military Museum in Bucharest). As we shall see in the next chapter, it was Hitler who would have the biggest ambition for such guns.

  Another universal use of available railways during the First World War was to transport the wounded. As with many aspects of the military use of the railways, the lessons on the provision of ambulance trains had to be relearnt, despite the experience and progress made in previous wars. Despite the fact that ambulance trains had been widely used in the American Civil War and had become quite sophisticated, with treatment facilities available on the trains, in the subsequent conflicts in Europe it was mostly back to dumping wounded soldiers on straw-strewn bare boards in covered freight wagons. Public opinion critical of the lax treatment of the wounded in the Austro-Prussian War had prompted the Prussians to create a commission to examine the best way of transporting the wounded. As a result, they developed a somewhat improved version by adapting fourth-class coaches – which were easy to convert as they had no seats – as vestibuled trains, allowing medical teams to move around the train, and no fewer than twenty-one saw service during the war. They were still pretty crude affairs with patients dumped on the floor on straw palliasses as unaccountably the military authorities eschewed the more sophisticated suspended-stretcher system developed by the Americans in the Civil War. Nearly 90,000 Prussian wounded were transported in these trains during the Franco-Prussian War, with many remaining in these carriages for several days as the trains were not given the priority which the suffering of their passengers merited.

  Towards the end of the century, there was much discussion about the best way of installing beds in the trains. The Americans favoured rubber loops into which the stretcher handles could be inserted while the Germans chose a hammock-like system and the Russians developed a method by which the stretchers were suspended on springs. Both the latter had their disadvantages, as the hammocks occasionally swung hard into the sides while the poor Russian wounded found themselves inadvertently trampolining. The Boer and Russo-Japanese wars had attracted much public interest in ambulance trains, as nursing the war wounded became a suitable occupation for titled, even royal, ladies. The Boer War saw the deployment of the well-fitted Princess Christian hospital train provided by the Red Cross and named after Queen Victoria’s third daughter.

  Given all this experience, it was quite extraordinary that none of the major combatants entered the First World War with a worked-out plan to cope with the wounded, despite all having intricate programmes to get the troops there in the first place. It was, yet again, an illustration of the military obsession with offence. Even the Germans, with their history of several conflicts during the railway age, and their reputation for being thorough and methodical, were woefully remiss, as an article in a medical magazine reported at the time on the transport of the wounded: ‘In the early part of November 1914 soldiers who had lain for days in trenches half full of water, and who had been exposed also to night frosts, were dispatched on long rail journeys in dirty trucks, as many as thirty men, probably suffering from dysentery, lying in each truck on a little straw, packed like sardines, without attention or protection from the cold.’27 According to the author J. A. B. Hamilton, who fought in the war, ‘it is a strange fact that throughout the war Germans never qui
te caught up with their ambulance train needs’.28

  The British started just as badly. There had been some thought devoted to the issue, but no action. As far back as 1905 there had been suggestions in the War Railway Council, the precursor of the Railway Executive Committee which ran the British railways during the conflict, that the major railway companies should provide ambulance trains to the military but an argument over costs resulted in the scheme being shelved. Therefore, bizarrely, when war broke out there were six ambulance train detachments of forty-five men headed by two officers, but no trains for them. They went to France and after some delay the French provided a hundred goods wagons and a few passenger coaches which were made up into basic ambulance trains. The wagons were disinfected, and stretcher cases were laid on clean straw, but the provision fell far short even of the trains that had been provided in previous wars. A nurse, Sister Phillips, described the difficulties caused by the lack of connection between the wagons: ‘Climbing from coach to coach by way of the footboard was a practice absolutely forbidden… Frequently this means of passing from one coach to another was an absolute necessity in the interests of the patients. No doubt a French stationmaster in a little out of the way French village will probably remember to this day the sight that met his amazed gaze in the early hours of a beautiful September morning in 1914. An ambulance train was flying through his station with an English sister clinging like a limpet to the side of the train.’29 This was muddling through at its British best (or worst), but gradually a fleet of ambulance trains was assembled by the French and British for the Western Front. The French gradually improved the trains in a haphazard way, with the medical staff commandeering suitable stock such as restaurant cars wherever they happened to see it, and adapting it to their purposes. Their endeavours resulted in a ramshackle series of trains, with coaches from different companies, with incompatible braking and lighting systems, and frequently supplied with whatever drugs and bandages could be bought from chemists en route. Not all coaches were suitable. The wagons-lits normally used on the Orient Express and originally hired at great expense to provide accommodation for officers, proved troublesome to repair and were soon discarded.