by Alan Palmer
One sovereign responded immediately. At midsummer in 1914 Abbas Hilmi II, Khedive of Egypt since 1892, had gone into residence at the palace which his family retained on the Bosphorus. He was still there when war was declared, and at once he backed the Caliph’s proclamation of a jihad: every dutiful Egyptian should rebel against British rule.16 None did so; but the Khedive’s call for action had far-reaching consequences. It cut the last constitutional links between Cairo and Constantinople, for Great Britain established a protectorate over Egypt on 18 December, deposed the unfortunate Abbas Hilmi II, and proclaimed his uncle Hussein Kamil ‘Sultan of Egypt’. Wisely, London stopped short of annexing Egypt, although the island of Cyprus was formally absorbed into the British Empire on the day war broke out with Turkey. At the same time the Sheikdom of Kuwait, whose relationship with the Ottoman authorities had always been ill-defined, was constituted an independent government under British protection.
In London any lingering beliefs in the value of upholding the Ottoman Empire were jettisoned as soon as Goeben and Breslau anchored off the Golden Horn. Strategic interests were changing rapidly. It would now be better for the Russians ‘to have Constantinople’ than the Germans: the Tsar’s empire was becoming increasingly dependent on British investment; and the possibility of satisfying historic ambitions on the Straits would reduce the risks of Anglo-Russian clashes in Central Asia and around Persia’s oilfields. ‘It is clear Constantinople must be yours,’ King George V told the Russian ambassador within a week of Turkey’s entry into the war; and at the same time his Foreign Secretary promised Russia an amicable settlement of the Straits Question once the Ottoman Empire sued for peace.17 But there remained a strong feeling in the British Cabinet that it would better still to have an Anglo-French naval presence off the Dolmabahche and Yildiz, enabling London and Paris to shape the final partition plans of a fallen empire—always remembering, of course, the needs of ‘our Russian ally’.
Early in September 1914 Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Kitchener (the Secretary of State for War) and their principal naval and military advisers discussed a grand strategy for the war which they assumed would soon be waged against Turkey. High on their list of possible operations was the forcing of the Dardanelles by the powerful fleet already concentrated in the northern Aegean; if necessary, the Gallipoli peninsula should be seized in order to facilitate the passage of the warships. The complexity of this task was underestimated. A preliminary bombardment of the forts at Cape Helles early in November, by both British and French vessels, silenced the guns at Sedd-el-Bahr, largely because one shell hit the magazine, causing an immense explosion; and six weeks later a British submarine torpedoed and sank a forty-year-old battleship at anchor in the Narrows. There was no further action in these waters until the New Year. By then defensive torpedo tubes, recommended by Admiral Limpus many months before, were in position at Kilid Bahr on the Narrows. Before the coming of spring Liman von Sanders planned to have six of the Ottoman Army’s fifty divisions protecting the shores of the Dardanelles from invasion.18
Kitchener, with his vast experience of Egypt and the Levant, favoured swift action elsewhere, preferably against the Baghdad Railway. A week before Christmas a landing-party from HMS Doris went ashore north of Iÿskenderun, covered by the light cruiser’s eleven six-inch guns. So far from meeting resistance, the raiders found that the local soldiery raised no objections to the blowing up of locomotives, stores and rolling-stock, even helping naval officers to plant the charges which treated them to their big bang in the night sky. The episode, Churchill admitted two years later, strengthened the British assumption that their enemy was easy prey. ‘What kind of Turk was this we are fighting?’ the Admiralty wondered.19
The question was answered in the terrible battles for the Gallipoli peninsula. On 15 January 1915 the War Council in London finally agreed on a naval expedition ‘with Constantinople as its objective’ to open up a route of supplies to Russia, hard-pressed on the Eastern Front. But when, on 18 March, a third of the capital ships seeking to penetrate the Narrows were sunk, the whole concept of the campaign was changed: the ‘Constantinople Expeditionary Force’—as, with a casual contempt for security, it was frequently referred to as it assembled in Egypt—was transported to Mudros, on the island of Lemnos in the northern Aegean. Five weeks after the naval bombardment British, Australian and New Zealand troops made a series of landings on the peninsula while a French Army Corps invaded what had once been the Trojan shore; but by then most of the Ottoman army—some 84,000 men—was on the alert. Inadequate planning, inter-service confusion, hesitant leadership, and all the unsuspected problems of the first amphibious campaign in modern warfare, worked together to turn an epic enterprise, imaginatively conceived and valiantly fought, into a tragedy of frustrated triumph. On 9 January 1916, almost a year after the War Council’s resolution, the last British troops surreptitiously evacuated Cape Helles, leaving behind a network of shell-pitted trenches and enough food and equipment to sustain four Turkish divisions for four more months. Left, too, on either side of the Dardanelles, were the remains of 34,000 dead from Great Britain and her empire and 10,000 dead from France, metropolitan and overseas. Only one in four of those who perished have known graves.20
Gallipoli was the greatest defensive victory in Ottoman history. The tenacity of ‘Mehmedchik’—the Turkish counterpart of ‘Tommy Atkins’won the empire of the Sultans a six-year reprieve. But the cost was frightful; although Turkish casualty figures in the campaign were never finally established, they must certainly have been twice as high as for the invading armies. Enver, as War Minister, claimed credit for the victory; more precisely, the strategic dispositions were ordered by Liman von Sanders while, at the tip of the peninsula, Essad Pasha and his staff successfully contained the inland thrust of the Anzacs. If a folk hero emerged from the campaign he was Mustafa Kemal, the colonel who inspired or cajoled the wavering fugitives of his XIXth Division into a valiant defence along the rocky ridges of Sari Bair and Anafarta. The official Ottoman War Ministry propaganda magazine wished to carry Kemal’s portrait on its cover, but Enver personally intervened: there could be no public trumpeting of a contemporary whose military achievements were beginning to surpass his own. Kemal was given command of the Sixteenth Army, and sent to fight the Russians in Anatolia. Fourteen years later a British staff officer, writing the official history of Gallipoli, assessed Kemal’s role in the defence of the peninsula objectively: ‘Seldom in history can the exertions of a single divisional commander have exercised so profound an influence, not only on the course of a battle but perhaps on the fate of a campaign and even the destiny of a nation.’21
The fighting at the Dardanelles was forced on the Ottomans by their enemies. So, too, through much of 1915 and 1916, was the grim campaign along the old Russian frontier in Transcaucasia, where in mid-February 1916 the historic fortress of Erzerum fell suddenly to a surprise enemy assault, almost certainly thanks to information received by the Tsar’s field commanders from Ottoman Arab officers incensed by the assertive ‘Turkism’ spreading through the Sultan’s army. In contrast to these defensive campaigns at the Dardanelles and in eastern Anatolia were the attempts by both Germany and the Ottoman Empire to spread the jihad by fomenting rebellion. ‘Our consuls . . . must inflame the whole Mohammeddan world to wild revolt,’ Kaiser William declared. ‘At least England shall lose India.’22 So, it seems, Enver too believed. Before Gallipoli, he had invited Kemal to take command of three regiments and lead them across Persia to raise the Muslims of Baluchistan, Sind and the Punjab against the British Raj—an offer Kemal shrewdly rejected. Indian Muslims took little notice of the Caliph’s proclamation, nor did Indian troops fighting alongside the British and Anzacs at Gallipoli respond to Turkish calls for mutiny.
Enver also gave his support to plans for saboteurs to cross the frontier from Mesopotamia into southern Persia and blow up the newly constructed Anglo-Persian Oil Company refinery at Abadan. Swift military actio
n by the British frustrated this particular design, although the German agent, Wilhelm Wassmuss, later sparked off an anti-British rebellion over a wide area of southern Persia.23 As a last resort Enver sent Young Turk officers into Libya to encourage the puritanical Muslim Sanussi sect to attack British outposts and, if Italy should again go to war with Turkey, to resume desert raids on the coastal towns of Cyrenaica. Here Enver had more success. Under Sayed Ahmed the Senussi fought loyally for their Caliph in the western desert until the empire’s final fall. On the other hand, one prominent Ottoman agent, Jafar Pasha al-Askiri, who was captured by the British in a western desert cavalry skirmish, later supported the Arab rebellion in his native Mesopotamia and helped create the Iraqi army.24
At Germany’s request the Ottoman High Command sought to implement a master design for ‘the destruction of British rule in Egypt’, developing a plan originally prepared in Berlin three months before Turkey became a belligerent. General Ahmed Cemal, abandoning ministerial office in order to return to active service, was appointed to command the Fourth Ottoman Army at Damascus in November 1914. Two months later he concentrated at Beersheba some 20,000 men, with artillery support, who were to mount an attack on the Suez Canal, ‘the jugular vein of the British Empire’. With the Turks were some German specialist troops, and Cemal had a Bavarian colonel, Baron Franz von Kress von Kressenstein, as his Chief-of-Staff. Pontoon bridges, constructed in Germany and smuggled through neutral Bulgaria, were intended to allow the invaders to cross to the west bank of the canal. Both Cemal and Kress believed that a surprise raid in strength on the British positions would incite Egyptian nationalists to turn against the occupying ‘colonialists’ and welcome back Khedive Abbas Hilmi II. The raiders might hope to ‘be joined by 70,000 Arab nomads’, predicted Ernst Jaeckh, the German High Command’s favourite Orientalist.25
Cemal’s raid did not (as is often said) take the British by surprise: French reconnaissance aircraft had seen the columns advancing across the Sinai desert. From 3 to 10 February 1915 there was fighting to the north of Ismailia; a single Ottoman platoon successfully bridged the canal before Cemal pulled his men back, disappointed at the failure of the Egyptians to welcome Ottoman liberation. While Cemal withdrew to Beersheba, Colonel Kress remained in the Sinai desert with a few battalions of infantry and a squadron of cavalry, as a standing threat to Egypt. German engineers supervised construction of a strategic railway linking Jaffa with Beersheba. Occasionally Kress’s raiders would drop mines into the canal, until in the late summer of 1916 Anzac horsemen finally cleared the desert. Not until the end of the year did the British resolve to open up a new—and ultimately decisive—battle front in Palestine.26
As early as August 1914, some contact had been established between British Intelligence in Cairo and dissident Arabs serving with the Ottoman army in Mesopotamia. The principal emissary was Major Abdul Aziz al-Masri, who had founded in Baghdad a secret society known as al-Ahd (The Covenant), in which Iraqi officers pledged themselves to support any cause promoting Arab independence from Turkish rule.27 The outbreak of war intensified British efforts to foment revolts in these outer Ottoman provinces. Here, however, there was a clash of interests between the Foreign Office and the India Office in London, and between Cairo and Simla, the headquarters of the British army in India; the Viceregal authorities opposed any encouragement of rebellion in the Ottoman Empire. They feared that the contagion of unrest would spread to the Indian subcontinent, where there were similar secret societies to those in the Arab lands.
There is no doubt that this cumbersome shared British responsibility for the Middle East helped the Ottoman High Command. While Cairo maintained political contact with the tribes of the Hejaz and southern Syria, it was the India Office which concluded the treaty of December 1915, recognizing the ambitious thirty-five-year-old Abdulaziz Ibn Saud as ruler of Nejd.28 The Viceregal administration in Bombay regarded the Gulf, Mesopotamia and the recently developed oilfields as falling within its sphere of interest—and also much of southern Arabia and Aden, where the British coaling-station was administered from 1839 until 1937 by military Political Residents appointed by the Government of India. And it was GHQ Simla which began the Mesopotamian Campaign with the dispatch of ‘Force D’ to the head of the Persian Gulf. The expedition landed at Fao on the second day of the war, brushed aside the local Ottoman garrisons and took Basra without much difficulty a fortnight later, thus safeguarding the oil installations in the Shatt-al-Arab. But instead of using Arab levies to harass the Ottomans, the British treated southern Mesopotamia as conquered territory: it was on this occasion that the twenty-six-year-old Iraqi Arab nationalist, Nuri as-Said, was hurriedly deported to India.
Force D’s hostility towards Arab nationalism, together with the arrival in Baghdad of Field-Marshal von der Goltz and a German mission, strengthened Ottoman resistance. Eventually General Townshend occupied the strategically important town of Kut-al-Amarah, 250 miles north of Basra, at the end of September 1915, and GHQ Simla at once urged him to advance on Baghdad itself. Townshend dutifully tried to accomplish all that was expected of him, but without Arab support any drive further into Mesopotamia was a rash undertaking, and on 22 November Goltz’s improvised army, strengthened with a crack Anatolian division, defeated the invaders at Ctesiphon, less than twenty miles south of Baghdad. By 3 December Townshend’s 17,000 men were besieged in Kut, together with 6,000 Arabs trapped in the fighting. Four attempts to relieve the town were defeated. Kitchener’s confident ruse of offering Khalil Pasha, the Ottoman commander, at least a million pounds if he permitted the Kut garrison to go free was rejected—and, for propaganda purposes, was treated with great contempt by Enver (who was Khalil’s nephew). On 29 April 1916 the Kut garrison passed into a harsh captivity. As after the evacuation of Gallipoli three and a half months before, the Ottomans prided themselves on having routed an infidel invader. Momentarily the claim boosted morale at home.29
Like other governments in 1914, the Ottoman authorities had assumed that the war they were entering would soon be over. The economy could not stand the strain of long campaigns on several battle fronts. Although most towns and villages in the provinces were accustomed to feeding themselves, Constantinople had depended on grain imports from Russia and, to a lesser extent, from France and Italy. There was, in consequence, a severe shortage of food in the capital, even during the first winter of war; its effects were aggravated by an influx of refugees and the spread of typhus. Other regions, normally self-sufficient, suffered from the conscription of agricultural workers for service in the army and, in eastern Anatolia, from the devastation caused by an invasion. Famine in Syria and the Lebanon was caused in part by a prolonged drought, but also through an inequitable system of food distribution, made worse by the mobilization of railway rolling-stock and track for military purposes. From October 1915, when Bulgaria entered the war as an ally of Germany, Austria–Hungary and the Ottomans, there was a direct rail-link once again with Central Europe, giving the Turks a market for cotton, wool, leather, oil from the Mosul vilayet and other minerals. Without Germany’s material backing the Sultan would have been forced to seek an early peace. As it was, official figures indicate that the cost of living in the capital quadrupled in the first twenty-five months of the war. Germany effectively subsidized its ally to the equivalent of a quarter of a billion pounds sterling in order to keep Ottoman armies in the field for four years.30
Politically there was no change in the character of Ottoman rule, although it was inevitable that censorship and police control should be strengthened. The Young Turks determined policy until the final weeks of war.31 Said Halim remained Grand Vizier until February 1917 when Talaat, long the effective chief minister, formally succeeded him. At the same time Mehmed V continued to fulfil the duties of a constitutional Sultan. He welcomed Kaiser William II on his third state visit, presiding over a banquet in the Dolmabahche on 16 October 1917; and in the third week of May 1918 he was host during the only Habsburg State Visit to the O
ttoman capital, entertaining Emperor-King Charles and his consort, Zita, with a splendour which taxed the resources of an empire threatened by runaway inflation. Seven weeks later—on 3 July—Mehmed V died and was succeeded by Abdulmecid’s youngest son, the fifty-seven-year-old Mehmed VI Vahideddin, last of the thirty-six Ottoman Sultans. Five months earlier, almost forgotten amid the stress of war, their half-brother Abdulhamid had also died, not from an assassin’s knife or poison as he had so long feared, but from heart failure in his bed at Beylerbey.