by John Keegan
In the Black Sea, where Russia maintained the second of her three fleets—the third, in the Pacific, played a minor part in the conquest of Germany’s possessions there and the destruction of her raiding cruisers—her command was complete. The Turks, after their declaration of hostilities in November 1914, had neither sufficient nor good enough ships to challenge, and the Russians, if sporadically and inefficiently, mined Turkish waters and attacked Turkish ports and shipping at will. Such operations, however, were peripheral. Turkey did not depend on sea lines of communication to sustain her war effort nor could Russia project military power through her fleet; a project to land the V Caucasian Corps near Constantinople in 1916 was abandoned after the difficulties became apparent.14
Yet Turkey’s navy was, nevertheless, to prove, even if indirectly, one of the most significant instruments in the widening of the world crisis. The Ottoman government, under the control of the “Young Turk” nationalists since 1908, had spent the years since taking power in modernising the empire’s institutions. That was a recurrent enterprise. Attempts to modernise in the first years of the nineteenth century had resulted in the murder of the Sultan, a second attempt in 1826, apparently successful, had foundered on the profound conservatism of courtiers and religious leaders. All Europeans who dealt with the Turks—and Germans, including Moltke the Elder, were prominent among them—recorded their frustration and contempt at the Ottomans’ seemingly incurable indolence. The Germans nevertheless persisted with eventual success. The Young Turks, who included numbers of Balkan Muslims, seemed different from the old, welcoming German military advice and commercial investment. The railway system benefited from German money, the Ottoman army was re-equipped with Mauser rifles and Krupp guns. The Young Turks nevertheless looked to Britain, as all emergent powers of the period did, for naval armament and in 1914 were about to take delivery from British yards of two magnificent Dreadnoughts, the Reshadieh and the Sultan Osman, the latter the most heavily armed ship in the world, with fourteen 12-inch guns. On the outbreak of war with Germany, Britain peremptorily purchased both. Two days earlier, however, on 2 August, Turkey had concluded with Germany an alliance against Russia, her neighbour, oldest enemy, protector of her ex-Balkan subject peoples and conqueror of vast swathes of former Ottoman territory.15 Germany at once sailed its Mediterranean squadron, comprising the battlecruiser Goeben and light cruiser Breslau, into Turkish waters, evading a mismanaged British effort to head them off. On arrival at Constantinople, they hoisted the Turkish flag and changed their names to Sultan Selim and Midillu; Souchon, the squadron commander, became a Turkish admiral. British protests were met with the riposte that the ships had been “purchased” as necessary replacements for the two Dreadnoughts commandeered by Britain which, as Erin and Agincourt, now formed part of the Grand Fleet.
For the next three months, Goeben and Breslau remained peacefully at anchor off Constantinople. The conditions for Turkey’s entry into the war were, however, already in place, for the treaty pledged her to assist Germany in the event of the latter having to support Austria-Hungary against Russia, a diplomatic circumstance already in force when it was signed. Enver Pasha, the leading Young Turk and Minister of War, was meanwhile completing his military preparations. Liman von Sanders, his senior German military adviser, expected him to open hostilities by an expedition into the great plains of the Russian Ukraine. Instead, Enver chose to make his attack into the wild mountains of the Caucasus, where terrain and the Muslim loyalties of the population would, he believed, work to Turkey’s advantage. As a public signal of precipitation of the new war, however, he sent Souchon, Goeben, Breslau and some of Turkey’s own raggle-taggle warships to engage the Russian fleet “wherever it was found.”16 Souchon, interpreting his orders broadly, divided his force and, on 29 October, attacked the Russian ports of Odessa, Sebastopol, Novorossisk and Feodosia. Three days later, Russia declared war on Turkey and by 5 November Turkey was at war with France and Britain also.
THE WAR IN THE SOUTH AND EAST
Turkey’s entry did not merely add another member to the alliance of the Central Powers or another enemy to those the Allies were fighting already. It created a whole new theatre of war, actual and potential, drawn in several dimensions, religious and insurrectionary as well as purely military. Turkey was the seat of the Muslim Caliphate and, as the successor of Mahomet, Sultan Mehmed V declared “holy war” on 11 November and called on all Muslims in British, French and Russian territory to rise in arms. The effect was negligible. Though the British felt concern that the Muslim soldiers of their Indian Army might be swayed, few were, and those mainly Pathans of the North-West Frontier, natural rebels who “would probably be sniping at British troops within a year or two of going on pension and at home in their tribe … [they] owed allegiance to no man, living in an anarchic paradise ruled by the bullet and the blood feud.”17 The troopers of the 15th Lancers who mutinied at Basra in February 1915 were Pathans, as were the sepoys of the 130th Baluchis who had mutinied at Rangoon in January. Both episodes were explicable in terms of unwillingness to serve outside India, a repetitive occurrence in the Indian Army. The mutiny of the 5th Light Infantry at Singapore on 15 February 1915 was more serious, since the sepoys were not Pathans but Punjabi Muslims, the backbone of the Indian Army, who did not merely disobey orders but murdered thirty-two Europeans and released some interned Germans, whom they hailed as fellow-combatants in the holy war.18 Most of the Germans, putting loyalty to colour above country, rejected liberation and the mutiny was swiftly crushed. The loyal half of the regiment was, however, judged too untrustworthy to commit to any regular theatre of war and was sent to fight in the Kamerun campaign.19 In four other cases the British decided not to risk using battalions largely Muslim in composition against the Turks; yet large numbers of Muslims did fight against the Sultan-Caliph’s soldiers without demur. The numerous Muslim regiments of the French army fought the Germans without paying the Sultan’s call to jihad any attention whatsoever.
Mehmed V’s holy war was therefore a flop. The engagement of his empire, by contrast, was a strategic event of the greatest importance, for so wide was its geographical extent that its territory touched that of his enemies at many points, so ensuring the opening of new fronts wherever it did. In the Persian Gulf it formally did not, but the effect was the same, for Britain regarded the Gulf and its coastline as a British lake. The “Trucial” Sheikhs of the Arabian coast had been bound by treaty since 1853 to refer disputes between them to the Government of India, whose power to maintain peace and punish its breach the same treaty established. The Viceroy’s political officers acted as residents, in effect overseers, at the sheikhs’ courts and, on the Persian side, as consuls with wide executive powers; since 1907 Persia had been divided into northern, Russian, and south-western, British, spheres of influence, an arrangement the feeble Persian government had no means to resist.20 The discovery of oil had further strengthened Britain’s interest in the Gulf and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s refinery on the Persian island of Abadan at the head of the Gulf was by 1914 an imperial outpost in all but name. As the main supplier of fuel for the latest generation of oil-burning Dreadnoughts (the Royal Sovereign and Queen Elizabeth classes), the company was judged a vital strategic asset and a controlling interest in its shares had been bought by Britain, at Winston Churchill’s instigation, in 1913.21
Turkey’s undisguised inclination towards Germany from August 1914 onwards decided Britain to secure its position at the head of the Gulf, which was Turkish territory, by military occupation. The obvious source of troops for the operation was India and in September part of the 6th Indian Division was shipped to Bahrein, then the most important of the Gulf sheikhdoms. On Turkey’s declaration, the British government also took the opportunity to recognise the separate sovereignty of Kuwait, while the convoy carrying the division proceeded to the mouth of the Shatt el-Arab, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Turkish Mesopotamia, bombarded the Turkish port and landed troops
on 7 November. The expeditionary force then marched inland and by 9 December had occupied Basra, the chief city of southern Mesopotamia, and advanced to Qurna, where the two rivers join. There it paused, while decisions were taken about its future employment. They were to prove among the most ill-judged of the war.
Meanwhile the Turks had taken an initiative of their own in another corner of their enormous empire. Egypt remained legally part of it but, since 1882, had been under the administration of a British “Agent” with powers of government. The higher tax officials were British and so were the senior officers of the police and army; Kitchener, British Minister of War, had first made his name as Sirdar of the Egyptian army. One of the few positive results of Mehmed V’s call to holy war was to prompt his nominal viceroy of Egypt, the Khedive, to reaffirm his loyalty.22 The British instantly abolished his office and declared a protectorate. That was resented by the Egyptian upper classes but, in a country where all power rested with the new protector and most of the commercial life was in the hands of expatriates, British but also French, Italian and Greek, their objections were wholly ineffective. Moreover, Egypt was filling up with troops, Territorials sent from Britain to replace the regular British garrison of the Suez Canal, recalled to France, and Indians, Australians and New Zealanders staging to Europe. By January 1915 their numbers had risen to 70,000.
It was this moment that the Turks, at German prompting, chose to attack the Suez Canal, which Britain had illegally closed to enemy belligerents at the outbreak of war. The conception was faultless, for the Canal was the most important line of strategic communication in the Allies’ war zone, through which passed not only much essential supply but, at that moment, the convoys bringing the “imperial” contingents from India and Australasia to Europe. The difficulty was in execution, for the Turkish approaches to the Canal lay across the hundred waterless miles of the Sinai desert. Nevertheless, careful preparations had been made. Pontoons for a water crossing were prefabricated in Germany and smuggled, through pro-German Bulgaria, to Turkey and then sent by rail across Syria to Palestine. In November the Ottoman Fourth Army was concentrated at Damascus, under the command of General Ahmed Cemal, with a German officer, Colonel Franz Kress von Kressenstein, as his Chief of Staff. Both hoped there would be an Egyptian rising once the attack was launched: even more wishfully, they expected to “be joined by 70,000 Arab nomads.”23 The approach chosen promised well, a direct march across the sands rather than down the traditional coastal route. Nevertheless, even in this very early age of aerial surveillance, a large army could not hope to pass unnoticed in terrain totally without cover during a journey of several days. It was, indeed, detected by a French aircraft before it reached the Canal, near Ismailia above the central Great Bitter Lake, on 3 February. The British were well prepared and, though fighting lasted a week, only a single Turkish platoon managed to drop its pontoon, so laboriously transported from Central Europe, into the Canal’s waters. Cemal, frustrated by British resistance and the failure of the Arab tribes to ride to his support—Hussein, Sherif of Mecca, was already in revolt—turned his troops away and retreated.
The war in the Middle East
The only outcome of the campaign was to keep in Egypt a larger British garrison than necessity dictated during 1915. Kress, however, remained in place and would cause the British trouble later; and there was one flicker of activity by the Arabs. In Libya, taken by Italy from Turkey in 1911, the fundamentalist Senussi sect embarked on a tiny holy war of raids against the western Egyptian border, the Italian occupiers, French North Africa and the Darfur province of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Some of the veiled Tuareg warrior tribe joined them and the Senussi leader, Sidi Ahmad, found a secure base in the Siwa oasis, ancient seat of the oracle to which Alexander the Great made his pilgrimage in 331 BC before setting out on the conquest of the Persian empire. Sidi Ahmad appears to have been inspired by the hope that his display of loyalty to the Caliph would win him the guardianship of Mecca in place of the rebellious Hussein. In the event, his Ottoman liaison officer, Jaafar Pasha, after being wounded and captured by South African troops at Aqqaqia on 26 February 1916, defected to the Allies and became commander of Hussein’s northern army in the later stages of the successful Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule in 1916–18.
The third front opened by Turkey’s entry into the war, that in the Caucasus, was by far the most important, both for the scale of the fighting it precipitated and because of that fighting’s consequences. The Ottoman advance into Russian Caucasia so alarmed the Tsarist high command that it prompted an appeal to Britain and France for diversionary assistance, and so led to the campaign of Gallipoli, one of the Great War’s most terrible battles but also its only epic.
Enver, whose conception the Caucasus campaign was, chose the theatre for a variety of reasons. It was far from the main areas of deployment of the Russian army in Poland, therefore difficult to reinforce and already stripped of troops to fight the Germans and Austrians. It was of emotional importance to the Turks, as a homeland of fellow Muslims, many speaking tribal languages related to their own. It was, Enver believed, a potential centre of revolt against Russian rule, which had been imposed by brutal military action in the first half of the nineteenth century. To the Russians the wars in Caucasia had been a romantic epic, celebrated in the writings of Pushkin, Lermontov and the young Tolstoy, in which heroes of the times had battled in chivalrous combat against noble savage chieftains; Shamil, the most famous of them, had won the admiration even of his enemies.24 To the mountaineers themselves, the Russian conquest had been the bitterest of oppressions, marked by massacre and deportation. “By 1864,” one contemporary calculated, “450,000 mountaineers had been forced to resettle … entire tribes were decimated and relocated to assure Russian control of key areas, routes and coastlines.”25 Enver counted on the memories of these atrocities to bring the “Outside Turks,” as Turkish nationalists liked to call all Muslims residing on territory once or potentially Ottoman, to Turkey’s side. His plans, indeed, went wider, envisaging a dual-pronged offensive—of which the advance to the Suez Canal was one, that into the Caucasus the other—that would result in the raising of revolt in Egypt, Libya and the Sudan and in Persia, Afghanistan and Central Asia.
Enver’s grand design was flawed on two counts. The first was that the non-Turkish peoples of the Ottoman empire, who formed the majority of the Sultan’s subjects, were already awakening to their own nationalisms; they included not only the Arabs, who outnumbered the Turks, but such important minorities as the Muslim Kurds.26 During his preparations for the advances on the Suez Canal, Cemal Pasha had found time to execute a number of Syrian Arab nationalists, who would become the original martyrs of the Arab renaissance, while many Kurds, oppressed by Ottoman officialdom for years past, took the opportunity the war presented to desert with their arms to the Russians as soon as mobilised.27 In the circumstances, “Outside Turks,” whatever their historical associations with the Ottoman caliphate, were unlikely to respond to his appeal to holy war. The second flaw in Enver’s plan was graver still, being unalterably geographical. “The Caucasus,” the Russian General Veliaminov had written in 1825, “may be likened to a mighty fortress, marvellously strong by nature … only a thoughtless man would attempt to escalade such a stronghold.”
Enver was worse than thoughtless. His decision to attack the Caucasus at the beginning of winter, during which temperatures descend to twenty degrees of frost even in the lower passes and snow lies for six months, was foolhardy. He had superior numbers, about 150,000 in the Third Army, to the Russians’ 100,000, but his line of supply was defective since, beyond the single railway, the troops depended on the roads, which were too few and snowbound to bear the weight of necessary traffic. His plan was to draw the Russians forward and then strike behind to cut them off from their bases. The first stage of the scheme succeeded, for the Russians favoured him by advancing during November as far as the great fortress of Erzerum and to Lake Van. This was the territory where t
he Seljuk ancestors of the Ottomans had won their victory of Manzikert against the Byzantines in 1071, the “dreadful day” from which their decline to extinction at Constantinople in 1453 dated. The Turks then had been free-ranging horse nomads, unencumbered by heavy equipment. The Ottoman Third Army brought with it 271 pieces of artillery and proceeded ponderously. The weather, too, slowed its advance and caused much suffering and death; one division lost 4,000 of its 8,000 men to frostbite in four days of advance. On 29 December 1914 the Russian commander, General Mishlaevski, counter-attacked at Sarikamis, near Kars, on the railway between Lake Van and Erzerum, and triumphed. The victory was complete by 2 January, when the whole of the Turkish IX Corps surrendered, and in mid-month no more than 18,000 of the 95,000 Turks who had fought the campaign survived. Thirty thousand are said to have died of cold, an entirely plausible outcome of a campaign fought in winter at a mean elevation of 6,500 feet. Much of the credit for the victory belonged to Mishlaevski’s Chief of Staff, General Nikolai Yudenich, who subsequently held command in the Caucasus with great success until the end of Russia’s part in the war. The victory was, however, to have one lamentable local outcome. Among the troops the Russians had employed was a division of Christian Armenians, many of them disaffected Ottoman subjects, who took the opportunity offered by Russian sponsorship to commit massacre inside Turkish territory. Their participation in the campaign, and the declaration in April 1915 of a provisional Armenian government by nationalists on Russian-held territory, underlay the Ottoman government’s undeclared campaign of genocide against their Armenian subjects which, between June 1915 and late 1917, led to the deaths of nearly 700,000 men, women and children, force-marched into the desert to die of starvation and thirst.