by Hew Strachan
In the Sudan, reports that Turkish agents were active in Darfur arrived in Khartoum from December 1914 onwards. Enver wrote to Ali Dinar, the Sultan, asking him to join the war on Britain on 3 February 1915. However, the letter took over a year to reach its destination. Nuri wrote in August, but the first Senussi to visit Darfur did not arrive until March 1916. Ali Dinar had already threatened the adjacent town of Nahud, in Kordofan, with attack in November. The problems of Darfur had emerged before the outbreak of the war, and were therefore of longer standing than the Senussi threat to Egypt. The British had wanted to leave it as a self-governing buffer between Sudan and Chad; the French, advancing from the west, had demanded a clearer demarcation. Ali Dinar was frustrated by the Sudan government’s failure to protect his position. Sir Reginald Wingate, the governor-general, initially would have preferred the resolution of the Darfur issue to have been postponed until after the war. But Ali Dinar’s behaviour increasingly threatened the stability of the tribes of Kordofan. The issue was therefore essentially a local one. Turco-Senussi contact may have influence Ali Dinar, but the notion that his campaign would sweep on to Khartoum, and then advance up the Nile in co-ordination with the Senussi advance on Egypt was laughable. Cairo opposed Wingate’s taking pre-emptive action in Darfur; London approved it (Wingate circumvented the proper channels to write direct to Kitchener), but would not pay for it. By maximizing any wider relationship between Ali Dinar and the world war, Wingate stood to justify his actions and transfer the expense.110
To the east, Djemal’s 4th army—bled to meet the demands of Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and the Caucasus—was in no position to renew its advance across Sinai. Thus the Senussi offensive from the west lacked any direct support. Nuri divided his thrust in two. The coastal advance, which he accompanied, was commanded by Jafar al-Askari, an Arab officer in the Ottoman army. Jafar had organized his forces into four brigades, each of four battalions of 400 men, and from them had fashioned the principal striking force. Inland, Ahmad al-Sharif led a second column from Jaghbub to the Siwa oasis. From Siwa further oases opened two routes to the Nile. But tactically, as well as strategically, the British had the upper hand. Aeroplanes enabled them to watch the Senussi movements; armoured cars gave them the mobility to turn local defence into counter-attack. Jafar could do no better than adopt defensive positions and then make good his escape. Thus were the months of December 1915 and January 1916 occupied.
In February 1916 Maxwell’s forces had accumulated sufficient camels, 2,000 of them, to enable sustained offensive operations west of Mersa Matruh. Their aim was the reoccupation of Sollum. On 26 February, at Agagiya, 24 kilometres south-east of Sidi Barrani, Jafar again adopted a good defensive position, manned by 1,600 troops. As the British attack took effect the Senussi-Ottoman forces moved off to the south. However, the pursuit of three squadrons of British cavalry turned retreat into rout, crushing the Senussi rearguard and capturing Jafar himself. The Senussi did not again stand their ground. Sollum was reoccupied on 14 March.
To the south Ahmad al-Sharif pushed forces forward to the Bahariya, Farafra (only briefly), and Dakhla oases, equidistant between Siwa and the Nile, in February. Maxwell restricted his initial response to aerial observation and the occasional air raid. At first his ground forces lacked the mobility to take the offensive westwards from the Nile into the desert itself. Gradually, however, the Imperial Camel Corps (in reality a brigade, built up company by company from Australians, New Zealanders, and British territorials) created a network of patrols. To the camels were added armoured cars. As the Senussi oases became isolated, so the British consolidated their hold with railways pushing on Bahariya and Dakhla. Both oases were occupied in October 1916. Siwa was cleared of Senussi in February 1917 in a raid launched with armoured cars from Mersa Matruh, 320 kilometres distant.111
The threat from Ali Dinar was over before it had begun. The Sultan of Darfur could not begin operations until the wet season in July. Wingate had to decide whether to wait until the rains, when there would be water but the ground would be glutinous, or to act in the dry season, when the going was firm but there would be little water. He opted for the latter, advancing on the capital of Darfur, El Fasher, in April and May 1916. What enabled Wingate to spurn the climatic and geographic constraints that had hitherto restricted the penetration of European armies in colonial wars was—as in the north—the internal combustion engine. By using light lorries forward from the railhead at Rahad, speed of movement and rapidity of resupply minimized the water problem. Four aircraft, on loan from Egypt, replaced mass with force. On 23 May Ali Dinar and 2,000 followers quitted El Fasher, his march south harassed by aerial attack. The completion of the Cameroons campaign to the west enabled the French in Chad to turn east and to co-operate with the British in boxing in the Darfur rebellion. Ali Dinar’s support ebbed. By the time he met his end, on 6 November, his power had long since been crushed.112
The Sudan as a whole was unaffected by Ali Dinar’s efforts. Indeed, the stability of the area was surprisingly consistent throughout the war. Outwardly, the Anglo-Egyptian condominium had good cause for concern in 1914. The inspector-general of the Sudan, Rudolf von Slatin, was an Austrian citizen unable to return from leave in Vienna in August. The Central Powers were therefore better placed with regard to political intelligence (for which Slatin had been responsible) than for any other area of the Middle East or Africa. And yet Slatin, although he offered his services, was never used; he spent the war working for the Austrian Red Cross. Worries about Turkish and German propaganda proved so ill-founded that censorship was abandoned in December 1916. The Islamic appeal of the Caliph found no answering chord in the Sudan. The Mahdists saw the Turks as effete and corrupt, and preferred the temporary inconvenience of British rule to the return of Turkey or the reimposition of Egypt. The Mahdi had been Britain’s scourge in the 1880s and 1890s; his son, Sayyid Abd al-Rahmin, became Britain’s prop, acting as a counterweight to Ali Dinar’s summons to holy war. Prosperity served to consolidate Britain’s position. In 1914, when the rains and the Nile flood both failed, famine was averted by food imports from India. In the four subsequent years harvests were abundant, Sudan becoming an exporter of grain and cattle. In each of the years 1915–18 the real value of Sudan’s exports was 20 to 25 per cent higher than in 1911–14. Furthermore, because taxation was light, the proceeds went (by and large) into Sudanese pockets. British penetration in the south was suspended for the duration of the war. A single rising in the Nuba in 1915 was the only blemish on a peaceful scene.113
The Senussi were fractured internally as well as worsted militarily. Friction between Turk and Arab had increased rather than declined with the advance into Egypt. Nuri’s expectations of military discipline had been frustrated by the Bedouin’s independent ways. More seriously, the position of Ahmad al-Sharif was under challenge. The sons of Mohammed el-Mahdi were now of age, and the elder, Mohammed Idris, laid claim to the leadership. Idris had visited Egypt on his return journey from Mecca in 1914, and had received Kitchener’s support in his pretensions. When Ahmad led the Senussi into Egypt Idris remained behind in Cyrenaica, free to consolidate his following. Ahmad’s defeat at the hands of the British discredited his pro-Ottoman policy while validating Idris’s conciliation of Cairo. Mannesmann was shot in 1916, possibly by Idris, although conceivably by the Turks, who were jealous of German influence. The Germans themselves concluded that the Senussi would follow their own agenda.114 By April 1917 Ahmad’s supporters were reduced to about 200; he abandoned Cyrenaica to Idris and moved to Tripolitania. But his status here was as a religious, not a temporal, leader.
Idris opened negotiations with the British in March 1916, saying that he was ready to expel the Turks and the Germans from Cyrenaica, and to make peace with Italy and Britain. However, despite the wish of both sides to resolve their differences, the continuing obligation of each to its ally confounded the possibility of speedy resolution. Idris was no friend to Turkey; the Turks in his army at Zuwaitinah, south o
f Benghazi, were virtual prisoners. But he could not afford to dispense entirely with them or with Ahmad, if he was to support his diplomacy with the threat of a return to military solutions. The British, for their part, had agreed with Italy not to make a separate pact with the Senussi. And yet that was exactly what Idris wished to achieve: he trusted the British, but not the Italians.
In May 1916 Idris proposed that the Senussi be accorded recognition in all their existing areas of control, from Cyrenaica through Tripolitania to Tunisia, and that Italy be confined to the coast. Left to their own devices, the British might have accepted this package. As sponsors of Arab nationalism in Arabia, it behoved them to adopt the same mantle in North Africa; moreover, Idris’s proposal would secure Egypt and free the British to get on with defeating Turkey. It seemed to many that Italy was more concerned to use Britain’s military prowess to make good the lack of its own, its aim thereby being to secure its Libyan empire rather than to fight the First World War. However, Britain’s obligations to Italy proved stronger than its cynicism. By September negotiations with the Senussi had collapsed.
The fear that Idris and Ahmad would be pushed together again, and that the Senussi threat in Cyrenaica would reappear, was ill-conceived. British control of Sollum and of the coastal frontier enabled Cairo to sustain economic pressure on Idris. In January 1917 talks were resumed, and in April agreement was reached. The Italians and the Senussi were each accorded zones in Cyrenaica, with free passage between each. Sollum was opened to the Senussi. Italy’s gains were limited: its sovereignty in the area was still unconfirmed and its position would continue to rest, ultimately, on force of arms. Idris, on the other hand, had, by dint of hard negotiation, gained diplomatic recognition for the Senussi. The Senussi, although moved to war by Islam, had laid the foundations of Libyan nationalism.
Italy accepted this uncongenial treaty for fear of something worse. The Turks, thwarted in Cyrenaica and Egypt, switched their attentions to Tripolitania. In May 1916 Italy had retaken Zuwarah, on the coast between Tripoli and Tunisia, and seemed well placed to exploit the tribal rivalries of the region. The French agreed to co-operate with a blockade of Tripolitania, thus cutting the caravan routes of the Sahara. But by the end of the year Zuwarah was back in the hands of the insurgents. Both the blockade and the division of power among the Senussi served to increase Turco-German credit. Although Ahmad el-Sharif joined Nuri, the Senussi’s status was religious rather than political, and Ahmad depended on Nuri rather than the other way round. Temporal authority resided with the chiefs, some of whom were supporters of the Senussi but others not. Nuri was therefore able to use his skills in playing off one against the other in order to maximize his own position.
The main base for Turco-German operations in Tripolitania was Misratah, along the coast from Homs. Although the German navy regarded it as a waste of resources, in 1917 U–boats called at Misratah every two or three weeks. They brought Mauser rifles, armoured cars, and even light aircraft; on one return journey UC20 brought a young riding camel as a present from the Arabs for the Kaiser. In May 1917 a fresh German mission, originally sent to establish Mannesmann’s fate, undertook the erection of a wireless station and the manufacture of small-arms ammunition. Nuri continued to be jealous of the Germans’ influence, and the mission’s leader, Wolffron Todenwarth, told Berlin that all equipment should be delivered in the name of the Turks. Although the Germans criticized Nuri, by the year’s end they had effectively lost contact with the Senussi. The Turks had established twenty posts on the Mediterranean coast. In 1918 their total strength included 20,000 regular troops, a comparable number of reservists with only limited training, and a further 40,000 reservists without training.115 The combination of Italian defeats and German imports meant that arms were abundant.
However, unlike Cyrenaica, Tripolitania was not in the grip of a new nationalism. Traditional rivalries simmered, and after 1918 would provide the splits which enabled a reassertion of Italian power. Around Misratah the most powerful personality was Ramadan al-Shitawi; although a supporter of the Central Powers, his methods of taxation and sequestration had the effect of driving others towards Italy. Inland, the Awlad Sulayman tribe resisted Turkish control. The Turks responded by using another tribe, the Urfella, to curb the Awlad Sulayman, who then threw in their lot with Idris. To the west, Mohammed Suf al-Mahmudi, although himself a Senussi, clashed with Khalifa ben Asker who was eager to broaden the insurrection and push into the adjacent French territories.
The Turks’ ability to control and exploit these conflicts was weakened through the erosion of Nuri’s power. In October 1916 Sulayman al-Baruni returned to Libya as the governor of Tripolitania. Militarily Nuri, as supreme commander for all Libya, remained superior, but Baruni’s immediate political master was Ahmad, whose power was now broken. In December 1916 Nuri switched his own headquarters to Misratah. Throughout 1917 the clashes of the two Ottoman leaders forced each tribe to decide with whom its loyalties lay. The Italians, reinforced in the spring of 1917, and equipped with gas and aircraft, cleared the coast between Homs and Zuwarah in a series of limited offensive. Civilian mortality in this area and along the Tunisian frontier was appallingly high. The 1917 harvest was poor and combined with the blockade to produce famine. To this the Italians added atrocity and massacre.
However, Italy had no intention—and no capability, given its commitments in the Trentino and on the Isonzo—of doing more than consolidating its foothold around Tripoli. The defeat of Caporetto in October and the danger of collapse in Italy itself served to underline the point. They also rallied the tribes, forced into co-operation by hunger and Italian success. Once again the Italian bridgehead was reduced, this time to Tripoli and Zuwarah.
At the end of 1917 Nuri was replaced by Ishak Pasha. At first Ishak succeeded in subordinating Baruni and in reuniting civil and military authority. But his own power, like Nuri’s, was purely military, and his tough policies lost him local support. In May 1918 Constantinople made a final effort to retrieve the situation, sending Prince Osman Fuad, the grandson of Murad V, as the Sultan’s personal representative. Fuad endeavoured to break the power of the chiefs by ceasing to distribute recruits on a tribal basis and by centralizing the allocation of fodder, arms, and other supplies. The effect, however, was to foster tribal resistance to Ottomanism. Desertion increased. In a final bid to unify the movement in Tripolitania, and to fuse the tribes of Libya with the Ottoman empire, Fuad named Ahmad as leader of an insurrection to embrace all North Africa from Egypt to Morocco. It was an abject failure. In August Ahmad left Libya for Constantinople.
Italy ended the war on an upbeat note, anxious, no doubt, to consolidate its claim to Libya at the coming peace conference. Giovanni Ameglio, an ever-present figure since 1912, was replaced as governor by Vincenzo Garioni. Idris now co-operated with the Italians as they pushed on Misratah. The Turks, although anxious to continue the fight with Italy even after the armistice, were once again the prisoners of the Senussi, not the manipulators of an emergent nationalism. Paul Kutzner, a German commanding an Arab machine-gun section, remained unaware that the wider war was over until he was captured by the Italians in autumn 1919.116
The Senussi front thus remained active throughout the war. In this it was perhaps the most successful of the Turco-German initiatives in revolutionary warfare. Nonetheless, its effect on the broad strategic picture was minimal. The threat to Egypt was remote and short-lived. The total British and Dominion forces committed to the western desert may have been 40,000 men. But in January and February 1916, Egypt as a whole was host to 370,000 men. Of these only 2,400 were engaged at Agagiya. Italy was the power more directly threatened, and yet Italy was not the object of (at least) German strategy. Nor did Rome really rise to the bait. It was prepared to let the bulk of Libya go, retaining only a foothold sufficient for a renewed post-war effort.
The war in Libya stood independently of the First World War. It had begun in 1911 and it was to continue until 1931. It is best charac
terized as a colonial war—which originated as colonial warfare’s first stage, that of resistance to European imperialism by a traditional society, and then developed into its second, that of national liberation. Its tactical features also simultaneously embraced backwardness and modernity. The use of air-power, not simply for reconnaissance but also for direct attack, initiated by the Italians in Libya, was carried on by the British. In the context of relative technological superiority and small force-to-space ratios, industrialized warfare made for decision and mobility, not—as on the western front—for indecision and immobility. The absence of fixed lines and the difficulties of transport meant that the contribution of artillery was negligible. Armoured cars, on the other hand, could—in the right circumstances—prove more effective, operationally and tactically, than the camels and cavalry which otherwise constituted the bulk of the contending forces. In this respect, the war against the Senussi was of immediate relevance. The tactical ingredients which brought success in the eastern desert and Syria in 1917–18 found their origins in the western desert and Libya in 1915–16.
FRENCH NORTH AFRICA
Before the war Germany’s most conspicuous bid for colonies had been in North-West Africa. The two crises over Morocco, in 1905 and 1911, were significant stepping-stones in the development of pre-war tensions. German agents were reported as active throughout the Maghreb. Many of the imputations were no doubt false: the legitimate activities of German priests, businessmen, scientists, and academics could be imaginatively re-created as a part of a wider conspiracy as easily here as in Britain or in metropolitan France. Some, whose conduct may well have been perfectly proper before August 1914, were recruited for state service thereafter: Leo Frobenius, who had already roused French suspicions before the war because of his frequent visits to Algeria, resurfaced as a German agent.117 The French had good cause to be nervous. Their hold on northern Tunisia and on the Algerian coastline might seem secure, but their penetration of the southern Sahara was incomplete, and the pacification of Morocco still in train. And yet, when the war broke out, for all its apparent vulnerabilities French North Africa received comparatively little attention from the Central Powers.