The Dandarnelles Disaster (33 page)

As war with Turkey loomed in autumn 1914, the British took steps to safeguard their oil supply, tiny though its contemporary needs seem when
compared with those of today. The navy was in the throes of switching from coal to oil while the needs of the army and the two air arms would obviously grow quickly. Their main supply point in the region was the Persian port of Abadan, in the British sphere of influence; on the opposite bank of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway is Basra, then an important Turkish military base. The first British force to arrive in October 1914 consisted of 5,000 troops from the Indian Army, supported by the navy's Persian Gulf flotilla. Basra was captured on 23 November and used as a main base for operations against the Turks in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Within a fortnight General Barrett advanced northward to take the junction of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates at Qurna.

The Turks struck back early in 1915 but their major counter-offensive was beaten back at the Battle of Shaiba in April, when Barrett was relieved by General Sir John Nixon, under orders from the Indian (but not the British) government to capture Baghdad. He moved further north to seize Turkish bases on the two great rivers, consolidating the British imperial grip on southern Mesopotamia. But Baghdad was still 250 miles away, supply lines were too long, the climate was unbearable, troops keeled over in droves, and the ‘Marsh Arabs' were hostile. Basra was incapable of handling enough supplies, which then had to be forwarded upriver. Nixon, who based himself there, was over-confident and dismissive of the Turks. He sent Major-General Charles Townshend's 6th Indian Division up the Tigris in September 1915, overriding the latter's opposition. At first the Turks retreated but at Ctesiphon, about 25 miles short of Baghdad, Town-shend was halted, badly mauled and beaten back at the end of November, taking refuge in Kut, which was besieged by four Turkish divisions early in December. The Indian government and a reluctant London administration mustered three divisions, two from India earmarked for the occupation of Baghdad and a third from Gallipoli, for the relief of Kut. But General Nur-ud-Din, the Turkish commander, defeated three Anglo-Indian attacks along the Tigris early in 1916.

General Nixon was relieved on health grounds by General Sir Percy Lake, who assembled a larger force for a new advance on Kut in April 1916. This too was defeated, and on the last day of the month Townshend surrendered Kut to General Khalil Pasha, the Turkish commander-in-chief in Mesopotamia, in a blow to British military prestige even worse than the failure at Gallipoli. Britain now took direct charge of operations, placing General Sir Stanley Maude (the last British soldier to leave Gallipoli) in command in August. By autumn his reinforced troops numbered 150,000
and more British officers had been brought in to exert control over the chaos affecting supply, transport and medical services. The logistical position was transformed by the end of the year with modern aircraft, better weapons and more and more vehicles. Maude's army expanded to a quarter of a million during 1917, outnumbering local Turkish forces by a margin of five to one. An advance towards Kut took from December 1916 to February 1917, when the siege was broken at the Second Battle of Kut. British troops finally took Baghdad in March. Most of Khalil's troops got away and Maude continued operations to prevent them being reinforced by the Turkish XIII Corps coming from western Persia. Despite a surrender and a number of skirmishes, the Turkish Army in Mesopotamia remained in being thanks to several skilled retreats. When General Maude, probably the best local commander on either side, caught cholera and died in November 1917, British operations were scaled down under General Marshall. But the fighting in Mesopotamia continued until the bitter end – the Allied armistice with Turkey agreed on 30 October 1918, to take effect on 1 November. Another British commission of inquiry into the Mesopotamian imbroglio started work as early as August 1916 and concluded that it too had all been an appalling mistake.

Meanwhile British imperial troops were also engaged in another major campaign against the Turks on the Palestine front. It began with the abortive attack towards the Suez Canal by Turkish troops of the Fourth Army led by Jemal Pasha, now governor of Syria, and the German General Kress von Kressenstein from Liman von Sanders's military mission. Some 30,000 Indian and ANZAC troops prevailed with minimal losses, but Kressenstein formed a small yet effective desert raiding force that caused much disruption on the Egyptian–Palestinian borders, and concomitant concern in London. Troops finally withdrawn from Gallipoli at the beginning of January 1916 were moved to the defence of Egypt under a cautious General Sir Archibald Murray, previously Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, from March 1916. His command was reduced to four infantry divisions by mid-year, nine having been sent to France and one to Mesopotamia. A second Turkish push towards Suez was beaten off in August.

Reinforced again to 150,000 men, Murray began an advance northward with half his force along the Palestine coast, relying heavily on cavalry and reconnaissance aircraft from the army's Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. The Turks set up a defence line from Gaza to Beersheba,
which repelled two British thrusts towards Gaza in March and April 1917. German air reconnaissance helped inflict heavy losses on Murray. He was replaced in June by General Sir Edmund Allenby as Britain built up its effort in Palestine, heavily outnumbering the Turkish defence, led from November by General Erich von Falkenhayn, the former German Chief of General Staff, based in Jerusalem. Allenby attacked the Gaza–Beersheba line, forcing Falkenhayn to form a new line 20 miles south-west of Jerusalem: but his counter-attack failed to break Allenby's right wing as the latter advanced northward, rolling up the Turkish Eighth Army along the coast before halting for the winter rainy season. Fighting continued however round Jerusalem (both sides were under strict orders not to attack the city itself), until Allenby entered the holy city, on foot at the head of his troops, on 11 December 1917, a massively symbolic victory.

The Mesopotamian front was run down at the beginning of 1918 in favour of Allenby's, which mustered 112,000 men in February. The British general took care to delude Falkenhayn that he would advance inland on his right while planning his major thrust along the coast to his left. On 1 March Liman von Sanders took over command of the Turkish line from the coast to the River Jordan and of the forces committed to the defensive Operation ‘Yilderim' (lightning), down to fewer than 40,000 men in Palestine. The infrastructure of the contested territory of the Ottoman Empire, never robust, was falling to pieces amid widespread Arab revolts fomented by the British, and Enver insisted on transferring troops to the Caucasian front against Russia. But Allenby had his problems too, losing 60,000 infantry to the Western Front between March and August 1918: although Indian reinforcements arrived, he could not mount an offensive until autumn, perilously close to the rainy season. Victory at the Battle of Megiddo (Armageddon) in mid-September and rapid cavalry and motorised thrusts broke up the Turkish defence as Allenby's forces advanced northward on a broad front towards Damascus and Aleppo. The dashing, fighting advance, one of the fastest on record since the invention of the internal-combustion engine, stands in marked contrast with almost the whole of the rest of the First World War, dominated as it was by trench warfare and the superiority of defensive tactics and weaponry over attacking forces. The British took 75,000 prisoners for fewer than 52,000 casualties (6,000 killed) over nearly three years – small change by First World War standards.

In the English-speaking world the Western Front is far better known than the Eastern, not surprisingly; in Australasia the Gallipoli campaign is even
better known (its naval prelude rather less so, whether in Britain or the Antipodes); but perhaps the least-known front of all in the history of the First World War outside Turkey is the Caucasian campaign between the Turks and the Russians, the struggle for the region south and west of the Caucasian mountains – today's Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. The Russians as ever had agents among the large Armenian population within eastern Turkey and were fomenting trouble even before war broke out: when it did, Armenian nationalist restlessness behind the lines, seen by the Turks as treachery and constituting a Turkish variation on the German post-war nationalist theme of the stab in the back, helps to explain (but not excuse) Turkish brutality towards this gifted but tragic ethnic minority. After a few border skirmishes, Enver, planning expansion at Russia's expense, assembled two armies, the Second and Third, under his own command north of Erzerum, a slow business without a railway in the area. The opposing Russian commander, General Mishlayevski, could not hope for reinforcement against a larger enemy because of the demands of the conflict with faraway Germany, but supported an incursion into Turkey by a division of Armenian rebels, who themselves massacred over 100,000 people in north-eastern Turkey in the opening months of 1915.

The Turkish two-pronged advance petered out when the Second Army was bogged down and the Third was routed at the Battle of Sarikamish. The victorious but still outnumbered Russians could do no more than send in a corps to occupy a strip of Turkish Armenia, where 30,000 rebels were now under arms. When a provisional government of Armenia was declared on 20 April 1915, the Turks engaged in what is now called ethnic cleansing of Armenians all over Ottoman territory. Even though hundreds of thousands of Turkish troops were engaged at Gallipoli, Enver ordered another advance on the Caucasian front in July, which was crushed by the Russians under the skilled General Yudenich in August, after which military activity declined on both sides. Yudenich was able to send a corps into Persia in November to foil both a threatened local revolt against the Allied cause and a Turkish deployment there. Despite preoccupations and bad news from the Eastern Front against Germany, the Russian army on the Caucasus front expanded to 22 divisions over the winter of 1915–16, not least to counter the release of Turkish divisions from the Gallipoli stalemate abandoned by the frustrated Allies. Yudenich captured Erzerum in February 1916 and Trebizond in April. Careful not to over-extend himself in difficult terrain, the Russian general contented himself with establishing a firm grip on Armenia in 1916. The western Allies would have liked him
to advance into Anatolia in 1917 to relieve pressure on their forces in Mesopotamia and Palestine, but the internal unrest in Russia, leading to the October Revolution, led him to stay put and sit tight.

That revolution put an end to the Russian occupation, prompting more anti-Turkish revolts by the Armenians, who were not above some more ethnic cleansing of their own. A ‘republic of Transcaucasia', set up by the Armenians, Azeris and Georgians, flashed briefly across the political firmament, collapsing under the competing aims of its constituent peoples when Armenia broke away in May 1918.

The Russian Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the victorious Germans in March 1918 was accompanied by an armistice between Russia and Turkey, whereupon the former evacuated Armenia altogether. By October 1918 the Turks withdrew from their own unprofitable operations in northern Persia, Baku and Armenia and repossessed much of the territory hitherto under Russian occupation. Enver's last major offensive in this region served only to undermine Turkish resistance in Mesopotamia and Palestine by drawing in troops better left there.

The CUP regime collapsed at this time and the dominant triumvirate fled to Berlin early in October. The new Ottoman government under Izzet Pasha set up a tribunal in summer 1919 which condemned the CUP leaders as war criminals
in absentia
. This brings us back to the last chapters in the story of Enver who, disguised as Ali Bey, managed to link up with German troops leaving Turkey for home via the Ukraine. General Hans von Seeckt, whom Enver knew well, was chief of staff on the German south-eastern front at the end of the war and, handily for Enver, became chief of staff in the rump German defence force, the Reichswehr, in 1919. In May of that year Enver made his first attempt to reach Russia, intent on pursuing his pan-Turkic and pan-Islamic ideas (and his own return to power), from Germany by aircraft but was arrested, unmasked and jailed as a suspected spy following a forced landing in Lithuania. After four months in prison the irrepressible Enver escaped and got back to Germany, where he joined other Young Turk exiles plotting in Berlin. In August 1920 he travelled incognito by train via East Prussia and Lithuania to Moscow, carrying a briefcase of papers from von Seeckt proposing a secret military alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union. That paved the way to the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922, enabling the Germans to train with tanks and aircraft in the vast spaces of Russia. This was a fundamental breach of the Treaty
of Versailles, concluded in June 1919 between Germany and the western powers, which forbade the Reichswehr to acquire or use such weapons. Thus Enver, who had so dramatically influenced the course of the First World War, helped to sow one important seed of the Second.

He even worked briefly in the Asiatic department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry in 1920–1. The Russians did not trust him but had designs on Turkey, especially if the new nationalist government of Mustafa Kemal were to be brought down by his war of liberation against the Greeks, who were initially supported by Britain and France. Soviet revolution or no, the Russians still lusted after Constantinople, even if the Bolsheviks had stopped referring to it as Tsargrad. Enver wanted to oust Kemal, whose government had been the first to recognise the new USSR (which returned the compliment), but Kemal had worked out Russia's true motives and identified Moscow as a potential enemy. Meanwhile at the end of 1920 Enver was plotting an invasion of Anatolia at the head of a Muslim army, just as Kemal wrote to him urging him to foment trouble among the Muslims in east and south Asia without telling the Russians. Then the Treaty of Kars settled outstanding territorial differences between Turkey and the Soviet Union, leaving Enver in limbo.