Basra: rail protection duty for India’s First World War soldiers.
Turkish Soldiers.
His calendar in the War Office in Whitehall showed that it
was Friday 18 December 1914. Sifting through the papers on his desk, Horatio,
Lord Kitchener, His Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, noted with
a grunt that today a formal British protectorate over Egypt had come into
force. So, Egypt was no longer part of the Ottoman Empire, that great rotting
relic of past Turkish glories still ruled from Constantinople. It was an empire
that included not just Turkey itself but the whole great swathe of Arabia,
stretching eastwards from the Suez Canal through Palestine and Syria, then
southwards taking in the whole of Mesopotamia and the desert vastness of the
Arabian peninsula, all the way to the Indian Ocean. For Kitchener, Arabia would
be the next great battlefield.
The Ottoman Empire had entered the Great War because of a
secret treaty signed with Germany on 2 August 1914. ‘So much for secrecy in the
Levant!’ thought Kitchener. What his network of spies and contacts throughout
Arabia could not find out could easily be bought for money or favours in
Constantinople, or in Baghdad.2 The Ottomans had entered the war when, after a
series of provocative incidents, on 28 October their navy had bombarded the
Black Sea ports of Odessa, Sebastopol, and Feodosia, belonging to their old
enemy Russia. The declaration of war by Russia, France, and Great Britain that
had followed on 4 November had been just a formality. The Ottoman response of
declaring a jihad, or holy war, against the Allies had produced singularly
little reaction among their own peoples, or among the Muslim troops and peoples
of the British and French empires. Instead, the British had landed the 6th
(Poona) Division from India unopposed at Basra, as the start of a painfully
slow advance up the river Tigris into Mesopotamia. Kitchener estimated that
Major General Sir John Maxwell’s 10th and 11th Indian divisions, now fully
formed in Egypt, should be enough to hold against a Turkish attack on the Suez
Canal. The much greater problem was that the Ottoman entry into the war had
severed the main line of supply and communications through the Black Sea
between the Russian Empire and its French and British allies. The British
government should have appointed him ambassador to Constantinople back in 1910
when they had the chance, Kitchener thought. He would have put an end to all
this nonsense with the Germans! Now, if the Black Sea route to Russia could be
reopened, he could put that right. He might even just save little Serbia,
hard-pressed though it was.
The formality of the British protectorate over Egypt was of
little matter to Kitchener. In reality, the British had controlled Egypt since
1882, including officering the Egyptian Army. Kitchener himself spoke Arabic,
and he had passed as an Egyptian when in disguise. In 1898 he had commanded the
combined British and Egyptian army that had smashed the Sudanese at Omdurman
and recaptured Khartoum. His active military service went back to 1870 and the
Franco-Prussian War, when he had volunteered as an ambulance corpsman with the
French. He had gone on to serve in most of the Levant, including Cyprus, which
he had mapped early in his career. After Omdurman, he had faced down a French
attempt at Fashoda to interfere in British rule over Sudan, risking a war with
France to do so. Sent to South Africa in 1899 alongside Field Marshal Lord
Roberts – little ‘Bobs’ who had died of old age and pneumonia only last month
visiting his beloved Indian troops in France – he had rescued the disastrous
British campaign against the Boers, ending the South African War of 1899–1902
by annexing the two Boer republics to the Crown.
Kitchener was now sixty-four years old. Having achieved his
last great ambition of commanding the Indian Army, in 1914 he was ending a
lifetime of imperial service with the post of consul general (effectively
governor) for Egypt. In Cairo, he had shared a palatial house with the
commander of the Egyptian Army, Major General the Honourable Julian Byng, an
aristocratic, tough, and experienced cavalryman known to all as ‘Bungo’. He was
Field Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum and Broome; ‘K of K’ – and to the
British ‘K’ never meant anyone else, just as a century before ‘the Duke’ had
only ever meant Wellington. The double ‘K’ monogram adorned the stately home
that he had bought at Broome Park near Canterbury. Music hall songs were sung
about him, and china plates and mugs were sold with his face on them. No
British public figure was more popular, or more of an imperial legend.
Kitchener reached for the latest report from Maxwell’s
headquarters in Egypt, assessing the Ottoman threat to the Suez Canal. ‘The
only place from which a fleet can operate against Egypt is Alexandretta. It is
a splendid natural naval base.’ The report’s author was one Lieutenant T. E.
Lawrence. Always on the lookout for promising officers, Kitchener made a note
of the name. Alexandretta, that was the key. The small and almost unnoticed
Turkish port in the eastern Mediterranean was barely a hundred miles from
Cyprus (which the British had also just annexed from the Ottoman Empire, having
governed it in practice since 1878). Kitchener knew better than most just how
ramshackle Ottoman rule over Arabia had become. ‘A great deal depends on the
attitude of the Arab tribesmen,’ he had told Sir Edward Grey, the foreign
secretary, on 5 December, but Baghdad, five hundred miles from Basra along the
Tigris, was ‘an open city of 150,000 inhabitants – the garrison consists of a
weak division of probably bad troops’. Kitchener also knew all about the men
now ruling the Ottoman Empire, the ‘Young Turks’ of the 1908 palace revolution
who hoped to modernise their country. They cared far more about Turkey than
about Arabia, and increasingly they had come to accept that the vast expanses
of desert and palm trees might not be worth keeping in the future, even if they
could.
Kitchener hated politics and politicians even more than he
hated the cold of the London winter. Meetings of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith’s
new War Council were meant to decide strategy, but they were achieving nothing
because no one could agree on a plan. Despite the high political office which
he now held, Kitchener had insisted on keeping his job as consul general for
Egypt, and because he was a serving field marshal he was still eligible for a
military command. In July 1914 he had been in London only to receive his
earldom from King George V, and had been about to take ship for Egypt again.
But with war breaking out in Europe, Asquith had appealed to him to take the
War Office position, which had been vacant since April after a political fiasco
over Ireland which had nearly brought down the government, causing the fall of
Colonel J. E. B. ‘Galloper Jack’ Seeley as Secretary of State for War, and
nearly that of Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. Asquith should
have given the War Office back to Lord Haldane, the brilliant political lawyer
who had created the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), the Territorial Force of
part-time peacetime volunteers, and much more besides. However, in the
atmosphere of August 1914, Haldane’s known admiration for – of all things –
German philosophy had ruled him out. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff
(the army’s professional head), Field Marshal Sir John French, had done the
decent thing in also resigning. But at least on the war’s outbreak French had
been given a proper job as commander of the BEF, which had been sent to the continent.
Kitchener grunted again, with approval: Johnny French was a difficult man to
work with, but he knew how to do his duty.
To Kitchener, Asquith’s appeal to take the War Office had
been direct and simple: in their hour of trial his country and its people once
more needed a hero, and he would never let them down. The problem was that,
despite the all-powerful Royal Navy, the British Empire had gone to war against
Germany without having an army to speak of. By continental European standards
the BEF was tiny. It had been badly knocked about before playing its
magnificent part in stemming the tide of the German invasion of France, and it
was crying out for reinforcements. The first troops of the Territorial Force,
who would ordinarily have needed months of training, were already in action
alongside the BEF regulars.
Kitchener had agreed with his new Cabinet colleagues that
the war would be long and hard, lasting perhaps three years. He had called for
a volunteer New Army, and both Britain and its empire had answered his call. By
the end of August one hundred thousand men had volunteered, and it would be
half a million by the start of the New Year. The recruiting posters were
everywhere, including Kitchener’s pointing finger telling the men that he
‘Wants You!’ The first of the New Army divisions – the ‘K-1’ divisions, they
were calling them – would be ready to be sent overseas by spring 1915.
Volunteers from Canada were arriving in Britain, and more from Australia and
New Zealand were training in Egypt, under the odd name of the Australia and New
Zealand Army Corps or ANZAC. It was a worldwide phenomenon unprecedented in
military history. Half a million men were volunteering to go to war, because K
of K had summoned them to do their duty.
In October, the hard-pressed BEF had also been reinforced by
four Indian Army divisions: an Indian Corps consisting of 3rd (Lahore) Division
and 7th (Meerut) Division, and an Indian Cavalry Corps consisting of 1st and
2nd Indian cavalry divisions. That had been mostly because of the work before
the war of General Sir Douglas Haig, now one of French’s subordinate commanders
with the BEF, from back when Haig had been Chief of Staff in India a few years
earlier. But putting Indian troops into a European war had been a stop-gap, and
the sooner they were out of France the better. Already, over seven thousand
Indian soldiers had been killed or wounded, in what one of them described
ominously as ‘this cold hell across the black water to which our British Sahibs
have sent us’. In Kitchener’s view, the complex balancing act that was the
British Empire did not include breaking faith with its Indian soldiers by
getting them killed by the Germans. Nor did it include those Indian soldiers,
many of whom revered their British officers, getting too close a look at the
darker realities of British society.
Although Kitchener did not admit to mistakes, he also knew
that appointing General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien as Johnny French’s other
subordinate commander had been an error: the two men just did not trust each
other. The problem was that Sir John French was in the wrong job. His
replacement as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Charles
Douglas, had died from overwork in October while trying to make the New Armies
a reality. Kitchener had chosen a pliable nonentity, Lieutenant General James
Wolff Murray, for his successor. At least Kitchener had an old and trusted
subordinate, General Sir Ian ‘Johnnie’ Hamilton, helping with recruiting at the
War Office. Hamilton was also the British Army’s expert on amphibious landings,
having pioneered the techniques and training before the war.
Kitchener re-read the draft of a letter he was writing to
Johnny French at BEF headquarters: ‘the German lines in France may be looked on
as a fortress that cannot be carried by assault and also cannot be completely
invested, with the result that the lines may be held by an investing force
whilst operations proceed elsewhere.’ Kitchener had seen too often what
happened when under-trained and badly equipped troops were thrust into action.
It would be at least two years before his New Army divisions were ready to beat
the Germans on the Western Front. So before then, what was the best use of
them, and of any other troops that he could find?
There was the last of the good divisions that Kitchener had
formed by bringing home the regular battalions from all over the empire, the
29th Division. Winston Churchill had contributed a Royal Naval Division made up
of sailors and marines, and the irrepressible Churchill would be bound to get
involved in the fighting somehow. In October he had led the Royal Naval
Division on a brief and unsuccessful excursion to preserve Antwerp from the
Germans, and had even tried to resign from the Cabinet if only Asquith would
give him command of the troops there! With a Cavalry Corps of three divisions
already serving with the BEF – with old Bungo in command of the new 3rd Cavalry
Division, Kitchener noted – an Indian Cavalry Corps of two divisions was not
going to be of much use. The Western Front would be dominated by artillery and
combat engineering for the foreseeable future. So, where would cavalry be most
useful?
Kitchener thought about his days as commander-in-chief in
India, when Haig as his inspector general of cavalry had introduced the new
tactics and methods that he and Johnny French had pioneered in Britain. Unlike
any other cavalry in the world – except for the Japanese and the Americans, and
they didn’t matter – the cavalry of the British Empire were equipped with the
same rifles as the infantry, and were trained to charge rapidly to capture a
position and then hold it dismounted. Even more importantly, years of hard
experience campaigning in the desert and the veldt meant that British Empire
troopers knew how to keep the horses alive and fit for battle in the most
unpromising terrain.
Generals, soldiers, sailors, plans – it was all starting to
fit together. Britain did not even have one proper army, but now by a conjuring
trick Kitchener would create two. What if he took command of the Indian Corps
and Indian Cavalry Corps taken from the Western Front, plus the Indian and
ANZAC infantry in Egypt, the Royal Naval Division, and the crack 29th Division?
Against the weak Ottoman Turkish divisions spread thinly throughout Arabia that
was the beginnings of a powerful force. For the time being, Kitchener’s job in
Whitehall was done. The best service he could give his country now was to
resign, go back to Egypt and beat the Turks, opening up the Black Sea route to
Russia. Then he could return in a year or so, in triumph as so often before, to
take command in the field of his New Army divisions, which by then would be well
enough trained to take on the Germans, and so win the war. But it all hinged on
the amphibious landings, on the cavalry, and on Alexandretta.
Alexandretta
On the very day that Kitchener was deliberating, 18 December
1914, at Alexandretta itself events were taking place that would convince Prime
Minister Asquith and the War Council of the wisdom of his plan. Frightened
officials in Alexandria were informed that a British warship had been sighted
out to sea just to the north of the port, and had landed an armed party of
sailors. The British had torn up the rail track, isolating Alexandretta from
Constantinople, and derailed an arriving train. The officials, with their small
military garrison and no warships, had hardly expected the Great European War to
reach as far as them. The artillery pieces from Alexandretta’s obsolete
fortress had been dismounted at the war’s start and sent elsewhere. The
strongest Ottoman forces, the fourteen divisions of the 1st and 2nd armies,
were on the European side of the Bosphorus in Thrace. They were waiting for an
expected attack by Bulgaria, which had been the main enemy in the First Balkan
War of 1912–13. Bulgaria had then been attacked by its own allies, Serbia and
Greece, in the Second Balkan War of 1913, enabling the Ottomans to seize back
Adrianople, but the threat was still there. The best quality Ottoman formation,
the 5th Army, of six divisions, was guarding the southern approaches to
Constantinople including the Gallipoli peninsula, in case the British or French
attempted to break through the Dardanelles by sea. Constantinople’s attention
was fixed on the Russian Caucasus, where the 3rd Army of eleven divisions and
two cavalry divisions was launching its great offensive at Sarikamis against
the Russians. This was an ambitious encirclement planned along impeccable
German General Staff lines, and modelled on the recent German triumph at
Tannenberg in August.
By far the weakest and least well-equipped Ottoman formation
was the 4th Army under Djemel Pasha (with the German Colonel Werner von
Frankenberg as his Chief of Staff). This had only XII Corps of two divisions in
Mesopotamia, and VIII Corps of five divisions in Palestine and Syria, mostly
facing the Sinai desert. That left only 27th Division at Damascus and 23rd Division
at Aleppo. The damning postwar assessment by Paul von Hindenburg (in 1914
commander of German forces in Eastern Europe) was that ‘The protection of the
Gulf of Alexandretta was entrusted to a Turkish Army which contained scarcely a
single unit fit to fight.’
Kitchener’s eyes were drawn to Alexandretta because, along
with its importance as a harbour, Alexandretta was also the hinge of Ottoman
strategic communications by land between Turkey and Arabia, including
Mesopotamia and the Levant. Alexandretta was the southern terminus of a minor
branch of the incomplete main rail line from Constantinople. In 1914 the main
line ran with some breaks through to Muslimie Junction, only a few miles north
of Aleppo. At this critical junction the line divided, with one branch going
south through Damascus and Amman, with a further branch through Jerusalem, and
the other going east to the railhead at Ras-el-Ayn, the gateway to Mesopotamia,
where far to the south the line joining Samarra and Baghdad had only just opened
that year.
North of Alexandretta there were two critical gaps in the
main rail line, totalling about twenty-five miles, through the Taurus and
Amanus mountains, where the route was impassable to wheeled transport. Rather
than negotiate the Amanus gap with pack animals, it was actually faster for
travellers and supplies to be routed down the Alexandretta branch line. They
would then strike out eastwards across the lower slopes of the Amanus range to
the open plain, covering the sixty or so miles inland to Muslimie Junction
across country. With all the gaps and problems of the line, and the bureaucracy
of a diverse and dissolute empire, military reinforcements and supplies from
Constantinople could take two months to reach Baghdad or Jerusalem. Enver
Pasha, the Ottoman minister of war, confided to his German allies that ‘My only
hope is that the enemy has not discovered our weakness at this critical spot.’
Enver’s hope was in vain. British war plans going back to
1906 included an attack from Egypt supported by amphibious landings at Haifa or
Alexandretta, accompanied by possible support from the Arab tribes. But the
British understood that the greatest Ottoman fear, other than a renewed attack
from the west by Bulgaria or the other Balkan states, was that the British
could use their formidable command of the sea to attack Constantinople through
the Dardanelles narrows. British plans before the war had considered a landing
on the Gallipoli peninsula to force a passage through the Dardanelles narrows
and on to Constantinople, but only as part of a much larger campaign involving
several fronts. Even at worst for the British, a landing at Gallipoli would
provoke a strong Ottoman response, tying down more of their best troops.
The first British warship to appear off the coast at Alexandretta – the appearance on 18 December that so panicked the town’s officials – was the light cruiser HMS Doris, one of a small naval flotilla with seaplanes based in Egypt and sent out from Alexandria to gather intelligence on the Ottoman dispositions. Next day, the Doris landed another shore party which drove in a Turkish patrol, blew up a railway bridge, wrecked a railway station, and cut the telegraph wires. The ship’s captain also sent an ultimatum, backed by the threat of a naval bombardment from the Doris’s 6-in guns against which Alexandretta had no defence, that its officials should surrender all warlike stores and engines.
War Plans and Strategies 1914: The Alexandretta Scenario Part I: Strategic Origins of the Idea
