Churchill's Wizards (15 page)

Lawrence, a classical scholar who later translated the
Odyssey
, now remembered a useful parallel from the ancient world. In book three of
Xenophon's
Anabasis
, a group of Greek mercenaries find themselves near Baghdad, a thousand miles from home, their generals and captains all treacherously murdered, surrounded by Persians thirsting for their blood. Xenophon steps forward, dressed in his finest clothes, to address the survivors. He is not a soldier like them but a leisured gentleman, a pupil of Socrates who has come along for the ride, in order to see the world and to report on it. Xenophon tells the Ten Thousand what he thinks they will have to do to get back to Hellas: first burn the wagons, the tents and all their baggage; carry only food, water and weapons, and live off the land. Thus freed to react fast, and to improvise new weapons and tactics, the Greeks fight through and survive.

Lawrence, considering his own situation late in 1916, germinated his own ideas about guerrilla warfare. This became the subject of his brilliant post-war essay ‘The Evolution of a Revolt' which appeared in October 1920 in the first issue of
The Army Quarterly
, a journal founded and edited by Guy Dawnay, the intelligence officer who sent Compton Mackenzie to Lesbos. It is one of the most important things that Lawrence ever wrote. Later reworked by Liddell Hart as ‘Science of Guerrilla Warfare' for the 13th edition of the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
, and incorporated into chapter XXXIII of
Seven Pillars of
Wisdom
, the piece overturns conventional military thinking and analyses irregular warfare in a new way for the modern age:

In 1916, the Turks had moved their soldiers down by train to Medina and were advancing the 250 miles south towards Mecca. Lawrence soon grasped that the Arab tribesmen were not strong enough to attack the Turkish front lines head on and were quite incapable of defending fixed positions, so he attempted neither. Instead, he moved a force northwards behind the Turks to threaten the 800-mile Hijaz railway line. This threw the enemy on the defensive: the Turks recoiled and retreated to Medina, then split their force, one half to garrison and fortify the holy city, the other half to protect their supply line. Lawrence realised there was no point in taking Medina in a conventional battle of
pointless bloodshed: if the Turks could be made to stay in their fort it would turn into their prison. So let the Turkish soldier languish there, consuming his own supplies and eating his transport animals, harmless and helpless without a target to shoot. ‘He would own the ground he sat on, and what he could poke his rifle at.' This left 99 per cent of the Hijaz to the Arabs.

‘The Evolution of a Revolt' describes what is now called ‘asymmetric warfare'. Fighting the Arab rebellion, Lawrence says, would be messy and slow for the Turks, ‘like eating soup with a knife'. There would be no pitched battles, because the Arab irregulars – all valuable individuals, not mere units – could not afford casualties; there would be no contact, because Lawrence's Arabs would instead wage ‘a war of detachment: we were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till we attacked'. The Arabs would not engage Turkish troops but only attack empty stretches of the Hijaz railway line. They blew up the tracks not to destroy them permanently but to give the Turks maximum aggravation in protection and repair. Cutting the telegraph wires had an intelligence purpose: it made the Turks use the wireless more, which the British could then intercept and listen to. Waging mobile warfare with Bedouin irregulars required the best intelligence, and careful attention to the tribesmen's mood and morale.

Guerrilla sorties in the desert were more like naval operations, with camel raiding parties as self-contained as ships. Each man carried six weeks' frugal supply of food on his camel, a hundred rounds for his rifle and a pint of water to last him between wells. Ranging over a thousand miles, the tactics were ‘always tip and run, not pushes, but strokes … We used the smallest force, in the quickest time, at the farthest place.'

The Arab irregular volunteers were contracted by honour, not
discipline, and their war was conceived as one-on-one. Ideally every action was a series of single combats, in which good-quality fighters kept cool, and used speed, concealment and accuracy of fire to prevail. Lawrence reckoned that ‘Irregular war is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge'.

The Armistice arrived before Lawrence could prove the idea that a war might be won without fighting battles, but he was moving that way. These simple ideas have become conventional nowadays, but then they were as revolutionary as quantum mechanics. After all, in 1916–17, the British thought it normal to lose 60,000 men in a single day on the Somme, or 142,000 in four days at Arras, or 275,000 in four months at Passchendaele. ‘The Evolution of a Revolt' ends:

That formula has had an almost incalculable historical effect around the world ever since. Communist insurgents, including the Vietnamese, learned the lesson well. The entire first printing of Robert Taber's study of
Guerrilla Warfare Theory and Practice, The War of
the Flea
(1964–5), was bought up by the US military during the Vietnam War. Forty years later, there are still lessons being learned in Iraq; the sort of American military officers who read
Small Wars
Journal
also possess well-thumbed copies of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
.

In December 2006, the US Army issued its new field manual on Counter-Insurgency, written by General David Petraeus and Colonel Conrad Crane, advocating a radical change from conventional American heavy-handedness and massive firepower towards a more ‘hearts-and-minds' approach. The third of its source notes cites T. E. Lawrence's ‘Evolution of a Revolt'; the sixth refers to his ‘Twenty-Seven Articles' from the
Arab Bulletin
of 20 August 1917, of which Article 15 reads:

Military deception and bluff would play a key role in the WW1 Palestine campaign. In June 1917, Lawrence accompanied the warrior Sheikh Audah abu Tayi (the colourful character played by Anthony Quinn in the film
Lawrence of Arabia
) in a surprise attack on the Arabian Red Sea port of Akaba. This was defended by the Turks against attack from the sea, from which an assault by the French or British was expected, but they did not anticipate attack from the desert behind. Lawrence swept in from the hinterland with several hundred Arab irregulars in a camel charge. Having secured another port for the Royal Navy to land supplies, successful Lawrence went up to Cairo to meet for the first time the newly arrived British commander-in-chief, General Edmund Allenby (played by Jack Hawkins in the film). Moths had chewed up Captain Lawrence's khaki uniform, so he was still dressed in his Arab gear. Lawrence described him in
Seven Pillars
:

Allenby studied the map while Lawrence told him about Eastern Syria and its inhabitants. If given guns and gold, this strange little man seemed to be promising him useful diversionary help against the Turks on the right flank. ‘At the end [Allenby] put up his chin and said quite
directly, “Well, I will do for you what I can”, and that ended it.'

Allenby's mission from Lloyd George was to conquer Palestine from Egypt, drive out the Ottoman Turks and take Jerusalem. He soon moved his headquarters from the fleshpots of Cairo up to the spartan desert front north of Rafa and, restlessly moving about among his men (which made him popular with the Australians), resupplied and reorganised his three corps for a major battle with the Turks entrenched at Gaza in Palestine where two previous British frontal attacks had failed.

Allenby's intelligence achieved more than his famed bullishness as a general. He was a cavalryman, and because he used thousands of horses and camels it is possible to think of his campaign as old-fashioned, but in fact it was also innovatory, making intelligent use of state-of-the-art technology in aviation, photography, mechanisation and wireless to deceive and outmanoeuvre the enemy. In her 2007 study,
Military Intelligence and the Arab Revolt
, Polly A. Mohs considers it ‘the first modern intelligence war'.

Palestine in 1917 was the last great campaign in the annals of war where horses and camels were used strategically en masse. It was an utterly different context from trench warfare in France where artillery was everything and cavalry were useless. In Palestine, Harry Chauvel's Australian Light Horse fought thirty-six battles against the Turks in thirty months and won them all. Two of Allenby's three corps in the Egyptian Expeditionary Force were commanded by cavalrymen, including the brilliant tactician Philip Chetwode of XX Corps.

Chetwode's chief staff officer on the advance from Egypt was Brigadier Guy Dawnay, the merchant banker involved in deception in the Dardanelles. ‘Dawnay was not the man to fight a straight battle' wrote T. E. Lawrence in chapter LXIX of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
. It was Dawnay and Chetwode who persuaded Allenby that the Third Battle of Gaza should not be head on.

Broadly, Allenby's plan was like a soccer player taking a penalty: his arm and body signal towards the Turkish right at Gaza, but his foot shoots left to the Turkish left at Beersheba and curves the ball into the back of the net. It was risky: the desert route to Beersheba was suitable for horses and camels, but not for vehicles, and there would be problems supplying the animals with water. It was vital that the Turks be led to believe that any movements in that direction were only
routine reconnaissance or feints; they had to think the real British attack was going to come up the coast to Gaza.

T. E. Lawrence wrote that Guy Dawnay

Major Richard Meinertzhagen (1878–1967) was the future author of
Nicoll's Birds of Egypt, Birds of Arabia
and a study of avian robbery,
Pirates and Predators
. His commander-in-chief, Allenby, was also an ornithologist, and perhaps their knowledge of the aggressive world of birds led both men towards deception. Dick Meinertzhagen (the surname is German) recorded his life in seventy-six volumes of diaries full of horror and hilarity. According to him, when he first met Adolf Hitler in 1934, the Führer threw his right arm up and said ‘Heil Hitler!' Slightly puzzled, Meinertzhagen put his arm up and said ‘Heil Meinertzhagen!' It is a great story, except that he never met Hitler.

You get the flavour of Meinertzhagen as a schoolboy from the dialogue he says he had with Lord Salisbury during inspection on a Volunteer Corps field day at Hatfield Park in the summer of 1892:

According to his
Diary of a Black Sheep
, when Meinertzhagen was at his second prep school near East Grinstead he was sexually abused and sadistically flogged by a schoolmaster called Walter Radcliffe. Young Dick claimed to have felt so abandoned that evil crept into his soul. From prep-school age he determined to be the predator, never again the weaker prey. All his life rage lurked behind Meinertzhagen's armour of opinionated intransigence. It could be expressed in violent words or deeds, or suddenly masked in urbane humour and charm.

Meinertzhagen had joined the Army in India and spent 1902–6
seconded to the King's African Rifles, often up-country in Kenya where he enjoyed slaughtering both animals and humans. It was while leading a punitive expedition against the Kikuyu and the Embu people in 1904 that he managed to discover the new species of eastern giant hog which now bears his name,
Hylochoerus meinertzhageni
. Meinertzhagen finally left Kenya after facing three courts martial because of the machine-gunning of twenty-three Nandi-speaking tribesmen on 19 October 1905. They had been resisting the building of the British Mombasa–Uganda railway (dubbed the ‘Lunatic Express') through their land, and their chief was due to meet Meinertzhagen to sue for peace. When they moved to shake hands, Meinertzhagen pulled out his pistol and shot Koitalel arap Samoei dead. He claimed it was self-defence against a wicked old man who was about to murder him and use his body parts for a magic broth.

He was a life-long obsessive field naturalist who used deception when hunting. In Kenya, he constructed a dummy ostrich by stretching the skin of a female ostrich over a bamboo frame. Holding the separate head and neck in his right hand and his rifle in his left, he could get as close as twenty-five yards to most game if he approached upwind. Meinertzhagen thought ‘the hunting of men – war – is but a form of hunting wild animals'.

According to T. E. Lawrence, Meinertzhagen

Meinertzhagen was shocked by this portrait of himself and begged Lawrence to remove it from
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
. But his own diaries give an even worse impression. When he was at the Staff College in Quetta, Baluchistan, Meinertzhagen says that when he found his syce or stable groom mistreating his ponies, he beat the man to death with a polo mallet. He claims to have hushed the matter up with the police and got the dead man registered as a plague victim. In the East African campaign against the Germans in Tanganyika, Meinertzhagen laid dead birds and animals around a clean water-hole
and signposted it POISONED so as to deny it to the enemy but keep it safe for his own use. As the British Intelligence officer, he once sent a suspected German spy 1,500 rupees and a thank-you note and made sure the Germans intercepted it, so they would shoot their own man and save Meinertzhagen the trouble. Running an effective network of agents in East Africa, Meinertzhagen discovered that the German officers' latrines were a good source of soiled documents and letters, yielding ‘filthy, though accurate information'. This was the vigorously amoral soldier who played a part in British deception in Palestine.

Meinertzhagen spent some time secretly preparing the famous ‘haversack ruse' of 10 October 1917 which Allenby credited with a major role in the successful attack on Gaza, and always claimed to have carried it off, in person and alone. In essence, Meinertzhagen said he rode out into the country north-west of Beersheba, deliberately tangled with a Turkish patrol and got himself shot at. He slumped in the saddle, dropping his water bottle, field glasses, rifle and, most important of all, a khaki haversack stained with his horse's fresh blood, containing personal letters, papers and £20 in notes. Then he rode away, mimicking the tactics of the lapwing, pretending to be wounded to draw predators away from its nest. But he lingered long enough to see the rifle and haversack were picked up.

The abandoned papers in the haversack looked absolutely genuine but were all forgeries. A British staff officer's notebook, Army Book 155, was filled with ‘all sorts of nonsense about our plans and difficulties'. The supposed agenda for a staff conference would have told the Turks and Germans the main attack was coming at Gaza, preceded by a mere feint at Beersheba, the opposite of the truth. There was also an ardent letter from a wife announcing the birth of a son called Richard (written, Meinertzhagen first claimed, by his sister who had never had a child and was miles and weeks away in England, though he later said it was composed by a nurse at El Arish). There were also notes on a cipher which would enable the enemy ‘to decipher any camouflage messages we might send later on'.

Meinertzhagen claims he backed up his stratagem by sending out anxious wireless messages about the haversack and furious divisional orders regarding proper security of papers; Turkish and German intelligence officers monitoring radio traffic took the bait to the commander of the Eighth Turkish Army, General Friedrich Kress von
Kressenstein, who swallowed it. Two British soldiers, not in the know but captured while genuinely searching for the haversack, confirmed its credibility, as did the finding of a copy of Desert Corps Orders (apparently carelessly thrown away in the wrappings of an officer's lunch) requiring the lost notebook to be returned to GHQ.

‘The haversack ruse' is a terrific story. Something like it did, indeed, happen. But in his 2007 biography,
The Meinertzhagen Mystery
, Brian Garfield says that the idea for it came from another man, Lieutenant Colonel J. D. Belgrave, and that the actual perpetrator was a man called Arthur Neate, on 12 September, and not Meinertzhagen at all. If Garfield is right, Meinertzhagen swooped in to steal the credit for other men's initiative and courage.

Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Wavell was a direct participant in these Palestine events as the liaison officer between the Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London and the commander-in-chief in the field, Edmund Allenby. Later, when Wavell himself had become commander-in-chief, Middle East, he would write an admiring biography of Allenby, subtitled
A Study in Greatness
. Allenby's use of intelligence, deception and guerrilla forces in what Churchill called the ‘brilliant and frugal' operations in Palestine profoundly influenced Wavell in the next World War.

Allenby's great push for Palestine began at the end of October 1917. The RFC and the RNAS had air superiority when the Royal Navy began shelling Gaza from the sea. The British in Cairo could listen in to all German aerial and airfield communications from Syria to Sinai, which meant they could send up planes to intercept any German efforts at aerial reconnaissance. Because of this, the enemy never spotted 40,000 British troops slipping eastwards on the night of 30 October. The British infantry seized the garrisoned town of Beersheba by surprise and, following a spectacular charge by the Australian Light Horse, the cavalry and camelry of the Desert Mounted Corps took the vital water wells before they could be demolished.

Then Allenby attacked Gaza on the night of 1 November. This distraction drew all the Turkish reserves westward. Deluded by false intelligence, including the haversack ruse, the Turks assumed this was the main assault of the Third Battle of Gaza. But on 6 November British mounted divisions attacked the Turkish lines from the east, from Beersheba. The Turks panicked: Gaza was abandoned the next
day and Turkish troops began retreating north along the coastal plain.

Meinertzhagen later claimed that many of these soldiers were drowsy and fuddled, because of another of his tricks: thousands of cigarettes, ‘heavily doped with opium', had been dropped on their lines. Meinertzhagen says he later tried one himself: ‘They were indeed strong. The effect was sublime, complete abandonment, all energy gone, lovely dreams and complete inability to act or think.' There is absolutely no confirmation of this story from anyone but Meinertzhagen.