Churchill's Wizards (17 page)

But then Allenby started imposing the terms of the Sykes–Picot agreement about French and British spheres of influence. Feisal must deal with a French liaison officer, and not attempt any control of Lebanon, even though Feisal's country Syria needed a Mediterranean port. The French dislike of the Hashimites began to emerge. Feisal, arguing for self-rule, denied knowledge of any Anglo-French deal and Lawrence – who had, in fact, betrayed the existence of the Sykes–Picot agreement to him – claimed ignorance of it too. What the Arabs should have earned by their own courage and endurance in the campaign was now trumped by imperial realpolitik. Lawrence backed away in disgust from the great deception he had been part of, inducing people to fight for what would never be given. Wavell described Lawrence as ‘overstrained in mind and body'. He asked Allenby's permission to go, and left Damascus on 4 October 1918. The last word in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
is ‘sorry'.

T. E. Lawrence has had many detractors, but also powerful friends. Chief among his admirers was Winston Churchill, who refers to Colonel Lawrence's ‘astonishing personality' in
The World Crisis
, and
wrote an essay for the anthology
T. E. Lawrence by his Friends
: ‘I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time … one of Nature's greatest princes.' Churchill also singled Lawrence out for admiration akin to hero worship in
Great Contemporaries
.

Churchill's own first experience of real war had been seeing ‘the Spaniards out-guerrilla-ed in their turn' by the rebels in Cuba in 1895. He read
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
as the story of one individual directing ‘audacious, desperate, romantic assaults' against a narrow steel railway track running through blistering deserts, the Achilles tendon which if severed would bring down Turkey, then Germany. Churchill identified with Lawrence as ‘someone strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independently of the ordinary currents of human action'. Churchill's later encouragement of the Special Operations Executive, of guerrilla and partisan armies, of commandos and Special Forces and their raiding tactics – ‘butcher and bolt' – owed an enormous amount to the example of Colonel Lawrence.

In the spring of 1921, Winston Churchill took over the Colonial Office. The Middle East ‘presented a most melancholy and alarming picture' of turmoil and turbulence. There was rebellion in Iraq, Egypt was in ferment, there was tension between Arabs and Jews in Palestine and disgruntled desert chiefs were rousing the Bedouin beyond the Jordan. Churchill formed a new department to deal with the area and invited T. E. Lawrence to join. He proved an admirable civil servant.

In March 1921, at the Hotel Semiramis in Cairo, Colonial Secretary Churchill gathered the top British civil and military administrators of the region (nicknaming them ‘the forty thieves') all together for a ten-day conference. Churchill and Lawrence then effectively redrew the map. They split the British-controlled territory west of Iraq in two, along the line of the river Jordan. The 23 per cent of the land west of Jordan, already under a Jewish High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, was to become the ‘national home for the Jewish people' promised in the Balfour Declaration. The 77 per cent of the dry territory east of the river, now named Trans-Jordan or Transjordania, was for the Arabs, and was to be ruled by Sharif Hussein's son, the Hashimite Emir Abdulla. His brother Feisal, who had been ejected from Damascus by the French in July 1920, now received his consolation prize, the Kingdom of Iraq, a place he had never visited.

Lawrence was pleased to seem a kingmaker in Jordan and Iraq and
to reward the Hashimite Sherifians, but Churchill was anxious to save some of the ‘ruinous expense' of imperial over-reach: garrisoning Mesopotamia or Iraq with 40,000 troops and suppressing the insurgency there in 1920 had cost Britain £33 million. He wanted to maintain the security of the new country on the cheap by withdrawing the soldiers and just using the RAF, then being nurtured on a shoestring by Hugh Trenchard.

When Churchill was in his previous job, Secretary of State for War and Air, he had told the House of Commons on 15 December 1919: ‘The first duty of the Royal Air Force is to garrison the British Empire', and the quiet success of a swift air campaign in Somaliland, in January/February 1920, convinced him that ‘air control' was the way of the future. Half a dozen RAF planes, supporting 500 Camel Corps and a battalion of Kings African Rifles on the ground, apparently managed to smash an Islamist rebellion by Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, known as ‘the Mad Mullah of Somaliland', in three weeks, and impose a peace that lasted for the next twenty years. It all cost only £77,000, so the Air Ministry made the claim that colonial policing by aeroplane, independent air action involving a little judicious bombing or mustard gassing of rebellious tribes, was the most economical use of the iron fist under the velvet camouflage of independence. After Feisal was crowned King of Iraq on 23 August 1921 he was protected from his enemies by eight RAF squadrons as well as some armoured cars and gunboats. By 1923 they had paid their way by saving Mosul and its oilfields both from Turkish invaders and Arab rebels.

Another fan of T. E. Lawrence was the foremost military critic in Britain between the wars, Captain Basil Liddell Hart, who wrote a biographical study of him, ‘
T. E. Lawrence': in Arabia and After
, published in 1934. Liddell Hart's famous ‘indirect approach', his 1920s rethinking of infantry tactics and strategy to avoid the butchery he saw as a company commander at the Somme, drew to an extent on Lawrence who, Liddell Hart said, ‘fore-shadowed what I believe will be the trend of the future – a super-guerrilla kind of warfare'.

Lawrence aroused love and hatred in equal measures. David Cannadine dismisses Lawrence as a ‘homosexual egomaniac'. Sir John Keegan sees the encouraging of guerrillas by developed nations, in which Lawrence played a pivotal role, as the tragic irresponsibility
which unleashed modern terrorism. Yet John Buchan said in his autobiography ‘I could have followed Lawrence over the edge of the world' and called Lawrence ‘the only man of genius I have ever known'.

John Buchan and Lawrence first met in 1920, although Buchan had heard about Lawrence from mutual friends like D. G. Hogarth and Aubrey Herbert. They had much in common: both were small, energetic, tougher than they looked, classically trained, with similar tastes in literature and the same benign vision of the future of the British Empire (a voluntary association without racial prejudice). They also shared a lifelong interest in unconventional warfare. ‘The science of war had always been one of my hobbies,' Buchan wrote.

Buchan changed Lawrence's life when, as director of information in 1917, he sent the American journalist and film-maker Lowell Thomas out east to cover Allenby's campaign. There he was introduced to Lawrence by Ronald Storrs, military governor of Jerusalem, with the words, ‘I want you to meet Colonel Lawrence, the Uncrowned King of Arabia.' The cinematic travelogue and lecture that Thomas put together after the war, ‘With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia', packed out the Royal Opera House, the Albert Hall, the Philharmonic Hall and the Queen's Hall in London from August 1919, and then toured the world for four years, culminating in a book,
With Lawrence in Arabia
, which launched the Lawrence legend and made him a kind of matinee idol.

It was John Buchan who suggested to Liddell Hart that he put Lawrence's essay ‘The Evolution of a Revolt' into the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
as its entry ‘Guerrilla'. John Buchan (according to his son William's
Memoir
) delighted in Lawrence's rare and secretive visits to his Oxfordshire home, and incorporated Lawrence into later incarnations of his fictional hero Sandy Arbuthnot. In Buchan's 1929 novel
The Courts of the Morning
(which reworks Joseph Conrad's
Nostromo
), Sandy Arbuthnot leads a horseback guerrilla uprising in a mineral-rich South American republic called Olifa, and blows up a railway, just as Lawrence did. For the increasingly desk-bound Buchan, Lawrence represented a last link to the world of adventure.

Back in England, at the end of 1916, long-haired, white-moustached David Lloyd George had stepped up to lead what he later called ‘the bloodstained stagger to Victory', the long last phase of the war in which camouflage, deception and propaganda played a vital role. On 6 December 1916 King George V asked David Lloyd George to become Prime Minister, and the ‘Welsh wizard' set about forming a national government, drawing his administration from the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties, with a war cabinet reduced to five. In the same month, Solomon J. Solomon set up a camouflage school in Hyde Park.

Lloyd George had more drive and initiative and a greater sense of urgency than his predecessor Asquith. A cartoon of him in
Punch
, entitled ‘The New Conductor', showed the new premier as a vigorous figure in evening dress, baton upraised for the 1917 overture. It was a mammoth task. The country was two years into a military effort that was draining the exchequer (the war cost £5.7 million a day) and straining national resources. The land battles slaughtered soldiers and the air raids scared the citizens of London, but it was the war at sea that was doing the most economic damage as U-boats attacked the cargo ships that supplied the British Isles. By the end of 1916, Britain had lost a fifth of its merchant fleet.

The Admiralty seemed paralysed in the face of the submarines, telling the Government in November 1916: ‘No conclusive answer has as yet been found to this form of warfare … We must for the present be content with palliation.' The only defences against submarines were underwater steel nets and not very reliable mines; U-boats could only be attacked when on the surface, by ramming or shooting. The new weapons that would eventually make a difference – hydrophones for detection and depth charges for destruction – took time to research and develop.

Churchill had feared from the beginning that enemy submarines could destroy British sea power and win the war. German U-boat attacks had diminished after the bad publicity they gained by sinking the
Lusitania
in 1915, and the Kaiser had curbed the renewal of torpedoings. But in 1917, with deadlock in the trenches and blockaded Germany reduced to a diet of potatoes, his Imperial Majesty was desperate: ‘I order the unrestricted submarine campaign to begin on 1st February with the utmost energy.'

Ironically, the power of the U-boat weapon would actually ensure that Germany lost the war. The isolationist United States of America only entered the fray after Imperial Germany began its strategy of indiscriminate submarine attacks on all ships, neutral or Allied, military or merchant, hospital or passenger, within huge zones of blockade. Two days after the Kaiser announced unrestricted submarine warfare, the USA cut off diplomatic relations with Germany. But this was not enough. Britain needed American manpower and industrial muscle actively on its side in the war. German submarines tipped US opinion in favour of the Allies, but a piece of deception clinched it.

The famous coup by the British Naval Intelligence Department that helped bring America into the war was not strictly naval, but diplomatic. The director of naval intelligence was still Admiral Reginald Hall, that ‘demonic Mr Punch in uniform' as Barbara Tuchman described him. Hall controlled Room 40, Old Building (OB40) at the Admiralty, the heart of British signals intelligence. Here were employed 800 wireless operators and around 80 cryptographers and clerks, who intercepted some 15,000 German secret communications in WW1. John Buchan's 1927 short story ‘The Loathly Opposite' describes wartime cipher work done by a unit of disparate amateurs very like those of OB40.

‘Gentlemen do not read each other's mail,' said US Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson piously in 1929 when he closed down Herbert O. Yardley's cipher bureau. The British – and Reginald Hall in particular – were less scrupulous about enemy communications in wartime. On 17 January 1917, OB40 illicitly intercepted, on American territory, a diplomatic cable message from the German Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, to Von Eckhardt, the German Minister in Mexico. Two of OB40's cryptographers, Nigel de Gray and the Reverend William
Montgomery (a scholarly expert on St Augustine of Hippo) cracked the code and were astonished by what they read. Zimmermann's cable said that if the USA came into the war on the Allied side, then Germany would propose an alliance with revolutionary Mexico and help the Mexicans reconquer lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

Hall had to play a clever game when he passed on this ticking bomb to the American Government in late February 1917. Hall's goal was to get the USA to join the combatants, so he had to convince the Americans that the cable threatening to foment revolutionary war from Mexico was genuine, without letting slip that the intercept had been made in violation of US neutrality. Moreover, Hall could not allow the Germans to suspect that their codes had been broken.

To camouflage his real source, the telegraph cable to the USA he was still tapping, Hall ensured that Edward Thurston, the British minister in Mexico, obtained a copy of the Zimmermann telegram in the form it had been received at the Western Union office in Mexico City. On 22 February, when Hall showed the American embassy in London the telegram dated 19 January, he could more or less honestly say that it had been obtained in Mexico and cracked in London.

The deciphered telegram shot to the US Secretary of State and then on to President Woodrow Wilson, who exclaimed ‘Good Lord!' several times as he read it on 27 February. When published all over the front pages of the US press on 1 March 1917, ‘the Zimmermann Note' caused a ruckus. Senator Stone of Mississippi and other isolationists suspected a trick by devious Brits trying to hornswoggle the USA into the war. The press magnate William Randolph Hearst (on whom Orson Welles based
Citizen Kane
) instructed his newspaper editors to treat it as ‘in all probability a fake and a forgery'. There were over eight million German-Americans in the USA, and they remembered previous anti-German propaganda campaigns by British agents. But on 3 March, when Zimmermann himself naïvely admitted to an American reporter in Berlin that he could not deny having written the note, the floodgates of righteous indignation opened. The idea of Mexican revolutionaries like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata being aided by Prussians to storm across the Rio Grande was too much. Pro-Germanism was swept away and the USA was inexorably impelled towards war. Later that month, 26,000 more US sailors were enlisted. Churchill said, ‘A new Titan long sunk in doubt … now arose and began ponderously to arm.'

The United States was taking up arms just at the time Britain and France's ailing ally, Russia, was letting them fall. On 15 March 1917, amid widespread strikes and the eruption of ‘soviets' or workers' councils, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia was forced to abdicate. A provisional government of liberals and moderate socialists was formed under Kerensky. They were, at least, parliamentarians, and the USA was the first government to recognise them, on 22 March.

President Wilson finally spoke up for the Allies, including Russia, on 2 April 1917. He declared that ‘the world must be made safe for democracy' and called the Imperial German Government ‘a natural foe of liberty'. The US Congress formally declared war on 6 April 1917, pledging ‘all the resources of the country'. In terms of resources, the USA produced more steel and more automobiles than any nation on earth, but its army of 5,000 officers and 123,000 men was not then very much bigger than the original BEF of 1914. The draft began in May 1917 and soon the USA had ten million fit young men under arms, being equipped and trained to go overseas. American soldiers first fired at the German enemy in late October 1917.

The all-out German U-boat threat to the vital food, fuel, and industrial supply lines of the British Isles, France and Italy required the urgent development of new methods of protecting ships from submarines. But the Royal Navy did not think naturally in terms of predators and prey. Incredibly, Lloyd George and Maurice Hankey had to struggle to make the hidebound Admiralty accept even the simple idea that grouping merchant ships into convoys gave security of numbers, and allowed them to be shepherded safely by destroyers carrying depth-charges. But after the convoy system began in July and August 1917, the losses from U-boats began to fall.

It was almost as hard to convince the naval establishment that camouflaging ships would confuse submarines. British Royal Navy battleships and cruisers had followed the style of the German and French fleets from 1903 in being painted a neutral blue-grey to blend with the sea and the sky, although most destroyers and flotilla leaders stayed black. Ships that did close support work for terrestrial forces (as in the Dardanelles) began getting mottled paintwork from 1915. But the Germans' intensifying use of submarines and torpedoes in 1917 called for something more daring.

The Scottish Professor of Zoology Sir John Graham Kerr was
among the first in 1914 to propose something like the painter Abbott Thayer's ‘countershading', concealing objects by reversing the natural positions of light and shade. Kerr suggested that Royal Navy warships should use white paint as well as the standard grey. But the Admiralty did not run with his biologically based idea, nor with Abbott Thayer's notion of painting submarines blue ‘like high swimming open sea fish'. During the 1917 submarine crisis, another painter came up with a dramatic new idea.

Norman Wilkinson was a 38-year-old professional marine artist who later became President of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colour. Living near Portsmouth, he was a yacht racer from an early age, and was encouraged to break into commercial art by Arthur Conan Doyle, then working as a doctor in Southsea, long before he became famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Wilkinson's painting of Plymouth Harbour, commissioned by the chairman of Harland and Wolff, hung over the mantelpiece of the smoking-room on the
Titanic
, the biggest passenger ship that yard had ever built. Wilkinson worked consistently for
The Illustrated London News
from 1901–15 (the heyday of the black and white illustrator) and claimed to be ‘the father and mother of the “artistic” poster on English railway stations'.

Wilkinson joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) and, as we have seen, painted in the Dardanelles. In 1917 he was posted to Devonport in the English Channel, and with the rank of lieutenant in the RNVR, was in command of an eighty-three-foot motor launch which swept for mines and patrolled off Portland Bill with two depth charges ready for enemy submarines. Wilkinson knew from the Dardanelles how alarming and effective submarines could be; now U-boats were sinking sixty vessels a week. On Channel patrol, he watched scores of troop-and supply-ships sailing across to France. Painted black and starkly silhouetted, he saw they were ideal targets for a U-boat commander's periscope sight.

Wilkinson also happened to be a lifelong dry-fly fisherman (his oils, drypoints and etchings of angling scenes are well known). Fishing requires tactics and camouflage; trout have to be persuaded, cautiously and intelligently, to rise to a deceptive fly. ‘The good fisherman', Arthur Ransome observed, ‘is always engaged in the active exercise of his imagination. He is the fish he catches.' In a chilly railway carriage, travelling back to Plymouth from a weekend's trout
fishing in Devonshire in the spring of 1917, Wilkinson had a sudden vision. If it was impossible to paint a ship so that no submarine could spot her, ‘the extreme opposite was the answer – in other words, to paint her … in such a way as to break up her form and thus confuse a submarine officer as to the course on which she was heading'. He arrived at Plymouth consumed with excitement, went straight to the Royal Naval Barracks and asked if he could see the commander. Wilkinson made a rough draft of a camouflaged ship, marked port and starboard with odd shapes in green, mauve and white, went to see the Flag Captain of HM Dockyard, Charles Thorpe, got him excited too, and drafted a letter to the Admiralty Board of Inventions and Research, dated 27 April 1917:

The director of naval equipment, Captain Clement Greatorex, picked up the idea, and gave it the name ‘dazzle painting'. At the end of May, a small store ship, HMS
Industry
, was then test-painted according to Wilkinson's designs, and coastal stations and other ships were ordered to report what they saw of her.

Wilkinson was informed that there was no room to do this at the Admiralty in London, so he would have to find other premises to develop his proposals. Walking along Piccadilly, he bumped into an old friend, the sculptor Derwent Wood, RA, outside the Royal Academy at Burlington House, where Solomon J. Solomon used to drill with the United Arts Rifles in their white jerseys. Wood suggested using the Royal Academy schools, and by the middle of June 1917 Wilkinson had managed to get the use of four studios for his ‘Dazzle Section'.

Wilkinson also outflanked the cautious Admiralty by selling his idea to the vigorous Glaswegian shipowner Sir Joseph Maclay, newly appointed by Lloyd George as the controller general of merchant shipping. J. P. Maclay saw the benefit of camouflaging Merchant Navy ships to protect them from submarines. Going behind the Admiralty's
back caused ‘a ding-dong row', but because Wilkinson was not a regular naval officer he got away with it, and ‘Dazzle' was transferred from Royal Navy to merchant shipping.

As Norman Wilkinson had realised on the Plymouth train, a ship with smoke unravelling from its funnels, moving against a changing sky and sea or sharply outlined on a horizon, was hard to hide. But, by using the ‘razzle-dazzle' geometry of bold stripes, curves and zigzags in black, white, blue and green to break up the structural outline of the hull, Wilkinson hoped he could disrupt the low-down periscope view from a U-boat. The distorting of perspective might make its commander doubt the target vessel's course, speed and distance in the same way as hunting lions miss the outline of an individual zebra, their vision confused by the flickering herd. The point of dazzle painting was deception. A camouflage officer once explained to a merchant skipper who objected to the vivid painting of his vessel: