Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (53 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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The Australians and New Zealanders are often said (especially by their descendants) to have provided the best fighting men on the British side during the First World War. It was at Gallipoli that they were first put to the test.
There were always two Gallipoli campaigns: a naval operation to break through the Turkish defences in the Dardanelles, and a military operation to land troops on the Gallipoli peninsula itself. If they had been combined properly they might have been successful; but they never were. The man responsible for the naval side was none other than Churchill, who was confident that the Turkish forts along the Straits could be knocked out ‘after two or three days hard action’. Not for the last time in his long career, he was looking for an easy way to win a European war. Not for the last time, the ‘soft underbelly’ of the enemy turned out to be harder than he expected. In fact, the naval attack on the Dardanelles nearly worked. Twice – on 3 November 1914 and 19 February 1915 – the Turkish forts were badly damaged by Allied bombardments. On the second occasion, a force of sailors and marines was successfully landed. But then there was needless delay, followed by disaster on 18 March when three ships were sunk as a result of careless minesweeping.
Kitchener then decided that the job should be taken over by the army. Five weeks later, in an amphibious operation that resembled a dress rehearsal for D-Day in the next world war, 129,000 troops were landed on beaches around the peninsula. The men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps – ANZACs for short – were only part of a huge Allied force which included British regulars and untried Territorials, Gurkhas and even French colonial troops from Senegal. The idea was simple: to establish coastal bridgeheads and then march to Constantinople itself, a hundred miles to the north-east. Churchill (always fond of casinos) privately admitted it was the ‘biggest coup’ he had ever played for. It was a gamble that would ultimately cost over a quarter of a million Allied casualties.
At dawn on 25 April the Australians and New Zealanders waded ashore at the crescent shaped beach on the west side of the peninsula known henceforth as ‘Anzac Cove’. Probably because of the strong currents, they were disembarked about a mile too far north. However, the Turks – among them the future president Mustafa Kemal – were quick to get to the scene and soon the disembarking troops came under a lethal hail of rifle fire and shrapnel. Five hundred Anzacs died on the first day alone; two and a half thousand were wounded. Although there is evidence that some of the troops panicked when they first came under fire, the real problem was simply the terrain: Anzac Cove is surrounded by a natural wall of soft brown stone with only scrub for cover. The men down on the beach made easy targets for the Turkish snipers. As you climb up the hill today, you can still see the lines of the trenches: the Anzacs’ hastily hacked out from the sun-baked earth, the Turks’ carefully prepared to German specifications.
Among the Australian infantrymen were two brothers, Alex and Sam Weingott from Annandale, a suburb of Sydney, sons of a successful Jewish clothes manufacturer who had fled persecution in Russian Poland to make a new life in the British Empire. Alex, the elder, was killed within a week, but Sam survived the initial onslaught. The journal he kept is by no means a great work of war literature, but it vividly conveys the intensity of the fighting at Anzac Cove: the proximity of the enemy, the lethal effect of shrapnel and the terrifying brevity of life at the front line.
Sunday 25th April
Arrived at the Gallipoli Peninsula at 5 o’clock am when the battleships opened heavy fire on the enemy. Engaged the Turks from 12 o’clock noon Sun. till daybreak Monday. Elbow grazed by shrapnel. Our fellows suffer heavy casualties.
Monday 26th April
... Engage the enemy the whole day. Their guns do awful damage. The biggest majority of our chaps seem to be wiped out.
 
 
Friday 30th April
... Keep up heavy fire during the day. Snipers still keep going and bag a lot of chaps on the beach. An Indian caught one and [it] cut his head off.
 
Wednesday 5th May
Went into the firing line at 7 o’clock am and came out at 1 o’clock pm. Had a merry time with the enemy and fired close on 250 shots myself. Enemy do heavy damage with shrapnel and I narrowly miss getting hit with the cap of a shell. Heavy shrapnel fire continues during the day. Turks have a good range. Went into the trenches at 2 am. Kept going all the time. Dead bodies outside the trench begin to smell.
 
Monday 17th May
Enemy keeps up heavy gun fire and the aim is very accurate. Mate of mine shot through the heart whilst asleep ... Shell explodes in our trench, killing or seriously wounding Captain Hill.
 
Tuesday 18th May
Turks give us an awful time. Shift tons of earth. Terrible sights. Men along side of me blown to pieces. Over 50 shells fired. Great moral effect on the troops. Many loose [
sic
] their nerves. Trenches blown to pieces. Work all night fixing them up.
 
Saturday 29th May
Tremendous bombardment by the enemy guns commencing at 3 o’clock am. They fire at point blank doing great damage to our trenches. One shell burst in my face and although unwounded was knocked out for a few minutes. My rifle was twisted beyond recognition. Put off for the rest of the day.
 
Tuesday 1st June
Artillery kept busy. Engineers blew up a portion of the enemy’s trenches ... Mortars do a great deal of damage during the night. Appointed Lance Corporal in charge of a section and I feel very proud.
 
Wednesday 2nd June
Overheard Lieut. Lloyd say that I would make a good N.C.O. as I wasn’t at all afraid. Enemy’s artillery fairly busy.
That was one of Sam Weingott’s last diary entries. Three days later he was shot in the stomach. He died on a hospital ship within a few hours of being evacuated.
Despite an attempted breakout in August, the Anzacs simply could not overcome tenacious Turkish defence of the high ground. And it was much the same story wherever the Allied forces attacked. Frontal infantry assaults were simply suicidal if the Navy’s gunners could not knock out Turkish machine guns and artillery. The stalemate was soon obviously as complete as on the Western Front – ‘ghastly trench warfare’ as the luckless British commander-in-chief Sir Ian Hamilton called it – while the problems of supply and sanitation were far worse. Amid bitter recriminations and buck-passing, Churchill pleaded for more time. On 21 May he wrote to Asquith: ‘Let me stand or fall by the Dardanelles – but do not take it from my hands’. Asquith replied bluntly: ‘You must take it as settled that you are not to remain at the Admiralty’. Fobbed off with the Duchy of Lancaster, Churchill’s political career seemed to be at an end. His wife Clementine thought he would ‘never get over the Dardanelles’; it seemed for a time he might even ‘die of grief’.
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The folk memory of Gallipoli is of brave Diggers led to their deaths by effete and incompetent ‘Pom’ officers. It is a caricature, though one that has a grain of truth. The real point was that the British Empire had picked on what it thought was a defunct Oriental despotism, and lost. Well schooled by their German allies, the Turks had been quicker to learn the new techniques of trench warfare. And their morale was also excellent, a combination of ‘Young Turk’ nationalism and Islamic fervour. Hasan Ethem was a soldier in the 57th regiment of Kemal’s 19th Division. On 17 April 1915 he wrote to his mother:
My God, all that these heroic soldiers want is to introduce Thy name to the French and English. Please accept this honourable desire of ours and make our bayonets sharper, so that we may destroy our enemy. You have already destroyed a great number of them, so destroy some more. After praying thus, I stood up. No one could be considered luckier and happier than I after that.
If God wills, the enemy will make a landing and we will be taken to the front lines, then the wedding ceremony [the martyr’s union with Allah] will take place, won’t it?
 
Like the mutinies by Indian troops in Iraq, the zeal of Turkish troops at Gallipoli suggested that the German strategy of holy war might be working.
Everywhere it was tried, the frontal assault on Turkish power failed. Despite its initial success in taking Basra and advancing up the Tigris towards Baghdad, the Indian Army’s invasion of Mesopotamia ended in disaster when General Charles Townshend’s army of 9,000 men – two-thirds of them Indian – were besieged for five months at Kut el Amara. Despite attempts at relief, Townshend was forced to surrender.
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Yet the British were not slow to devise a new Middle Eastern strategy in the wake of these debacles. It emerged in a form almost as fantastic as the German plan for an Islamic
jihad
against the British Empire. The idea was to incite a revolt against Turkish rule by the desert-dwelling Arab tribes, under the leadership of the Sharif of Mecca, Husayn ibn Ali. The man who came to be most closely identified with this new strategy was an eccentric Oxford historian turned undercover agent – an archaeologist, a linguist, a skilled cartographer and an intuitive guerrilla fighter, but also a masochistic homosexual who yearned for fame, only to spurn it when it came. This was T. E. Lawrence, illegitimate son of an Irish baronet and his nanny; a flamboyant Orientalist who delighted in wearing Arab dress, a man who made no secret (or did he just dream?) of having been raped by Turkish guards when briefly taken prisoner at Dera’a. But his affinity with the Arabs was to prove invaluable.
Lawrence’s aim was to break the Ottoman Empire from within, by stirring up Arab nationalism into a new and potent force which he believed could trump the German-sponsored holy war. For centuries Turkish rule over the sandy wastes of Arabia had been resented and sporadically challenged by the nomadic tribes of the region. By adopting their language and dress, Lawrence set out to turn their discontent to Britain’s advantage. As liaison officer to Husayn’s son Faysal from July 1916, he argued strongly against deploying British troops in the Hejaz. The Arabs had to feel they were fighting for their own freedom, Lawrence argued, not for the privilege of being ruled by the British instead of the Turks. His ambition, he wrote, was
that the Arabs should be our first brown dominion, and not our last brown colony. Arabs react against you if you try to drive them, and they are as tenacious as Jews; but you can lead them without force anywhere, if nominally arm-in-arm. The future of Mesopotamia is so immense that if it is cordially ours we can swing the whole Middle East with it.
 
It worked. With Lawrence’s support, the Arabs waged a highly effective guerrilla warfare against Turkish communications along the Hejaz railway from Medina to Aqaba. By the autumn of 1917 they were probing Turkish defences in Syria as General Edmund Allenby’s army marched from Sinai towards Jerusalem itself. On 9 December Allenby invited Lawrence to join him as, with becoming humility, he entered the Holy City on foot through the ancient Jaffa Gate (‘How could it be otherwise,
where One had walked before
?’). It was a sublime moment. After three long years of military reverses, here at last was a proper victory with all the desired trimmings: cavalry charges, fleeing foes and a dashing young hero in the vanguard. To the romantically inclined, the fact that Jerusalem was in Christian hands recalled the Crusades – even if the story in the officers’ mess was that the surrender of the city was initially accepted by a cockney cook, who had got up early to find some eggs for breakfast.
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