Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (29 page)

In the preceding year’s campaign, even when Allenby had an advantage in numbers, he was quite open to the idea of using deception. In the operations that culminated in the capture of Jerusalem he had feinted a drive along the coast but actually mounted a “right hook” well inland. This move was supported by a stratagem that employed a staff officer to drop his haversack, containing false indications of an intended British move, after being “surprised” by a Turkish scouting patrol and apparently wounded while escaping. The operation went as planned, and the Turks ended up concentrating far too much force along the coast, allowing Allenby to advance inland.
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This particular idea was dreamed up and carried out by Richard Meinertzhagen, who had smeared the haversack with his own fresh blood at the moment he sighted the Turkish patrol that he hoped would “ambush” him. He was the same intelligence officer who had crossed swords with von Lettow in East Africa earlier in the war. Now he was operating in the Middle East, often interacting with Lawrence and the others involved in guiding the Arab Revolt. The best description of Meinertzhagen ever given was provided by Lawrence, who summed him up insightfully as “a student of migrating birds drifted into soldiering, whose hot immoral hatred of the enemy expressed itself as readily in trickery as in violence.”
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But Allenby could hardly resort to the “haversack trick” in the hope of deceiving the Turks again. And the plan for this campaign was to reverse the course of the last, as Allenby intended to drive up the coast rather than make another inland flanking movement. So the challenge lay in how to give the impression that he was mounting another right hook while really intending to strike straight at the wing of the Turkish army nearest the coast. To trick the enemy into believing he was going inland again, Allenby pulled out all the stops, relying heavily on the Arabs to mount an offensive from deep in the desert that would convince the Turks they were the advance force preparing the way for British regulars.

Allenby charged Lawrence with the task of raising his level of activity so as to divert large numbers of Turkish troops eastward. Allenby’s goal was for two-thirds of the enemy army to be shifted from the spot along the coast where he intended to strike. In the event, Arab raids achieved almost exactly this degree of enemy redeployment. Their ability to do so was partly the result of growing Turkish (and German) respect for the Arab irregulars as fighters, an assessment that grew out of the pitched battle at Tafileh early in 1918.

This was a fight that was forced upon Lawrence, who was loath to slip away ahead of the Turkish troops advancing to recapture Tafileh, a town he had only recently liberated. Had he left the locals to their fate, they would likely have been massacred for joining the Arab cause—and other villagers farther north would have been increasingly reluctant to embrace the revolt. So Lawrence stood and fought, skillfully deploying his troops in holding and flanking actions against a much larger force. In this one conventional battle, Lawrence demonstrated a grasp of tactics that went beyond guerrilla warfare and demolitions. He showed how his small units, properly employed, could take on traditional massed forces with real hope of winning. In the end, the Turks were driven off with heavy losses. The great British strategist B. H. Liddell Hart called the battle “a gem.”
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The effort to divert Turkish forces kept the Arabs and Lawrence in near-constant action up and down the railroad line, often mounting strikes at some distance from it. The Turks were frustrated by their inability to come to grips with the raiders, and their anger led to the commission of atrocities in various villages. Lawrence, his post-Deraa persona now on full display, allowed retaliatory slaughters of the Turks by his own troops as well. It was an exceptionally ugly moment in the campaign. But the end result, the redeployment of Turkish forces away from the British target area, was achieved.

Beyond helping to foster a favorable dispersion of Turkish troops, Lawrence was also charged with mounting deeper attacks against other key rail and communications infrastructures—much as Nathan Bedford Forrest did in his deep strikes during the Civil War—so as to reduce the enemy’s ability to respond effectively to Allenby’s offensive. Yet one more task Lawrence was assigned was to encourage the Arabs living in Syria along the way to Damascus either to join the cause or at least to welcome the Allies. In these undertakings too, Lawrence was eminently successful. The Chicago journalist Lowell Thomas, who would do so much to burnish the Lawrence legend, described the outcome of the campaign that ensued: “Lawrence and Allenby lost only four hundred and fifty men, although they completely annihilated the Turkish army, captured over one hundred thousand Turks, advanced more than three hundred miles in less than a month, and broke the backbone of the Turkish Empire.”
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Lawrence and his irregulars arrived in Damascus, the culminating point of the 1918 campaign, on October 1, just before Allenby and the main force got there. The Turks soon sued for peace, and the Great War itself ended in an Allied victory a month later.

Interestingly, Lawrence’s decision to leave the Turkish stronghold in Medina to wither was well borne out. At the war’s end its large garrison was still in place under the command of Fakhreddin “Fakhri” Pasha, a skillful commander who had repelled several ill-advised assaults by some of Lawrence’s more conventional-minded colleagues. But, as Lawrence had believed from the outset, this strongpoint required care and feeding that opened the Turks to a host of pinprick attacks all along its lengthy, tortuous line of supply. As Liddell Hart noted of Lawrence’s overarching concept of operations, it was aimed at an enemy “as dependent as any Western state on the lifeline of modern civilization—the railway.”
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Liddell Hart firmly believed that Lawrence should be ranked among the “great captains” of all military history, not merely as a master of irregular warfare. The basis for this judgment was in part a reflection of Liddell Hart’s own preference for taking an “indirect approach” to defeating enemy forces in any kind of war, conventional or irregular. But there was something more to his view. Liddell Hart believed that Lawrence had fixed upon an essential truth of modern military affairs: advanced technology both empowers and imperils. Yes, there are always attractive new capabilities that come with advanced systems. But there are likely to be even more new ways in which to exploit the dependencies that come with the latest technologies, posing the prospect that modern militaries may be more easily, and fatally, disrupted.

In Liddell Hart’s view, Lawrence had unearthed a great new truth in strategy that would soon compel military thinking: “the old concentration of force is likely to be replaced by an intangibly ubiquitous distribution of force—pressing everywhere yet assailable nowhere.” And he contended that Lawrence’s campaign was not a model to be used only by scattered guerrilla forces. As he put it: “What the Arabs did yesterday, the Air Forces may do tomorrow. And in the same way—yet more swiftly. Mobile land forces such as tanks and motor guerrillas may share in the process.”
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In short, the underlying meaning of Lawrence’s military career suggests that the true impact of technological change in the modern era will be to enliven and expand irregular approaches to warfare far more than it will reenergize or improve upon traditional, conventional concepts of operations.

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Whatever his far-reaching effects on military affairs, Lawrence’s great political project on behalf of the Arabs came largely to naught. Although some historians have downplayed his role in Arab affairs at this time—like George Antonius in his classic
THE ARAB AWAKENING—
Lawrence was indeed present at the Versailles peace talks, translating for Feisal and debating with Woodrow Wilson and Georges Clemençeau. But he failed to overcome the powerful pull of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and Britain. Negotiated earlier in the war, it gave France sway over most northern Arab territories and left the British the area south of a diagonal running from Acre in today’s Lebanon to Kirkuk in Iraq.

Lawrence was terribly disheartened by this carving-up of his imagined new caliphate; but he did not lose hope. A few years later, while serving as an aide to Winston Churchill—who, in yet another of his famous comebacks, was now Britain’s colonial secretary—Lawrence helped put Feisal on the throne of Iraq and did the same for his brother, Prince Abdullah, in Jordan. Iraq was to prove unstable from early on, devolving firmly into dictatorship by 1958, the throes of its turbulent politics eventually ensnaring the United States. Jordan, however, has remained a relatively stable state and, increasingly, a voice of peace and reason. Abdullah I was assassinated in 1951 in Jerusalem, but his great-grandson and namesake, son of the revered King Hussein, still sits on the Jordanian throne. Lawrence would be pleased.

After his time with Churchill, Lawrence sought to escape into anonymity. This was difficult, given that Lowell Thomas had done so much with his lectures—which Lawrence frequently attended—to turn him into a “brand.” And Lawrence himself had nurtured the brand in the first place, the distinctive white robe he wore becoming the latter-day counterpart of Garibaldi’s red shirt. His autobiographical account,
SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM
, and its more reader-friendly abridgement,
REVOLT IN THE DESERT
, fed the legend further. Despite efforts of both Lawrence and Thomas to acknowledge others’ contributions in the Allied advisory mission to the Arabs, revisionist histories of the revolt would later argue that Lawrence had not done all he said he had, or that he had downplayed the role of the Arabs.
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The current historical verdict, best expressed by Jeremy Wilson, is that “
SEVEN PILLARS
is remarkably accurate on questions of fact.”
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Lawrence appears to have decided that his only chance of regaining a “normal” life after the war was to give up his own identity. Surrendering his lieutenant-colonelcy, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force under an assumed name—John Hume Ross—was discovered, and then left the service only to reenlist in the Tank Corps. Now, as T. E. Shaw, he became fascinated by the future prospects for mobile armored warfare using his raiding ideas. As his biographer Robert Graves noted, during the Arab Revolt Lawrence “had fought some fifty armored-car actions, enough to evolve a whole scheme and system of battle for them.”
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But army rigidity did not appeal to him, so T. E. Shaw became an airman again. These were his happiest years. He served as an aircraftsman and was the best mechanic wherever he was based. Others knew who he was but allowed him to live as he wished. He received little treatment that could be called favoritism, being sent off to the wilds of Waziristan in the late 1920s. There the British, in an eerie foreshadowing of U.S. drone strikes eighty years later, tried to use airpower to quell hostile Pashtun tribesmen. Then, upon his return to Britain, he became involved with the RAF’s speedboat detachment, whose mission was to rescue downed pilots and crew who had ditched or parachuted into the English Channel. Lawrence loved flight, speed, and all the advances in technology that were coming so swiftly during these years.

His style of life has remained a historical and psychological puzzle. Some argue that his taking a pseudonym and assuming a humble position might have something to do with feelings of inferiority that grew from his illegitimate birth. His father, Thomas Chapman, had a wife and four daughters at the time he ran off with the girls’ nanny. He had five sons with her, T. E. being the second. There is no consensus as to why he chose “Lawrence” as his new surname, but T. E.’s resort to aliases does echo his father’s choice of a new life with a new name.

Other views about his return to service in the “other ranks” suggest that he needed a steady income and a social support structure. But he was a famous figure, not only for his war exploits but as a growing literary lion who consorted with the likes of George Bernard Shaw, Robert Graves, and E. M. Forster, and who could easily have earned a fine living as a writer. As to his views on the social benefits of life in the armed services, one need only glance at
THE MINT
, his scathing critique of how soldiers were stamped out, to see that Lawrence loathed regimentation and spit-and-polish.

In my view, his return to military life as, basically, a mechanic, can be satisfactorily explained by his desire for settings in which he could tinker with tanks, planes, and speedboats and develop a deep understanding of their workings and potential. For Lawrence was, at heart, a technologist. He may have ridden camels into battle in the desert, but he fought in just as many armored-car actions. During the revolt he became an absolute technical expert at demolition, “Emir Dynamite.” He hungered to develop a deep knowledge of technological advances, I am convinced, because he had so much to say about how the kind of irregular war he fought might be waged in almost every future conflict.

If there was a first among equals in his love of technological tools, it was certainly aircraft. Lawrence had often been flown around during the revolt—not all his reconnaissance was done on a camel’s back—and sometimes the pilots let him take the controls. He was a great enthusiast about the potential of attack aircraft in irregular wars, given their ability to strike swiftly over great distances. As he once told Liddell Hart, “I’m a tremendous supporter of air.”
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