Roger Ford - Eden to Armageddon: World War I in the Middle East

PEGASUS BOOKS

Roger Fords work encompasses both narrative military history and that of military, aviation and naval technology. It includes a highly acclaimed account of the development and employment of the machine gun, The Grim Reaper (1996), and a two-volume history of the part Allied special forces played behind German lines in France in 1944: Fire from the Forest (2003), which dealt with the role of the SAS, and Steel from the Sky (2004), which described that of the little-known Jedburgh teams, the first of a new breed of military advisors. After many years in London and a period in Tuscany, he and his wife now life in southern France.

Sultan Abdul Hamid II

Ismail Enver Pasha

Ahmed Jemal Pasha

Mehmet Talaat

Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim

Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz

Brig.-Gen. Walter Delamain

Lt.-Gen. Sir Arthur Barrett

Maj.-Gen. Sir Charles Townshend

Lt.-Gen. Sir John Nixon

Lt.-Gen. Sir Percy Lake

Lt.-Gen. Sir Fenton Aylmer VC

Maj.-Gen. Sir George Gorringe

Sir Frederick Maude

Sir William Marshall

Halil Pasha and staff

Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill and Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher

Rear-Adm. John de Roebeck

Rear-Adm. Rosslyn Wemyss

Maj.-Gen. Aylmer Hunter-Weston

Mustafa Kemal

Lt.-Gen. Sir Frederick Stopford

Lt.-Gen. Sir Bryan Mahon

Sir Ian Hamilton and Gen. Henri Gouraud

Gen. Henri Gouraud and Gen. Maurice Bailloud at Gallipoli

Maj.-Gen. Beauvoir de Lisle

Lt.-Gen. Sir Julian Byng

Lt.-Gen. Sir William Birdwood

Nikolai Nikolaevich Yudenich

Feisal ibn Hussein

Gen. Sir Edmund Allenby

Captain T.E. Lawrence

Kaiser Wilhelm II

David Lloyd George, Vittorio Orlando, Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson

The Bab-i Ali

Bashi-Bazouks

SMS Goeben

Riverine hospital ship

Turkish ski troops

Dunsterforce advance party

Towing landing parties to ANZAC Cove

Australian troops aboard HMS Prince of Wales

ANZAC wounded

Steam drifters

Australian troops charging at Gallipoli

The Royal Naval Division rehearsing an attack

Australian sniper and observer at Quinns Post

ANZAC dugouts giving onto terraces

ANZAC Outpost No. 2 inland from North Beach

Steeles Post at ANZAC Cove

Senegalese at Gallipoli

75mm field gun in action

V Beach at Cape Helles

British machine gunners, Gallipoli

Bathing at Helles

Kiretch Tepe

Turkish field artillery

Australian dressing station

Suvla Point

HMS Cornwallis

Playing cricket to deceive the Turks

The Hureira Redoubt

Turkish machine gunners on the Gaza-Beersheba Line

Gen. Kress von Kressenstein inspecting Turkish stormtroopers

Turkish infantry north of Jerusalem

Australian Light Horse entering Damascus

Greek forces at Smyrna, 1919

1. Eurasia in 1914

2a. The Ottoman Empire in 1875

2b. The Ottoman Empire in 1914

The Ottoman Empire was a dominant force in world affairs for over half a millennium. At its height it had spanned three continents, reaching from the Persian Gulf to modern-day Algeria, had already lost anything more than nominal control over its North African provinces, and its grip on the remnant of its European territory in the Balkans was being prised loose, thanks largely to the efforts of the power which had been its implacable enemy since the closing years of the seventeenth century and would remain so until her own fall in 1917: Russia.

Russia was a force to be reckoned with in the Balkans thanks to her self-appointed status as defender of the Christian faith, a role she had assumed following the fall of Byzantium on 29 May 1453. Despite forceful Turkish proselytising, two-thirds of the population of the Balkan provinces remained Christian, and provided the Russians with an adequate working mass. Dissidence flared up and was more or less put down on a regular basis, but in 1875 something altogether more serious began to take shape.

By that year, thanks largely to the Industrial Revolution having passed it by and left it with a balance-of-payments disaster, This immediately shut off all sources of credit, of course, and desperate for money, it levied swingeing new taxes in a forlorn attempt to raise it. Already the taxation situation was weighted heavily against non-Muslims (who were deprived of at least 40 per cent of their incomes); the new demands further exacerbated that, and the Russians wasted no time in exploiting the resulting unrest.

The Porte expected a backlash, no doubt, but it had every confidence of being able to weather it; that was a sorry miscalculation. Protests began in June 1875in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as it happened, but could have broken out in any one of a half-dozen virtually identical locationsand were put down swiftly enough, but the Turks failed to stamp out the embers completely, and they were blown into life again the following year, this time in Bulgaria. By the spring of 1876 the Russian-inspired dissidents were ready to act, but the Ottomans, forewarned by an excellent intelligence-gathering who settled the matter in their own inimitable fashion while the Turkish Army looked on. By mid-May the tragic affair was over. No attempt was made to separate the guilty from the innocent, and the most vulnerable suffered inordinately. There are no clear historical data for the number of people killed, and estimates range from 3,000 to ten times that, with 12,000 being generally accepted; 80 towns and villages were burned to the ground, and perhaps 200 more sacked.

The Turkish governments miscalculation was to underestimate just how badly a reversion to almost mediaeval standards of repressive behaviour would play in the West, and after the smoke, both literal and metaphorical, had cleared it found itself isolated and friendless (and with a new sultan at its head, Abdul Aziz having paid the ultimate price An armistice was reached, and followed by a conference at San Stefano, where Istanbuls international airport now stands; the resulting treaty saw Bulgaria granted her independence and awarded Northern and part of Eastern Thrace and most of Macedonia.

The other Great Powers (and they were not alone) were not amenable to what was seen as a move towards pan-Slavism, and convened the Congress of Berlin to reopen the matter in July 1878. While the resulting treaty watered down the effects of Russias victory substantially, it left the Ottoman Empire in Europe in tatters, with Constantinople in possession only of a band of territory stretching from the lower Adriatic to the Black Sea. The rest of the Balkan statesSerbia, Rumania (that is, Wallachia and Moldavia), Montenegro and the northern part of Bulgaria His opinion was to inform that of subsequent British administrations; it was still reverberating (in that of David Lloyd George) well into the 1920s.