Enemy on the Euphrates (6 page)

It was never to be. On 28 June 1914, a Serbian extremist assassinated the Austrian Duke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and a month later (28 July) the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. Thereafter, a fatal interlocking network of international treaties dragged all the major powers into war. At midnight on 30 July, the tsar ordered total mobilisation of the Russian armed forces in support of Serbia. In response, on 1 August, Austria’s ally Germany also began mobilisation and the following day signed a secret alliance pact with the Ottoman Empire. On 3 August, Germany declared war on Russia’s ally France and invaded Belgium. This in turn triggered Britain’s declaration of war against Germany the following day. Finally, after completing its mobilisation, on 31 October the Ottoman Empire joined Germany and Austria in their war against the Allies.
¹³
And now, the British oil interests at Abadan and in south-west Persia had suddenly become uncomfortably close to enemy soil.

Many years after the end of the First World War, Lieutenant Wilson – by then, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Arnold Wilson MP – reflected on the events which had tumbled Britain into a major war in the Middle East at the beginning of November 1914. When ‘the little war cloud first arose in the West, no bigger than a man’s hand’, he mused, ‘it occurred to no one in Turkish Arabia that it would overshadow them within a few months bringing terror and doom to pygmy man.’
¹
Neither could he, nor anyone else, ever have imagined that within six years nearly 30,000 British and Indian soldiers and an equal number of Turks and Arabs would perish – as Wilson put it – ‘in the flower of their youth in the country of the two rivers and the rocky wastes of Kurdistan’.

Unlike the other major powers bound by those toxic international treaties, there was nothing inevitable about the outbreak of hostilities between the two empires – Ottoman and British. Although the latter’s long-standing diplomatic support for the former was beginning to weaken somewhat,
²
the British government had shown little concern when a revolutionary organisation, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), overthrew the government of the paranoid and despotic Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1908, and had maintained a studied neutrality in the 1912 Balkan War which had driven Turkey from most of its European possessions. True, by 1914 there was a powerful pro-German faction within the Ottoman government, notably in the person of its virtual dictator, the dapper, thirty-three-year-old Enver Pasha; but there were also elements within the ruling CUP which had no wish for an
armed struggle against the British Empire. Nevertheless, once hostilities had commenced in Europe in August 1914, a long, smouldering fuse of war began to slowly burn its way towards the British possessions and dependencies at the head of the Gulf.

Difficult though it is to say precisely how that fuse was lit, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, was probably one of the incendiarists. Britain had been building two Dreadnought class battleships for Turkey on the Tyne, the
Sultan Osman
and the
Reshadieh
. The ships had cost Turkey £7.5 million, a huge sum of money for a bankrupt nation, and the cash had been raised by public subscription in the hope that the new warships would enable the Ottoman Empire to recover islands in the Aegean and Dodecanese which had been lost to Italy and Greece in the wars of 1911 and 1912. The
Sultan Osman
had been completed and Turkish crews had arrived to man both vessels, but the ships were awaiting the construction of a larger dock sufficient to hold them at Istanbul. On 28 July, the day on which Austria declared war on Serbia, Churchill proposed that both ships should be requisitioned for the Royal Navy and on 31 July the cabinet approved their seizure.

These events enraged Turkish public opinion and Churchill’s action played into the hands of the Germanophile Enver Pasha, who had been secretly negotiating with Berlin for an Ottoman–German pact behind the backs of his colleagues in the CUP. Consequently, on 2 August 1914, Germany and the Ottoman Empire signed an alliance, although the Turks decided to make no formal declaration of war against the Allies until their mobilisation was completed. Meanwhile, two German warships, the 23,000-ton battlecruiser
Goeben
and the light cruiser
Breslau
, had been ordered to the western Mediterranean with a view to attacking ships ferrying troops to France from its North African colonies. On 3 August they were secretly dispatched to Istanbul, from where they were allowed to pass through the Dardanelles into the Black Sea. On 27 October the two ships, accompanied by Ottoman vessels, began to bombard the Russian ports of Odessa, Sevastopol and Feodosia. Three days later, Britain, France and Russia withdrew their ambassadors from Istanbul and on 31 October the Ottoman Empire declared war on the Allies.
³

While these events were unfolding and relations between London and Istanbul were beginning to deteriorate, anxiety began to grow over the security of Britain’s oil operations at Abadan island and its Persian hinterland.
⁴
At that time the oilfield at Masjid-i-Sulayman and the Abadan refinery were producing only around 8,000 barrels per day, a very modest production level by world standards,
⁵
but there were expectations of substantial future increases and the Royal Navy needed every barrel it could get its hands on. Admiral Slade, one of the government’s two representatives on the board of Anglo-Persian, wrote a memorandum to this effect urging the dispatch of troops to defend the oil installations. But initially, Churchill thought there were simply not enough troops available. In a minute attached to Slade’s memorandum he therefore concluded – no doubt ruefully, given his previous support for Anglo-Persian – that ‘we shall have to buy our oil from elsewhere.’

However, throughout September and October 1914 consultations between London and the government of India continued as to how best to protect the nascent British-owned oil industry should hostilities with the Ottoman Empire commence. Although the government of India was reluctant to do anything which might ignite Muslim passions – and there were already reports of strong anti-British sentiments among the population in Baghdad and Basra
⁶
– feelings in favour of a landing in southern Iraq grew in strength, fortified by the view that Britain must do all it could to protect its client sheikhdoms at Kuwait and Muhammara, especially since it was Sheikh Khaz’al of Muhammara who was the British oil industry’s ‘landlord’ at Abadan. On 2 October the crucial decision was made. A brigade-strength expeditionary force of Anglo-Indian troops in five transport ships supported by the old battleship HMS
Ocean
would put to sea on 16 October with orders to make what was described as a ‘demonstration’.
⁷

Meanwhile, on 29 September, the Royal Navy sloop HMS
Espiégle
, mounting six 4-inch guns and four 3-pounders, was ordered to enter the Shatt al-‘Arab, followed by the armed merchantman
Dalhousie
, while another sloop, the
Odin
, stayed to patrol the mouth of the estuary.
Espiégle
then sailed up the Shatt al-‘Arab and anchored off the Sheikh of
Muhammara’s capital at the mouth of the Karun. Whatever was intended by this exercise in gunboat diplomacy, its impact only exacerbated the growing tensions between Britain and the Turks. The governor of Basra, Subhi Bey, demanded the ship’s departure by 21 October, threatening to blockade it if it didn’t withdraw by that date. So
Espiégle
dropped back to Abadan; but it did so under heavy small-arms fire from the Ottoman side of the river.

At the same time, the small expeditionary force of one British battalion and three Indian battalions with two 10-pounder mountain batteries, from Sir Arthur Barrett’s 6th (Poona) Division, which had put to sea on 16 October for the purpose of making the ‘demonstration’, sailed for the Shatt al-‘Arab with the following orders:

1) Protect the oil refineries, tanks and pipelines.

2) Cover the landing of reinforcements.

3) Assure local Arabs of our support against Turkey.
⁸

The landing force was commanded by Brigadier General W.S. Delamain of the Indian Army and accompanying him as chief political officer was Arnold Wilson’s superior, Sir Percy Cox. The brigade arrived at the sandbar which obstructs the mouth of the estuary on 3 November and, after sweeping for mines, sailed up to Abadan. Meanwhile the sloop
Odin
bombarded the Turkish fort on the Fao peninsula which was later stormed and occupied by Royal Marines from the battleship
Ocean
. After making a difficult landing without barges or landing stages, the Anglo-Indian force deployed at a small Arab village called Saniyya on the right bank of the Shatt where, on 11 November, it was briefly and ineffectually attacked by around 400 Ottoman troops. A few days later, the remainder of the 6th Division under Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Barrett arrived to reinforce Delamain’s men and on 19 November, in a driving rainstorm, General Barrett ordered his men forward through a sea of mud to attack the old Turkish fort of Zayn, where the Ottoman troops had concentrated. With the support of a battery of royal field artillery the 4,000 Turkish and 1,000 Arab defenders were overwhelmed
and fled back towards Basra. However, two Indian battalions were quickly loaded onto the sloops
Espiégle
and
Odin
, which steamed rapidly up to Basra, arriving unopposed at the port before the retreating Turkish troops on 21 November. Barrett’s force then pursued the Turks to Qurna, at the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates, which was captured on 9 December after some heavy fighting.

During this first, successful phase of the invasion the British forces suffered one small but significant loss. In an inconclusive skirmish on 17 November, Sir Percy Cox’s assistant political officer (APO), Captain R.L. Birdwood, was killed. At the time Lieutenant Arnold Wilson was in London, having just completed an arduous journey along the Turko-Persian frontier as part of an expedition to delineate the border between the two territories which had been a bone of contention for many years. News of the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and the Ottoman Empire reached him as he and his companions crossed the Ottoman-Russian border on 29 October and he straightway made for Archangel, from where he took ship to England. He was expecting to be sent to the front in France but suddenly received orders to set off immediately for Basra, where he was to replace Birdwood as Cox’s APO. He arrived there on 28 December 1914. An obscure British junior officer had been killed in action. A barely less obscure British junior officer had replaced him. But within a few years this seemingly unremarkable event was to have major repercussions.

At the outbreak of war, the great Victorian military hero Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener of Khartoum gave up his post as consul general in Egypt to become war minister, to the delight of the British public. The tall, square-headed, sixty-three-year-old viscount, whose Maxim guns had wiped out thousands of spear-carrying Sudanese at the battle of Omdurman in 1898, was the object of almost hysterical adulation by the British public. This porcelain-collecting lifelong bachelor, with a penchant for interior decorating, was convinced that with millions of Muslim subjects within her Indian Empire, Britain faced both dangers and opportunities in a war against an Ottoman enemy which was now urging a jihad against the Allies – a holy war sanctioned by the fact that the CUP’s new puppet sultan, Mehmet V, was also the caliph, Islam’s supreme leader and nominally the ultimate successor of the Prophet Muhammad. The threat of Turkish subversion spreading throughout the British Empire’s 70 million Muslim subjects in India and millions more in Egypt and the Sudan – where Kitchener had first-hand experience of militant Islam in his war against the followers of the Mahdi – was, he believed, a very real one.

Kitchener lived at a time when fear of a mysterious religious uprising in ‘the East’ was already capturing the popular imagination. Among those who warned of such a threat was John Buchan, wartime director of information and writer of espionage novels. In his 1916 thriller
Greenmantle
, Sir Walter, a Foreign Office official, asks secret agent Richard Hannay to call on him.

‘There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. And the wind is blowing towards the Indian border. Whence comes that wind, think you?’

Sir Walter had lowered his voice and was speaking very slow and distinct. I could hear the rain dripping from the eaves of the window, and far off the hoot of the taxis in Whitehall.

‘Have you an explanation, Hannay?’ he asked again.

‘It looks as though Islam had a bigger hand in the thing than we thought,’ I said. ‘I fancy religion is the only thing to knit up such a scattered empire.’

‘You are right,’ he said. ‘You must be right … there is a Jihad preparing … the question is how? … Supposing there is some Ark of the Covenant which will madden the remotest Moslem peasant with dreams of Paradise? What then, my friend?’

‘Then there will be Hell let loose in those parts pretty soon.’
¹

Muslim peasants dreaming of Paradise; preparations for a jihad; thethreat to the Indian border – these were all very real in the minds of Britain’s rulers at this time, especially among those whose experience had been formed largely through imperial service. But Kitchener believed that possibilities of countering the call to jihad were also present. Given the increasingly pan-Turkish nationalism and small but noticeable displays of secularism apparent among the new rulers in Istanbul, there was also the opportunity to sow disaffection among the Muslim notables in some of the peripheral Ottoman territories – in particular the Arab lands.

Some such disaffection already existed and it was beginning to coalesce with ideas of a cultural and political ‘Arab Awakening’ emanating from small groups of intellectuals in Syria and the region which would later become Lebanon.
²
Although, as yet, falling a long way short of a demand for independence, it was nevertheless an embryo movement for some kind of self-determination and was beginning to reach out, not just to highly educated urban notables, but even to some of the sheikhs and landowners of distant rural backwaters like the mid-Euphrates region of Iraq.
³
If Britain could play upon the anxieties of local Arab rulers with vague promises of support for some kind of devolution under the
protective shield of the British Empire, it might counteract the emotional appeal of the Turkish call to jihad. As Sir Mark Sykes – recently adopted as Kitchener’s protégé – had argued in Parliament in the spring of 1914, ‘There are native states which exist in the provinces of the Ottoman Empire at the present mo.ment which could be made into independent states. If the worse came to worst, there are Armenians, Arabs and Kurds who only wish to be left in peace to develop the country.’
⁴