Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (9 page)

N
ewcastle was basking in a summer heatwave. The mercury had touched thirty degrees on the previous afternoon and it looked set to rise even higher during the course of the weekend. Local newspapers were predicting a rush of day-trippers to the seaside, although they warned that thunderous storms had been forecast for later in the weekend. If they had known about the extraordinary events taking place on Newcastle’s wharves, they might also have predicted tempestuous times in the world of international politics.

There was much to keep the people of Newcastle entertained on that sweltering August weekend in 1914. At the Empire, the impresario, G. H. Elliot, was performing his much loved vaudeville act, ‘the chocolate-coloured coon’. At the Tyne Theatre, the Antarctic explorer, Cecil Meares, was lecturing on Captain Scott’s fateful expedition to the South Pole. But one attraction looked set to overshadow all of these. On Sunday, 3 August, just two days after Turkey and Germany had signed a secret alliance, a colourful military pageant was to be held in Newcastle docks. The largest dreadnought in the world – the mighty
Sultan Osman I
, which was being built in the shipyards – was to be handed over to a Turkish captain and crew.

The ceremony was to be performed with all the pomp and circumstance that Newcastle could muster – and with good reason. The
Sultan Osman I
was by far the biggest dreadnought ever built. She was 700 feet long and 90 feet wide, so big that it was feared she would not fit under the two bridges that spanned the river. She was also the most heavily armed fighting ship in the world; her fourteen guns could fire 23,000 pounds of high explosive each minute, enough to overwhelm any other dreadnought afloat.

For more than a year, this beast of a ship had been an object of wonder to the cityfolk of Newcastle. They had watched in awe as her giant twin funnels became an ever more impressive addition to the city skyline. The local dock workers returned to their families each evening with eye-stretching tales of the ship’s interior. The officers’ wardroom had polished teak decking, silk-shaded lamps and Turkish rugs to adorn the floors. It was furnished with mahogany gaming tables and cretonne-covered armchairs. In each corner there was a brass spittoon for the pious Muslim officers who did not like to swallow their saliva during the fast of Ramadan.

Ottoman ministers had been obliged to borrow more than £4 million – some £225 million in today’s money – to buy the
Sultan Osman I
, along with a second ship named
Reshadieh
. Servicing the bank loans for these two dreadnoughts soon proved an impossible burden. Ministers found themselves facing a massive shortfall of money and were forced to appeal directly to the people. There were collections in villages across Turkey and patriotic fund-raising events were organised, even in the farthest-flung outposts. According to one observer, ‘agents had gone from house to house, painfully collecting these small subscriptions . . . there had been entertainments and fairs and, in their eagerness for the cause, Turkish women had sold their hair for the benefit of the common fund.’

Now, after a long wait, the vessels were almost ready to be delivered. No one was looking forward to the Sunday handover ceremony more than Captain Raouf Bey, the much decorated naval hero of Turkey. He had arrived in Newcastle just a few days earlier, having been appointed commander of the dreadnought by the Turkish government. Such was his enthusiasm at being aboard the ship that he had failed to notice that his Turkish crew was being secretly monitored by Newcastle’s dockyard police. Nor had he realised that the Admiralty in London had sent a top-secret telegram to the shipbuilders, requesting that the final stages of construction be slowed down. There was good reason for this delaying tactic. On 28 June, news had reached London that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, had been assassinated. In the five weeks since, an event that had seemed like a local crisis had escalated into something of far greater significance. As rumours about general mobilisation in Central Europe reached London, ministers argued that this was the worst possible time to be handing over the world’s largest dreadnought to a country whose loyalty in the event of war was at best uncertain.

No one was more concerned than Winston Churchill, the youthful First Lord of the Admiralty. He knew that Raouf Bey and his crew had arrived in Newcastle and had been warned that the Turkish captain had a reputation for acting precipitately. Churchill feared that Raouf Bey would suspect that work on the ship was being deliberately delayed and would attempt to board her by force. ‘There seemed to be a great danger of the Turks coming on board,’ he later wrote, ‘[and] brushing aside Mssrs Armstrong’s workmen and hoisting the Turkish flag.’

The prospect of such a scenario caused grave concern in Whitehall, especially as the Turkish and German governments were forging ever closer links. On the last day of July, just hours before the German Kaiser ordered the mobilisation of his armies, Churchill took a decision that was to have profound and far-reaching consequences. The
Sultan Osman I
was to be impounded.

Raouf Bey, unaware of this change of policy, was still looking forward to the handover ceremony, but as he gazed across the dockyard on the morning of the pageantry, he was greeted by a most unwelcome sight. A company of Sherwood Foresters was marching towards the
Sultan Osman I
and all of the men were carrying guns with fixed bayonets.

By the time he realised that the vessels were being impounded, it was too late for him to act. The dockside was ringed with troops and Raouf Bey was a captain without a ship.

Churchill was delighted when he learned of the successful seizure. ‘The addition of the two Turkish dreadnoughts to the British fleet seemed vital to national safety,’ he wrote. But in Turkey the requisitioning was viewed very differently. There was disgust at Britain’s action and the tens of thousands of people who had donated money felt that Churchill had stolen what was rightfully theirs. In the days that followed, the Ottoman army was mobilised and Turkey put on a war footing.

Churchill thought this to be nothing but bluster and continued to act as if Turkey were a valued ally. He even offered the Turkish government £1,000 a day in compensation for the commandeered battleships. But he was about to be outsmarted by the German government, which had followed with great interest the saga of the
Sultan Osman I
and
Reshadieh
. Anxious to capitalise on the tensions between Britain and Turkey – and strengthen the bond with Constantinople – they hatched a plan to present their Oriental ally with the very prize that had been denied them by Britain.

The seizure of the dreadnoughts attracted little notice in Smyrna. Few people in the city had given money towards the purchase of the
Sultan Osman I
and
Reshadieh
. Indeed, the Greek population had been dismayed by the news that Turkey was to take delivery of the vessels. Now, there was a certain satisfaction to be gained from the news that the two ships had been impounded.

The reactions were more mixed among the elite of Constantinople. Sultan Mehmet V, the head of a dynasty that had ruled the Ottoman empire for more than 450 years, was outraged by the turn of events, yet he had little appetite for war and certainly had no desire to fight Britain. Fearing that it would lead to the further disintegration of his formerly huge realm, he declared himself firmly in the peace camp.

This would certainly have been the wisest course for Turkey, but the sultan no longer wielded much power. The day-to-day running of the country had fallen into the hands of a small group of men who were attempting to halt the decline of the once-mighty Ottoman empire. In the years since the Young Turk revolution of 1908, which had deprived the sultan of much of his authority, decision-making had increasingly been concentrated in the hands of three men – Enver Pasha, Mehmet Talaat and Ahmed Cemal. Of this triumvirate, it was Enver Pasha who was the most energetic in banging the drums of war.

Enver Pasha aroused strong feelings in all who met him. The American ambassador to Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, had initially been struck by Enver’s youthful looks. ‘He was an extremely neat and well-groomed object,’ he wrote, ‘with a pale, smooth face, made even more striking by his black hair, and with delicate white hands and long tapering fingers.’ His most striking feature was his neatly clipped moustache, whose ends he waxed and twisted upwards in the German manner.

Enver was a charming host, yet there was a more disturbing side to his character. The ambassador found him to be extraordinarily egotistical and noted that his favourite armchair was positioned between portraits of Napoleon and Frederick the Great. ‘This fact gives some notion of his vanity,’ wrote Morgenthau. ‘These two warriors and statesmen were his great heroes and I believe that Enver thought fate had a career in store for him not unlike theirs.’

Enver Pasha had first-hand experience of the crushing defeat suffered by the Ottoman army during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. These conflicts had robbed Turkey of much of her European territory and left the Ottoman army extremely demoralised. If it was ever again to be an efficient fighting machine, it would require root-and-branch reform.

Enver got some inkling as to how this might be achieved while serving as military attaché in Berlin. He found much to admire in the German army and felt that a military alliance represented Turkey’s best hope of future military success. Soon after the end of the Balkan Wars, he negotiated the appointment of a German general named Liman von Sanders as inspector general of the Ottoman army.

Liman von Sanders was appalled by the state of decline into which the once-great army had fallen. The guard of honour that assembled to greet him was in a wretched condition: ‘a considerable part wore torn boots or shoes,’ he wrote, ‘[and] others were barefooted.’ He and his team of seventy German officers set to work with clinical efficiency, retraining troops and acquiring new equipment. The effects of these reforms were rapid and startling. When Henry Morgenthau was invited to a public review of the troops in July 1914, he was astonished by the transformation. ‘In the preceding six months,’ he wrote, ‘the Turkish army had been completely Prussianised. What in January had been an undisciplined, ragged rabble was now parading with the goose-step.’

It was by no means a foregone conclusion that Turkey would join Germany in the event of war. Enver Pasha was avowedly pro-German in his views but other members of the inner circle were looking elsewhere for military alliances. Mehmet Talaat favoured joining Russia while Ahmed Cemal, the third member of the ruling triumvirate, looked to France for military co-operation.

Germany had invested large sums of money in allying herself to Turkey and had no intention of losing that investment. Her secret weapon came in the form of a towering Thuringian aristocrat named Baron Hans von Wangenheim, Germany’s ambassador to the country.

Wangenheim was a veritable giant, ‘his huge, solid frame, his Gibraltar-like shoulders, erect and impregnable, his bold, defiant head, his piercing eyes, the whole physical structure constantly pulsating with life and activity’. So wrote Morgenthau, who so despised the man that he dispensed with all diplomatic niceties when describing him.

Wangenheim vowed to do everything in his power to win Turkish support, especially now that Britain and France were at war with Germany. He knew that with Turkey on board, the German navy could close the Dardanelles – the only practical line of communications between the Allied powers and Russia. Russia would no longer be able to export grain, her greatest source of revenue, nor receive any munitions.

On 11 August 1914, Morgenthau visited Wangenheim in order to discuss some matters of official business. He found his German counterpart behaving in a most unusual fashion. ‘Never had I seen him so nervous and excited. He could not rest in his chair more than a few minutes at a time; he was constantly jumping up, rushing to the windows and looking anxiously out towards the Bosphorus.’

The reason for his excitement soon became apparent. After a final glance out of the window, he gave a joyous little skip and informed Morgenthau that two German battleships – the
Goeben
and
Breslau
– had just arrived in Constantinople. They were to be offered to the Turkish government by its German counterpart – a replacement for the two dreadnoughts that Britain was refusing to hand over.

‘Wangenheim had more than patriotic reasons for this exultation,’ wrote Morgenthau. ‘The arrival of these ships was the greatest day in his diplomatic career.’ When tidings of the offer reached news-stands across Turkey, Germany was presented as the country’s only true friend.

Scenes of extraordinary jubilation marked the appearance of the ships. The German commander, Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, was lifted onto the shoulders of his crew and displayed to the crowd. The German sailors donned Turkish fezzes and the vessels were given Turkish names. Although not as big as the dreadnoughts in Newcastle, they had the advantage of being ready to put to sea immediately. They were to be crewed by German mariners sailing under the Ottoman flag and Admiral Souchon was made commander-in-chief of the fleet.

As the countdown to war with Turkey now began to gather pace, even the most optimistic politicians in Britain conceded that the country was certain to side with Germany. The decisive moment came on 29 October 1914. At 3.30 a.m., and without a declaration of war, Admiral Souchon’s ships bombarded the Russian ports of Odessa and Sebastopol. Four days after this unprovoked attack, Britain, France and Russia declared war on Turkey. Enver Pasha had at last got his way. Although four Ottoman ministers resigned, there was no turning back.

The sultan was informed of these events in his Dolmabahçe Palace. ‘To make war on Russia!’ he exclaimed in horror. ‘But its corpse alone would be enough to crush us.’ The German community living in Constantinople agreed, believing Enver’s actions to have been extraordinarily reckless. A German acquaintance of Sir Edwin Pears, a historian who lived in Constantinople, remarked: ‘Sir Edwin, you have written
The Destruction of the Greek Empire
; I think you are going to live to write
The Destruction of the Turkish Empire
. . . they are committing suicide.’