The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (43 page)

While Enver inherited from Shevket’s policy a new and powerful German military mission, Cemal as Minister of Marine inherited an equally strong commitment to seeking more and more British
aid for refurbishing the Ottoman fleet. In the spring of 1912 Rear-Admiral Arthur Limpus became the third flag officer of the Royal Navy in five years to be seconded to the Turks as a senior
adviser, and by August 1914 Limpus had more than seventy British naval officers attached to his mission (an almost identical number to the German army officers who came with Liman von Sanders,
although the size of the German mission increased rapidly with the outbreak of war in Europe). Limpus’s immediate predecessor, Admiral Williams, had already encouraged the purchase of a
dreadnought, and the British-built
Reshadieh
was launched in September 1913, although it was some months before she could sail for Turkey. Before the end of the year Admiral Limpus scored
two notable successes: Armstrong Whitworth and Vickers received contracts to build new naval dockyards; and Armstrongs also undertook to complete a second and even larger battleship,
Sultan
Osman I
. Cavit and Cemal were certain they could raise the three and a half million pounds required for such prestigious symbols of imperial might as the two warships.

Public excitement over the new naval programme matched the equally well-orchestrated enthusiasm for the Hejaz ‘pilgrim’s railway’ in the later years of Abdulhamid’s
reign. The CUP Clubs, set up in towns and large villages over the previous two years, supervised battleship fund-raising in local communities, emphasizing in reports for foreign consumption how
even schoolchildren would bring in their contributions
to so great a patriotic cause. A celebratory ‘Navy Week’ was planned on the Golden Horn, when it was
proposed that the whole of the Sultan’s fleet should escort the new battleships through the Dardanelles to inaugurate the era of Ottoman Naval Power.
⁷

So quickly were the two ships completed in British yards that four hundred Turkish officers and seamen reached Tyneside in July 1914 to sail them to Gibraltar and across the Mediterranean on
their commissioning voyage to the Straits. The men’s arrival coincided with the mobilization of Britain’s resources for war: on 1 August, before the crescent flag could be run up, both
vessels were seized by the Admiralty and ‘temporarily’ commissioned in the Royal Navy. News of the Admiralty’s action, telegraphed at once to Constantinople, caused dismay and
consternation.
⁸
The anger of the Turks was fed by an anti-British press campaign, financed by the German embassy, which understandably made much of the
British failure to offer immediate compensation. The seizure of the ships discredited sympathizers with the Entente in Said Halim’s cabinet. For several weeks the ‘pro-Germans’
had argued that, if Germany and Austria–Hungary won a war from which the Ottomans stood aside, the victors would ruthlessly partition the Empire. Now the Entente Powers looked no less
cynical: not only did they remain deaf to overtures for an alliance; they showed apparent contempt for the CUP’s hopes of restoring Ottoman pride in the empire. On 2 August Said Halim and
Enver concluded a formal alliance with Germany, so secret that Cavit, Cemal and most of their cabinet colleagues were kept in ignorance of its existence for several weeks. The alliance treaty
provided only for military action against Russia—in which case it was accepted that Liman von Sanders would have ‘an effective influence on the general direction of the [Ottoman]
army’.

It has been claimed that the conclusion of the secret treaty ‘was a supreme blunder, which brought down the Ottoman empire’.
⁹
Yet the
alliance terms left the Porte with room to manoeuvre. Enver and Said Halim continued to press for definite promises of treaty revision in the Balkans before committing themselves to military
action; Germany, they urged, should put pressure on Bulgaria and Greece to retrocede parts of Thrace and islands in the Aegean; but there was no response in Berlin.
As late
as the middle of August, the British ambassador was still emphasizing the pro-Entente dispositions of both Ahmed Cemal and Dr Nazim, and he urged the First Lord of the Admiralty (Winston Churchill)
to send a ‘sympathetic and friendly message to the Minister of Marine’. Churchill had already telegraphed an appeal to Enver, whom he knew and admired, counselling him to avoid
entanglement with Germany. Now he sent a further message, setting out clearly the compensation which Britain would provide for the commandeered battleships: £1,000 a day, payable each week so
long as Turkey remained neutral, was proposed. Enver formally declined to accept a message which, though pleasantly phrased, carried with it a distinct insinuation of bazaar
bargaining.
¹⁰

The Germans could offer more than a hiring fee and ‘deep regrets’. They capitalized on Turkish resentment of Britain’s naval rebuff. On the evening of 10 August the
battle-cruiser SMS
Goeben
and the light cruiser SMS
Breslau
entered the Dardanelles, after evading pursuit by the Royal Navy from the Straits of Messina eastwards.
Goeben
had
attracted interest and envy a few months earlier when she became the largest warship ever to drop anchor off the Golden Horn. Now the fine prize was to be handed over to the Sultan—on 12
August it was announced in Berlin that Germany had sold both warships to the Turks:
Goeben
became the
Jawuz Sultan Selim
and
Breslau
was renamed
Midilli
. Although they
were not so powerful as the dreadnoughts seized by the British, the two warships had one inestimable advantage: they could put to sea at once under the Ottoman flag, with German officers and crews
aboard and ready for action. The British naval mission officially ceased to function on 15 August, although Admiral Limpus remained in Constantinople until the Admiralty ordered him to Malta on 9
September.
¹¹
By then Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, the ‘droop-jawed, determined little man in a long ill-fitting frock coat’ whose seamanship
had brought
Goeben
and
Breslau
to the Dardanelles, was flying his flag as Commander-in-Chief of the Ottoman fleet; and the number of German workmen, sailors and coastal gunners on the
Straits had risen to about eight hundred.
¹²

In London it was assumed that the Ottoman Empire would soon enter the war as Germany’s ally. There was, however, still some hesitancy in Said Halim’s cabinet and, as if to remind
ministers of their duty,
the German-subsidized newspapers continued to emphasize the virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice in service to the State. The effects of this
press campaign were not always to Germany’s liking. An intensive Turkish nationalism, active during the Libyan and Balkan Wars and associated especially with the sociological secularist
writer Ziya Gökalp, reached fever pitch that autumn. Early in September the popular mood encouraged the Young Turks to announce the abolition of Capitulations: all foreigners in the empire
would henceforth be subject to Ottoman civil, criminal and commercial codes of law.
¹³
Yet, although this move was intended in the first instance to
penalize the British and French, it provoked a protest in Berlin since it also threatened the status of the increasing number of Germans serving within the Empire. Ardent Turks did not always
bother to discriminate between one
giaour
and another. For the Young Turks in 1914, neutrality and reform would have been a wiser programme than the fulfilment of Enver’s alliance
treaty.

The scale of the German victory at Tannenberg convinced both the Grand Vizier and Enver that, whatever happened on other fronts in Europe, Russia would never again possess the resources to mount
a sustained offensive along any distant borders of the Tsar’s empire. The temptation to recover lost lands in the Caucasus was therefore almost irresistible. At the same time, the naval
pressure from Russia’s British ally was becoming intolerable; better to seek a speedy decision by force of arms than risk slow strangulation. On 27 September Royal Navy warships patrolling
off the Dardanelles stopped and turned back a Turkish torpedo-boat seeking to enter the Aegean—a less high-handed action than it sounds, for there were several Germans in the
crew.
¹⁴
The Turks responded by immediately closing the Straits and laying mines along the main channel. Trade between the Black Sea and the outer
world at once came to an end, effectively closing the seaports of Bulgaria, Roumania, Russia and Turkey, except for coastal traffic. Thus, though Odessa and Constanza suffered from Turkey’s
self-imposed blockade, so too did Trebizond, Samsun and Constantinople itself. To offset the financial loss to the empire, Germany made available from 21 October onwards the equivalent of
£200 million of gold bullion, stipulating that it would be handed over to the Ottoman Treasury as soon as the Sultan declared
war. On 28 October Admiral Souchon,
flying his flag in
Jawuz Sultan Selim
, led his ships into the Black Sea and shelled Odessa, Nikolaev and Sebastopol. This raid by Souchon was decisive. A Russian ultimatum on 1 November was
rejected; so, too, were British and French ultimata four days later. By the end of the first week in November the Ottoman Empire was at war. Despite the growing secularism among intellectuals in
his capital, Mehmed V observed the traditional responses of a Sultan-Caliph. On 11 November he proclaimed a jihad, or Holy War, calling on all Muslims in British, Russian and French territories to
rise up and smite the Infidel.
¹⁵

One sovereign responded immediately. At midsummer in 1914 Abbas Hilmi II, Khedive of Egypt since 1892, had gone into residence at the palace which his family retained on the Bosphorus. He was
still there when war was declared, and at once he backed the Caliph’s proclamation of a jihad: every dutiful Egyptian should rebel against British rule.
¹⁶
None did so; but the Khedive’s call for action had far-reaching consequences. It cut the last constitutional links between Cairo and Constantinople, for Great Britain
established a protectorate over Egypt on 18 December, deposed the unfortunate Abbas Hilmi II, and proclaimed his uncle Hussein Kamil ‘Sultan of Egypt’. Wisely, London stopped short of
annexing Egypt, although the island of Cyprus was formally absorbed into the British Empire on the day war broke out with Turkey. At the same time the Sheikdom of Kuwait, whose relationship with
the Ottoman authorities had always been ill-defined, was constituted an independent government under British protection.

In London any lingering beliefs in the value of upholding the Ottoman Empire were jettisoned as soon as
Goeben
and
Breslau
anchored off the Golden Horn. Strategic interests were
changing rapidly. It would now be better for the Russians ‘to have Constantinople’ than the Germans: the Tsar’s empire was becoming increasingly dependent on British investment;
and the possibility of satisfying historic ambitions on the Straits would reduce the risks of Anglo-Russian clashes in Central Asia and around Persia’s oilfields. ‘It is clear
Constantinople must be yours,’ King George V told the Russian ambassador within a week of Turkey’s entry into the war; and at the same time his Foreign Secretary promised Russia
an amicable settlement of the Straits Question once the Ottoman Empire sued for peace.
¹⁷
But there remained a strong feeling
in the British Cabinet that it would better still to have an Anglo-French naval presence off the Dolmabahche and Yildiz, enabling London and Paris to shape the final partition plans of a fallen
empire—always remembering, of course, the needs of ‘our Russian ally’.

Early in September 1914 Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Kitchener (the Secretary of State for War) and their principal naval and military advisers discussed a grand
strategy for the war which they assumed would soon be waged against Turkey. High on their list of possible operations was the forcing of the Dardanelles by the powerful fleet already concentrated
in the northern Aegean; if necessary, the Gallipoli peninsula should be seized in order to facilitate the passage of the warships. The complexity of this task was underestimated. A preliminary
bombardment of the forts at Cape Helles early in November, by both British and French vessels, silenced the guns at Sedd-el-Bahr, largely because one shell hit the magazine, causing an immense
explosion; and six weeks later a British submarine torpedoed and sank a forty-year-old battleship at anchor in the Narrows. There was no further action in these waters until the New Year. By then
defensive torpedo tubes, recommended by Admiral Limpus many months before, were in position at Kilid Bahr on the Narrows. Before the coming of spring Liman von Sanders planned to have six of the
Ottoman Army’s fifty divisions protecting the shores of the Dardanelles from invasion.
¹⁸

Kitchener, with his vast experience of Egypt and the Levant, favoured swift action elsewhere, preferably against the Baghdad Railway. A week before Christmas a landing-party from HMS
Doris
went ashore north of Iÿskenderun, covered by the light cruiser’s eleven six-inch guns. So far from meeting resistance, the raiders found that the local soldiery raised no
objections to the blowing up of locomotives, stores and rolling-stock, even helping naval officers to plant the charges which treated them to their big bang in the night sky. The episode, Churchill
admitted two years later, strengthened the British assumption that their enemy was easy prey. ‘What kind of Turk was this we are fighting?’ the Admiralty wondered.
¹⁹

The question was answered in the terrible battles for the Gallipoli peninsula. On 15 January 1915 the War Council in London finally agreed on a naval expedition
‘with Constantinople as its objective’ to open up a route of supplies to Russia, hard-pressed on the Eastern Front. But when, on 18 March, a third of the capital ships seeking to
penetrate the Narrows were sunk, the whole concept of the campaign was changed: the ‘Constantinople Expeditionary Force’—as, with a casual contempt for security, it was frequently
referred to as it assembled in Egypt—was transported to Mudros, on the island of Lemnos in the northern Aegean. Five weeks after the naval bombardment British, Australian and New Zealand
troops made a series of landings on the peninsula while a French Army Corps invaded what had once been the Trojan shore; but by then most of the Ottoman army—some 84,000 men—was on the
alert. Inadequate planning, inter-service confusion, hesitant leadership, and all the unsuspected problems of the first amphibious campaign in modern warfare, worked together to turn an epic
enterprise, imaginatively conceived and valiantly fought, into a tragedy of frustrated triumph. On 9 January 1916, almost a year after the War Council’s resolution, the last British troops
surreptitiously evacuated Cape Helles, leaving behind a network of shell-pitted trenches and enough food and equipment to sustain four Turkish divisions for four more months. Left, too, on either
side of the Dardanelles, were the remains of 34,000 dead from Great Britain and her empire and 10,000 dead from France, metropolitan and overseas. Only one in four of those who perished have known
graves.
²⁰