The War With The Ottoman Empire: A Century Perspective

Professor Jeffrey Grey, from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) at UNSW Canberra, is one of Australia’s finest military historians. His publications include A Military History of Australia, (Cambridge University Press) and The Australian Army: volume I: The Australian Centenary History of Defence, (Oxford University Press). In this centenary year of the Great War, Jeffrey Grey has produced The War with the Ottoman Empire: Volume II – The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War. As Grey’s new work demonstrates, the war with the Ottoman Empire was a war not only between great empires but about empire and the furthering of European imperial interests, and its aftermath laid the foundations of the modern Middle East. The end of the Ottoman Empire marked the end of a culture belonging in the past. Jeffrey Grey addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 21 April 2015.

THE WAR WITH THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: A CENTURY PERSPECTIVE

JEFFREY GREY

The centenary of the Great War has us firmly in its grip. Governments at both federal and state level have committed eye-watering sums to commemorative and celebratory events organised around a four-year cycle, with the distinction between the commemorative and the celebratory not always well-defined or clearly evident. Perhaps inevitably, most attention and effort will be devoted to events “of the moment”, often at a local (for which read “electoral”) level and with little likely medium or long-term impact.

Academic commentators – and others – have suggested that the centenary events provide magnificent opportunities for teaching and learning about the course and conduct of the war. Such opportunities to really deepen and broaden the public’s overall understanding of the Great War and its place in our history and our development as a nation across the course of the twentieth century (and which might go beyond the trite “birth of a nation” thesis too often trotted out around 25 April each year), appear to have gone begging.

Much the same can be said about the efforts of Australian publishers. The immediate lead-up to the centenary saw British publishers launch a raft of serious books devoted to re-examining key questions about the outbreak of the war and its conduct in the last months of 1914, with a focus both on the British Army and more generally on events in eastern Europe. Serious books by established scholars and aimed at an intelligent general readership, titles such as Margaret McMillan’s The War that Ended Peace (written by a Canadian based at Oxford as Warden of St Antony’s College) and Chris Clark’s The Sleepwalkers (written by an Australian who is the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge) prompted spirited arguments across a wide readership, in Clark’s case becoming a best-seller in Germany as well. In the United States, lacking the distraction of centenary activities for at least another two years and unenthusiastic about that prospect, at least thus far, US publishers have brought out new titles on generally neglected areas, especially to do with the war in eastern Europe and the Balkans and the even more under-appreciated activities in those parts of the Middle East not encompassed by the Dardanelles campaign.

The flood of books anticipated from Australian publishers has not really happened, and the titles that have appeared have tended to conform to the usual pattern in the field: weighty and historically largely worthless tomes by journalists, and a smaller number of much better and more scholarly research-based books, most of which will reach a much smaller audience than they deserve. The exception here thus far has been Joan Beaumont’s Broken Nation, winner of the Prime Minister’s prize in History for 2014. Publication these days includes much more than traditional printed pages, but the plethora of web sites and other digital products often prove short-lived while their construction, while admirably democratic and available to anyone who cares to learn the fairly simple methods for their creation is equally free of any form of review or quality assurance processes.

The authoritative record of Australians’ participation in the Great War was provided for that generation by the massive official history edited, and partly-written, by C.E.W. Bean. Bean shaped the way we still see the Great War and our part in it, and his influence on the writing of Australian military history of a certain kind remains pervasive to this day. Bizarrely then for such a central figure in the interpretation and presentation of Australia’s Great War, we lack any serious body of literature on him as an historian, public intellectual and architect of major national institutions; indeed, despite two lengthy additions in the last 12 months we still need a fully satisfactory biography of the man. As it is, I suspect that today Bean is more often referred to than actually read. Reading tastes, like writing styles, change over time and the massive detail which Bean invested in his volumes is now beyond both the attention span and the knowledge base of all save a research audience. This is really only to say that Bean and his history is of its time, and that time is not ours.

As a general observation, historical writing in English on the Great War suffers from a number of limitations and possesses some defining characteristics which, taken together, have resulted in a prolonged adolescence in the genre which has only recently begun to break down. Whilst the decades-long obsession with the Western Front in British historiography of the war has diminished understanding of other theatres and the symbiotic relationships between them, it has nonetheless greatly aided our detailed understanding of the ways in which the war was fought in that theatre, especially as a result of the “revisionist” work of the last 40-odd years.

Whether one fully subscribes to the notion of the “learning curve” and associated analysis, the fact remains that the study of the British Armies in France and Belgium is immensely richer and more varied than was once the case, and it is much more difficult to advance and maintain most of the tired old clichés about British generalship, the fighting qualities of the armies, the alleged superiority of Dominion forces and a host of other tropes that once held sway undiminished by even nodding acquaintance with fact. Some popular cultural beliefs remain impervious to reasoned, evidence-based argument – anything to do with Douglas Haig heads the list – but there can be little question that the historical landscape is immeasurably richer and better-developed than was the case when the late John Terraine began his valiant and often lonely campaign to overturn a half-century’s accumulated nonsense about the reality of the war.

The relentless focus on the Western Front, positive in its own terms, has meant however that other theatres and other aspects of the Great War have often not received the beneficial scrutiny of the “revisionist” wave. With the exception of the Dardanelles campaign of 1915 – obsessively privileged in the historical writing in Australia and New Zealand – the war against the Ottoman Empire falls squarely into this category. Although this has begun to change in the last decade through the efforts of mostly younger scholars, the various theatres in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean remain poor cousins historiographically. Especially in the Antipodean narratives, the war is characterised by a sentimental nostalgia for the mounted units and a grossly simplified and romanticised retelling which effectively divorces these theatres of the war from their contemporary context and regards them as something other than operations of modern industrial warfare.

In British accounts Field Marshal Lord Allenby looms justifiably large, but this often results in a dismissal of his predecessor, General Sir Archibald Murray, while the Dardanelles campaign distracts historical attention from the earlier defence of Egypt and the Canal under the first wartime GOC, Egypt, General Sir John Maxwell who, I would argue, laid the foundations on which others subsequently built. The campaign in Sinai in 1916 is usually treated in passing, and there is little attempt to see the inter-connectedness of the various theatres (Egypt itself, Sinai, Mesopotamia, the Dardanelles, Salonika, the Hejaz, Palestine, and the significant Russian theatres in the Caucasus and Central Asia) and the interplay between them.

The other missing dimension is consideration of the Ottomans themselves. Our knowledge of the Ottoman military is shallow and incomplete, and our understanding of the impact of the war on the Ottoman Empire’s constituent societies is no better. The recent observation of a leading young Turkish historian, that “the material and environmental devastation caused by the war has never been assessed, and the war’s civilian experience has still not been studied in any detail” could apply to no other major combatant power.[i]

There are a number of significant structural problems that help to explain this: the relevant archives have only been opened to public access in the recent past, the organisation and language of the records and their finding aids reflects Ottoman practice and both are subjects of study in their own right, while fluency in written Ottoman Turkish (a different language and script from modern Turkish) is fairly rare, even among Turkish historians. Military history is not a recognised field within Turkey’s university system and few historians work in it, although this is changing among a (mostly) younger generation of scholars based both in Turkey and abroad.[ii] Nor has the relevant official history, which runs to 27 volumes, been translated into English (or any other modern European language).[iii]

The centenary of the Great War is of enormous significance to one national institution above all others: the Australian Army. Fittingly and as part of its contribution to marking the events concerned, successive Chiefs of Army agreed to underwrite a multi-volume series – The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War – which examines our part in the Great War in a fresh way for a contemporary readership.[iv] We have not set out to tell a different story, but to tell the story differently, not least through asking questions that Bean and his team did not and through the use of archival sources which were either unavailable to writers in the 1920s and 1930s or, for whatever reason, were not used by them. As historians we have also had the benefit of the literature published on the subject since Bean completed his official history in the early 1940s and which, as I suggested above, has greatly added to our understanding of complex issues and events.

The biggest challenge for modern Australians seeking to understand the Great War and our part in it is to see those events in context – a context, moreover, which is deeply unfamiliar to our ways of thinking about both ourselves and the wider world. To an extent that Australians of our time simply do not appreciate, this was a British nation in 1914 and its institutions – such as the Army – were decidedly British in character and form. It is absolutely the case as well that participation in the Great War and its impact in subsequent decades began to undo that state of affairs, but this was a longer and more gradual process than is sometimes understood. There is no point in judging those facts from the standpoint of modern Australia in the early twenty-first century, and to do so results in deeply misleading conclusions which are frequently simply wrong.

An excellent example of this is provided by the popular belief in the general incompetence of the British officer class and, in Australia, by an allied belief that British authorities sought to stymie the appointment and advancement of Australian officers to positions of authority within the Australian Imperial Force. This ignores the fact that the officer corps in the British Army expanded as massively as did the wartime army and that traditional sources – which overwhelmingly drew from the middle class and the minor rural gentry – were quickly exhausted. As a result, approximately 100,000 temporary commissions were granted in the course of the war, mostly to middle and lower-middle class men and to those serving in the ranks.

The wartime officer corps was thus a very different entity from its Edwardian precursor. The popular notion that the British were hell-bent on appointing British officers of dubious ability to commands over Dominion troops is nonsense. The War Office was in fact very sensitive to the perception that older or unfit officers were given commands and did its best to ensure that this was not the case. In both commanders and staffs the Dominion forces generally got the best available, and often in greater numbers than the Territorial and New Army units, which had to take what was left.

It needs to be remembered as well that at the war’s beginning there were just six staff-qualified officers on the Australian establishment while the most senior officer, William Throsby Bridges, was only a major-general i.e., a divisional commander. When Bridges was killed on Gallipoli the British appointed Major-General J. Gordon Legge to succeed him even though every senior Australian officer in the force objected that he was unfit for the command, and London over-ruled the commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, General Sir Ian Hamilton (who was inclined to listen to his Australian senior officers), because Legge was the Australian government’s nominee.

As the British Empire armies expanded, almost exponentially, in the first two years of the war the pressure to fill officer positions became even more pronounced. The Australians did not have sufficient staff officers to fill all the positions on the 1^st Division headquarters in 1914 and by the early months of 1916 there were five infantry divisions, most of a mounted division and two corps headquarters to staff while heavy casualties had been incurred among officers on Gallipoli. The result was frequently accelerated promotion which might – or might not – get the desired result. British Regular officers could find themselves discharging functions for which they had no experience, but at least they had a shared educational and training experience to draw upon as they did so.

Serious military education and training in the Dominions before 1914 was very limited, even for Regulars like Chauvel but even more so for officers of the Militia. Operational experience for the latter was confined to the war in South Africa, on a much smaller scale and much lower application of modern military technology. Those who survived, of course, often grew into their new roles and positions, but it was very much a case of ‘learning while doing’ and of being well-qualified for the job only sometime after one had assumed its responsibilities.

The tendency to sentimentalise the light horse, to elevate the charge at Beersheba to a level of epic it cannot sustain, and inability to see that what was important about the mounted divisions of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was not their horses per se but the qualities of mobility and shock action which they made possible, means that many Australians fundamentally misunderstand the campaigns in Palestine and Syria and under-estimate the extent to which this was a theatre of modern war as that term was understood in 1916-18.

In many key respects the British war with the Ottomans confirms trends and developments in other theatres, including the Western Front. The differences between them are sometimes more apparent than real. The excessive emphasis on the mounted units in Palestine helps to obscure the fact that at its height the EEF also contained two infantry corps which disposed ultimately of seven divisions as opposed to the three (ultimately four) mounted ones in the Desert Mounted Corps. The British deployed tanks, armoured cars, heavy artillery, chemical weapons and airpower in support of these formations, and the sense of cooperative interaction between the arms and services not only never disappeared but became more evident as the war went on; at the tactical and operational levels, in both planning and execution, combined arms warfare was the reality of fighting in the Middle East and manoeuvre and mobility remained key determinants of success, on both sides.

Our tendency to push our own views back onto earlier generations leads to other distortions as well. The so-called “Gallipoli Star” is a good example of the way in which we can misread the significance of events because the context is unfamiliar or unwelcome to us. The institution of the 1914 Star as a campaign award to recognise those engaged in the early weeks of fighting on the Western Front led to pressure from several Dominions for its extension to recognise the early volunteers who had come forward to go to the war, and in Australia and New Zealand this became conflated with a desire to recognise those soldiers who had participated in the Dardanelles campaign.

Powerful endorsement came from the King, George V, who wanted to grant a medal “quite distinct from the 1914 decoration” while the Adjutant-General in the War Office recognised readily that “the Australians and New Zealanders will have their own way in the end”.[v] The Dominion governments could easily have issued an award of their own devising had that been the intention. The real point is that the medal which would become the 1914-15 Star, for which eligibility would include Canadians, Newfoundlanders and Indians as well, was to be awarded within the Imperial system and it is clear that it was this form of Imperial recognition, on a par with that afforded the mostly British Regular Army recipients of the 1914 medal, that was uppermost in many Dominion minds.

Wars rarely end neatly and great power wars almost never do so. The passage of the armistice in November 1918 marked merely the end of a phase of the conflict, albeit a major one. In significant ways the Great War served a similar function for major and minor powers elsewhere. For countries as different as Ireland and Russia the fighting continued into the early 1920s while the consequences were felt for decades beyond that. The Ottomans were faced with partition and dismemberment under the terms of the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, but the outcome of the Turkish War of Independence saw that position abandoned and substantially revised with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. One might argue that the Turks were the only winners among the losing nations, and their outcome looks a lot better, in hindsight, than those accorded to such ostensible winners as the Czechs and Poles.

The Ottomans entered the Great War because they feared the consequences of not doing so. Their involvement on the side of the Central Powers was not inevitable and the diplomatic record of the decade before the war began shows regular attempts by Constantinople to secure an alliance with Britain (in 1908, 1911 and again in 1913), moves which were largely frustrated by Russian geo-strategic and French financial interests.

German intentions towards the Empire in the years before 1914 were not benign, either, a fact not lost on the Ottoman government, but their resultant diplomatic isolation offered them few viable options as the international order deteriorated. Despite the generally poor press that they attract, the government of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP aka “the Young Turks”) was bent upon the modernisation of the Ottoman state and the preservation of the Empire – participation in the Great War doomed both to failure. But it seems not unreasonable to ponder what the modern Middle East and much of the world’s history since at least 1945 might look like now had the Ottomans maintained the neutrality they announced in August 1914.

ENDNOTES

[i] Mustafa Aksakal, ‘The Ottoman Empire’ in Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War: Vol I: Global War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 459.

[ii] In addition to Aksakal, these would include, but is not confined to, Mesut Uyar, Mehmet Besukci, Yucel Yanikdag and Hikmet Ozdemir. Among older Western scholars, Edward J. Erickson continues to make significant contributions on the tactical and operational performance of the Ottoman military.

[iii] Edward J. Erickson, ‘The Turkish Official Military Histories of the First World War: a Bibliographic Essay’, Middle Eastern Studies, 39:3, July 2003.

[iv] The authors and volumes, in order of publication, are: Michael Molkentin, Australia and the War in the Air (2014); Jeffrey Grey, The War with the Ottoman Empire (2015); Robert Stevenson, The War with the Germans (2015); John Connor, Peter Stanley and Peter Yule, The War at Home (2015); Jean Bou and Peter Dennis, The AIF: An Organisational Study (2016).

[v] Letter, Stanfordham to Derby, 21 November 1917; Memorandum, Adjutant-General to Secretary of State for War, 18 November 1917. TNA WO33/4985.