The Dandarnelles Disaster (3 page)

CHAPTER 1

The Turkish Question

The Ottoman Empire that was dying on its feet in 1914 was founded in 1299 and captured Constantinople in 1453, putting an end to the residual eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire. Its power peaked about a century later, when it ruled not only what we now call Turkey but also the Balkans, the Levant, the Arab interior and much of North Africa, including Egypt. Defeated in the great naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 and foiled in its attempt to seize Vienna in 1683, its long decline accelerated, making it possible for expansionist European powers, most notably Britain and France, to acquire direct or indirect control of much of its territory, especially in North Africa, in the nineteenth century. Greece broke away to form an independent state in 1830, to which Crete and western Thrace (Salonica) were later added. Italy came late to the feast, seizing coastal Libya and the Dodecanese islands off the Turkish south-western coast in 1912.

Meanwhile Austria-Hungary, Germany's ally, vied with Russia for influence in the Balkans, a tinderbox of rival nationalisms that flourished in the power vacuum left by the receding Ottomans. Bismarck, architect and Chancellor of the second German Reich, unified in 1870-1, dismissed the region as ‘not worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier' – but also forecast that if Europe once again succumbed to war, ‘it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans'. Tsar Nicholas I of Russia declared that ‘Turkey is a dying man … He will, he must, die.' It was as if the leading European powers had gathered round a corpse like carrion crows, ready to squabble over the remains of a once-great empire variously referred to for well over a century under such headings as ‘the sick man of Europe' or ‘the Turkish (or Eastern) Question'.

The rivalry among the powers over Turkey boiled down to Russia's eternal ambition to gain secure access to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea by acquiring control of Constantinople – and the determination of the others to prevent it. As Napoleon had written to his ambassador in St Petersburg in 1808: ‘The root of the great question is always there: who will
have Constantinople?' In what was merely the latest in a long series of wars between them, Russia invaded Turkey's Danubian provinces (modern Bulgaria and Romania) in 1851 and destroyed the Turkish Black Sea fleet in 1853. This prompted Austria to intervene in the Balkans, while Britain and France supported Turkey and declared war on Russia in 1854. In Britain a disgusted Lord Salisbury, the future Prime Minister, declared that Britain had ‘backed the wrong horse'.

The ensuing Crimean War set new standards in military incompetence on both sides, with Russia losing messily by default in 1856. Nevertheless she went to war again in 1877 after the Ottomans had brutally suppressed Slav revolts in the Balkans, imposing harsh territorial terms on the defeated Turks in the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878. But later the same year Russian ambition was once again thwarted at the first Congress of Berlin, where Serbia, Montenegro, Romania and Bulgaria had their autonomy confirmed, Austria gained control of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Britain took over Cyprus. Serbia and Bulgaria effectively became client states of Russia. Under Bismarck Germany had joined the encircling powers in 1875, working to divide non-Turkish Ottoman territory in the Balkans between Russia and Austria in the longer term, with Berlin acting as mediator while generally avoiding closer entanglement in Turkish affairs to avoid alarming Russia.

Yet German involvement in Turkey went back to 1826, when the Sultan of the day sought Prussian help in reforming his army after an internal military revolt – the origin of the German military mission to Constantinople. In the same spirit the British were invited to send a naval mission. In 1883 the German Lieutenant-Colonel Colmar Baron von der Goltz became deputy chief of the Turkish General Staff (and inspector-general of military education); he would play a key role in the Middle Eastern campaign of the First World War and would die in harness in 1916 as a field marshal in the Ottoman Army. In 1913 another future field marshal in that army, General Otto Liman von Sanders, became chief of the German military mission – a year after Rear-Admiral Arthur Limpus was appointed head of the British naval one.

British interest in the Ottoman Empire was closely related to London's central imperial policy: to protect the route to India via the Mediterranean, whose eastern basin the Turks dominated from north, east and south. The British began to take less and less notice of Turkey and its concerns once they had acquired control of Egypt (nominally ruled by a Turkish
khedive
or viceroy), the Suez Canal and Cyprus. After that, what with possessing naval bases and staging posts at Gibraltar and Malta plus their Mediterra
nean Fleet, the British felt the imperial lifeline was safe, complacency set in and Britain lost active interest in her role as Turkey's traditional patron.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ascended the German imperial and Prussian thrones in 1888, was only too ready to fill the resulting gap, especially after he dismissed Bismarck from the chancellorship in 1890. Without the guiding hand of the consummate old statesman and power-broker, Germany managed within a few years to fall out with every major power in Europe except Austria-Hungary, thus demolishing the main element of Bismarck's foreign policy, the shifting network of alliances isolating France to prevent her seeking revenge for her defeat and loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the war of 1870. Undeterred by the brutal and corrupt regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, known as ‘the Damned', begun in 1876, the autocratic Wilhelm invested heavily in Turkey, most notably by financing the ‘Berlin–Baghdad railway' project, inaugurated in 1883. New track slowly wound its way through Ottoman territory (in 1914, just two sections, in today's Syria and Iraq, remained to be built). The overall aim was to complete a line running nearly 1,900 miles across German, Austro-Hungarian or friendly-neutral territory, except for 175 unavoidable miles through Serbia. Talks in 1895 between Britain and Germany on what to do about the crumbling Ottoman Empire led nowhere, thanks to the rapidly diverging interests of the participants. The Kaiser paid a state visit to Constantinople in 1898, during which he encouraged Turkey's aspirations to revive its spiritual leadership of Islam, the caliphate. He can hardly have been unaware that the majority of the world's Muslims lived within the British Empire at the time.

Elsewhere, Britain's old enemy, France, had in 1892 concluded an alliance with Russia – not only Britain's rival in the ‘Great Game', the struggle for power in Central Asia, but also Turkey's traditional foe. This marked the end of more than two decades of French isolation in Europe, as fostered by Bismarck ever since the war with Prussia. The accord was reached two years after Germany had, despite Russian pleas, chosen not to renew its 1887 ‘reinsurance' treaty with St Petersburg, arguably Wilhelm's greatest diplomatic blunder. Under this pact each partner had promised to remain neutral if the other got involved in war with a third party – unless Germany attacked France or Russia attacked Austria. Russia was given a free hand by the Germans to intervene in the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. This secret treaty replaced the ‘League of the Three Emperors' (of Germany, Austria and Russia) formed in 1873 and allowed to lapse in 1887, when Austrian and Russian interests in south-eastern Europe diverged. As far as
Berlin was concerned, it had already been superseded in 1879 on the conclusion of the Dual Alliance with Vienna.

Britain stood alone at this time in her concern about the relentless persecution of ethnic minorities by Abdul Hamid II, but the realignment of alliances among the leading powers only encouraged inertia in London: the route to India was safe and the vaguely formulated idea of seizing Constantinople to restrain the Sultan was dropped. London continued for the time being to follow its old policy of avoiding unnecessary entanglements on the continent of Europe, which however would not outlast the nineteenth century by more than a year or two.

By default therefore the Ottoman Empire turned to Germany for protection, especially as Berlin was showing keen interest: and Germany's main ally, Austria-Hungary, Russia's rival in the Balkans, could only applaud the resulting check on Russian ambition. The Germans also poured money into a new port at Haidar Pasha, on the Baghdad railway route and the Asian side of the Bosporus, the channel between the Black Sea and the Marmara. All this now made Germany, rather than Turkey, the perceived main obstacle to the eternal Russian ambition of gaining direct access to the Mediterranean. And Germany's growing dominance in Constantinople in the new century also made it the main threat to the British route to India. But, once the Kaiser and Admiral Tirpitz decided on the rapid expansion of the Imperial High Seas Fleet from 1898, a direct and open challenge to British world maritime supremacy, the main arena of Anglo-German rivalry became the North Sea. The first dramatic consequence of the growing anxiety in London about Germany's headlong naval expansion was the British alliance with Japan in 1902. With the Imperial Japanese Navy, modelled on the British, prepared to help look after British interests in the Far East, the Admiralty could withdraw major naval units to European waters.

Embittered by the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the war of 1870, France regarded Germany, which had supplanted her as Europe's leading military power, as her main enemy ever since. Now as Britain reacted to the threat posed by the Kaiser's naval challenge, she took another even more important diplomatic step: an understanding with France. The outcome of Wilhelm's rash naval building programme was not only the
Entente Cordiale
in 1904 but also a naval construction programme to outstrip Germany's. France eventually agreed to take the main responsibility for the naval defence of the Mediterranean, enabling the British to reduce their Mediterranean Fleet while they took the naval lead in the Channel, the North Sea and north Atlantic.

Three years after the Entente Britain reached an agreement with Russia, much the lesser threat to British interests when compared with the thrusting new Germany and its ruler's constant demand for an undefined ‘place in the sun'. This understanding completed the Triple Entente that the Central Powers would confront in 1914. The latter were members of the Triple Alliance with Italy, but this pact required the Italians to aid their Germanic partners only if they came under attack. Since the Central Powers did the attacking in 1914, the
casus foederis
never arose and traditionally Anglophile Italy began the war as a neutral. All these developments formed the ABC of causation that led to war: Alsace-Lorraine (France v. Germany); Balkan peninsula (Russia v. Austria); capital ships (Britain v. Germany).

The machinations of the European powers as they sought to profit from the decline of the Ottoman Empire were matched by turbulence within it, especially in the period leading up to the war of 1914. The inept and brutal reign of Abdul Hamid II prompted a revolt by a group of relatively youthful intellectuals and military officers who were soon referred to as the ‘Young Turks'. They gravitated to the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), founded by students and young army doctors in 1869 and dedicated to modernising and liberalising the empire before it disintegrated altogether. The reformist constitution announced by the Sultan on his accession in 1876 had been set aside soon afterwards because he took the view that an ignorant population was not ready for it or worthy of it. The newfangled Chamber of Deputies was suspended. Fears of further losses beyond the territorial amputations imposed at the Congress of Berlin, given the endemic unrest in the Balkans and among the Arabs, prompted the CUP in 1908 to threaten revolution unless the constitution was reinstated. This was not the first time the military had intervened in Turkish politics, nor would it by any means be the last. The Sultan complied and the CUP won a huge majority in the ensuing election to the Chamber of Deputies, which reassembled on 17 December.

But the CUP at this stage represented only one of three ideological strands to be found among the politically aware classes in Turkey: the Ottomanist tendency, which wanted to save the empire by modernisation; the Pan-Turkish movement, which wanted to unite all ethnic Turks from central Asia to Anatolia under a single flag; and the Pan-Islamic, which wanted to revive the caliphate and thus re-establish Turkish hegemony over Islam. Rivalry among imperialists, nationalists and Islamists was
intense and was by no means discouraged by the end of the Sultan's tyranny. The CUP used its parliamentary advantage to force the Grand Vizier (prime minister), Kemal Pasha, out of office in February 1909, forming a new government. A month later Islamists provoked a rising in Constantinople, supported by soldiers of the army's First Corps, in favour of Islamic rule. The CUP brought in the Third Corps from Salonica to suppress the revolt mercilessly: 60 alleged ringleaders were hanged. Abdul Hamid was deposed and sent into internal exile in Salonica; it is not clear whether he was involved in the failed coup. His younger brother Rashid took his place under the official name of Mehmet V. He was to be the last Sultan – and the first to reign like a constitutional monarch rather than rule like a despot.

So it was not the new Sultan who undermined the new constitutional arrangements but the CUP, which used the abortive revolt as an excuse to suppress opposition parties as it swung towards nationalism, the Turks being outnumbered by non-Turks in parliament. Then a damaging series of wars between the empire and its neighbours began in 1911, when the Italians invaded Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the coastal regions of modern Libya. Britain undermined Turkey's capacity to resist by declaring Egypt neutral, even though it was officially still Ottoman territory, thus preventing the Turks from sending troops overland from Syria; the superior Italian fleet ruled out a Turkish naval riposte. Not content with their North African conquests, the Italians seized the Dodecanese islands in spring 1912 (Italy withdrew only in 1947, in favour of the Greeks rather than the Turks). The Ottoman government resigned in summer, when Kemal Pasha was reinstalled as Grand Vizier.