Palestine and World War I

Grand Strategy, Military Tactics and Culture in War

Haim Goren, Eran Dolev, Yigal Sheffy

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781780763590
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857738875
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The Palestine Campaign has become one of the most glorified military campaigns of the twentieth century. The last campaign fought by the Ottoman Army, and thus the last act of the once-mighty Ottoman Empire, the Palestine Campaign saw the British Army under General Allenby conquer the Holy Land, forcing the Turkish army back into Europe. Meanwhile the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement ensured the British and French would continue to influence the Middle East for the next 60 years. This front saw some of the most influential stories of the Great War, from T.E. Lawrence's Arab army in the desert, to General Allenby entering Jerusalem on foot in 1917. Palestine and World War I shows how the events of the Great War have left a lasting legacy in the Middle East.

CHAPTER 1

THE PALESTINE CAMPAIGN WITHIN THE GREAT WAR

Jay Winter

Back to the future: materialist explanations of war

During the 40 years that I have been studying the Great War, there have been two sea changes in the direction of historical research. In the mid-1960s, when I began my studies, there was a shift from the high political history of the war – the war of the staff headquarters and Cabinet rooms – to the broader social history of the war. This change was stimulated in part by the creation of the first great television series of the war. BBC2 was launched in 1964 with its still-unmatched 28-part series on the Great War. The historical authors of this series – Correlli Barnett and John Tremaine – wanted to give the series a patriotic gloss, assuring the viewing public that the war was terrible but that the right leadership and the right side won. Whatever their efforts, the public took away from the series a different message: that the war was a colossal waste, and that the soldiers who suffered it were lions led by donkeys, in the phrase made popular by a book of the time. At the same time, Marc Ferro, author of a sprawling social history of the Russian Revolution, produced a six-part series on French television which used film to illustrate the power of social movements, first in support of war and then, in support of revolution, thereby undermining the Russian war effort and overthrowing the monarchy. Social history in those days meant the history of the common people, and what better way to show their faces and their anguish than to use period film clips and the words of contemporaries, collected in volumes that grew into massive libraries.

There was also a populist current in historical writing in the 1960s, when thousands of 50th anniversary books appeared to honour those who had fought in the war. Historians began to indict those who had led others into the trenches and kept them there until their political and economic interests were met. The people bore the brunt of the war, and for what: the dreams of generals and industrialists. So said Fritz Fischer, the great German historian, who in two major works published in 1961 and 1969 showed that German war aims were massive and punitive, and that the thrust to dominate Europe and the world was not initiated by Hitler in the 1930s but by Tirpitz, von Moltke, Hindenburg and Ludendorff a generation before. The Nazis were not parentheses in German and world history; they were the legatees of a war for world dominion.

Many other historians pushed on in search of the people's war. A decade later, three major works took the historiography of the war in a second new direction. In 1975 Paul Fussell published The Great War and Modern Memory; a year later John Keegan published The Face of Battle; and in 1979, Eric Leed's book No Man's Land appeared. All three have the Vietnam war in between the lines, and suggested that the impact of war was most pronounced not in the realm of political or social conflict but rather in cultural history, defined as the study of signifying practices in the past, or more simply, the study of the ways contemporaries high and low made sense of the violent world in which they lived.

At the same time, there was a more general sense among historians that the Marxist and Marxisant ideas which had informed the work on the social history of this period were inadequate. More than a decade before the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the intellectual force of Marxist ideas throughout the academy had disintegrated. There seemed no reason to explore Marxism either as a theory of society (who rules and why) or as a theory of action (how groups of people overthrow one social order and establish another). In the vacuum thus produced, an idealist turn in historical studies helped spread the doctrine of cultural history among students in many parts of the world. Instead of studying ‘war and the working class’, young historians queued up to study representations of war in literature, in language, in war memorials and other facets of material culture.

We are still in this cultural phase of the history of the Great War, and to my knowledge, there is no end in sight. In part this reflects a wider ‘memory boom’ inside and outside the academy, where everyone studies memory, whatever meaning he or she attaches to the word. But it may be time to suggest that we should turn the clock back a bit. I am not at all persuaded that the materialist vision of history of the 1960s – without the Marxist patina many of us used at the time – is utterly beyond redemption. Indeed it is my contention that once we move away from the great centres of the war on the Western Front, once we leave Western Europe and move to the multiple and varied periphery of the war, we will find at hand abundant evidence of the hard materials of imperial domination, resource exploitation, and colonial hypocrisy that Fritz Fischer identified in the German Foreign Office papers over half a century ago.

Cultural historians study what they term war cultures, or sets of representations commonly shared among populations who use them to accept the burdens of war. They spar over whether the 1914–18 war was total war, and indeed whether such a notion is ever possible, or whether, like Zeno's paradox, totality is an ever-receding limit that is approximated but never reached. They consider whether the threshold of violence on the Western Front constituted a point after which anything was possible, and debate whether this new kind of war, total war, opened a door through which some – and only some people – passed linking warfare and genocide, in this case the Armenian genocide of 1915–17 (on which more below).

These questions all have force and significance, but when we move to the vast dependencies of the European combatant powers, do they really yield powerful analytical tools? My answer is by and large no, but I do consider the case of the Armenian genocide to be an exception to this rule. The cultural history of genocide is everybody's business.

My purpose here is therefore to heighten our understanding of the war outside Europe as a continuation of nineteenth-century imperial conflict and imperial warfare. This interpretation resides on the notion that history moves at different tempos during the same time period, and that the Great War was at one and the same time a move forwards to an era of industrial mass killing and a move backwards to an organization of the non-European world according to the strategic and material needs of the dominant imperial powers. Woodrow Wilson saw it otherwise: to him the war ushered in an age of self-determination and regime change, where those with right on their side could install democracy and instill democratic values in those adolescent nations unable to develop them on their own. It should surprise no one that George Bush had a photograph of Wilson on his desk in the Oval Office. He was one of the legatees of the moral high-mindedness and imperial illusions of the Great War.

What I intend to do, therefore, is not to say goodbye to all that; I am not about to turn my back on the field of cultural history where I myself have laboured for several decades. Instead I want to pause and consider that perhaps Marx was right when he wrote that we make history but not in the way we think we do. The Great War changed the language of war, albeit slowly, but despite redistribution of Germany's overseas assets in 1919, the war also left intact very rough and unforgiving equations of imperial power in the post-war years. That is the tragedy of self-determination, and of the failure of the mandates sponsored by the League of Nations in the inter-war years. Words changed, but destinies did not. The tragedy of Palestine bears the marks of this glacial movement of imperial history over the past century.

Imperial histories

There were two movements: towards imperialist power and away from it. The Great War was both the apogee and the beginning of the end of European imperialism. Materialist history explains the first, but not entirely the second. For that we need to explore what has been termed by Erez Manela the ‘Wilsonian moment’, that time from 1918–22 when the staying power of imperialism was disclosed, as was the evanescence of American-led attempts to bring self-determination to subject peoples around the globe.

There are good reasons to look at outcomes rather than at origins alone. Imperialism did not cause the outbreak of World War I, but it structured international relations in such a way as to make war likely, if not inevitable. Imperialism did not determine the conduct of the war, but it framed the choices made by each side and gave the Allies in the long run an insuperable advantage over the Central powers. Imperialism both structured and caused the failure of the post-war settlement, thereby ensuring that a second war would break out and that the imperial structures which emerged from the 1914–18 conflict would fragment and collapse. The decolonization of all six great imperial powers – Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman empire, and Russia (last but not least) – was and is the lasting legacy of the Great War.

The process I wish to describe is dialectical. The war expanded imperial horizons and objectives, so that by 1917 war aims were framed in blatantly imperialist language. Everyone knew this at the time because the Bolsheviks published the secret agreements from the Tsar's foreign ministry. But these sordid arrangements were put in question not by Lenin, who was able to take Russia out of the war, at the price of a vast expansion in German imperial power and territory; the man who undermined empire was Woodrow Wilson and he did not do so in the way he thought he did. His call for self-determination collided with imperial realities and it was this collision, leading to the failure of self-determination, which brought about turmoil and violence in the immediate aftermath of the war. It was Wilson's failure to secure a peace in which self-determination was power-blind and colour-blind which led in short order to riots in Cairo and Beijing. When Wellington Koo, the Chinese delegate to the Paris Peace Conference, cabled home with the news that German concessions in China were not to be returned but assigned in the short term to Japan, his message was received with shock. On 4 May 1919, 3,000 students demonstrated against imperialism and the Treaty in Tiananmen Square; thus the May 4 Movement was born. Among its fruits was the Chinese Communist party, the very last thing in the world someone like Woodrow Wilson wanted to bring about. And yet he did, with the same mix of blindness, Presbyterian high-mindedness and a sense of assurance that he and only he was right, which he left as a legacy to later American administrations.

It is this binary history of war and imperialism that I wish to address in this introduction. After briefly examining the imperialist framing of international tension before the war and international efforts during it, I turn to the violence that followed the war, both chronologically and logically. The crisis of empire in the aftermath of war took lives all over the world. It did so here too. Eight young men and women – including Joseph Trumpeldor – died in an encounter in March 1920 in the upper Galil. These eight gave their name to Qiryat Shmona, a war memorial in its own right. One month later five Jews and four Arabs died, and hundreds were wounded in riots in the Old City of Jerusalem. In May 1921, 48 Arabs and 45 Jews – including the great writer Yosef Haim Brenner – were killed in riots in Jaffa.

Was this kind of violence coming anyway? Perhaps, but the collision between an imperial outcome of the war and equal but diametrically opposite promises of self-determination made it both inevitable and immediate. The Great War both heightened expectations of national movements that their goal might be at hand, and at the same time made their realization even more remote and out of reach. That dual process of the expansion and violent contraction of hope is the source of post-war disorder and much else besides.

First, we must address the preliminary questions, related to the limits of an imperial interpretation of the war. Does it make sense to describe the outbreak of war as caused in some sense by imperialism? From the vantage point of the Middle East, it does not. The war was not fought for oil. Output from Mesopotamian or Persian oil fields was then at very low levels, dwarfed by Indonesia and Venezuela, not to mention the United States. A number of countries sought advantage by blocking the access of others to these potential resources only then just coming on stream, but it is only later, emphatically during and after World War II, that both oil output and the strategic struggle over it took on global proportions. It is true that before 1914 there was considerable German investment and know-how in the Berlin to Baghdad railway project, incomplete at the outbreak of the war, and the Germans had helped build the Hejaz line. But there were much bigger issues closer to home than that. Britain and Germany went to war over which of the two powers would dominate North-Western Europe; a German victory would indeed have had consequences in the imperial realm, but first came the question of who controlled the Channel ports. Britain, which imported 75 per cent of its food supply in peacetime, simply could not afford to give up mastery of the seas. Even parity with Germany would have been a disaster. British dominance had to be ensured and the cost of doing so was the commitment of land forces, to be raised from scratch, to fight on the Continent. The neutrality of Belgium was a cover for a very real clash of vital interests.

The decision of Turkey to join the German side on 5 November 1914 reflected first and foremost its long-standing conflict with Russia. To be sure, it was troublesome to the British and the French that a Muslim country had challenged them in this way. In part to stop British troops from chewing on barbed wire, in his inimitable phrase, and in part pour encourager les autres muselmans, Churchill thought up the hare-brained scheme of forcing the straits of the Dardanelles. When Turkish mines put paid to that plan, Churchill went full steam ahead and decided to launch a very difficult combined sea and land operation at Gallipoli in April 1915. The outcome was the same. Allied troops were pinned down for eight months and had to withdraw in total defeat in January 1916. This leads us to question what kind of intelligence Allied leaders were working with then. Did anyone photograph the cliffs at Gallipoli and work out the logistics of taking them? It seems to me that intelligence was less important to Churchill and Hamilton than good old Orientalism: the Turks would collapse in the face of British and Anzac troops, because in the British imaginaire that is who they were and what they did when challenged by European power. The subsequent disaster at Kut, where Townshend and 8,000 troops surrendered to the Turks, made matters worse. We know now that these were only temporary setbacks. A year later, General Maude's relief column retook the town, and Allenby's advance took care of the rest.

The imperial dimension has more purchase when we turn to the subject of subversion as a strategy in the war. Both sides engaged in it, at times with appalling amateurishness. The Arab revolt guided by Lawrence of Arabia and the Balfour Declaration were subtle steps in this direction compared to the offer made to Mexico in January 1917 by the German Foreign Minister Zimmermann, that in return for support in the war, Mexico would be rewarded with New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. This billet doux, easily intercepted by British Naval Intelligence, was made available to President Wilson two months later; Wilson's reaction was furious, and the rest is history. The fact that Mexico thought that the German idea was preposterous was neither here nor there; it was German malevolence which had to be stopped.

The same hand of the Kaiserreich blundered completely when, working through Sir Roger Casement, an Irish nationalist, Germany sent arms by U-boat to the Irish coast for an insurrection in Ireland. The arms and Casement were captured immediately; the British kept the arms and hanged Casement. But even without the weapons, Irish nationalists went ahead with their quixotic revolt, hoping – with reason – that the British would make martyrs of them all. This is precisely what the British did, thereby initiating a vicious civil war and undermining their hold over the Catholic counties of southern Ireland.

Subversion was the name of the game when the German army sent Lenin from Switzerland to Scandinavia, and finally to the Finland Station in Petrograd in a sealed railway car; this gambit was somewhat more successful than the German demand to make the Ukraine an independent satellite state of Germany, a demand forced down Bolshevik throats in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918, a treaty which evaporated when Germany lost the war.

Imperial power did frame Allied victory, though, in ways which made all the difference to the war on the Western Front, though not to the war in the Middle East. I am still of the opinion that the war was won and lost in the West; there Allied strength was based on imperial reserves, human and capital, both formal and informal, which Germany could never match. That is why I stated years ago that Germany lost the war on the very first day of the conflict. The strength of the German army, the most remarkable fighting force ever put together to date, obscured that fact for four years, blunting everything the Allies could hit them with, and still remaining in March 1918 within shelling distance of Paris.

By late 1918, it became apparent to even the German High Command that though they had had the strength to defeat French and British offensives in 1915, 1916, and 1917, and to punch a huge hole in Allied lines in March 1918, they simply could not win the war. They could not turn tactical gains into strategic ones. They could not defeat the whole world arrayed against them. The morale of an army sinks to breaking point when soldiers lose sight of victory; when it becomes clear that today's sacrifice will never yield tomorrow's breakthrough. German soldiers came to see the war this way, and it is this recognition which led them to surrender by the tens of thousands in the late summer of 1918. The German army was defeated on the field of battle; it lost the industrialized war.

Imperial wars

Elsewhere, on the Eastern Front, in the Middle East, industrialized war was less in evidence. Lines of supply were admittedly long on both sides, and cutting the Hejaz railway undeniably made a difference to Allenby's campaign. But in a line stretching from Riga to the Black Sea and then continuing to the Middle East, including Gaza and Jerusalem, an older kind of war was fought, one which had both industrial and non-industrial forms. The key measurement is the use of horsepower. In 1914, military supplies in British forces were divided 10/1 with respect to organic versus inorganic supplies: the predominance of manpower and horsepower lies here. By 1918 on the Western Front, the ratio was entirely reversed: there were now ten times the quantities of metal and machines and chemicals compared to food and fodder. Behind the Riga–Black Sea line and in the Middle East, the older ways continued. This was true of disease as well. Casualties in this extended Eastern Front were balanced between those inflicted by enemy action and those arising from disease. There a twentieth-century war was fought in nineteenth-century sanitary conditions, and as a result the proportions of those who served who were killed rise rapidly the further east one looks.

The notion of total war is also hard to apply to this eastern zone of warfare. Industrialization is the key to the concept of total war and only later, much later, ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• 1. The Palestine Campaign within the Great War
• Part I A ‘Multinational Campaign’
• Part II Strategic-Political Aspects of the Campaign
• Part III Military Aspects of the Campaign
• Part IV Palestine during the Campaign
• Part V Cultural Aspects of the Campaign