Enemy on the Euphrates, page 8
7
Imperial Objectives in the East
On Monday 12 April 1915, Sir Mark Sykes took his usual early morning stroll from his four-storey town house in Buckingham Gate to Westminster Cathedral, where he heard Mass, and then returned home for breakfast. No. 9 Buckingham Gate had not been his first choice as a London base for his parliamentary work. Having inherited his father’s huge estate in 1913, valued conservatively at £290,000, he had originally considered renting a furnished house in Mayfair at £1,200 per year; but his wife Edith had put her foot down at this extravagance and, in the end, Sykes had to agree that the Buckingham Gate house at £500 per year was not only much more economical but was ideally placed for his work as an MP. And since his recent appointment by Kitchener to the War Office, Buckingham Gate was eminently suitable – a short walk through St James’s Park took him to Whitehall and Horse Guards Parade. But on this particular day he was heading for the Foreign Office, and at 11.00 a.m. Sykes strode purposefully into the designated committee room carrying a large briefcase packed with notebooks, diaries, maps, gazetteers, travel brochures and photographs and settled into one of the comfortable chairs surrounding the huge table in the centre of the room.
The committee to which Kitchener had dispatched Sykes as his personal representative had been established by the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, charged with advising the cabinet on ‘British Desiderata in Turkey-in-Asia’: in effect, what to do with the vast non-European territories of the Ottoman Empire once it had been defeated; and at that particular moment, few Englishmen had any doubts about the rapid defeat of ‘the Turk’.
Indeed, ‘the Turk’ already seemed to be on the brink of defeat. In December 1914 an Ottoman army of 90,000 had advanced into the Caucasus, initially causing widespread panic among its Russian defenders. In early January 1915, in a raging blizzard and with temperatures dropping to minus 30°f, they had thrown themselves against the Russian army defending the town of Sarikamish. But the plan had not taken account of the atrocious weather conditions and in an attempt to outflank the Russians, Enver Pasha’s troops had floundered in the snowdrifts and over 30,000 men froze to death. Most of the survivors were forced to surrender and only 12,000 of the initial attacking force escaped the catastrophe.
Also in January 1915, Djemal Pasha; commanding the Ottoman Fourth Army based at Damascus, had sent 20,000 men of the VIII Corps, including the Arab 25th Division, to attack British forces defending Egypt’s eastern frontier. After a ten-night march across the Sinai peninsula, they had mounted attacks against British posts at Qantara in the north and Kubri, seven miles north of Suez, in the south. According to Djemal Pasha, ‘The Arab fighters who constituted the bulk of the 25th … performed splendidly.’1
Djemal Pasha had hoped that the success of an Ottoman force would trigger an Egyptian Muslim uprising. On 3 February his troops mounted a major attack at Tussum at the southern end of Lake Timsah, six miles south-east of Ismailia. But it was another disaster; they simply did not have sufficient strength to make a breakthrough. The few Ottoman troops who succeeded in crossing the Suez Canal were all killed or captured and Djemal Pasha was forced to order a retreat to Beersheba, having lost about 1,400 men.
Meanwhile, the government of India had successfully established a bridgehead in Southern Iraq, captured Basra and Qurna and were currently taking steps to defend the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s facilities in south-west Persia. Reinforcements were arriving daily from India and it could only be a matter of time before an advance further up the Tigris commenced.
True, the recent naval assault on the Dardanelles had been disappointing. Between 19 February and 13 March Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden had attacked the forts at the mouth of the Dardanelles and attempted to sweep the mines which the Turks had laid further up the straits. But heavy gunfire from the Turkish forts, gun emplacements and 6-inch mobile howitzers on the northern, peninsular side of the channel had made it impossible for his minesweepers to carry out their task. Overwhelmed by the difficulties of trying to force a way through, Admiral Carden had a nervous breakdown and was replaced by his second in command, de Roebeck. On 18 March Admiral de Roebeck, under strong pressure from Winston Churchill to demonstrate progress, began a major naval advance into the straits. Unfortunately, a number of capital ships, Irresistible, Inflexible and Ocean, and the French battleships Bouvet and Gaulois were sunk by mines or seriously damaged by coastal shellfire and de Roebeck was obliged to call off a plan to force his way through to Istanbul. However, a formidable land army under General Sir Ian Hamilton was now being assembled at Mudros on the Aegean island of Lemnos and there was a strong expectation that within a few days a major amphibious assault on the Gallipoli peninsula would be mounted. Then the combined naval and land forces would sweep through to the Ottoman capital.
The committee to which Sykes had been summoned was to be chaired by Sir Maurice De Bunsen, formerly British ambassador in Vienna, who had brought together representatives of all the government departments whose views would have to be taken into account in putting together the committee’s final report: the War Office, the Admiralty, the India Office, the Board of Trade and of course, the Foreign Office itself. As Sykes glanced around the table he would have seen a group of elderly men – in their sixties or older – with only two exceptions. There was George Clerk of the Foreign Office, whom Sykes had met once or twice and who was in his mid-thirties, and sitting to the left of the chairman was a very short bald man whom Sir Maurice introduced as ‘Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Hankey, secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence’. As yet Sykes knew him only by reputation.
SYKES’S 1915 PROPOSED SCHEME FOR THE ‘DECENTRALISATION’ OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE’S EASTERN POSSESSIONS
Calling the meeting to order, Sir Maurice reminded the assembled officials of their remit. The cabinet had already agreed to the tsar’s demand for Istanbul and the Turkish Straits together with the islands of Imbros and Tenedos in the northern Aegean, and in return the tsar’s government had assured Britain that it would respect the ‘special interests’ of Britain and France in Asiatic Turkey. Sir Maurice made it clear from the start that the ‘special interests’ they were being asked to define were ‘the primary economic and commercial interests of Great Britain and the policy it would be desirable for H.M. Government to adopt to secure those ends’.2 Doubtless Britain also had a ‘civilising mission’ east of the Dardanelles and eventually the ‘white man’s burden’ would have to be taken up; but for the moment it was ‘economic and commercial interests’ which were the overriding focus of the committee’s deliberations. Accordingly, the first civil servant called upon by Sir Maurice to address the committee was Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith, permanent secretary of the Board of Trade.
Sir Llewellyn stated that HM Government had three principal economic and commercial objectives in the Asiatic territories of the Ottoman Empire: firstly, obtaining a free and open market for British manufactures; secondly, the acquisition of secure sources of food supplies and raw materials; and thirdly, to create a field for the employment of British capital and an outlet for the surplus population of Britain’s Indian Empire. The first of these desiderata implied ensuring that neither the Turks nor Britain’s allies should, in occupation of portions of the Ottoman Empire which they might retain or acquire, be allowed to impose any tariff barriers which would obstruct British trade. The second objective should be based on the recognition that Iraq was of particular interest to Britain as it could be an important source of foodstuffs when major irrigation works were carried out and of oil resources when they were developed. Both the oil and irrigation possibilities fell mainly within the Baghdad vilayet, Llewellyn Smith stated, and so ‘they must clearly be included within a British controlled area’.3 However, although he believed that British interests in Upper Iraq were not as great as in Baghdad and Basra, Llewellyn Smith added that ‘an important oil region lies in the Mosul Vilayet … and it therefore seems desirable that Mosul too should fall within the British sphere of influence.’
The following day the committee reconvened and under the direction of its chairman moved on to discuss the strategic implications of the economic interests which had formed the principal topic of the previous day’s deliberations. De Bunsen opened the session by stating that, in his view, if Basra was going to be incorporated into the British possessions – and the government of India now seemed determined that this should be so – then it would also be necessary to control the Baghdad vilayet. Baghdad must not fall into the hands of any other power or its possession by a potential enemy would threaten Britain’s position at Basra and the head of the Gulf. To this, the representative of the India Office, Sir T.W. Holderness, agreed, adding that British control up to a line north of Baghdad, from Hit on the Euphrates to Tikrit on the Tigris, should be sufficient and would almost certainly satisfy the government of India.
In fact, the views of the government of India itself were already set out in two telegrams from the viceroy to the secretary of state for India, received in February and March and now placed before the Committee.4 In the first, Lord Hardinge had asked,
How far the safety of the oilfields in the upper valley of the Karun river could be permanently secured if the Vilayet of Baghdad were to remain under foreign and possibly hostile control?5
adding,
It is assumed that the administration of the Vilayet, when it comes definitely under British rule, will be carried out by the government of India.
However, in a further telegram in March, the viceroy somewhat modified his remarks about the future administration of Baghdad, stating,
Our interests are at Abadan and in Karun Valley by (sic) the oil works … it is essential that for this and other reasons we should remain in permanent occupation of Basra Vilayet and that on political, economic and religious grounds, the Baghdad Vilayet should also be ceded by Turkey and a native administration under our protection and control established there.6
But Llewellyn Smith thought control of Basra and Baghdad alone was insufficient. If Britain was going to become involved in negotiations with the French on the future of ‘Turkey-in-Asia’, as was probably inevitable, it would be necessary to ask for something more. Britain, he argued, must also have Mosul. Only by taking the line of defence up to this mountainous northern area would it be possible to construct a strategically sound defensive position in the event of future hostilities with either the remnants of Ottoman power or one of Britain’s current allies. And he concluded by saying, ‘May I also remind you gentlemen, that it must not be forgotten that there is a valuable oil region in the Vilayet of Mosul.’7
Sykes agreed. ‘If the Baghdad Vilayet is to be incorporated it will be necessary as well to take the Vilayet of Mosul.’ Major General C.E. Callwell of the War Office also threw his weight behind the demand for Mosul: in his opinion the ‘Hit–Tikrit line would be unsuitable as a defensive position.’ However, he added a further consideration. If Britain was going to control all three of the Iraqi vilayets this newly acquired addition to the empire would have to have an outlet to the Mediterranean, either at Haifa in Palestine or further north at Alexandretta.
Admiral Sir H.B. Jackson added that, whereas he had no objection to including Mosul in the list of desirable acquisitions, he felt obliged to say that from the Admiralty point of view the essential thing was to control the vilayets of Basra and Baghdad. ‘Both these Vilayets are of first importance owing to the oil supplies which the Admiralty draws through those regions.’8
By the time the third meeting of the committee was convened on Thursday 15 April it had become clear that the observations which a number of members had already made in relation to the question of oil resources called for a more detailed exposition of the subject than any of the permanent appointees – even Sykes – could offer. Sir Maurice De Bunsen therefore opened the meeting by reminding the committee, ‘It is known that there are extremely rich oil deposits in Mesopotamia and in view of our commitment as regards the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, it is important to know what steps we should take to safeguard those interests.’9
De Bunsen therefore informed the committee that he had invited Rear Admiral Sir Edmond Slade, reputed to be the country’s leading oil expert, to address the meeting. Slade had led the Admiralty’s investigating commission which spent three months in Persia between October 1913 and January 1914 studying the operations of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and which had declared the company’s concession to be potentially of great value and capable of supplying the Royal Navy’s requirements for a long time. Behind his bluff, grey-bearded nautical exterior he possessed a shrewd analytical mind with a personal fascination for the facts and figures of fuel logistics and the emerging geopolitics of oil. It had been Slade who had urged the government to obtain some form of control over Anglo-Persian, paving the way for Churchill’s dramatic move to partially nationalise the company.10 Subsequently, Slade had been chosen as one of the two government-appointed directors on the board of Anglo-Persian and at the beginning of hostilities in the East it was Slade who had strongly urged the defence of the Abadan refinery and Anglo-Persian’s pipelines.11 So when the admiral took his place at the table and began his exposition the committee members would have listened to him very attentively indeed. Slade explained to the committee that there were,
large deposits of oil throughout Asiatic Turkey. A strip of oil-bearing regions is known to run from the southern extremity of Arabia along the west coast of the Persian Gulf, through the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates and so on to the northern coast of Asia Minor almost to the European end.
If the Eastern possessions of the Ottoman Empire were partitioned, Slade argued,
it would be sufficient if we secured the Vilayet of Mosul as that district comprises some very rich oil-bearing lands, connecting with the Persian oil fields, which it is essential we should control to prevent undue competition with the Anglo-Persian Concessions.12
Now here was a consideration which had not, as yet, entered the minds of the committee – it was not, apparently, just a question of acquiring access to Iraqi oil in order to supplement Britain’s military oil requirements currently being developed in Persia, but given the apparent abundance of oil in ‘Asiatic Turkey’ to which the admiral had alluded, it was also a matter of preventing any other power – or company – acquiring oil resources in Iraq, developing them, and undermining the monopoly which the partnership of state and private interests had obtained in Persia and at Abadan. Oil was going to become a major world commodity and when production of that commodity began to take on the scale that he envisaged, Slade, for one, had no intention of allowing competition from other large oil companies (and here, both he and the committee members most probably thought of Shell) to force down prices and undermine the returns on the heavy investment which not only British taxpayers but also British capitalists had made in southern Persia.
Slade concluded his presentation by urging that once the Iraqi oilfields were acquired it would be necessary to ‘connect the fields by a pipeline with the Mediterranean’ and Haifa was again mentioned as a possible oil terminal. De Bunsen then expressed his satisfaction that ‘Admiral Slade’s views as to our requirements in regard to oil practically coincide with the views that the Committee has taken in regard to the inclusion of the Mosul Vilayet in the territory to be acquired by us.’
Although this was the first time they had met, as the deliberations of the De Bunsen Committee proceeded, Sykes and the thirty-eight-year-old secretary of the Committee for Imperial Defence, Lieutenant Colonel Hankey, became close friends. They met, they dined, they discussed. It wasn’t just their similarity in ages: Hankey as well as Sykes was an ‘Easterner’. It was Hankey who, on Boxing Day 1914, had issued a memorandum to the War Council proposing a major attack on Turkey. Contrary to the views of the majority of the British general staff, Hankey argued that ‘no increase in men would enable us to break the front in the West’, urging that victory was only to be obtained in the Eastern theatre of operations.13 And by now, Hankey had won the enthusiastic support of both Churchill and Kitchener: the assault on the Ottoman Empire had begun. Moreover, of all the members of the De Bunsen Committee, it was Hankey who seems to have paid closest attention to the repeated mention of oil in the Mosul vilayet. Three years later it would be Hankey who turned all his subtle intelligence and guile to the task of ensuring that Mosul and its oil remained firmly in the grasp of the British Empire when the war ended.
By the time of the fourth meeting of the committee on 17 April, the rest of its members had become duly impressed by Sykes’s seemingly comprehensive knowledge of Turkey-in-Asia, its peoples, geography and resources. No doubt interspersing his detailed factual observations with amusing anecdotes based on his travels, Sykes began to introduce his own schemes for dividing up the conquered Ottoman Empire. The first of these called for the Allies to partition all but Turkish Anatolia among themselves with Russia receiving a northern, France a central and Britain a southern part of the Asian provinces. As an alternative he proposed keeping the area ‘nominally independent but under effective European Control’ within Allied ‘zones of political and commercial interest’. Both of these schemes – ‘partition’ and ‘zones of interest’ – would involve the construction of a British-controlled railway stretching over a thousand miles from a new British Mediterranean port, probably at Haifa in Palestine, to the Euphrates. However, the Foreign Office, under Sir Edward Grey, a high temple of self-regarding moral rectitude, worried that the discussion might be developing along far too imperialistic lines. So the committee found itself unable to reach a consensus on either of Sykes’s proposals.
At the next meeting, a month later, Sykes came up with yet another scheme for ensuring that Britain’s ‘desiderata’ in Asiatic Turkey were achieved. After the Turks were defeated, their Asian territories should be ‘devolved’ into five historical and ethnographical ayalets: Anatolia, Armenia, Syria, Palestine and Iraq. In theory these ayalets would remain provinces owing formal allegiance to a reformed – and much weakened – Ottoman Empire. In practice they would enjoy considerable powers of self-determination, albeit guided by foreign ‘advisors’. In the event it was this scheme which the committee decided to recommend in its report published on 25 June 1915.
