Book Review - The Emergence of the Middle East 1914-1924 by Howard M. Sachar

 The Emergence of the Middle East 1914-1924 by Howard M. Sachar

London: Allen Land The Penguin Press, 1970 (first published 1969)  ISBN 0713901586

This is a well-written history in the old style, describing the impact the First World War had on the creation of what we know now as the countries of the Middle East and its littoral - specifically Greece, Turkey, Syria, Palestine as it then was (Israel now), Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Before World War One, all of these countries apart from Greece were part of the Ottoman Empire, and this book is essentially a description of how that Empire was broken up, mainly through the actions of the victorious members of the Entente, specifically England and France.

Many of us think we know the history of how the modern Middle East came to be, but Sachar's book taught me things I didn't know about what occurred during these years; things that have filled in some gaps in my knowledge and brought to me a greater understanding of why history in that part of the world has developed in the way it has.

The Ottoman Empire's fateful decision to side with Germany during the War brought ruin. The British, fearing for their access to the Suez Canal, went to great efforts to defeat the Ottomans in Palestine, and used everything at their disposal, including inciting the Arabian Peninsula to revolt. This is of course a famous story, and Sachar fills it out in a historical sense, pointing out the limited effectiveness of the revolt in the fight against their Turkish overlords (it was the British army that did most of the "heavy lifting"), and putting the Lawrence legend into proper historical perspective.

A story less well-known is the Ottoman's war against Russia, which was, until the Revolution a successful one for the Entente, as opposed to the disaster at Gallipoli. Iraq was hellish for both sides - initially a tactical failure by the British, although strategically important. Ottoman losses were catastrophic, and when the end came, the carcass of their Empire was up for grabs.

Sachar describes the machinations of the carve-up of the Empire well. He shows us that the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement was in some ways only a minor cause of the current problems in the Middle East. The British imagined a rule over Mesopotamia (Iraq), but initially wanted the Arabs to rule their own kingdom, which included the interior of Syria, all of Palestine, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The French scuppered the Syrian part of the plan, insisting that they extend their rule beyond the coastal strip (including Lebanon) and having suzerainty over the inland as well. After initial talks, an agreement between Feisal and the Jewish communities in Palestine could not be reached: because England had committed to a Jewish homeland in Palestine, they felt that they had the right and indeed the responsibility to rule in that place. The machinations between the pro-Jewish and pro-Arab sections of the British government did much to poison relations between Jew and Arab there, with results that echo down to today.

Feisal was sent to Baghdad to rule over the protectorate of Iraq, while his brother Abdullah was given the Transjordan area as his feifdom, much to the anger of the Jewish people in Palestine, who thought that they would inherit this. It must be remembered that all these areas were not colonies of the two European imperial powers, but protectorates under a League of Nations mandate. As Sachar points out, this kindled the idea and hope within natives of these areas that one day they would be masters in their own lands, which did indeed happen after the next great conflagration.

The remaining part of the Empire, Turkey (Sachar does not really deal with Arabia in this book), was a different story. Defeated, dispirited and exhausted, but the fighting was not over. The Armenians (Sachar devotes a chapter to their war time destruction within Anatolia) attacked the Turks to claim their homeland, assisted by the Russians. After setbacks, Kemal managed to destroy them. The Greeks, based around Smyrna, attacked initially to gain territory that had a plurality of their countrymen, but after initial successes, tried to get to Ankara. Kemal again defeated the Greeks and destroyed their army in Turkey. The Italians, French and English, tired of war and the expense of occupation, forced a solution at the Lausanne conference, beginning the biggest mass exodus of populations in history to that stage, and in the process creating a (basically) ethnically homogenous Greece and Turkey.

There is much base politics and treachery in this story, all of which is well told by Sachar. His descriptions of many of the major players give a good sense of the type of people they were, and he manages to tie this multi-stranded story into one connected thread. When I began this book I suspected that it would turn out to be a dry academic tome, but it's actually quite readable, accompanied with decent maps, notes and bibliography.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Crimea by Orlando Figes

 Crimea: the Last Crusade by Orlando Figes

London: Penguin, 2011 (first published 2010)    ISBN 9780141013503

Within ten kilometres of my home I can travel down Raglan Street, Cardigan Street and Malakoff Street on my way to either Redan or Sebastopol. If I like, I can drive a couple of hours west to Panmure, or if I chose to drive north-west I can have a coffee in St. Arnaud. If I drive south-east for an hour or so to Melbourne I can travel down Inkerman Street and Alma Road to the suburb of Balaclava. That all these names are linked to the Crimean War tells me not only the time period when these suburbs and streets were coming into being, but what a huge effect this conflict had on the public opinion of Britain and her empire at the time.

And yet who has heard of that war these days? Given the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is timely to revisit this period in history, for it can inform the bystander of some of the issues that underlie today's conflict. Thankfully, we can read this well-written book by that great student and historian of recent Russian history, Orlando Figes.

Figes not only writes about the tragedy of the fighting, but of the deeper religious, colonial and territorial claims that drove this war, as well as writing an interesting and useful chapter on the legacy of the war (and yes, a couple of the places listed above get a mention).

As Figes writes in his introduction "each power entered the Crimean War with its own motives." The Turks were fighting to hold on to their European empire. The British were fighting ostensibly to save the Turks from Russian aggression, but actually to try to contain Russia (whose expansion they feared), and garner more trade with Turkey. Napoleon III fought for the glory of France, and also perhaps to create a Europe of nation-states that would look to him as an elder statesman. 

And what of Russia? Well, as Figes states "As for the Tsar, Nicholas I, the man more than anyone responsible for the Crimean War, he was partly driven by inflated pride and arrogance, a result of having been tsar for twenty-seven years, partly by his sense of how a great power such as Russia should behave towards its weaker neighbours, and partly by a gross miscalculation about how the other powers would respond to his actions..." sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it...

Ostensibly the War began when Russia took umbrage at how the Turks were treating Christians in the Holy Land. This led the Tsar not only to bully Turkey, but to invade the Danubian delta, with an idea to "free" the Slav Christians from the Muslim yoke. His actions raised the ire of both Britain and France. Britain had long been concerned that Russia's access to the Black Sea was a strategic arrow pointed at the heart of British trade and power in the East. France was concerned not only for the continuation of Catholic Austria (with her quarrelsome Orthodox subjects), but also for the rights of Catholics in Palestine. Their concern for the plight of Turkey came a very poor last in this race of self-interest. And so both the British and the French sailed to the Crimea, where with their superior technology and better-trained armies they quickly put the port of Sevastopol to siege, and almost as quickly they began to lose huge amounts of soldiery to disease and cold. The viciousness of the fighting, both in the field at the Alma, Balaklava and Inkerman, and during the siege, is well-covered by Figes with apposite quotes from journals and newspaper reports from the time.

Figes also covers the politics of the War, especially in England, where newspaper reports for the first time played a big part in how the public reacted to and indeed shaped the policy of the Government. There were many aspects of the Crimean War that made it the first modern war - newspaper reporting, modern rifles (both the French and the English had them and the Russians did not, which turned the tide of many of the battles), and the development of modern logistics, which were needed for the British and French to continue the siege.

The siege of Sevastopol perhaps doesn't seem as present to English-speaking peoples who think about the Crimean War as the Charge of the Light Brigade or Florence Nightingale, but to the Russians, it is a sacred event and memory - similar in scope to the Australian view of Gallipoli. Figes points out in his epilogue how the partition of the USSR in 1991, which meant that the Crimea and Sevastopol were no longer part of Russia, was traumatic for the Russian people and for Putin, unbearable.

Yet for Alexander II, who succeeded his brother during the War, once Sevastopol had fallen there was little point in continuing a war he knew he could not win. While the English war party, led by Palmerston, wished not only to continue the War but to expand it, the English public, horrified at the loss of life, felt that the taking of Sevastopol meant victory was at hand and that the troops could come home. Napoleon similarly was looking for a way out, which the fall of Sevastopol gave him.

And so the peace conference, which included Austria as well as the four belligerents, tried to give something to everyone. Britain came out of it with a Black Sea that was Russian-fleet-free, France came out of it with the Austrian and Turkish empires intact, and a commitment to assistance in Italy, the Austrians  gained an assurance that their own Orthodox subjects would not be stirred to revolt by the Russians, and the Russians could save face through the assurance that Orthodox rights in the Holy Land would be upheld by the Ottoman Empire. For the Ottomans, despite being the victim of the Russian attack that began the war, very little good came from the "victory". Their territorial integrity was restored for the moment, but they were subject to many restrictions on how they could govern, mostly concerning giving freedoms to their Christian subjects. These freedoms, and the imposition of western "aid" and "trade", led to a backlash from more traditional parts of society, while the Christians continued to mobilize for independence, with the acquiescence, if not actual assistance, of most of Christian Europe

No-one knows how many died during the War, but estimates range up to 800,000 soldiers and civilians. Many of these people died horribly from wounds, disease or the cold. A lot of the deaths could have been prevented with proper hygiene and medical attention, which was sadly lacking in both the British and Russian armies. Figes records the advances made by those armies during the War, along with the quirks that siege warfare brought to the Crimea (if you had the money, you could buy French Champagne from Fortnum and Mason's at Balaklava, along with any other luxuries you might require).

That Figes manages to weave such stories through his narrative while still enlightening us about grand strategy and battles both on the field and back "home" is one of the strengths of this book. I can't think of a better way to get up to speed on a period of history that needs further exploration in these current times. Recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead

Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead

London: Aurum, 2007 (first published 1956)           ISBN 9781845132392

It's appropriate on this day of all days that this is the book I'm reviewing. One hundred and two years ago, at dawn on 25 April 1915, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula as part of an Entente amphibious landing designed to take Turkey out of the War. The venture was a disaster for the Entente, as well as for the Ottoman Empire.

Moorehead's narrative of the campaign is still - sixty years after it was written - the ideal entree to the story for someone who knows little of what went on, or perhaps has a too Australian-centric view of what occurred in the eight months Entente troops were invested on the Peninsula.

While the landings in April and the battles thereafter were the blooding of the ANZACs, the preponderance of the landing forces were British and French troops, including many Indian and African regiments.

Moorehead's over-arching theme is one of missed opportunities on sea and land, and of poor decision making. It was British and French diplomatic bungling that brought Turkey into the war on the side of Germany rather than the Entente powers. Once this had occurred the Navy decided that if it could force the Narrows, Turkey would capitulate. They were not far from the truth in this - Moorehead paints a scene of a fractured and fragile Turkish government run by the Young Turks, and how the sight of a British battlefleet in the Istanbul Roads probably would have brought an armistice.

To achieve this outcome the ships needed to get through the Bosphorus. They so nearly succeeded. Just at the moment the Turks could no longer defend the straits with guns or mines, the British - shaken by their losses - decided that they needed an army to take the Peninsula by land, as they couldn't take it by sea alone. The respite allowed the Turks to recover somewhat while the British planned the landing.

The fact that the British did this planning in three weeks explains in part its eventual failure, although to get so many men ashore at all - it was until that time the largest amphibious operation ever - was a kind of success. The overall commander of the force, Hamilton, had a part in the failure as well. A man of poetic temperament and undoubted bravery, he was a leader who let his subordinates run their battles: a good trait, but Hamilton's lack of clear tactical objectives and orders led to much confusion on the battleground.

Despite the rushed planning and Hamilton's quirks, strategic victory on the first day was a near-run thing. Even though the ANZACs landed in the wrong place, and were faced with a maze of gullies and cliffs rather than the more easily sloping land they expected, some few managed to scale the heights before being thwarted at the last moment by Mustafa Kemal, whose ruthlessness and drive during the Campaign started him on the path to becoming Ataturk.

Although the beachhead was precarious, it held: the Entente forces were not strong enough to dislodge the Turks, and neither could the Turks repulse the invaders. The appalling loss of life that occurred during both the Entente and Turk attacks is chronicled well by Moorehead. The battles that have become the staple of Australian and New Zealand military history, such as Lone Pine, The Nek and others that have become bywords for bravery and sacrifice, are put into perspective by Moorehead by showing the greater moves that were going on around them. The landing at Suvla, which Lone Pine and The Nek supported, which was doomed to fail as Moorehead so clearly shows, was the last throw of the dice by the Entente; and after the failure recriminations began.

Both Hamilton and Churchill (who was the initial supporter of the Naval plan) paid the price of failure with their careers and for many other commanders Gallipoli was their last battlefront posting. For many more though it was a schooling ground of great importance, not the least of these "students" being Monash, Blamey and Morshead.

When the decision to evacuate was made it was done so with a heavy heart, and with the expectation that evacuating might cost anything up to forty thousand casualties. The fact that the entire Peninsula was evacuated with only a couple of dozen deaths was a triumph of careful planning: a terrible irony, as careful planning before the campaign began may have led to victory. As it was, the Entente gained nothing and lost tremendously both in men and material.

The Turks won a great victory, but still lost their Empire.

Moorehead tells this story exceedingly well: as a seasoned war correspondent he can portray battle with a skill that made his byline famous in World War Two, and as an Australian he brings much feeling to the description of ANZAC in particular. His ability to sum up a person or a stiuation in a few well-chosen phrases is remarkable and goes a long way to making his books compulsive reading. His choice of primary material is always apt and to the point, and while reading this book it occurred to me that Antony Beevor owes much to Moorehead.

If you want to know more about this episode of the Great War, this book is the perfect place to start.

[In respectful memory of Privates S.B. McGregor M.M. 2nd Field Ambulance, who landed at ANZAC Cove on 25 April 1915, and his brother James, 3rd Battalion, killed at Lone Pine in August 1915]

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell