The Caucasus, 1914–16

The Caucasian front between Russia and Turkey comprised two battlegrounds: Armenia in the west, Azerbaijan in the east. While the ultimate strategic objectives for the Turks were to capture the Baku oilfields in Azerbaijan and to penetrate Central Asia and Afghanistan in order to threaten British India, they needed first to capture the Armenian fortress of Kars, which, together with that of Ardahan, had been a Russian possession since 1878.

A Russian advance from Sarıkamış (Sarykamysh, south of Kars) toward Erzurum in Turkish Armenia in November 1914 was countered in December when the Turkish 3rd Army, under Enver himself, launched a three-pronged offensive against the Kars–Ardahan position. This offensive was catastrophically defeated in battles at Sarıkamış and at Ardahan in January 1915; but the Turks, ill-clad and ill-supplied in the Caucasian winter, lost many more men through exposure and exhaustion than in fighting (their 3rd Army was reduced in one month from 190,000 to 12,400 men, the battle casualties being 30,000). Turkish forces, which had meanwhile invaded neutral Persia’s part of Azerbaijan and taken Tabriz on January 14, were expelled by a Russian counterinvasion in March.

During this campaign the Armenians had created disturbances behind the Turkish lines in support of the Russians and had threatened the already arduous Turkish communications. The Turkish government on June 11, 1915, decided to deport the Armenians. In the process of deportation, the Turkish authorities committed atrocities on a vast scale: most estimates of Armenian deaths have ranged from 600,000 to 1,500,000 for this period.

Grand Duke Nicholas, who had hitherto been commander in chief of all Russia’s armies, was superseded by Emperor Nicholas himself in September 1915; the Grand Duke was then sent to command in the Caucasus. He and General N.N. Yudenich, the victor of Sarıkamış, started a major assault on Turkish Armenia in January 1916; Erzurum was taken on February 16, Trabzon on April 18, Erzıncan on August 2; and a long-delayed Turkish counterattack was held at Oğnut. Stabilized to Russia’s great advantage in the autumn, the new front in Armenia was thereafter affected less by Russo-Turkish warfare than by the consequences of revolution in Russia.

Mesopotamia, 1914–April 1916

The British occupation of Basra, Turkey’s port at the head of the Persian Gulf, in November 1914 had been justifiable strategically because of the need to protect the oil wells of southern Persia and the Abadan refinery. The British advance of 46 miles northward from Basra to al-Qurnah in December and the further advance of 90 miles up the Tigris to al-ʿAmārah in May–June 1915 ought to have been reckoned enough for all practical purposes, but the advance was continued in the direction of the fatally magnetic Baghdad, ancient capital of the Arab caliphs of Islām. Al-Kūt was occupied in September 1915, and the advance was pushed on until the British, under Major General Charles Townshend, were 500 miles away from their base at Basra. They fought a profitless battle at Ctesiphon, only 18 miles from Baghdad, on November 22 but then had to retreat to al-Kūt. There, from December 7, Townshend’s 10,000 men were besieged by the Turks; and there, on April 29, 1916, they surrendered themselves into captivity.

The Egyptian frontiers, 1915–July 1917

Even after the evacuation from Gallipoli, the British maintained 250,000 troops in Egypt. A major source of worry to the British was the danger of a Turkish threat from Palestine across the Sinai Desert to the Suez Canal. That danger waned, however, when the initially unpromising rebellion of the Hāshimite amir Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī against the Turks in the Hejaz was developed by the personal enterprise of an unprofessional soldier of genius, T.E. Lawrence, into a revolt infecting the whole Arabian hinterland of Palestine and Syria and threatening to sever the Turks’ vital Hejaz Railway (Damascus–Amman–Maʿān–Medina). Sir Archibald Murray’s British troops at last started a massive advance in December 1916 and captured some Turkish outposts on the northeastern edge of the Sinai Desert but made a pusillanimous withdrawal from Gaza in March 1917 at the very moment when the Turks were about to surrender the place to them; the attempt the next month to retrieve the mistake was repulsed with heavy losses. In June the command was transferred from Murray to Sir Edmund Allenby. In striking contrast to Murray’s performance was Lawrence’s capture of Aqaba (al-ʿAqabah) on July 6, 1917: his handful of Arabs got the better of 1,200 Turks there.