A House Divided Cannot Stand: World War I and the Failure of the Allied Decisions at the End

 It is often said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result.  War, in general, fits this definition perfectly.  There are many examples. I will use one – World War I, 1914-1918. This is not the first piece I’ve done on WW I.  I recently read another good book on WW I, “A Peace to End All Peace” by David Fromkin (1989), published by Holt Paperbacks.  The thrust of the book is on the British, their Middle East (ME) campaigns, and the disastrous decision made at the end of the war on how to divide the defeated Ottoman Empire.  The title of the book is very descriptive of the reality and madness of this war and the decisions made at the end.  The expansive British Empire was still intact during this war.  An empire that reached around the world, from the ME to Africa, India and Asia, such countries as Malaysia, Burma, and Singapore.  Click here for a map of British India prior to 1947.  Britain also had the help of their dominions and former colonies such as Australia and New Zealand and African colonies in the war effort.  A huge empire.  In my reading, of the Fromkin book, the British deserve much of the blame for fanning the flames of war.  With one million British and empire troops, and with help from France, the British were the main fighting force against the Ottoman Empire.  At war’s end they occupied most of the former Ottoman territory.  The main aim of both Britain and France was colonial gain, not a thoughtful division of the defeated Ottoman Empire.  Greed was number one.  What the British did in the ME turned out to be a catastrophe.  They made agreements with the French and the multiple indigenous Arab tribes which they reneged on, over and over.  One such example was the Sykes-Picot Agreement.   

Being the dominant military power in the ME, Britain had a lot of influence.  They made promises to the Jewish people about an independent Jewish Palestine that they could not or would not keep.  They made deals with the French which they never kept, unless they had no choice either financially or practically.  They played the Arabs against each other and the French against the Arabs.  They made ill informed decisions based on the opinion of their appointed ME representatives.  They were basically driving half blind; pretending they understood the Arabs when they did not.  They had lone-wolfs in the ME like T.E. Lawrence, who is portrayed as a hero of the Arabs, but left a lot to be desired.  Lawrence even fooled his own government with his bravado.  In the early 1960s, a big movie was made about him called “Lawrence of Arabia” which lionized him.  The Fromkin book is not so kind to him.  The British treated Lord Kitchener, their “expert” ME representative, as their go-to man on everything ME or Arab where in fact Kitchener was self-deluded, and certainly overrated, and mostly wrong on military decisions he recommended.  They made decisions that proved to be disastrous, such as their attack on the Dardanelles in February 1915 which turned into a humiliating defeat for them.  They lost some 200,000 casualties just in this campaign, the Turks lost an equal number and the French some 47,000.  Many of the British casualties were empire troops from Australia, India and New Zealand. 

The French and the Arabs were not the only ones stiffed by the British.  In Chapter 41 of the Fromkin book, he gives the example of the promises made to Italy to get her to join the war on the Allied side.  Britain, France, and Italy signed an agreement, known as the St. Jean de Maurienne Agreement, promising Italy part of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat.  A deal that neither France nor Britain meant to keep and in fact, reneged. Italy, a country of 35 million people at the time did join the war and lost over 650,000 casualties and got nothing in return.  Sure, they got the Alto Adige area from Austria, but within three years after World War II, they were forced to cede the area south of Trieste called Istria, which included the city and port of Fiume to the Communist tyrant, Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia - They were stabbed in the back by their “friends,” Britain and France.  It gets worse.  After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, Italy landed troops in the area they understood were to be given to them, Anatolia, the western area of what is today Turkey, The British double-crossed them by playing the Greeks against the Italians; sending the Greek Army there too, not to help them out but to compete for the same territory. After it was clear they had no support, the Italians pulled out, but the Greeks stayed and fought a war with the Turks.  By 1922 a resurgent Turkey, led by the brilliant Turkish military commander, Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, crushed the Greek Army.  Ataturk became the first leader of Turkey and is worshipped as the George Washington of Turkey. 

After crushing the Greeks, Ataturk attacked the City of Smyrna, which in those days was an international city with a mostly Christian population.  After crushing the defenders of Smyrna, Ataturk’s forces burned Smyrna to the ground, killing about 200,000 Christians, Greeks, Armenians, and others, and committing unspeakable war crimes.  The Greek Archbishop of Smyrna, Metropolitan Chrysostom, was captured by marauding Turkish forces and turned over to a mob which savagely mutilated him before killing him.  A fine book on what happened in Smyrna in 1922 is called “Paradise Lost, Smyrna 1922,” by Giles Milton.  A most disgraceful episode in history that no one knows about.  Another disgraceful episode was the fact that many western naval vessels were docked at the Port of Smyrna and refused to help the people desperate to flee the fires.  Many drowned in the harbor, fleeing the fire.  The world stood quiet and to this day very few know of this atrocity; like the Armenian Genocide of 1915.  For more details on this despicable historical episode, I wrote an entire piece on it in 2010 in this blog.  Click here to read it.  Another book on the Ataturk destruction of Smyrna is called “The Great Fire” by Lou Ureneck, Harper Collins, 2015; re-named in the paperback version “Smyrna 1922.”  Both books are well researched and written.  Excellent reading. 

Backstabbing, promises and agreements not kept, inner fighting among allies was the dominant theme of the Fromkin book.  Self-interest, delusion, bone-headed decisions based on guesswork were common everyday occurrences.  If these leaders were a classroom full of 3^rd graders, you would call he principal and have them put in detention until they wised-up.  The best example of these shenanigans perpetrated by the allies, but mainly Britain and France was when Britain decided to play the Greeks against the Italians in Turkey.  Here was the first opportunity that came up in the 465 years since the Turks conquered the Byzantine Greek Romans in Constantinople in 1453.  The Greeks had a chance to regain their former territory, but they were abandoned by France and Italy.  Britain gave them verbal support but would not lift a finger to aid them.  All were looking at their own interest, not common interest. The allies, after the defeat of the Ottomans, were left with insufficient military forces to maintain the peace in Turkey.  It was estimated that they would need close to 1,000,000 troops to enforce the armistice. Britain did not have the troops nor the money to do this, nor the will; exhausted by the war.  This provided the Turks the opportunity to rearm, unimpeded.   Allied bickering was their undoing, almost as much as an opposing army.  Good leaders matter: unfortunately, there were very few on the allied side.  Without Ataturk, the Turks would have never been able to mount a resistance.

This sorry situation with supposed allies, betraying each other at every turn is a familiar playbook.  When the Byzantines were on their knees against the marauding Turks in the 15^th Century, they begged their Christian friends in Europe for help.  Constantinople, a grand city, and capital of Christendom for centuries was down to a population of around 50,000.  All appeals for help were denied by their brother Christians in Europe.  One exception was a Genoese military commander, Giovanni Giustiniani, who gathered 700 volunteers to go help Constantine XI, the last emperor of the Byzantines.  The Byzantines had only 7,000 troops vs a Turkish force of over 80,000.  The Turks surrounded Constantinople, breached the city walls with a new cannon they had acquired, and went on a killing spree, killing all the Christians they encountered.  The Moslem Turks had completed their conquest of the Byzantine Empire.  This is what isolationism looks like. For an excellent history of what happened to the Byzantine Empire, read the fine book, “Lost to the West” by Lars Brownworth (2009), Crown Publishers. 

War makes men in power delusional and dangerous.  Such bad actors as Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin are prime examples.  All three were certainly mad men, detached from reality.  This type of delusion is widespread, however, not just confined to lunatics such as these three.  The British, with their greed for more power and land launched a catastrophic war that did the opposite of their greed:  Within 25 years they lost their entire empire and caused another catastrophic world war.  I recently read a book on the history of the Habsburg, Austria-Hungary Empire.  The leaders of this empire had many problems they could not solve.  Going to war, was thought of as an opportunity for a better future.  It did the opposite – they lost their entire empire like the British some twenty years later.  War is madness.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Both Britain and France were happily anticipating earning a large piece of the Ottoman Empire.  It never materialized.  It never occurred to them of how to keep the peace after the war. First, the two parties fought each other on how much France got, second the local people yearned for independence, and they did not want neither one governing them; third, both the British and French would have to have a large military presence in the acquired territories.   They did not have the money, nor the troops to do it.  Fourth, neither one could afford the cost of having a large military presence in the acquired territories.  So, within twenty years and huge expenditures both France and Britain lost the entire former Ottoman territory, and the area became independent and divided into what we have today in the ME.  So, the result:  a lot of blood and human beings killed and maimed, a lot of money spent with zero gain.  This debacle led also to the end of the British, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, and German empires.  Welcome to the madness of war.    We are still paying the price of these bad decisions.  constant turmoil 100 years later.   

World War I estimated deaths:   

Allies including Britain:  900,000  

France:  1.3 million

Italy:  651,000

Russia:  1.9 million

USA:  116,708

Serbia:  275,000  

Other Nations: 5.4 million     

By the end of World War II, the British, Japanese and French Empires ended.  In all nine million combatants and five million civilians died.  Costs are estimated at 337 billion dollars in 1918 money, or about 7 trillion dollars in today’s money.   The madness of war. Did any nation gain anything? I don’t think so.

In reading the Fromkin book, you get the impression that the British were herding cats; they had an impossible situation in their hands for which no one could solve.  The Arabs were in competition for land and independence.  The established Arab aristocracy was in a race to find their own leaders. There was the House of Saud and the House of Hashem who competed for who was going to win the top price of leader of areas yet undetermined.  The Arab prince, King Hussein of the Hejaz, an area along the western coast of what is today Saudi Arabia, curried favor with both other Arabs and the British to support his leadership.  Then there was Abdullah of Transjordan, another Arab prince who eventually became king of Jordan.  The British, eager to have powerful Arabs support them, would pay them a yearly subsidy.  Hussein of the Hejaz, for example, was paid 100,000 Pounds yearly.  Then there was the question of Zionism, the Jewish homeland question which the British tried to negotiate.  This was a huge challenge for which there was no answer.  One hundred years later, the problems still exist.  As of this writing the nation of Israel is in a war with Hamas, the rulers of the Gaza Strip.  Arabs and Jews are killing each other at record pace. Just within the last month over 20,000 people have been killed.  Without fear of equivocation, the British were swimming against the tide in the ME. By the beginning of World War II, both the French and British left the ME.  By 1948, the British would lose their entire empire, except for a few African countries which they lost by the early 1960s.  The French were defeated in Indochina by 1954, then they had another war in Algeria which they also lost.  So much for the dream of empire. 

Greed, selfishness, and betrayal are the fruits of what happened in the ME and during WW I.  You can’t help but feel exhausted by the treachery among supposed allies.  The depravity of man is clearly exhibited in this story.   

Final Thoughts:

You may say that looking back with the convenience of time and results is “Monday morning quarterbacking.” This may be so, but there is one glaring lesson:  Failure to learn from history is condemnation to repeat the same mistakes,” as George Santayana would say.  Some examples:

1.     Vietnam.  The United States failed to learn the lessons of the French failure there after WW II.  The Americans plans in Vietnam failed to take in consideration the Vietnamese culture, their customs and what would work there.  They then failed to consider, how to keep the peace once they withdrew.  Within a year after their withdrawal, South Vietnam was conquered.  They also failed to learn that Ngo Dinh Diem was considered by his people as a legitimate leader.  Once he was murdered, with the approval of the US, everything went to hell.  They also failed to understand that their “Strategic Hamlet Program” was designed to fail, even though the South Vietnamese told them it would.  What Diem always told the Americans turned out to be true and their position proved utterly wrong.  For more details on the Vietnam disaster seem my 2016 post here. 

2.     World War I.  The world, and specially Britain and France failed to understand the Moslem mind; they pretended to know.   We’re still paying the price of this failure – Israel and Palestinian wars.  The allies brought their European ways and politics which were totally rejected  in such a world.

3.     The Gulf War of 1991.  The United States failed to learn from the utter failure of every decision made in dividing the Middle East after WW I.  They failed to anticipate how to keep the peace in Iraq after defeating Saddam.  They failed to learn that democracy is a foreign term in Moslem areas.  They do not wish to have democracy.  They also failed to learn that in Moslem areas, religion and tribes are uppermost (something not understood by Europeans). 

Although the French and the British share to largest percentage of the blame for their disastrous decisions, they are not alone.  Leaders in the world make such mistakes on a regular basis, as pointed out earlier.   What is most disturbing, though, is their arrogance which lead them to believe that they know better than the natives, and their way is the right way – it is usually not.