Welcome to another deep dive. Hey there. If you
are tuning in right now, you're probably looking
for that really thorough aha -filled breakdown
of a massive subject. Right. You know, you want
to get completely caught up on a really complex
topic, but you don't want to feel like buried
under a mountain of academic jargon. Nobody wants
that. Exactly. Well, you are in exactly the right
place. Today, we are taking a single, incredibly
dense historical text, and we're looking at the
Middle Eastern theater of World War I. It's a
massive topic. It really is. Our mission for
this Deep Dives is to explore what was arguably
the largest... most complex and honestly most
world -altering geographical theater of the First
World War. Yeah, without a doubt. Because when
we think of World War I, our minds usually just
go straight to the trenches. The Western Front,
the mud. The mud, the barbed wire. But the Middle
East was this incredibly volatile chessboard
of spies, oil grabs, falling empires, and asymmetrical
warfare. It was just a completely different kind
of war fought across this staggering expanse
of territory. But before we get fully underway,
it's absolutely vital that we set the stage for
you regarding the nature of the information we're
going to be discussing today. Yeah, it's really
important. The historical text we're unpacking
covers some profoundly dark politically and historically
charged subjects. We'll be discussing things
like brutal imperialism, nationalistic uprisings,
mass famines and genocides. And we want to be
incredibly clear with you right up front. As
we go through this, we are impartially reporting
the contents of the provided historical text.
We are not endorsing any specific political viewpoints,
nor are we taking sides. We are simply acting
as your guides, conveying the historical record
exactly as it's documented in the source material
we're working from today. That is the goal. We're
here to help you understand what happened according
to the historical records so you can see how
it shaped the political landscape that you live
in today. Okay, let's unpack this. To understand
this massive conflict, we really first have to
look at the chessboard and the players. The motives.
Right. Why were the major global powers fighting
over this specific region in the first place?
Let's start with the British. What were their
primary goals? Well, the British had two massive
overriding priorities. First off, they were just
desperate to protect the Suez Canal in Egypt.
Which was basically their shortcut. It was the
vital artery of their empire. It was the quickest
route to India and all their eastern colonies.
I mean, if they lost the canal, they lost their
global lifeline. So priority one. Priority two
was oil. The British Royal Navy had just recently
transitioned from running on coal to running
on oil. Oh, wow. Yeah, which meant they were
suddenly, utterly dependent on petroleum deposits
in southern Persia. Which they controlled. Exactly.
They had exclusive access to this oil. through
the British -controlled Anglo -Persian oil company,
protecting that pipeline was just entirely non
-negotiable for their war effort. So on the other
side of the board, you have the Ottomans and
their German allies. What were they trying to
achieve? Were they just playing defense? Not
at all. Their strategic goals were highly ambitious.
From an economic perspective, they wanted to
cut off Russian access to the hydrocarbon resources
around the Caspian Sea. But there was also this
massive ideological component driving the Ottoman
leadership. The Ottoman War Minister Enver Pasha
had this grand sweeping vision. A pan -Turkic
state, right? Yes. He dreamed of beating the
Russians and opening the way to Azerbaijan, the
Caucasus and beyond. He wanted to unite newly
established Turkic states entirely away from
Western influence. The reality of trying to actually
execute that dream seems staggering when you
look at the infrastructure they had. I mean,
reading the source, it's like a true David versus
Goliath situation when it comes to industrial
capability. What's fascinating here is just how
severe that logistical mismatch was. I mean,
let's look at the hard numbers. The Ottoman Empire
had a total of five thousand seven hundred and
fifty nine kilometers of railway to cover that
whole territory. Right. A massive mountainous
desert filled territory. To put that in perspective,
France, which is way smaller. Right. France had
about a fifth of the land area of the Ottoman
Empire, but they had fifty one thousand kilometers
of railway. Wait, hold on. So imagine you're
trying to move. millions of troops, artillery,
food, across an empire roughly the size of Western
Europe, but you only have the railway infrastructure
of a small modern state like Denmark. Yep. That
sounds like an absolute logistical nightmare.
It was a nightmare. And it wasn't just transportation
either. It was raw materials. Ottoman coal production
in 1914 was a negligible 826 ,000 tons. And the
British? Britain was churning out 292 million
tons. Gee. France was producing 40 million tons.
And Ottoman steel production was essentially
nonexistent. How do you even fight a modern war
without steel and coal? Barely. When you're fighting
an industrial war, you need industrial manufacturing.
But the entire Ottoman Empire had exactly one
cannon and small arms foundry. Just one. One.
They had a single shell and bullet factory and
a single gunpowder factory. That is insane. And
all of them were located right in the suburbs
of Constantinople. You really have to picture
this almost entirely agricultural economy. Relying
on what? Wool and cotton. Wool, cotton, hides.
And they're trying to mobilize millions of men
to fight against the greatest industrial superpowers
the world had ever seen. Which perfectly sets
up why the war in this theater was fought so
differently. Because they didn't have endless
factories churning out artillery shells, they
had to use every other tool at their disposal.
Here's where it gets really interesting. The
unconventional stuff. Yeah, because this wasn't
just conventional armies marching in straight
lines. It was a shadow war of subversion, espionage,
and tribal alliances. How did that actually play
out on the ground? Well, the major powers realized
that financing internal rebellions within their
enemies' territories would force the enemy to
divert massive resources just to contain the
threat. It's pretty smart. It was a brilliant,
albeit chaotic, strategy. For instance, the British
Foreign Office established an entire division
known as the Arab Bureau. Their specific goal
was to conceptualize and finance the Arab revolt
against the Ottomans. They funneled money, weapons,
and gold to tribal leaders. This is Lawrence
of Arabia. Exactly. This is the operation that
featured the famous T .E. Lawrence working alongside
Amir Fazl to blow up the very railways the Ottomans
were so desperately relying on. But the Germans
were doing something very similar, right? They
weren't just sitting back watching the British
stir up rebellions. Far from it. Right before
the war, Germany established the Intelligence
Bureau for the East. Their goal was to foment
subversive and nationalist agitations in British
India, Persia and Egypt. And they had their own
guy. They did. They had their own legendary figure
operating in the Persian Gulf. A German diplomat
named Wilhelm Vosmus. The guy they called the
German Lawrence of Arabia. That's the one. What
made him so effective? Immersion. He was incredibly
immersed in the local culture. He learned the
local dialects. He wore traditional clothing.
And he used German gold to buy the loyalties
of various Persian tribes, turning them against
the British. He managed to tie down thousands
of British and Indian troops who were sent entirely
just to hunt them down and secure the oil fields.
He was literally a one man insurgency. And when
you look at the actual forces fighting in these
campaigns, the diversity is just mind blowing.
troops from all over the world converging in
the desert. You did. The British relied heavily
on the British Indian Army. Units like the Indian
sappers and miners were crucial because they
had extensive experience dealing with dissident
tribal forces on the frontiers of India. And
the French bought in forces, too. Yeah. France
sent the French Armenian Legion, which fought
fiercely in Palestine and Syria. And local populations
were drawn in. often lured by massive promises.
I was really struck by the mention of the Assyrian
people in the source. Yes. They were promised
an independent nation by the British and Russians,
so they joined the Entente powers, the allied
forces opposing Germany, and the Ottomans. Led
by figures like Aga Petros. Right. And they became
known as the Assyrian volunteers, or quote, our
smallest ally. The Kurdish involvement is another
perfect example of how unpredictable this theater
was. Many Kurds belonged to the Ottoman elite
and fought loyally for the empire. Like the Hamidi,
right? Exactly. The Hamidi was an elite, mostly
Kurdish cavalry division that played a significant
role in the Caucasus and Persian campaigns. But
at the exact same time... You had other Kurdish
nationalist factions actively rebelling against
the Ottomans. Precisely. They were undertaking
uprisings hoping the Allies would help them create
an independent nation. That's just a web. A vast
complex tapestry of ethnicities, religions, and
tribes. It meant the battle lines weren't just
drawn on a map in London or Berlin. They were
constantly shifting based on local allegiances,
old rivalries, and immediate survival. It really
makes you realize how volatile every single military
decision must have been. And unfortunately for
the troops on the ground, some of those decisions
resulted in monumental blunders. Massive blighters.
If we look at the timeline from 1914 to 1916,
it is essentially a master class in military
overreach. Walk me through the winter disaster
of 1914 at the Battle of Syracomish. This is
a devastating example of ideology just completely
overriding tactical reality. Ottoman War Minister
Enver Pasha took personal command and ordered
an offensive against the Russians in the rugged
Caucasus Mountains. Even though his generals
said no. Right. His own seasoned commanders,
like Hasan Izzet, explicitly warned him not to
attack. The winter conditions were brutal and
the supply lines simply didn't exist. But Enver
Pasha... push forward anyway, and the result
was just catastrophic. The troops were entirely
unprepared for the freezing temperatures. We're
talking about tens of thousands of men freezing
to death in their camps. It's horrific. An astonishing
90 % of his third army was lost to the cold battle
or a desperate chaotic retreat. And while the
Ottomans were suffering in the Caucasus, the
Allies were about to make their own colossal
mistake to the West. In 1915, the British and
French decided to launch a massive naval assault
on the Dardanelles. The streets leading to Constantinople.
Yes. Winston Churchill, who was first Lord of
the Admiralty at the time, aggressively pushed
this idea. Why did Churchill think he could just
sail obsolete battleships straight into the heart
of an enemy empire? Did they not anticipate any
resistance? They severely underestimated the
Ottoman coastal artillery and the ingenuity of
German mine laying tactics. They basically assumed
the sheer sight of the mighty British Navy would
cause the Ottoman defenses to crumble. Well,
they didn't. No. On March 18th, That naval assault
turned into a complete catastrophe. As they tried
to push through the heavily mined straits, the
French battleship Bouvet struck a mine, exploded
mysteriously and capsized in minutes, taking
its entire crew down with it. Unbelievable. And
soon after, the British ships HMS Irresistible
and HMS Ocean also struck mines and sank. The
naval commanders panicked and called off the
attack. It proved unequivocally that you couldn't
just sail past the Ottoman defenses. So the naval
plan fails. What was the allied backup plan?
They couldn't just pack up and go home, right?
Right. And that led to an even bloodier blunder.
Doubly. The amphibious landings at Gallipoli
in April 1915. Since they couldn't force the
straits by sea, they decided to land troops on
the peninsula to take out the forts from behind.
It turned into months of brutal, grueling trench
warfare pinned against the cliffs. The casualties
were horrendous. The Allies suffered roughly
131 ,000 dead and hundreds of thousands wounded
before finally withdrawing in defeat. But Calipoli
is massive historically, isn't it? Oh, absolutely.
It really forged the national identities of Australia
and New Zealand, the ANZAC forces. And on the
Ottoman side, it elevated a lieutenant colonel
who proved to be a brilliant tactician, Kemal
Atatürk. We will definitely be talking about
him more in a few minutes. Right. But the blunders
certainly weren't limited to the mountains or
the sea. Down in Mesopotamia, which is modern
-day Iraq, the British command got overly aggressive.
General Nixon ordered Major General Townsend
to advance his troops all the way up the Tigris
River to Baghdad if possible. Which seems insane
given how long their supply lines were getting.
It was. They overextended themselves entirely.
They fought an inconclusive battle at Zatisifan
and ended up having to retreat to a town called
Qut al -Amarra. where they were completely surrounded
by Ottoman forces. The siege of Kut lasted from
December 1915 to April 1916. And the conditions
inside Cook became horrific. Starvation, disease.
The British tried three separate times to break
the siege with relief forces, failed every single
time, and Townsend was eventually forced to surrender
his entire remaining force. It was an absolute
humiliation for the British Empire. It was a
humiliation for the military, sure, but for the
local civilian populations across this entire
theater, the shifting front lines weren't just
humiliating, they were a matter of life and death.
This brings us to a much darker reality of this
war. Yes, this is where we really need to shift
our tone. As we discussed at the start, we're
looking directly at the historical record provided
in our source to understand what happened to
the civilian populations caught in the crossfire.
The text outlines unimaginable tragedies. In
May 1915, during the height of the Russian offensive
in the Caucasus, the Ottoman parliament passed
the Tessier Law. What did that legislation actually
do? The Tessier Law was an authorization for
the mass deportation of populations. The Interior
Minister, Khaled Pasha, ordered the forced deportation
of Armenians from regions under Ottoman control.
And the historical text explicitly details this
as the Armenian Genocide. Yes. It notes the active
participation of forces like the Hamidi cavalry
and the special organization, which was essentially
an Ottoman state intelligence and special operations
unit deployed for this exact, dark purpose. And
the suffering extended to other groups as well.
The text documents the Assyrian massacres, often
referred to as the Assyrian Genocide, which sparked
a subsequent Assyrian War of Independence. And
over in Persia, the civilian toll was equally
horrific, wasn't it? It was devastating. The
text records that an estimated two million Persian
civilians died from famine. Two million. Yes,
and this famine was directly exacerbated by the
constant shifting military occupations of Russian,
British, and Ottoman forces. They routinely requisitioned
local food supplies and just destroyed agricultural
infrastructure. It is a devastating ledger of
human suffering. And strictly from a military
perspective, the casualty rates were also uniquely
horrifying in this theater. This raises an important
question for you, the listener, to consider.
Why were the military casualties in the Middle
East so distinctly different from the Western
Front? Disease. The answer is the catastrophic
breakdown of medical infrastructure. We have
a shocking statistical comparison to illustrate
this. In France and Flanders on the Western Front,
there were 1 .3 non -battle casualties, meaning
sickness, frostbite, things like that, for every
one battle casualty. Wait, 1 .3 to 1 on the Western
Front, but what was it in the Middle East? In
the Mesopotamia and Sinai Palestine campaigns,
the ratio was an astonishing Are you kidding?
Ten soldiers hospitalized for disease or environmental
injury for everyone wounded in actual combat.
How was that even possible? Were they just not
treating people? They couldn't. The Ottoman medical
services had almost completely broken down. There
was no medicine, no clean water, and no transport
for the wounded. Afflictions that would normally
be treated and survived in the British Army on
the Western Front, like dysentery or typhus,
became fatal in the Ottoman Army. That's grim.
More than 3 .5 million Ottoman troops fell sick.
When you combine military and civilian deaths,
total Ottoman losses are recorded as as being
between 25 and 27 % of their entire population.
That is roughly five million deaths out of a
population of 21 million. That has to be the
highest proportion of a population lost by any
country that took part in World War I. It is.
The scale of the demographic collapse is almost
hard to comprehend. So by the time we reach the
final years of the war, 1917 and 1918, the Ottoman
Empire was fracturing under this immense internal
and external pressure. General Allenby takes
command of the British forces launches a major
offensive into Palestine. They capture Gaza,
and then in a massive symbolic victory, Allenby
captures Jerusalem just before Christmas in 1917.
And the final blow came in September 1918 with
the Battle of Megiddo. Allenby, aided immensely
by the hit -and -run tactics of T .E. Lawrence
and the Arab fighters tying down Ottoman garrisons
in the rear, forced the Ottoman troops into a
full -scale disorganized retreat. Which brought
an end to it. This ultimate military collapse
led to the Ottomans accepting the armistice of
Mudros on October 30th, 1918. The armistice of
Mudros basically being the formal cessation of
hostilities that officially broke the military
back of the empire. Exactly. The fighting stopped.
But the political maneuvering was really just
beginning because the victors now had to decide
what to do with a massive defeated empire. What
happened to all that territory? If we connect
this to the bigger picture, the allies hadn't
just been fighting. They'd been planning for
the aftermath for years. Right. Secret plans
by France, Britain and Italy to partition the
Ottoman Empire actually dated all the way back
to 1915. Following the armistice, allied troops
occupied the capital of Istanbul. In 1920, they
drafted the Treaty of Sevres, which was designed
to ruthlessly carve up the territory into various
European spheres of influence. But the treaty
was never ratifying. because the British had
essentially abolished the Ottoman Parliament.
Which sparked massive outrage and led directly
to the Turkish War of Independence. This is where
Kemal Ataturk, the hero of Gallipoli we mentioned
earlier, rises to lead the Turkish national movement.
Yeah. He rejects the European quarepup entirely.
They annul the Treaty of Severus, fight fiercely
to secure their own borders, and eventually force
the world to recognize them by signing the Treaty
of Lausanne in 1923. And then, in a move that
truly marked the end of an era, Atatürk sought
to modernize and secularize the new Turkish state.
He officially abolished the centuries -old Ottoman
Caliphate on March 3rd, 1924, permanently closing
the book on an empire that had existed since
the 1300s. So what does this all mean? We have
covered an incredible amount of ground today.
We really have. We've seen how a glaring lack
of railways and coal factories crippled an empire's
ability to fight a modern war. We've seen how
spies like Wilhelm Wasmus and T .E. Lawrence,
along with shifting tribal alliances, turned
the desert into a shadow war. And we've seen
how the strokes of a pen for victorious nations
formally dismantled a 600 -year -old empire amidst
unimaginable civilian and military suffering.
He's a profound reminder of how rapidly the global
order can change and how the gritty logistical
realities on the ground, like the length of a
railway line or the availability of medical supplies,
often dictate the grand visions of politicians.
As we wrap up this deep dive, we want to leave
you with one final thought to mull over. Think
about those secret treaties and the arbitrary
lines drawn on maps by exhausted European empires
in the 1920s. The borders. Right. They carved
up vast, deeply diverse populations of Arabs,
Kurds, Armenians, and Assyrians entirely without
their input or consent. Those lines didn't just
end a war. They lead the very geopolitical fault
lines that continue to dominate our daily news
feeds today. That's a great point. When you look
at the modern Middle East, with all its ongoing
conflicts, alliances, and complex borders, you
are quite literally still watching the final
act of World War I play out in real time. Thank
you so much for taking the time to explore this
incredibly complex history with us. We appreciate
your curiosity and we hope you walk away with
a richer, more nuanced understanding of how the
past continues to actively shape the present.
Keep asking questions, keep digging into the
sources, and we'll see you on the next deep dive.