Climbing Mount Niitaka


There is a scene at the end David Lean’s 1962 film ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, that takes place as the First World War ends, after the Anglo-Arab capture of Damascus. Lawrence is being sent home to England, presumably into retirement. Prince Faisal, son of the Arab king Hussein bin Ali meets with Lawrence and his commanding general Edmund ‘Bull’ Allenby:

FAISAL (to Lawrence)

There’s nothing further here for a warrior. We drive bargains; old men’s work. Young men make wars and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage and hope for the future. Then, old men make the peace. And the vices of peace are the vices of old men, mistrust and caution.

It must be so.

Writers and film makers are rarely able to get war right because they have a need to sell a story. What there is to sell is entirely on the surface, the ‘action’: the killings, explosions and ironic remarks; then redemption. War isn’t a story, it’s a self-inflicted disease, a kind of cancer brought on by stupidity. There is no sense to war but its own senselessness, its character is false, its ability to bring out the beast in man then to pretend otherwise. What finds its way to film and the page are the pretenses, what lies underneath is difficult to capture, it is the void; nothingness, and nobody is interested in nothing.

Faisal in the flesh was a duplicitous and opportunistic 40 year-old, certainly young enough to be dragooned into one of Allenby’s regiments. As the son of a king, his aim was higher: to rule some sort of empire or at least assist. To this end Faisal pledged allegiance to the British, then to the Ottoman government then the British again, month by month, swinging with the wind. After the end of the war he become the king of Syria for an instant before the French took over, then the slightly longer-lasting king of Iraq. He died at the age of 48 as an exile in Switzerland, a footnote to history except that he was played in a movie by Obi Wan Kenobi.

It is the stupid old leadership which sends the young off to die with the aimless wave of the hand. The stupid young are expected to thank them for it. Wars are begun for historical narratives that have long since run cold and for vanity, the real vice of the old. Cruel, damaged men set out to murder anyone not clever or quick enough to get out of the way, to blow up and burn, to leave no stone standing, nothing behind but ashes. If the old men cannot cheat death, nobody else will.

The Ottomans were brought into the First World War almost by happenstance, the perfidy of the German government and the confusion of the Turks. From 1911 they had been at war, a few years later they were hovering at the edge of ruin. The army had been humiliated, first by Italians then by Balkan upstarts, national politics were chaotic and riven by factions. Some of the factions were pro-British, others were pro- German, almost all were anti-Russian. Burdened by massive debts, the country was nearly bankrupt. Nevertheless, the Turks ordered and paid for the construction of two battleships from British naval shipyards. In the late summer of 1914, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, making one of his typically doltish decisions commandeered the ships for the Royal Navy. The British government offered to pay; the Kaiser stepped in and offered German replacements. One of these was almost brand new; the 26,000 ton dreadnought battle cruiser Goeben and its escort the 6,000 ton Breslau. Conveniently, the two ships were already in the Mediterranean, patrolling off the coast of Algeria, tasked with preventing French troops in the African colonies from making their way back to France. That mission was suspended and the ships ordered to Constantinople. In the age before radar and aerial surveillance, the two cruisers were able to elude and outrun the British, despite having to stop in Messina and Naxos to take on coal.

The Germans and British both desired to bring the Ottomans into an alliance. The geopolitical position of the Ottomans on the Black Sea, the eastern Mediterranean hard by the Suez Canal and across Arabia deemed it important but only in abstract. The Turkish government was a defective instrument, the capital a cauldron of attachés, spies, interest groups; of conflicting lines of authority, of military missions and special envoys, rebels and salesmen. The current leadership had seized power in 1913 in a coup d’etat. The official position of the Turks was neutrality but the forces pulling against them were tidal. The Ottomans first favored the British and French but London’s diplomatic efforts were tentative, over time the Turks began their tilt toward Germany. Berlin offered shiny toys: funds, railroads, armaments and advisors and now, ships. When the shooting started in August, 1914, the Turks declared themselves for Germany. Meanwhile, the Goeben and Breslau arrived in port. A day after arriving, they were reflagged as Turkish vessels but kept on their German commander and crews. Lacking a clear remit from Ottoman authorities or anything resembling a chain of command, the Germans were free to act out the Kaiser’s wishes. In October, the two ships — now the Yavûz Sultân Selîm and the Midilli — sailed north into the Black Sea and with a few Turkish destroyers presumably on a training exercise. On the 29th, they bombarded Sevastopol and other Russian ports, laid mines and damaged or sank several Russian ships.

What the Germans hoped to gain from this insanity was- and is unknown, that part was left out of the movie. The Turks reaped the whirlwind. Russia declared war on Turkey November 1st. England and France followed a few days later. Within weeks the Ottoman army was mobilized and ill-considered offensives underway.

A map drown by T.E. Lawrence indicating possible post- Ottoman states.

The Ottomans were too decrepit to offer Germany difference-making help or resources. The Turks’ large empire was conveniently located next to lots of things but its size and awkward geography put them at a tremendous disadvantage. They could be invaded from any number of points where distance and topography made it difficult and costly to defend or even reach. Constantinople could field large numbers of troops but they had almost nothing in the way of transport, there were too few horses or wagons, almost no trucks and too few roads to run them on. To get from one place to another the Turkish soldiers had to walk. Arguably, Constantine’s legionnaires in the fourth century had better roads to walk on than the Ottomans in 1914. There was very little real industry, had only few hundred miles of railroad that ran from the capital to some of the larger towns but nowhere troops might actually be needed such as the Caucasus. The railroads they did have were short of locomotives and rolling stock. They had too few cargo ships, too little artillery or aircraft, what they had was of poor quality. After the British declaration, the incredible Turkish navy was effectively bottled up in the Black Sea where it rattled around until the end of the war.

The Ottoman soldier was an illiterate peasant press-ganged from the countryside with nothing to fight for save the prospect of loot which never seemed to materialize. There was no sense of nationality or identity outside the tribe into which the peasant was born. Training was harsh but mercifully brief: conscripts would be given uniforms and rifles and for a week or two instructed how to shoot. They would be beaten a few times by noncoms and senior recruits — to teach them discipline — then ordered immediately to the front. With the inadequate logistics, the Turkish soldiers were chronically short of rations and ammunition. Worse, the Turks had practically no medical infrastructure. The Turkish soldier was more likely to die of exposure, infection or disease than of wounds; those wounded could expect poor treatment or none at all. Like other armies in the Middle East, junior officers were somewhat adequate but senior officers were cronies of the ruling elites and almost criminally incompetent. They had gained combat experience in the Balkans where they learned how to run away.

There was almost nothing for the Turks to gain from their new war. They were too weak to recover territories lost in southeastern Europe or to make significant inroads against the Russians. They were too far from the center of gravity in Europe and incapable of sending more than a few token troops to Germany. Any potential gains in Persia or to the east were out of reach because of the transport issues. The best the Ottomans could have been expected to do was tie down English and Russian resources that could have been directed elsewhere. This was not part of any plan in 1914: the governments and the generals on all sides were expected to be done with the war in a few months. There would not be time for the diversion of resources or the tying down of armies to have any effect.

The Turks launched large offensives against the Russians in the Caucasus which failed with massive losses on both sides. They tried to capture the Suez Canal from the British and failed. They did push the British from Palestine but only for a short period. Their Libyan gambit toward Egypt was farcical. On the other hand, the Turkish soldiers proved to be stubborn defenders able to endure harsh conditions, provided they were properly led. The British march on Baghdad from the port of Basra through Mesopotamia became a grueling, disease-ridden slog that was ultimately an embarrassment. The British naval attempt to force the Dardanelles and shell Constantinople turned back due to ineffectual Royal Navy leadership and sharp Ottoman gunnery. The British attempted to capture Constantinople by landing Australian and New Zealand ground troops at Gallipoli. This was another blunderous exercise by the First Sea Lord which also ended in disaster for the British.

On the home front, the Turks faced crippling problems almost immediately. Like the other combatants, the government requisitioned all available horses for military use. Without their animals, farmers lost the ability to plow their fields, harvest crops or transport them to market. The call up of troops likewise meant a shortage of rural labor, the result was famine. There were also shortages of coal and other necessities, and inflation. With that, Turkish morale plummeted along with public support for the government. Practically bankrupt when the war began, the country could not afford the battles of attrition being waged against it. Soon enough, the Turkish military disintegrated with hundreds of thousands returning to their homes. By 1918, the Ottomans had three-times more deserters than troops in uniform.

Unknown photographer: thousands of frozen German corpses litter a field outside of Stalingrad in 1943.

By giving his ships to the Turks, the Kaiser wound up undermining his own war effort, effectively surrendering the Mediterranean to the British. Expanding the German empire to include the Ottomans was costly and increased the Germans’ strategic exposure. In a stroke, the Turk’s logistical time-and-distance woes became those of the Germans’. The Ottoman sideshow did ultimately allow the Germans to postpone the inevitable. Resources diverted by the Allies toward the Middle East were unavailable in Europe to defeat the Kaiser; this included about a quarter of British military strength. Without the diversion, the war would have ended sooner, millions of unnecessary deaths would have been prevented, the Americans might have remained at home, the Russian army might not have mutinied, there might have been no October Revolution, no Lenin, no USSR and perhaps, no Nazi Germany.

As the Ottomans collapsed, they lashed out against Armenian and Greek minorities, massacring hundreds of thousands for no particularly good reason. Had the war ended earlier, many of these lives would likely have been spared. Had the Turks not entered the war there would have been no massacres at all.

US Navy aircraft gun camera footage of a Japanese aircraft shot down during Battle of Philippine Sea in 1944.

The collapse of Russia and the arrival of the American army on the French battlefield in 1918 brought an end to the ‘war to end all wars’. The Ottoman Empire did not survive defeat or its massive losses. These amounted to approximately one quarter of the population, mostly by starvation and disease but also battlefield deaths and genocide. The other combatants also fared poorly: Russia and much of eastern Europe were dragged into a totalitarian abyss from which they have never completely emerged. The Middle East soon became the world’s leading provider of oil and gas which gave those countries favored by geology economic and political power. The region, nevertheless, was- and remains today a cockpit of backwardness, religious fundamentalism and barbarity. Britain, the world’s great military and economic power in 1914, was left a tottering wreck; its young men swept away, massively in debt to the United States and with its colonial subjects seeing their masters as something far less than masterful. Once-great-power France was bled into irrelevance, becoming a larger Belgium or Luxembourg then ultimately a tourist trap. Germany’s lost generation included leaders who might have given the German people alternatives to Hitler and his mad rush to Stalingrad and the Holocaust.

Trump’s abrupt decision to pull out of Syria was reportedly made ‘instinctively’ at the end of his call with Turkey’s president

Worst still was the demise of Europe’s spectacular creative impulse, funded with gold stolen by the conquistadors from Peru and Mexico, one that ran in an unbroken line from the early fifteenth century to 1914, that had survived frightful episodes such as the 30 Years War, the Inquisition, the English- and French Revolutions and Napoleon; to the height of European cultural and artistic achievement: all of it was ended. The lamps indeed went out all over Europe and were never relit. Civilization was replaced with accounting entities, mass media and marketing. The civilization impetus was gone and soon forgotten, lost along with those who might have carried it forward. The ashes and broken stones have been papered over with the artifacts of modernity like cars and smartphones but the loss reverberates into the present, all of this for the careless vanity of a few old men, Kaisers and Tsars, kings and prime ministers plus a handful of corrupt, idiotic bureaucrats.

U.S. to send an additional 1,800 troops to Saudi Arabia to boost defenses against Iran

“Climb Mount Niitaka,” was the signal sent from Tokyo to its carrier task force in the northern Pacific on December 2, 1941, ordering the air attack on Pearl Harbor. On December 8th, the US declared war against Japan; a few days after that, Adolf Hitler declared against the United States. This was insanity: both the Japanese high command and the Germans understood the impossibility of defeating America with its immense manufacturing capacity, vast reserves of manpower and alliances with Britain and Russia. The Japanese attacked the Americans anyway. They reasoned the recently imposed US fuel embargo would cut short its military ambitions across southeast Asia. How Tokyo expected the US to lift the embargo after killing thousands of US sailors and airman cannot be explained. Likewise, there is no rational explanation for the German declaration other than stupidity.

… which never goes out of style: on October 9, 2019, Turkish forces decided to climb their own Mount Niitaka and invade the Kurdish region of northeastern Syria. American soldiers in a peace-keeping role jumped into their vehicles and fled. Trying to find some sort of logic for Turkey’s gamble is difficult, perhaps rescue ISIS fighters from Kurdish jails, more likely the vanity of the Turkish dictator and that of his American counterpart. The vices of old men must include disgrace and cowardice, not the flight from battle so much but from selling out allies for imaginary gains. Like the Ottoman Empire in 1914, Turkey is not so good at war; they are poor, dependent upon external credit and goodwill, on fuel supplies from outside its borders and the traffic of wealthy European tourists to beach resorts and luxury hotels. Turkey is a member of NATO, its government desires admittance to the European Union. Any potential gains must be measured against losing these things which are now in jeopardy or perhaps swept away already.

In 1914 it was a mystery what sort of outcome the Ottomans were hoping for in their war against the Allies; they didn’t think things through, it is unlikely the Three Pashas imagined the total destruction of their country. It is also unknowable what the current Ankara government hopes to gain from its war, but it is stupid and the outcome is unlikely to be too much fun.

6 thoughts on “Climbing Mount Niitaka

    1. steve from virginia Post author

      Trying to sort out the nonsense from the real nonsense.

      Sometimes, it’s impossible.

  1. Mister Roboto

    Keeping the Kurds well under the thumb of the Turkish state has always been a sub-rational priority for any government in Ankara.

  2. ellenanderson

    “the capital a cauldron of attachés, spies, interest groups; of conflicting lines of authority, of military missions and special envoys, rebels and salesmen.”
    Plus ca change, non?

  3. Bachs_bitch

    Steve, I can’t agree with your assessment of war as just some stupid and irrational death drive. It is that in part of course but it’s also a necessary extension of civilisation itself. Warriors who are honest with themselves and others all describe wars as something akin to changing diapers on a bedridden elderly relative dying of cancer. They are disgusting, stomach-turning affairs you want to escape but there’s a vague sense of honour and serving a higher ideal, and a moral and material demand for stoic composure.

    The only rewards you can hope for as the average peasant soldier in a war are survival, relief and something to brag about. The rewards of victory in war for entire civilisations are comparable to those of an ambitious knight, hiding in a suit of armor and decapitating peasant soldiers to please the king. To continue with the metaphor above, it’s like ordering other people to change the diapers on a childless rich elderly relative dying of cancer who might notice your presence.

    The British industrial revolution pretty much came down to them being an island and owning lots of coal and colonies. Coal production peaking in the 1910s necessitated a rapid transition to oil, especially for the Royal Navy. The Germans were looking for oil too, and didn’t stop looking until they were (mostly) incorporated as business-class passengers on the Starship Amerikkka. The stupidity that motivated WW1 was also that permeating human existence itself in large part.

    What else are the fracking operations but far less violent and more well-regulated versions of the phenomena we label “wars”? Likewise the third world sweatshops, unequal exchange, economies of scale, colonialism and neocolonialism, serfdom, slavery and all the other disgusting horrors inflicted by human beings upon each other for millennia.

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