66. The Turkish Front
If the Italians outperformed Papen's expectations, the Turks lived up to the most dismal predictions of their inefficiency. In 1941, despite six years of loudly trumpeting their claims to Mesopotamia, the Near East, and the Caliphate, they had made no plans. The most modern ship in the Sultan's navy was the British-built, Greek-crewed cruiser
Athina, the fleet's flagship was the same battlecruiser that Admiral Souchon had brought to Constantinople in 1914, and the troops were largely armed with the long-barreled Mauser 98, not even the shortened form found in German service. Even the Turkish armored units, comprised of exported Panzer I and Panzer II models, was hopelessly out of date, and it was less than a decade old. The polyglot nature of the Sultan's empire ensured that communication was almost universally terrible. Even down to battalion level, orders had to be transmitted as numerical codes.
The solution, more or less forced upon the Sultan by the German leadership, was the assignment of a German "advisory" staff which took over the Turkish war effort. Orders went out from Istanbul in German to officers at corps level, and the corps-level officers transmitted their orders to the Sultan's army. This system performed admirably in the coastal region, and along the Baghdad rail line, suddenly endangered by the British position in Iraq, but in the open desert, it was subject to constant breakdown. The Iraqi desert rapidly became a sieve for sorting competent from incompetent commanders, heroes from cowards.
The first Turkish thrust, in the heat of August, was down along the coast. They met with rapid success, with the cities of Beirut and Damascus taken almost against no opposition. In Syria, a French stay-behind unit training the Syrian government, the 2e Regiment Etrangere d'Infanterie, put up a valiant defense, but were simply outnumbered and, over the first two weeks of September, overwhelmed. The regiment's commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Ferdinand Barre, transmitted his last message from the old Citadel of Damascus:
The Turks are everywhere. The situation is very grave. The combat is confused and goes on all about. I feel the end is approaching, but we will fight to the finish.
Thus, the Sultan reclaimed the onetime capital of the Caliphs. The Turkish forces in the region, consisting of fifteen infantry divisions, now came across an entirely different sort of resistance, the three divisions of the British corps in the area under General Auchinleck. "The Auk" had been deprived of his armor by General O'Connor's ill-advised invasion of Ethiopia early in the war. However, the presence of three divisions of British regulars in Palestine meant that he could stop the Turkish advance and, despite the danger of the Italians in Egypt, stop any threat to the Suez Canal from the north. Auchinleck's forces adapted much more quickly to the western deserts of Iraq than the Turks, mostly because of superior communications and training, and their maneuvers between Damascus and Karbala kept the Turkish forces from Baghdad for the entirety of the autumn of 1941. By the beginning of December, Auchinleck had even recaptured Damascus.
However, the Sultan's avowed goal of helping the Kurds in northern Iraq meant that serious pressure was applied there; within two weeks of the declaration of war, Turkish mobile forces charged down the Berlin-Baghdad line to Mosul, and the Sultan's armies were able to take Mosul and Kirkuk against Auchinleck's eastern corps, consisting of two British infantry divisions under acting Lieutenant-General Bernard Law Montgomery. Montgomery, fighting with his characteristic attention to detail, established the "Baghdad Line" in an arrowhead-shaped arc from east of Baghdad to Hilla; he considered the desert beyond this point to be sufficient defense against the Turks.
The weak point in this line was the Iraqi division, of uncertain sympathies and therefore stationed to the south, where Montgomery judged Turkish attack least likely. The "Turkish" staff, consisting of Bendlerblock officers, agreed with Montgomery's assessment of the situation and therefore launched a broad-front attack, with the northern end at Samarra and the southern end at Hilla equally weighted. The goal was simply to tie down the reliable British infantry and force the Iraqis into collapse. This attack, launched in late November, had predictable results: in the south, the Iraqis broke. In the north, Montgomery's mine and wire belts stopped the Turkis advance cold. Though the Turks were now at the gates of Baghdad, they lacked the strength to push further.
Montgomery launched one of the few successful counterattacks in Iraq at this time, catching the flank of the Turkish thrust into Persian Azerbaijan. At the Battle of Lake Urmia, Montgomery's corps caught the Turkish 1st Infantry Divison (Motorized) off-guard, routing them and chasing the Turks back out of Kirkuk. Montgomery's victory at Lake Urmia and Auchinleck's recapture of Damascus were both trumpeted by the Prime Minister, who recognized that the Treaty of Alexandria and the attendant Italian annexation of Egypt demanded some sort of public response.
However, by the first week of December, 1941, operations had taken on a rather different cast: the first Italian forces were across the Canal, other Italian troops were probing south, and fresh new German divisions had arrived in Alexandria. The March up the Nile had begun in Africa, and O'Connor in Ethiopia had begun to construct, using native labor and at backbreaking difficulty, a road from Addis Ababa to Mogadishu, the closest port of any size that was not under threat of occupation. In Iraq, it was clearly only a matter of time before Baghdad fell, and after Baghdad, Basra and with it the oil terminal in Kuwait. Auchinleck attempted to break his forces out of the British Mandate, but instead of Italians or Turks, by this point his opponent was Generalleutnant (for a short time longer) Günther von Kluge.
Auchinleck's troops were split by Kluge's highly mobile Afrika Korps, isolating the 51st Highland Division in Jerusalem and leaving him with only his staff and two infantry divisions in Jordan-Syria. His assault into Jerusalem itself was praised even by Auchinleck for the pains he took to spare the Old City, and the Highlanders surrendered on 22 December 1941. In a gesture that would characaterize the Syrian fighting, he allowed the division, which had defended the city heroically for three weeks, to march into captivity with full honors. Now he turned his attention to the capture of Auchinleck.
Striking out of Amman in the first week of 1942, he attacked first east into the desert, to split Auchinleck's forces, then north, where Auchinleck himself had retreated with the bulk of his troops into Damascus once more. Auchinleck and the 78th Infantry Division surrendered on the fifth, and Kluge stopped in Damascus just long enough to survey the city before speeding south. His troops engaged the last British defenses in Transjordan, around the port of Aqabah, on the eighth, and within a matter of hours, the demoralized British, barely kept in supply by the hard-pressed Indian theater, surrendered.
The road was now clear for Kluge to advance on Baghdad and a baton.