On May 31, 1921, he reported to the cabinet that the “pronounced suspicion of Zionism” among Palestinian Arabs was unjustified. There was no validity in “current accounts of the inferior quality of recent Jewish immigrants.” Indeed, they had “created a standard of living far superior to that of the indigenous Arabs.” But they would need protection. The rioting in Haifa had spread to Jaffa; Jews were dying. “Zionist battalions,” he believed, were not the solution. He recommended “a strong local gendarmerie.” Nor did he favor elections; the Arab majority “would undoubtedly prohibit further immigration of Jews.” But how many Jews? At present Palestine was inhabited by over 500,000 Moslems and fewer than 80,000 Jews. Two weeks later he assured the House that Arab fears that “in the next few years they are going to be swamped by scores of thousands of immigrants from Central Europe, who will push them off the land,” were “illusory.” Jewish immigration would be “a very slow process, and the rights of the existing non-Jewish population would be strictly preserved.” Here he was dissembling. His private papers show that he anticipated a Zionist state of between three and four million—Israel’s population today.74
Arab violence in Palestine was growing. On the fourth anniversary of the Balfour declaration Samuel cabled Churchill that a gang of “roughs” had invaded Jerusalem’s Jewish quarter; gunfire had been exchanged and policemen had found four corpses, three of them Jews. Meanwhile, Winston had delivered a major speech in the House on Middle Eastern developments. Arabs had fought with the Allies during the war, he reminded them, and Allied “pledges were given that the Turkish rule should not be reintroduced in these regions.” At the same time, a promise “of a very important character” had been given to the Jews—that Britain would do its best “to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine.” England was “at this moment in possession of these countries,” providing “the only form of Government existing there.” To redeem these assurances he had created Iraq and Transjordan, which had given “satisfaction to Arab nationality.” Now he promised to move toward a political solution in Palestine. If the Arabs were provided with a democratic form of government, they would “veto any further Jewish immigration,” and this would violate England’s pledge, which would mean “that the word of Britain no longer counts throughout the East and the Middle East.” He believed the riddle could be solved. He could not guarantee “complete success, but I do believe that the measures which we are taking are well calculated to that end.” He had “great confidence in the experts and high authorities” working on the problem, and he asked Parliament to give them “support in the difficult and delicate process of reduction and conciliation which lies before us, and on which we are already embarking.”75
Applause was prolonged. “Winston has had a great success,” Austen Chamberlain wrote Lloyd George, “both as to his speech & his policy, & has changed the whole atmosphere of the House on the Middle East question.” But many were unconvinced. Churchill was not the only English politician to believe that there was a predominance of Jews in Red Moscow, and hebraphobia, as Meinertzhagen called it, was still quite respectable then. Lord Winterton warned Winston that “once you begin to buy land for the purpose of settling Jewish cultivators you will find yourself up against the hereditary antipathy, which exists all over the world, to the Jewish race.” The Zionists were alarmed, but Churchill, undiscouraged, proceeded to draft a Palestinian constitution which would prevent the Arab majority from barring Jewish investment and immigration. He assured the nervous Zionist leaders that “His Majesty’s Government have no intention of repudiating the obligations into which they have entered toward the Jewish people.” A House referendum on the declaration and the constitution was scheduled for June, and anti-Zionists in both the Commons and the Lords began to hold strategy meetings. In the upper house they were a heavy majority; despite an appeal from Balfour, a newly created earl, the peers voted down his declaration, 60 to 29. Churchill told the House that it couldn’t be renounced, that it was “an integral part of the whole mandatory system, as inaugurated by agreement between the victorious Powers and by the Treaty of Versailles.” To those who argued that the Arabs could develop Palestine’s economic wealth by themselves, he said: “Who is going to believe that? Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps towards the irrigation and electrification of Palestine. They would have been quite content to dwell—a handful of philosophic people—in the wasted sun-drenched plains, letting the waters of the Jordan continue to flow unbridled and unharnessed into the Dead Sea.” An Arab delegation called at the Colonial Office. He told them bluntly: “The British Government mean to carry out the Balfour Declaration. I have told you so again and again. I told you so at Jerusalem. I told you so at the House of Commons the other day.” The House backed him, 292 to 35, rendering the Lords’ vote meaningless. On July 22 the League of Nations approved. All legal hurdles for the birth of Israel had been cleared.76
Yet it remained in gestation for another quarter century. British Arabists remained militant. On August 19, 1922, Lord Sydenham wrote The Times that in Palestine the British had adopted “a policy of forcing by British bayonets a horde of aliens, some of them eminently undesirable, upon the original owners of the country.” Later that year, when Churchill was all but immersed in the bogs of Ireland, the government issued a White Paper affirming the declaration but adding that this did not mean “the imposition of a Jewish nationality upon the inhabitants of Palestine as a whole.” This bland concession to the Arabs infuriated Weizmann without placating the Arabs. The only alternative seemed to be a continuance of British rule. In 1928 the Zionists, with British encouragement, established the Jewish Agency for Palestine to manage their interests there. The immediate response of the Arabs was a pogrom. A succession of British commissions studied the Palestine dilemma in 1929, 1936, 1938, and 1939. Some suggested restrictions on Jewish immigration; one proposed partition. The Arabs struck back with violence, terrorism, and boycotts of British goods. With the outbreak of World War II, England once more needed the Arabs as allies, and nothing was done until the postwar years, when Jewish terrorists took matters into their own hands. Robert Rhodes James, who is perhaps Churchill’s most astute critic, believes that his failure “to produce a workable solution in the area cannot be held against him. It was a task beyond his capacities, but it is probably true to say that it was beyond the capacities of any individual to accomplish. At the time it seemed as though he had skillfully reconciled the conflicting wartime assurances made by the British to the Arabs and the Jews.” His successors in the Colonial Office were either lacking his determination, intimidated by the Arabs, or infected by racial prejudice. Poring over the old documents, one has the feeling that they themselves did not know.77
In his speech of June 14, 1921, Churchill had told the House that any successful Middle Eastern policy would eventually depend upon “a peaceful and lasting settlement with Turkey.”78 That was precisely what Britain lacked, and it is a supreme irony that the most damaging blow to Winston’s prestige during his two years as colonial secretary came from—of all places—the Dardanelles. Moreover, the man who dealt it was the victor of Gallipoli, General Mustapha Kemal, now Kemal Atatürk (“the Great Turk”), who had become an enlightened dictator consecrated to the transformation of his homeland into a modern state. At San Remo and in the Treaty of Sèvres, imposed on the weak sultan by the Allies, Turkey had been stripped, not only of its Arab possessions, but of many lands inhabited by Turkish people. The Bosporus and the Dardanelles were internationalized and the shores of both straits demilitarized. Moreover, Greece, Turkey’s ancient enemy, had been awarded Smyrna, Thrace, and the sultan’s Aegean islands.
Lloyd George was responsible for this. A passionate philhellenist, under the spell of Premier Venizelos, he believed the Greeks were completely justified in their determination to regain what they regarded as their lost territories in Asia Minor, including areas not awarded them at Sèvres. Churchill
vehemently disagreed. For eight months he urged Lloyd George to negotiate with Kemal. The prime minister replied that Kemal was a rebel and an outcast. At a cabinet meeting in the first week of 1920, Winston recommended that British troops be withdrawn from Constantinople. George said they would leave only when Greek soldiers were ready to replace them. Curzon, the foreign secretary, agreed with Winston; so did the foreign ministers of France and Italy. Churchill pointed out that since England was not prepared to field an army against the Turks, its support of Greece’s adventurism was dangerous. Championing Kemal’s revolution as vigorously as he opposed Lenin’s, he wrote George that an attempt to force new terms on him “wd require great & powerful armies & long costly operations. On this world so torn with strife I dread to see you let loose the Greek armies.” He received no reply. He sent feelers to the Turks and learned that “Mustapha Kemal is willing to negotiate.” Again he wrote the prime minister: “No doubt my opinions seem a vy unimportant thing. But are you sure that about Turkey the line wh you are forcing us to pursue wd commend itself to the present H. of C.?” In a war, he predicted, the Turks would defeat the Greeks, and “to let the Greeks collapse at Smyrna will leave us confronted with a Turkish triumph and the Turks will have got back Smyrna by their own efforts instead of as the result of a bargain with us.” To Lord Derby he wrote: “I think we should use Kemal and a reconciled Turkey as a barrier against the Bolsheviks and to smooth down our affairs in the Middle East and in India.”79
To Lloyd George’s embarrassment, the Venizelos government fell. George still wouldn’t budge, however. Greek friendship, he told the House, was essential for England, and he was unwilling “to purchase a way out of our difficulties by betraying others.” He also reported that his ministers were in “unanimous agreement” that Smyrna should not be returned to Turkey. That was untrue, and Churchill angrily reminded Hankey, who had drafted the minutes of the meeting, that he had expressed his conviction that “the restoration of Turkish sovereignty or suzerainty over the Smyrna Province is an indispensable step to the pacification of the Middle East.” It was also his impression that these views had been shared by the lord privy seal, the chancellor of the Exchequer, and the secretary of state for India.80
As Lloyd George climbed farther and farther out on his limb, Kemal completed his ruthless suppression of his Turkish rivals and united the country behind him. The caliphate had been abolished, ending fourteen centuries of Islamic rule. Elected president and appointed commander in chief of the armed forces, Kemal vowed to reconquer all Turkish territories occupied by foreign forces. In defiance of the Allies, he had kept the sultan’s army intact, and his askari, with their preference for the bayonet and their fearsome war cry—“Uhra, Uhra!” (“Kill, Kill!”)—routed the Armenians and Georgians in the east and then the French in the south. While he was preoccupied with these theaters, the Greek army invaded Turkey. At first their advance was virtually unopposed. Riddell wrote in his diary: “L.G. is still very pro-Greek and much elated at the Greek military successes. He said we always regarded the Turk as a first-class fighting man but even here he had broken down. L.G. told me he believes the Greeks will capture Constantinople, and he evidently hopes they will.” Frances Stevenson wrote: “D. very interested in the Greek advance. He has had a great fight in the Cabinet to back the Greeks (not only in the field but morally) & he & Balfour are the only pro-Greeks there. All the others have done their best to obstruct & the W.O. have behaved abominably. However D. has got his way, but he is much afraid lest the Greek attack should be a failure, & he should be proved to have been wrong. He says his political reputation depends a great deal on what happens in Asia Minor.” He kept such doubts from his colleagues, jubilantly telling the House: “Turkey is no more!”81
He was wrong. In the summer of 1921, when the Greek invaders were within thirty miles of Angora (now Ankara), Kemal turned and defeated them on the Sakarya River. The Allies, alarmed, tried appeasing him by forbidding the Greeks to approach Constantinople and offering unspecified revisions of the Sèvres treaty. Kemal, who had already denounced its provisions, ignored them. Mounting a counteroffensive, he crushed the Greeks in the battles of Afyon Karahisar and Bursa. They broke and fled in confusion across the Dumlu Pinar plateau, toward the coast. In the second week of August he was within a day’s march of Smyrna. By now he had become a terrible myth—“le mangeur d’homme,” the French called him—and his frantic enemies, unable to stand against him, turned on the civilian population. Every Turkish village in the path of their flight was burned to the ground. Inside Smyrna, Turkish women and children were put to the sword. But Smyrna was home to thousands of Armenians and Greeks, too. When the Greek soldiers escaped by sea, and Armenians unwisely resisted the onrushing askari, the Turks ran amok. Moving systematically from street to street, they dragged all civilians who weren’t Turks from their hiding places and butchered them on their own thresholds. Those who sought refuge in Smyrna’s wooden churches faced an even ghastlier fate. The church walls were drenched with benzine and then fired. Refugees who attempted escape from cremation were bayoneted as they leapt out. The flames spread. Kemal’s men sealed off the Turkish quarter, encircled the rest of the city, and cheered as it was reduced to ashes. The few civilians still alive were then massacred. Except for the homes of the Turkish natives and a few buildings near the Kassambra railroad station, Smyrna was destroyed.
These appalling events were unknown to the outside world for several weeks. Royal Marines had evacuated British subjects from Smyrna before the atrocities began. It was the consensus of European statesmen—with the exception of Lloyd George, who stubbornly doubted the Greeks had suffered “a complete debacle”—that the invaders had asked for it. Paris urged Athens to sue for an armistice, and Sir Horace Rumbold, the British high commissioner in Constantinople, agreed, cabling Curzon that any such truce must be followed by “the immediate and orderly evacuation of Asia Minor by Greeks.”82 But by now the situation was beyond the control of anyone except Kemal, whose momentum kept growing. Soon the straits and even the Gallipoli peninsula were in danger. Here the Turks faced, not Greeks, but British, French, and Italian soldiers. At Sèvres the Allies had established “neutral zones,” including the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporus, which were proclaimed international waters to be guarded by Allied infantry. Kemal, however, recognized no neutrals in his struggle. On Turkish soil anyone not for him was against him, and putting Smyrna behind him, he wheeled toward the Sea of Marmara, on whose shores a force of demoralized Greek soldiers had taken refuge. But they were not his main objective. The horrified maritime powers—chiefly England—realized that he meant to close the straits.
Now, as in 1915, the key position there was Chanak, the Dardanelles’ port of entry, a seedy waterfront town of crooked streets and high walls still pocked and pitted from de Robeck’s shelling. Once it became clear that Kemal had designs upon it, the French and Italian contingents stationed there withdrew, leaving a few thousand British troops to confront fifty-two thousand Turks. Churchill suggested that the Tommies be boated across to the European shore, thereby yielding everything on the Asian side to Kemal. If this were done, the first lord of the Admiralty assured the cabinet, the Royal Navy could still keep the channel open. The War Office forwarded the proposal to General Sir Charles Harington, the commander of the occupation force in Constantinople, but Harington insisted that his men remain in the town as a rear guard. Lloyd George was against Winston’s idea anyway. He said that if they were to “scuttle” from the threat, “our credit would entirely disappear.”83 Colonel Digby Shuttleworth, a tactful officer, was dispatched to Chanak. At his request, the Admiralty sent the battleships Ajax, Iron Duke, and Marlborough and the seaplane carrier Pegasus to anchor between Chanak and Gallipoli and train their guns on the approaches to the town.
Churchill had a sickening feeling of déjà vu. The ghosts of de Robeck, Fisher, and Kitchener rose before him. He told the cabinet that he felt “very uncomfortable” abou
t the weakness of Shuttleworth’s position and recommended that not only Chanak but also Constantinople be abandoned, drawing “the whole of the British forces” into Gallipoli. This, he said, would involve “no serious risk,” and had “the very great merit that it would mystify, confuse, and hold up the enemy.” Lloyd George shook his head. To take that line, he said, “would be the greatest loss of prestige which could possibly be inflicted on the British Empire.” Churchill withdrew his motion and switched course. “The line of deep water separating Asia from Europe,” he said, was “a line of great significance, and we must make that line very secure by every means within our power. If the Turks take the Gallipoli Peninsula… we shall have lost the whole fruits of our victory, and another Balkan war would be inevitable.” He then joined Lloyd George, Balfour, Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, and F. E. Smith—who had become Lord Birkenhead in 1919—in a hardline bloc. “We made common cause,” Winston later wrote. “The Government might break up, and we might be relieved of our burden. The nation might not support us; they could find others to advise them. The Press might howl; the Allies might bolt. We intended to force the Turk to a negotiated peace before he set foot in Europe.”84
On September 15, 1922, they sent Kemal an ultimatum. He was told that he remained in the neutral zones at his peril: “It is the intention of His Majesty’s Government to reinforce immediately… the troops at the disposal of Sir Charles Harington, the Allied Commander-in-Chief at Constantinople, and orders have been given to the British Fleet in the Mediterranean to oppose by every means any infraction of the neutral zones by the Turks or any attempt by them to cross the European shores.” But where were Harington’s reinforcements coming from? Not from Italy or France; their men were gone. Raymond Poincaré had announced in Paris that the French “would not consider themselves bound by any responsibility for any development that might result from the action which General Harington had been authorized to take.” And not from the Empire, either; it was on this occasion that Churchill, on instructions from Lloyd George, asked the Dominions for troops and was turned down by all except New Zealand and Newfoundland. Winston was dining at Sir Philip Sassoon’s Park Lane home on September 25 when word arrived that Kemal had finally responded to the British note. He had rejected it. Churchill was furious. Hankey, a fellow guest, wrote in his diary: “We talked late into the night. Winston, hitherto a strong Turko-phile, had swung round at the threat to his beloved Dardanelles and become violently Turko-phobe and even Phil-Hellene.”85