Far from home they fought, often far from supplies and equipment, and yet still they
fought bravely with their more local compatriots, defending their alliance in this, the first
world war - the German Asia Corps.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about the German Asia Corps
in the First World War.
The first attempts at military cooperation between Germans and the Ottoman Empire go
back to the 1830s when Hauptmann Helmuth von Moltke- the elder Moltke- of the Prussian
Army was sent as an advisor to the commanders of Sultan Mahmud II, to help modernize the
Ottoman Army.
This was the beginning of partnerships and friendships between the Prussians and the
Ottomans, both of whom were by geography under threat from Russian, British, and French expansion.
A second attempt was made in 1878 under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who wished to remake his army
in the Prussian model.
This was doomed to failure from the start, as German officers were exasperated by the
nepotism within the Ottoman command structure and an army that was far below any European
standard in training and equipment.
A new generation of officers began to emerge, however, in 1883 when Colmar Freiherr von
der Goltz began teaching at the military academy in Constantinople.
In 1913, after the Young Turks revolution, a new attempt under Liman von Sanders was
even more promising.
He became a Turkish Marshal and one of the most influential officers in that empire,
steering an alliance.
When war broke out in Europe, the Ottoman army had been so much restructured and reorganized,
equipped with German weaponry and trained by German officers, that it was able to go
toe to toe with European armies.
At least for a while and on a limited level.
In September 1914, before the Ottomans joined the war, Friedrich Freiherr Kreß von Kressenstein
was sent to Syria to train an 18,000 strong Ottoman Army Corps and lead the instruction
of pioneers for the taking of the Suez Canal.
When that adventure went off early in 1915, by which time the Ottomans were in the war,
they took German field batteries and howitzers across 250km of the Sinai Desert without losing
a single man- an amazing feat- but the attack broke down in the face of Indian machine gun
fire.
British aircraft had spotted them coming, and they had no aircraft of their own, but
the mission really showed how much an Ottoman army could achieve if it was competently led
and well-equipped.
The first German military mission of the Asia-Corps, Pasha I, was to be sent out to the Palestine
Front in the summer of 1916.
1,500 men, of whom 140 were officers, and some Austrian artillerymen, were sent with
aircraft, field batteries, and minenwerfer.
This seemed like an exotic foreign adventure to the average German soldier- to be in the
Holy Land surrounded by so much history, especially in comparison to the gloom of the other German
fronts, this was almost tourism.
Well, so they thought until they reached Aleppo.
The locals already referred to it as Plague-town, so that should give you a hint what it was
like.
There was cholera, typhus, spotted fever, and more.
Most of the soldiers would catch at least one of these, and disease was far more deadly
than the fighting on this front.
The Ottoman army had very limited medical equipment or even doctors and the death rate
in the military hospitals could climb as high as 40%.
In fact, over the course of the war, 3.5 million Ottoman soldiers would get sick, and 500,000
of them would die of disease.
The German army doctors were the most powerful propaganda tool they could have brought to
the Ottoman Empire.
Aleppo was also awash in refugees, it was a town ravaged by corruption, and the only
things really thriving were the brothels and the bazaars.
Even there, the German soldiers were outraged that you could buy German rifles, aircraft
parts, or gasoline; stuff that had obviously been stolen or sold by corrupt officials.
The Germans were pretty happy to leave Aleppo behind and head to Jerusalem.
Now, at this time there were some 100,000 Jews living in all of Palestine, and around
75,000 of those spoke German.
Many had gone to German or Austrian schools in Jerusalem or had connections to orders
like the German Templars.
The Kaiser, though, refused to become an official patron of these German-Jewish colonies, to
avoid alienating the Ottomans, but they still wholeheartedly welcomed the Asia-Corps.
Despite temperatures that could soar well over 50 degrees Celsius, the lack of food
and supplies, and just generally harsh conditions, they performed well militarily.
The first push at El Arish was a success, surprising the Australians, and as German
aircraft took to the skies they gained local air superiority, which they would not lose
until autumn 1917.
To even get aircraft to the Ottomans until late 1915, the Germans had had to smuggle
them through neutral Romania and Bulgaria, and they had to declare them as circus planes
or red cross planes.
They were really needed at Gallipoli and on the Hejaz front and made a big difference
in terms of reconnaissance, but supplying took ages and a lot of stuff was stolen along
the way.
For example, of seven planes sent simultaneously to Baghdad, only one could be assembled from
parts that actually arrived there.
Same with the German motor convoys that were vital for the Ottoman supply system- if a
truck broke down it could be out of action for weeks.
Austria-Hungary also had a small military mission to Palestine.
Well, already in late 1914 they had sent agents to the local Arabian tribes to encourage them
to fight the British, but they were no match for the British funding, so the best they
could do was try to buy neutrality.
They had also been in the Caucasus teaching the Ottomans how to ski.
By mid 1916, the famous Hungarian mountain gun batteries were supporting the German right
flank in Bethlehem.
Now, these guys were citizens of a real multi-national and multi-cultural empire and had an easier
time opening up to local customs and were far less elitist and patronizing than the
Germans were.
Baghdad fell to the British in March 1917 and Ottoman Minister of War Enver Pasha visited
Berlin to try to sort out an offensive to retake it.
A new army group was to be built from Western Front veterans and Ottoman regulars, called
Heeresgruppe F, or Yildirim in Turkish, meaning the bolt, and under the command of no less
than former Chief of Staff of the whole German Army, Erich von Falkenhayn.
His bright idea was to reach Meseken, then cross the Euphrates by raft, then march 800km
across the desert with 25,000 camels.
The word for this is “madness”.
Everyone who’d served in the Middle East knew this was futile.
Heck, the supply line couldn’t even support the Sinai front at this point, so the plan
was first postponed and then changed to a Palestine expedition where the Yildirim would
support the Ottomans on the Jaffa-Jerusalem line.
Falkenhayn, who “wanted to lead a Turkish army through the desert like a German army
through Europe” wanted to fight the battle for Jerusalem like he did the Battle of Verdun.
Other German officers intervened in time to prevent Jerusalem from suffering the same
destruction as Verdun.
By 1918, the German and Austrian military missions were fighting a war of attrition
they could not win.
By this time also, they were outgunned by the British, who had better planes and artillery.
The Arab revolt raids on the Ottoman supply line had caused it to begin collapsing.
The Ottoman soldiers were starving by now, wearing rags, and with barely any ammunition.
Austro-Hungarian plans for their own Asia-Corps were cancelled when those troops were needed
in Albania, and troops like the “Holy Legion” or the “Afrika-Battalion”, made up of
French-Arabian deserters, never materialized.
The German troops were more and more on their own, and the British September offensive toward
Nazareth forced them to pull back to the north.
Scenes of horrific violence followed as Lawrence of Arabia’s Arab Revolt forces fell on the
stragglers and the wounded.
The Asia Corps had to fight their way out of this to Damascus, the only orderly forces
amid the chaos of late 1918, as Lawrence would write in his memoirs.
On October 31, 1918, one day after the Ottoman Empire signed an armistice, Liman von Sanders
transferred his command to Kemal Pasha, but the German retreat was fraught with problems.
They couldn’t go through Bulgaria or Romania, so they had to be shipped to Odessa and then
try to make it to Germany from there, through the civil war stricken country, where many
lives were lost to skirmishes with the locals.
The final prisoners the Allies took in Palestine would return to Germany in late 1919.
The chaos of the retreat from Palestine to Germany, and the fight for mere survival,
forced the Asia Corps to leave most of its documents behind, this made a detailed history
a complicated endeavor.
The bombing of the German archives in 1945 made it nearly impossible.
We want to thank Markus Linke for the research of this episode.
If you want to learn more about the Palestine front, you can click right here for our special
about T.E. Lawrence aka Lawrence of Arabia.
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See you next time.