044 Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and his order to die

Mustafa Kemal

Ottomans are not so sick after all

It is Sunday 25 April 1915. It is the 44th week after the shooting at Sarajevo.

South Africans and Rhodesians give the Germans in Southwest Africa a beating.

Italian diplomats sign the secret London Pact: if Rome chooses the side of the allies, it is entitled to claim parts of Austria-Hungary, among which South Tyrol, Gorizia, Istria and half of Dalmatia.

An Austrian submarine, commanded by Georg Ritter von Trapp, succeeds in eliminating French cruiser Leon Gambetta in the Adriatic Sea, killing 547.

A new type of Zeppelin bombs the Sussex coast of England.

Germans and Austrians prepare for an attack at Gorlice in Galicia.

Despite warnings of the German embassy, ocean liner Lusitania leaves New York, destination Liverpool.

A French attack at Ypres results in heavy losses, in spite of support by the British artillery.

The Germans continue to target the allies with chlorine gas.

And the allied invasion of Gallipoli paints the sea red, while on the Turkish side a true hero emerges, Mustafa Kemal.

A lot has perished because of the First World War. Even headwear has been subject to demolition. Think of the Pickelhaube, the spiked symbol of the Prussian military. Or the fez, the round red felt hat – leftover of Byzantine culture in the Ottoman empire.

In post-First World War Turkey the fez was banned. It was Mustafa Kemal who was behind the Hat Law of 1925. He was the strong man, especially honoured by secular Turks as Atatürk, Father of Turks.  No Turkish living-room would be complete without his portrait on the wall. Insulting him would be the equivalent of lese-majesty, hence forbidden by law. Atatürk was in the hearts of all the Turks and it was he who made a town in the heart of Turkey its capital: Ankara. His sarcophagus is there, too.

Back to the fez. Why does a head of state want to interfere with headwear? For the same reason why Atatürk exchanged Arabic script for the western alphabet. The reason also why he granted women the right to vote, but forbade them to wear veils. Why he closed down monasteries of the Dervishes. Why he introduced family names and abolished all sorts of titles and nicknames and epithets. Why he established a civil code. Why he founded museums and stimulated the arts. Why he adopted the international calendar and time indications. And why he, above all, separated  mosque and state. Atatürk wanted Turkey to become a modern European nation.

Historian Bernard Lewis describes it as follows in ‘The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years’: ‘Atatürk, the master of social symbolism, was not pursuing the idle caprice of a despot when he decreed that the fez and all other forms of traditional headgear must be abandoned and European hats and caps adopted in their place. This was a major social decision, and he and those around him knew perfectly well what he was doing.’ Says Lewis.

The Turkey of Atatürk radically broke with the traditions of the Ottoman Empire, the once so mighty realm of the sultans. The First World War had been the fatal blow, but the decline had begun much earlier. When the peoples of Europe tried to find their way out of the Middle Ages in utter blindness, the civilization of the Ottomans had been at an unprecedented level for ages. Medically, mathematically, chemically, astronomically, philosophically and even theologically speaking, the islamic world was a long long way ahead of Europe.

In 1453 Constantinople had fallen into the hands of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror. That signified the end of the Byzantine Empire as advanced post of Europe. The Ottomans had already  earlier managed to penetrate Europe via the Dardanelles. The Balkans were overrun, but in the sixteenth century the Ottomans were also at the gates of Vienna and even made attacks on the Spanish coast. Everywhere in Christian countries Allah’s hordes were feared.

However, in 1699 after a battle against a Holy League the Ottomans are forced to sign the Treaty of Karlowitz. It is the first time that they have to face a real defeat. The realization has dawned upon them that only the western way of waging war can be successful. Military reforms will precede a cultural merger. It is the French Revolution – with its ideals of equality, liberty and fraternity – that really breaks open Ottoman civilization. Napoleon brings the printing press to the Middle East.

A new western principle is introduced past the Bosphorus: nationalism. It is the aim of merging a state with a people. The Ottoman Empire has been organized differently. Numerous cultures have lived together there for centuries relatively harmoniously. Compared to Europe the Ottoman Empire was the epitome of tolerance and cultural diversity in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Persecuted minorities from other countries found a place there and minorities from their own empire enjoyed a lot of freedom.

However, in the nineteenth century more and more ethnic groups – Greeks, Kurds, Armenians, Arabs and Jews – began to experience Ottoman rule as tyranny. This made the realm of the sultan sick. The eastern Question was put on the map. In 1853 the Russian czar Nicholas I expressed his worries: ‘We have a sick man on our hands, a man gravely ill, it will be a great misfortune if one of these days he slips through our hands, especially before the necessary arrangements are made.’

Despite the caring words of the czar, the Russians repeatedly wage war with the Ottomans in the nineteenth century. The sultans succeed in holding their own thanks to the European powers. They are opposed to a Russian extension at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. In the Crimean war, between 1853 and 1856, the French and the British even fight together with the Ottomans against the Russians.

Six decades later the situation is completely different and the Ottomans stand between the Russians on one side and the British and the French on the other. They do not allow an allied rapprochement across the water, via the Dardanelles, and across the land, via Gallipoli. The common Turk appears to be a lot more vigorous than the sick man of Europe for which the Ottoman Empire had been held.

When the allied forces land on the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April 1915, a German by the name of Liman von Sanders is in command of the Ottoman troops. But commander Mustafa Kemal will be the star on the front. It seems that Australians and New Zealanders chase the Turks away from their slopes and their trenches, but then Mustafa Kemal straightens his back. The beach where the Anzacs land turns into a bloodbath. Every Turkish child learns how Mustafa Kemal Atatürk encouraged his men never ever to give up: ‘I don’t order you to fight, I order you to die.’ And these words proved to be very successful. In nine months’ time around a hundred thousand were killed during the batlle of Gallipoli. More than half of them were Turkish martyrs. The number of wounded soldiers on the side of the Ottomans is calculated to be another 140,000.

Mustafa Kemal was born in the Ottoman town of Salonika, which is now known as the Greek town of Thessaloniki. His surname ‘Kemal’ means something like ‘the perfect one’. His father was a government official, who later went into the wood trade. Mustafa Kemal was born in 1880 or 1881. Due  to the absence of a proper civil registry, there has always been some disagreement about the exact date of his birth. The theory that Mustafa’s father was of Jewish descent is not accepted by everyone either.

Mustafa Kemal joins the Committee of Union and Progress, better known as the Young Turks. He serves as a professional soldier in the Turkish-Italian War of 1911-1912 and in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913.

Strong man Enver Pasha does not like the heroic role of Mustafa Kemal at Gallipoli, where he has also been hit by shrapnel. Mustafa Kemal has also spoken against the commitment to Germany in the first year of the war, though this has not prevented him from serving in the Ottoman army. After Gallipoli he is first sent to Edirne and then to the Caucasus front, far away from Enver’s power base in Constantinople. When he is in command of the Turkish Second Army after being promoted general in 1916, Mustafa Kemal made life for the Russians very difficult. After that things become tougher for him on the Arab front. Syria and Palestine offer very little perspective for him.

Meanwhile he accompanies on a tour through Germany the heir apparent of the throne of the Ottomans, the later sultan Mehmet VI. On his return he first takes sick leave and goes to Vienna and Karlsbad to recuperate. He is not only plagued by kidney problems, but also has to cope with the remnants of the venereal disease gonorrhoea. During his rehabilitation in Austria he becomes more familiar with the western lifestyle. Once returned to active service Mustafa Kemal, too, has to acknowledge defeat. On 31 October 1918 the armistice of Mudros is signed on board the British warship Agamemnon. The Ottoman Empire is left completely stripped.

On 8 February 1919 French general Franchet d’Espèrey parades through Constantinople on a white horse, just as Mehmet the Conqueror had done in 1453. The pride of the Turks is wounded. Their defeat is finalized in the Treaty of Sèvres, which will be signed by the new Turkish sultan, but which is rejected by an alternative government in Ankara. That government is led by Mustafa Kemal. He will gloriously lead the Turkish war of independence, which will result in the Treaty of Lausanne. In 1923 the Republic of Turkey is composed of Asian Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, which on the other side of the Dardanelles is considered to be a part of Europe.

Mustafa Kemal then remodels his country. Above all, he shows himself to be a Turkish nationalist. Threfore his name is not hallowed in Greek, Kurdish or Armenian circles. But whoever claims that Atatürk’s ruthless modernization has gone hand in hand with ethnics cleansing, will be addressed by any true Kemalist with the words of Atatürk: ‘It is not important that you are a Turk, but that you feel Turkish’.

He gets married in 1923, but the marriage is dissolved after two years without issue. He will, however, adopt seven daughters and a son. In 1934 Mustafa Kemal accepts the title Atatürk, Father of Turks. Four years later he dies at the age of 57 of cirrhosis of the liver, a disease that must have been the result of his consumption of large quantities of raki. In that respect, too, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was far removed from straight Islam.

The Turks have erected a memorial at Anzac Cove, the bay of Gallipoli where so many Australian and New Zealand boys were killed on 25 April 1915. It carries the following words that Atatürk spoke to them and their loved ones in 1934: ‘Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives… you are now lying in the soil of  a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours… You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace, after having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.’

Next week: Alfred Vanderbilt

Tom Tacken (translation Peter Veltman)

 

043 Anthony Fokker and the nightmare of aeronautics

Anthony Fokker

The airplane breaks through as air weapon 

It is Sunday 18 April 1915. It is the 43rd week after the shooting at Sarajevo.

The war produces a technological tour de force: two Brits hang above the Dardanelles in a hot air balloon. They are observing a Turkish camp, pass on its position by telephone to the ship they are attached to with a cable. The ship telegraphs the information to a cruiser that in its turn bombards the Turkish camp from behind the horizon with grenades.

Meanwhile on both sides of the Dardanelles the Turkish troops under the command of the German general Liman von Sanders prepare for an allied invasion.

On his way to Gallipoli the English poet Rubert Brooke dies of blood poisoning on a French hospital ship as a result of a mosquito bite.

At Zillebeke in Flanders the Germans make frantic attempts to recapture Hill 60.

The German government apologizes to the neutral Netherlands for sinking cargoship SS Katwijk.

In the Second Battle of Ypres the Germans fail to make optimal use of the chaos they caused with chlorine gas on the side of the allies.

And the French aviator Roland Garros reveals his secret to the Germans, after which there is a lot of work to be done for Dutch aviation pioneer Anthony Fokker.

Plagiarism is not the biggest crime of the First World War, but it was certainly widespread. Eagle-eyed they stared at each other’s war activities. What is the enemy capable of? Or rather, are we capable of that, too? Can we possibly do even better.

Take the story of the French pilot Roland Garros, after whom in later years a tennis tournament in Paris will be named. On 19 April 1915 he crashes near Ingelmunster, occupied territory in Flanders. Garros survives the crash, also sets fire to his plane, but cannot prevent that the Germans secure the wreck. Now they are going to figure out how that darn Frenchman succeeded in taking down five German planes in three weeks’ time.

Well, Roland Garros was the first fighter pilot who literally went straight for his target. Thanks to a technical gimmick he could fire a machine gun through his propellers. If a bullet struck the blade of a propeller, it would ricochet on a wedge-shaped metal plate. It was far from ideal, as the propeller could become unbalanced.

The Germans immediately started to copy the mechanism which they had got their hands on. However, it appeared that it was quite suitable for the French copper bullets but not for the German steel ones. Now it was time to contact a 25-year-old Dutchman, Anthony Fokker. In no time flat Fokker succeeded in reconciling a machine gun with a propeller. Via a cam, pushrods and rocker arms the machine gun stopped firing at the exact moment when one of the propeller blades passed. Fokker had done it: safe firing through the arc of the spinning propellers.

The synchronized machine gun with which Fokker started equipping his E.III planes, was the beginning of German superiority in the air. In the summer of 1915 the English newspapers started to write moody stories about the Fokker Scourge. Fokker Fodder, they sneered about their own planes.

Anthony Fokker can be called a controversial figure. Some consider him a war criminal, who shamelessly made money from the horrors of the war. For others he is a genius, who combined the entrepreneur, the inventor and the adventurer.

Soon it appeared that young Fokker was not born for teaching. Tinkering with model trains and fiddling with paper airplanes he got a grip on engineering. Tony was a do-it-yourselfer. When he was seventeen he produced a solid tyre as the solution for flat tyres that haunted motorists. Alas, apparently the patent for that had been granted earlier in France.

In 1911, on Queen’s Day, he made a name for himself by going around in circles a few times over the Dutch city of Haarlem in a plane which he had designed himself. It was called The Fokker Spin (Spin being Dutch for Spider). As a member of the local Orange committee, which organized all sorts of festivities for Queen’s Day, his father had inspired him. Fokker junior had every reason to please his dad. After all, he ivested huge sums of money in his son’s aeronautics, money he had earned as a coffee grower in the Dutch East Indies. For a long time there had been no immediate prospect of a return on the investments in the passion of his son, but for the time being dad Fokker could strut around the streets of Haarlem like a peacock.

Aeronautics in the first decade of the twentieth century is a phenomenon which only few people take seriously. That had also been the experience of bicycle mechanics Orville and Wilbur Wright, when they tried to get the American army interested in their flying machines. It is all very well, was the army’s answer to the two brothers, as long as it does not cost us any money.

In 1903 the Wright brothers had succeeded in keeping a plane in the air for the first time. Six years later the Frenchman Louis Blériot flew across the Channel. And another year later Anthony Fokker built his Spin in Germany. Its pilot seemed caught in a web of metal wires that held cockpit and wings together.

‘When I was a boy of sixteen and heard about flying machines for the first time, my only goal was to become an airman. They were the new heroes in those days. Perhaps that was what attracted me: to become a hero’, Fokker said in his autobiography, which he entitled ‘The Flying Dutchman’.

On the eve of the Great War Fokker leaves for Germany and starts building airplanes and giving flying lessons at the same time. In 1913 he is the first to imitate Frenchman Adolphe Pegoud’s looping. During the war he will also give demonstrations behind the front of new types of airplanes. ‘Fokker surprised us by his skill’, writes Max Immelmann, one of Germany’s flying aces, after Fokker showed in June 1915 how his new Eindecker should be flown. Immelmann will, incidentally, lose his life when his Fokker E.III breaks apart. It must have been a technical defect.

Fokker was on good working terms with the airmen. Not only Immelmann and Oswald Boelcke, but also Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, and Hermann Goering belonged to his circle of close friends. Behind these friendly relations also lay an economic incentive, as was often the case with Fokker. As a born Dutchman he could not rely on contacts in the highest German circles. With special thanks to the pilots on the ‘shop floor’ he kept the order books of his Fokker Flugzeugwerke filled. Between 1914 and 1918 over 7,600 Fokker airplanes left the factory.

Initially in the Great War pilots take over the role which for centuries had been assigned to the cavalry: finding and exploring hostile troop concentrations. In 1911 the Italians were the first to do so over Tripoli during their war with the Ottomans. That took some getting used to. ‘The noise those damned things make frightens our horses’, grumbles a British cavalry officer in an official protest during the First World War.

It soon became apparent that planes could also shed bombs and attack ground targets. The sky then turns into the backdrop for spectacular aerial combats, which are observed by Private Snuffy from his trench with amazement. In 1917 Orville Wright writes: ‘We thought we gave the world an invention that made war imposssible. What a dream it was. What a nightmare it has become.’

It will not have troubled Fokker during the war. The Fokker D-VII is his latest masterpiece in 1918. The German pilots love it. Its reputation is so great that a special clause for the Fokker D-VII is laid down in the armistice agreement later that year: all planes of this type should be handed over to the allies. Fokker will, however, deceive his way out of this. He succeeds in transporting hundreds of engines and dismantled parts of his D-VII to Holland, where he begins the Nederlandse Vliegtuigenfabriek. This is followed in the United States by the Fokker Aircraft Corporation. It will be clear that Anthony Fokker is a man of the world.

His Dutch biographer Marc Dierikx has revealed how Fokker managed to change nationality three times. In 1914 he becomes a naturalized German for obvious reasons. After the war he succeeds in again acquiring Dutch citizenship with the help of his friend Prince Hendrik, husband of the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina. And in 1922 he reports to the Immigration Office in order to become an American.

Faithfulness is also in his love life not a key principle for Anthony Fokker. In 1919 he gets married for the first time, but this marriage already runs aground after four years. In 1927 Violet Austman is the bride. Her death, two years later, shows a grim side of the man behind the entrepreneur Anthony Fokker. When she is allowed to go home after a long hospitalisation because of a nervous breakdown, Fokker is nowhere to be found. He has sent a driver to pick up his wife. When he finally arrives home at night, he does not even give her a glance. Violet recognizes her sad fate and steps out of the window on the fifteenth floor of her New York apartment. She is stone dead.

Also as an employer Fokker repeatedly shows his relentless side. He gives employees the sack before Christmas and takes them on again after the end of the year in order to economize on their days off. In 1931 he even disposes of Reinhold Platz, the man who put Fokker’s revolutionary ideas in practice even before the war. Platz turned the rough sketch Fokker made into an airplane, after which Fokker himself corrected the flaws of the design during trial flights. They were a golden duo, but not for eternity.

Let us just say openly that Fokker was a moron. His biographer Dierikx has explained his ruthlessness as follows: ‘In his early childhood he was the little coffee-grower’s boy who was superior to the kampong children with whom he played. This is reflected in the way he treats his nearest staff, in the fact that he does not succeed in shaping his personal life, his relation to women. The little boy in the kampong becomes the creative kid in the attic in Haarlem, but with only a handful of friends.’

1929 is the year that Fokker sees his wife seeking escape in death. It is also the year when he suffered as a merchant. The crisis hits him hard. He no longer appears to be the innovative business man of old. He is not bold enough to change to completely metal planes. However, Fokker gets back on his feet when he can buy the licence rights of American planes for Europe for next to nothing.

His life story ends prematurely. In 1939 he needs an operation on his sinuses. This rather mild intervention has fatal consequences. Anthony Fokker dies at the age of 49, an age that most pilots in the First World War have not reached.

Next week: Mustafa Kemal.

Tom Tacken (translation Peter Veltman)

042 Fritz Haber and the yellowish-brown cloud at five o’clock

Fritz Haber

Germans use poison gas as a weapon

It is Sunday 11 April 1915. It is the 42nd week after the shooting at Sarajevo.

Bulgaria agrees to a Serbian-Bulgarian committee that will investigate Macedonian border incidents.

The British experience great difficulties in repelling the Turkish-Arab attack near the port of Basra in present-day Iraq.

Pope Benedict XV informs American president Woodrow Wilson to be prepared to launch a joint peace initiative.

Fifteen allied airplanes bomb Ostend on the North Sea coast again.

The Germans decide to increase their efforts on the eastern front.

The British submarine E-35 tries in vain to reach the Sea of Marmara via the Dardanelles.

Russian troops, with additional Armenian volunteers under the command of general Andranik Ozanian, defeat the Ottomans in the Battle of Dilman.

The Germans see their attacks stranded at Notre Dame de Lorette.

British troops take Hill 60, a hill near the village of Zillebeke in West Flanders.

And a German prisoner of war tells the French that at Langemark bottles filled with gas are ready to be used, the poisonous experiment of Fritz Haber.

The story of the First World War is a random collection of contrasts. Take Fritz Haber, generally considered to be the ultimate promoter of chemical warfare, and Albert Einstein, especially known for his pacifism. It appears that Einstein, the apostle of peace, and Haber, the poisoner, were on friendly terms with each other before, during and after the war.

In 1914, just before the war, Haber got Einstein to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, which has been called the Fritz Haber Institute since 1953. Two brilliant scientists, Haber and Einstein, both of German-Jewish descent. But Haber will trade in the Jewish faith for Protestantism already at a very early stage, while Einstein will adopt the Swiss nationality long before the war. The world view of one is completely opposite to that of the other. Between ’14 and ’18 Haber wants to win the war for the Germans by putting poison gas in the hands of soldiers. Einstein persists in his anti-militarism, although it is he who in later years will be at the basis of the most horrible weapon of all time, much more horrible than Haber’s poison gas: the atomic bomb.

Both have to leave Germany in 1933, the year that the Nazis seize power. Especially Fritz Haber is getting a raw deal. He has worked hard for Germany as an ardent patriot all his life. Now the same Germany chases him away as the eternal Jew. In a letter Einstein expresses his sympathy with the exile Haber: ‘I can feel your inner conflicts. It is somewhat like having to abandon a theory on which you have worked for your whole life. It is not the same for me because I never believed it in the least.’

What then was this sacred faith of Fritz Haber?  Well, he formulated his scientific creed as follows: ‘Im Frieden der Menschheit, im Krieg dem Vaterland’ (‘In times of peace humanity, in times of war the fatherland’). Gas was his most manifest contribution to the German war effort, but the Germans also managed to keep the production of ammunition at the usual level thanks to Fritz Haber. After the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914 the German army ran the risk of having no more explosives. As a result of the British trade blockade Germany had no more access to the raw materials for nitric acid. The Haber-Bosch process offered a solution. Together with Carl Bosch Fritz Haber had succeeded in making ammonia of hydrogen and nitrogen already before the war. The Germans managed to convert this ammonia during the war into hundreds of thousands of tons of nitric acid, essential for the production of ammunition.

Haber was not the only scientist who dealt with poison gas, but he was indeed the man behind the first successful gas attack of the Second Battle of Ypres. To many historians this was the beginning of chemical warfare. At the end of January 1915, however, the Germans had already made an effort to this on the eastern front near Bolimów. In the Neuve Chapelle area in October 1914 a German experiment with gas that made its victims sneeze violently was mainly aimed at eliminating the enemy temporarily. Even earlier in August 1914 the French had already been carefully working with tear gas. So it is highly questionable to call Fritz Haber ‘the father of poison gas’.

Eric Wils, a Dutch chemist who has explored the First World War, eliminates the persistent misunderstandings about poison gas as follows: ‘There has been a discussion since 1915 whether the use of tear gas grenades in 1914 by French soldiers was the first use of poison gas in the First World War. The fact remains that on 22 April 1915, when the Germans released 150 tons of chlorine at Ypres, there was a completely new situation. For the first time  a chemical weapon had been developed which was used on a large scale to achieve a breakthrough in the trenchwar. Not just blowing some smoke or poisonous vapour in the direction of an opponent during a fight, but spreading 150 tons of chlorine. Especially produced for the fights in April 1915 in an industrial manner and stored in 6,000 cylinders. This chemical warfare escalated in such a way that in 1918 millions of poison gas grenades, including the ones filled with mustard gas, were fired by the fighting parties.’ So much for Eric Wils’ explanation.

Let us put it like this: Fritz Haber is responsible for poison gas to become a factor of importance in the war. According to estimates gas attacks proved fatal to 91,000 soldiers. That is not even one per cent of the 10 million who were killed in the First World War. But gas gave the war unprecedented and macabre dynamics. Statistics prove that, cynically speaking, bombs and grenades were deadlier and therefore less humane. But gas was so elusive and treacherous. It made the war in a certain sense inhuman. One of the German soldiers who had to dive into the hole that chlorine gas had made in the front on 22 April 1915, would say: ‘I am not very happy with the idea of poisoning people. All the dead lie on their backs with clenched fists.’

We can still feel the soldiers’ fear of the gas in their trenches when reading Wilfred Owen’s poem, Dulce et Decorum est. The poet still hears his comrades call: ‘Gas! Gas! Quick boys!’ They reach for their gas masks, but one of them does not make it. The picture of this bloke, ‘choking and drowning’, ‘blood gargling from his froth-corrupted lungs’, that picture will never vanish from his dreams.

Such was the reality resulting from Fritz Haber’s laboratory. But it is not said to have haunted him. Also after the war Haber kept defending the chemical weapon as a higher form of warfare. He has recorded this as follows: ‘One cannot die a nicer death than by breathing hydrocyanic acid gas.’ Besides, also a person like Winston Churchill will continue promoting the use of poison gas after the Great War. He intends to silence rebellious Arabs in Iraq with it.

And yet an overkill of combat gasses will remain reserved to the First World War. The Second has stayed deprived of it. It was a much too dynamic war for it. But gas also frightened both parties in World War II, just as a nuclear confrontation did not happen in the Cold War. In 1997 the signatories of the Chemical Weapons Convention agree to ban poison gas from the world. This is almost a century after all civilized nations of the world had promised to do  the same during the Hague Convention.

This promise, however, proved of little value in the Great War. Backed by government and army command scientists, led by Fritz Haber, experimented with the new weapon to their heart’s content. The gas escaped from cylinders and was blown towards the enemy by the wind or it was fired in grenades. After teargas at Bolimów and chlorine gas at Ypres there came attacks with phosgene, chloropicrin, hydrocyanic acid and arsenic compounds. The British and the French could only follow the Germans in their gas arms race with difficulty.

In July 1917 Ypres is again the backdrop for the release of mustardgas. It will appropriately be called Yperite. Mustard gas will prove to be the killer among combat gasses. Its victim is given the time to rot away from the inside and outside. The skin will be covered in blisters and the mucous membrane detaches from the trachea. The pain is infernal until finally death comes as the redeemer.

Likewise Fritz Haber’s wife seeks redemptive death. Ten days after the chlorine attack at Ypres she commits suicide using her husband’s service pistol. The night before hubbie had celebrated his promotion to captain with a dinner party. According to one theory another much younger woman is involved, the woman Haber will marry during the war, but whom he will also divorce again. A more plausible explanation is that Clara Immerwahr preferred death to life with a man who perverted science. As she herself had graduated as a chemist summa cum laude, she could not bear that her husband cultivated death and destruction in test tubes. She did not get through to him. Fritz Haber’s patriotism was immune to his wife’s pleading. The day after Clara’s suicide Fritz Haber travelled to the eastern front to disperse his poison gas. Others were left to arrange the funeral.

In the first months of 1915 Haber had to convince the generals of the power of the gas. But it did not turn out to be a magic formula. Gas could surprise the enemy, but when should their own infantry start chasing the cloud? Too early and the gas would turn against their own troops. Too late and the enemy would be extra prepared for the attack. As the war progressed, the quality of protective measures increased. Initially cotton rags, handkerchiefs and gauze dressings drenched in urine had to protect the breathing passages. But soon gas masks were passed around in the trenches. A gas alarm was given with rattles and whistles.

Gas could have meant a breakthrough on 22 April 1915 between Steenstraat and Langemark. Chaos on the side of the allies was complete. Thousands of Algerians and zouaves, gasping for air, fled from the yellowish-brown cloud that had come drifting in at five o’clock in the afternoon. A six-kilometre hole had been created in the front, but the Germans failed to push through. The following day Canadian troops flowed in to prevent a German advance. They, too, were treated to gas, but Ypres stayed out of reach of the Germans.

***

Yes, the story of the First World War is full of contradictions. But also the peace that follows makes you raise your eyebrows. In 1919 it is announced that the Nobel Prize for chemistry is awarded to … Fritz Haber. There are of course protests, but Haber will still be honoured in Sweden as the man who managed to bake ‘bread out of air’. Chemical fertilizers could be introduced because of Haber’s synthesis of ammonia. Behold the Janus face of scientist Fritz Haber: the number of people he saved from starvation far exceeds the number of soldiers whose breath he took away.

After the war Haber and his friend Albert Einstein make an effort to undo the boycott of German scientists. Haber feels responsible for Germany’s defeat, but dedicated himself fully to chemical insect control. This leads to Zyklon B, the gas the Nazis used to speed up the genocide of the Jewish people in the extermination camps.

Haber had no knowledge of this at all, having died in 1934 at the age of 65. He could not rest in German soil and that is why he is buried where he died, in Basel, Switzerland. Shortly before he passed away he required the ashes of his first wife Clara to be placed in his grave, which is what happened. It has remained a sober tomb though.

Next week: Anthony Fokker

Tom Tacken (translation Peter Veltman)

041 Pancho Villa and the lead role in his own film

Pancho Villa

Americans have a problem in Mexico

It is Sunday 4 April 1915. It is the 41st week after the shooting at Sarajevo.

Field Marshal Karl von Bülow, commanding officer of the Second Army of the Germans, has to leave the battlefield after a heart attack.

Also Alexander von Kluck has to step back as commander of the First Army as a result of injuries by a French grenade.

Russian general Aleksei Brusilov enters Austria-Hungary, but the Germans come to the rescue of the Austrians in the Carpathians.

Anzac troops, Australians and New Zealanders, leave for the Dardanelles from Egypt.

The Turkish government focuses its anger on two million Armenians and starts their deportations.

After a bitter mine battle, which started in February, the French finally succeed in conquering the ridge near the village of Les Éparges.

Italy declares to remain neutral, provided that Austria-Hungary gives up a number of territories.

Erich von Falkenhayn, chief of the German general staff, transfers troops from the western to the eastern front.

Albanian forces, under German-Turkish command, are preparing for an attack on the town of Durrës and after that on Serbia. 

And in the Battle of Celaya heavy blows are dealt to Mexican revolutionary and popular hero Pancho Villa.

Well, Pancho Villa. What are we expected to believe of this man? That he married 24 women? That he invented the tactics of the mad locomotive, stuffing a hijacked train carriage with  explosives and then setting it in motion towards the enemy? That he once ceased a pursuit when he suddenly perceived an ice cream van in the streets of Chihuahua? That his right-hand man Rodolfo Fierro shot dead a random passer-by because he had a current bet with Pancho Villa: does a dying man fall forward or backward? That in 1926 Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of two American presidents, paid 25,000 dollars for Pancho Villa’s skull? And that since then this skull has been in the possession of a secret society called Skull and Bones?

One story is juicier than the other. Pancho Villa is therefore larger than life. In Mexico he is still lauded in corridos, ballad-like songs that do not always reveal whether a hero or a villain is praised.

Our question should be what Pancho Villa has to do with the First World War. We have to look for the answer with the Americans. In the middle of the Great War, when the United States are still neutral, Pancho Villa plays the game of cat and mouse with the American army under the command of general John Pershing. The country that is to put an end to a world war has not been able to collar a confounded rogue like Pancho Villa in their own backyard.

The United States’ descent into the European cesspit also had to do with Mexico. When the Zimmermann telegram, named after the German state secretary for Foreign Affairs, made public in January 1917 that the Germans were stirring up Mexico against the United States, president Woodrow Wilson was forced to resort to military means. America entered the European war.

The biggest country of Latin America, Brazil, also actually declared war on Germany in 1917, in response to the recommencement of the German U-boat campaign. Smaller countries like Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador contented themselves with the severance of diplomatic relations with Germany.

At the outbreak of the war in 1914 Latin America still bore a European stamp. In preceding decades the continent had been swamped with European emigrants. But the increasing United States inspection of the activities of Central and South America was equally unmistakable. The First World War would irreversibly speed up this process. After 1918 the almost a century-old Monroe doctrine had become practice: ‘America for the Americans’. The game of a Europe that had bled to death was definitely over in Latin America.

The omnipotence of the Spaniards and the Portuguese had already ended in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The French had remained just barely visible in Latin America thanks to a few Caribbean islands and French Guyana. The German influence was primarily military. Latin American governments preferred to professionalize their armies after the Prussian model, spiked helmets included.

But it was particularly the British who had represented Europe on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. In the three decades before the First World War British businessmen increased their investments in Latin America fivefold.

Though there had no longer been any political dependence in Latin American countries for a century, economic and cultural independence was a completely different story. In fact the continent had kept its colonial structure. English and increasingly American bankers and industrialists pulled the strings.

Uncle Sam himself also played his part. It was especially under president Theodore Roosevelt that foreign politics in the United States began to exhibit imperialist features. The Spanish-American war of 1898 had been a walk in the park, a ‘splendid little war’. Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico and also the Philippines, the last vestiges of the Spanish Empire had been taken under the wings of the American Eagle on a nod and a wink.

Another project of Roosevelt was a canal that would connect the two oceans. Panama was taken away from Colombia, after which the digging could start. Roosevelt stretched the Monroe doctrine a little more. Countries in Latin America that economically or politically made a mess of things, had to take into account intervention of the United States. In 1905 the Dominican Republic was the first country visited by the policeman of the western hemisphere, Teddy Roosevelt.

Nextdoor neighbour Mexico, however, was a much more complicated story, and an old story to boot. Before the Americans began to fight each other in a bloody civil war, the United States and Mexico had known a history of border conflicts.

Napoleon III’s grotesque attempt to turn Mexico into a puppet empire also lay buried in time. The staff duty puppet, Maximilian of Habsburg, had been killed by a Mexican firing squad in 1867. Nine years later one Porfirio Díaz took firm control of the situation. He allowed the economic power of the United States in Mexico to increase spectacularly, but at a certain moment it became a bit too much for Diaz. ‘Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!’, he exclaimed. As a counterweight Díaz decided to attract European investors, notably British. To the Americans this was the sign again to start looking around for new rulers in Mexico.

Díaz’s dictatorship, the Porfiriato, was double-faced. Economic progress went hand in hand with social oppression. Liberal forces therefore rose up in 1910 with the support of America. Díaz fled and drew his last breath in Paris in the year of the war 1915.

The fall of the Porfiriato leads to a turbulence in which also the Americans lose their balance. In April 1914 there is the Tampico Affair. The Mexicans have arrested an American officer, to which the Yankees react by occupying the port of Veracruz for a short while. There is the threat of war, but Argentine, Brazil and Chile manage to mediate.

In October 1915 president Wilson decides to acknowledge a new government, led by Venustiano Carranza. In doing so he incurs the wrath of one of Carranza’s opponents, Francisco Villa, better known as Pancho Villa, since he fled into the mountains after killing the rapist of his sister, so the story goes.

In April 1915 Pancho Villa had suffered a grim defeat in the Battle of Celaya. With French fervour Villa attacked, but his opponent proved a beter student of the war on the European continent. Pancho Villa’s men got hopelessly entangled in the defensive positions of Carranza’s troops.

It seemed that Villa had played out his role, but he did not admit defeat. Was it pure revenge or an attempt to pit Carranza against Wilson?  Whatever the case, in May 1916 Pancho Villa crosses the border with more than 400 men. The Villistas are targeting the sleepy border town of Columbus, New Mexico. The raid has to be paid for with the lives of eighteen Americans and about seventy Villistas.

America’s answer soon follows. Columns of soldiers, commanded by general John J. ‘Black Jack’ Pershing, invade Mexico. America now has its own little war. But the hunt for Pancho Villa, El Centauro del Norte, remains without success. After eleven months the punitive expedition is abandoned. American soldiers have not only battled with followers of Pancho Villa, but also with Mexican government troops. This was because Carranza did not tolerate American interference. Which then to the Germans was a reason to start intriguing, with the familiar result.

Pancho Villa has also been called the Mexican Robin Hood. He divided the land of conquered haciendas among farmers and soldiers. He imposed taxes on landowners. He robbed trains. He proclaimed himself governor of Chihuahua. He printed his own money. He even created his own legend.

What is true in any case is that he played the leading role in his own films. In 1912 an American production, ‘Life of Villa’, appears. And another two years later a Hollywood crew travels to Mexico again. The title of the new film is somewhat longer: ‘The Life of General Villa’. The contract, in which Villa promises the crew that they can film him during the Battle of Ojinaga, has been fully preserved, but unfortunately the film itself has not, apart from one or two scenes. In 2003 Antonio Banderas plays the star role in a film about the curious collaboration between Hollywood and the Mexican caudillo. The title of the film is really a nice one: ‘And starring Pancho Villa as himself’.

There is also a bestseller about him. American journalist John Reed associated with Pancho Villa for a while. Reed became known as the writer of ‘Ten Days that shook the world’, an eyewitness account of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. He published his adventures with Pancho Villa under the title ‘Insurgent Mexico’.

Pancho Villa continued his guerilla war until 1920 with a small army of peasants, cowboys and unemployed miners. His reputation is marked by cruelties. Especially the Chinese suffer under his hands. In 1920 Pancho Villa makes peace with the Mexican government, but by doing so he does not save his own skin. In 1923 hired murderers killed him by pumping an enormous quantity of lead into his body. They leave him in his car, a Dodge, American make, riddled with bullets.

Next week: Fritz Haber

Tom Tacken (translation Peter Veltman)