Chapter 24 Britain secretly opened up the Eastern battlefield

In World War I, the Allied Powers were fighting against central countries such as Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman-Turkey [in World War I, central countries were the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman-Turkish Empire, and Belgium. ——Translator] In the process, if there is still an unknown trick, it is that in 1916, when the war was at its most intense, a secret diplomatic agreement was signed.The agreement was signed by Britain, France, and later Italy and Tsarist Russia.The agreement was dubbed the "Sykes-Picot Agreement", after the two British and French officials who drafted the document.The agreement revealed a secret that Britain intended to control oil in the untapped Arabian Gulf after the war.

At that time, France was engaged in a tragic and fruitless battle with Germany along the Maginot Line, while Britain put a huge army of more than 1.4 million people into the Eastern battlefield. Britain invested precious manpower and materials in the eastern part of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. The British public explanation for this extraordinary move is that doing so can not only ensure the more effective combat effectiveness of the Russian army against the Central Powers, but also It enabled Russian food to be transported through the Dardanelles into Western Europe, which was in urgent need of food at that time.

But that is not the case. After 1918, Britain continued to station millions of troops throughout the Middle East. In 1919, the Persian Gulf became the "British Lake".The angry French could only protest feebly as their troops in the millions were bleeding on the western front.The British cleverly took advantage of the stalemate to defeat the relatively weak Turkish Empire.France lost nearly 1.5 million soldiers and 2.6 million were seriously wounded. After the war, these oil fields were transferred to British hands. After the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in November 1917, Lenin's communists found a secret document in the archives of the Tsar's foreign ministry and quickly brought it to light.This was the plan of the great powers to divide the Ottoman Empire and divide it up after the war.Its details were drawn up in February 1916, and in May 1916 it was secretly approved by the governments concerned.The world was virtually in the dark about this secret wartime diplomatic conspiracy.

On the British side, the Secretary of State for War, Sir Mark Sykes, Eastern Adviser to Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, drew up the document.This document was used to win France's acquiescence to Britain, agreeing to transfer a large number of British troops from the European battlefield to the Middle East.In order to win the agreement of France, the British government authorized Sykes to make concessions to George Picot, the French negotiator and former consul general in Beirut, to give France part of the Ottoman Empire's land in Arabia after the war. of. In this way, France would effectively control the so-called "A region".This area covers the Greater Syria area (Syria and Lebanon), including major inland towns such as Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus, as well as the oil-rich Mosul area in the northeast and the oil-extracted areas in this area. Concessions (at that time, the German Bank owned oil exploration rights in this area in the name of Turkish Petroleum Corporation).The price for France to gain control of this area is very simple. It only needs to verbally recognize Arabia's independence from Turkey and become a French protectorate.

Under the Sykes-Picot agreement, Britain would control "Area B" in the southeast of French-held territory, from today's Jordan eastwards to much of Iraq and Kuwait, including Basra and Baghdad.In addition, Britain also controls ports such as Haifa and Acre, and has the right to build a railway from Haifa through French-controlled areas to Baghdad, and can be used to transport troops. Italy was promised Turkey Anatolia and the vast mountainous regions along the Tudkneth Islands, and Tsarist Russia would receive Ottoman Armenia and Kurdistan southwest of Yerevan. In addition to these secret provisions in the Sykes-Picot agreement, Britain also set a precedent for the arbitrary division of territories.Most of these territorial divisions are preserved to this day, including the division of Syria and Lebanon into French "protectorates", and Pan-Jordan, Palestine (Israel), Iraq, and Kuwait as British dependencies (Figure 3).As mentioned earlier, Persia had been under effective British control since 1905.At the time, Britain considered Saudi Arabia unimportant in terms of strategic interests—one of the few big mistakes she made.Later, when she realized this, she was deeply depressed.

As we will see later, in Britain's long-term strategy to control the world's oil supply, abandoning Mosul is only a tactical expedient for her.Due to the tragic failure of the conquest of Ganipoli in 1915, in addition to recognizing the previous French claims to the countries on the eastern Mediterranean coast and the island of the Levant, Britain also had to cede the oil exploration rights of Mosul to France. France.