The last Crusade? British propaganda and the Palestine campaign, 1917-18

Journal of Contemporary History

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2001, Pages

  Bar Yosef, Eitan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248075539     PISSN: 00220094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/002200940103600104     Document Type: Review

References (102)

1. Punch, 19 December 1917, 415.
2. See the discussion in Jonathan Newell, 'Allenby and the Palestine Campaign' in Brian Bond (ed.), The First World War and British Military History (Oxford 1991), 191.
3. For a recent example see John Thom Spach, 'Allenby and the Last Crusade', Military History, 12, 7 (March 1996), 26-32.
4. Public Record Office [PRO], Kew, Notice D.607 (15 December 1917), FO/395/152, no. 218223. The notice was duly incorporated in the Official Press Bureau Instructions; see copies in HO/139/19/78. Also see Deian Hopkin, 'Domestic Censorship in the First World War', Journal of Contemporary History, 5, 4 (October 1970), 151-69.
5. Wingate to FO, 14 February 1918, FO/371/3383, fo. 98-9.
6. Roger Smither (ed.), The Imperial War Museum Film Catalogue, vol. I, The First World War Archive (Trowbridge 1994), item IWM 17.
7. Censor's minute on note from M.I.7. A. to Press Bureau, 28 October 1918, HO/139/27.
8. The British propaganda effort during the first world war has been described as 'an impressive exercise in improvisation'. Certainly, the organization of the propaganda apparatus was notoriously fragmented and overlapping. Tempting as it is, however, to turn to this interdepartmental mismanagement as the source of any ambiguity in propaganda matters would be to over-simplify. The News Department - created in the Foreign Office on the outbreak of war to serve Allied and neutral journalists - operated, albeit unofficially, as the authoritative body regarding propaganda policy-making. It continued to perform this role after the establishment of the Department of Information in February 1917. Most significantly, it appears that during the decisive period that led to and followed the occupation of Jerusalem - autumn 1917 to spring 1918 - propaganda concerning the Palestine campaign was controlled by one man, Sir Mark Sykes. See M.L. Sanders and Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War 1914-1918 (London 1982), 1, 26, 64 and passim;
9. Roger Adelson, Mark Sykes: Portrait of an Amateur (London 1975), esp. 241, 245-8.
10. see also Gary S. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester 1992);
11. Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature and Propaganda 1914-13 and After (London 1989);
12. Cate Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War (London 1977).
13. Christopher Hill, 'Till the Conversion of the Jews', Religion and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Brighton 1986), 291-2;
14. The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (1993; repr. Harmondsworth 1994), 249-50;
15. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven, CT 1992), 18-54 and passim.
16. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs of Lloyd George (London 1936), vol. II, 1090-1.
17. Matthew Hughes, 'Lloyd George, the Generals and the Palestine Campaign', Imperial War Museum Review, 11 (1996), 4-17;
18. Sanders and Taylor, op.cit., esp. 11, 38-9, 77-8.
19. CAB/23/2, 2 April 1917 (1).
20. Lloyd George to Buchan, 1 February 1917, FO/395/139, no. 42320.
21. see also Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine, British-Jewish-Arab Relations: 1914-1918 (1973; 2nd edn New Brunswick, NJ 1992), 169-71.
22. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modem Middle East 1914-1922 (1989; Harmondsworth 1991), 97;
23. George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (London 1938), 126-48;
24. Briton Cooper Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs, 1914-1921 (Berkeley, CA 1971), 8, 27, 32.
25. Fromkin, op. cit., 109; Antonius, op. cit., 140-2.
26. Cf. Bruce Westrate, The Arab Bureau: British Policy in the Middle East, 1916-1920 (University Park, PA 1992).
27. Official Press Bureau Instructions, D.122 (24 December 1914), D.186 (16 March 1915), D.363 (21 February 1916), HO/139/19/78.
28. Notice D.607, FO/395/152, no. 218223.
29. GHQ Egypt to WO, 2 December 1917, WO/33/946, no. 8638.
30. see also David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers' Letters, 1914-1918 (London 1999), esp. 14-15, 25, 199.
31. Sanders and Taylor, op. cit., 49.
32. Gaselee to Benson, Master of Magdalen College, Cambridge, 10 April 1917, FO/395/139.
33. Gaselee to Lestrange, 11 April 1917, FO/395/139.
34. Vivian Gilbert, The Romance of the Last Crusade (New York 1923), 1. Future references appear in the text.
35. Peter Parker, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos (London 1987), 228-9.
36. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (London 1981);
37. Cecil D. Eby, The Road to Armageddon: The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature 1870-1914 (Durham, NC 1987);
38. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York 1975);
39. Elizabeth Siberry, 'Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries' in Jonathan Riley-Smith (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades (Oxford 1995), 365-85.
40. Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: 'The Jewish Question' & English National Identity (Durham, NC 1995), 106-7.
41. Joseph Shadur, Young Travellers to Jerusalem: The Holy Land in American and English Juvenile Literature 1785-1940 (Ramat Gan, Israel 1999), 84-91.
42. Cf. John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester 1994).
43. Letter home, 13 December 1917, Papers of Major-General G.P. Dawnay, IWM 69/21/2, box 2, 'Egypt and Palestine 1916-17'.
44. The following analysis is based on some 50 diaries, letters and memoirs from the Imperial War Museum collection, in addition to 30 printed biographical accounts, published primarily in the decade following the war, 15 military and regimental histories, and 5 troop journals. I have concentrated mainly on British writers - with several Australian and South African exceptions - who served on the Palestine front any time between summer 1917 and spring 1918, most of them in the ranks or as subalterns.
45. The Cambridge Review, 23 October 1943, 25.
46. Shane Leslie, Mark Sykes: His Life and Letters (London 1923), 294.
47. Joel C. Hudson, Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture: The Making of a Transatlantic Legend (Westport, CT 1995), 52.
48. T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (London 1935), 453.
49. Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England in the First World War (London 1996), 253.
50. see also Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade: The Church of England in the First World War (Durham, NC 1974).
51. David Lloyd George, The Great Crusade (London 1918), 11.
52. Cf. Girouard, op. cit., 275-93;
53. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York 1989), 70-106 and passim.
54. Michael Gavaghan, The Story of the Unknown Warrior (Preston 1995), 26. To be sure, the Crusader as a central motif in war propaganda and postwar commemoration was not limited to Britain. As Mosse has shown (op. cit., esp. 70-106), Germany and France employed the same visual vocabulary, which also, no doubt, shaped the articulation of their ambitions concerning Syria and Palestine. In Russia, on the other hand, Palestine was associated with a strong tradition of popular piety, manifested in annual mass pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Unfortunately, a discussion of these issues is beyond the aims and scope of this article.
55. Adelson, op. cit., 211-12.
56. Consequently, the nineteenth-century European penetration of Palestine was often described by contemporaries as the 'Peaceful Crusade': 'the gradual "reconquest" of the "Holy Land" for Christianity through religious, cultural, and philanthropical penetration'. Significantly, this idea was widespread on the Continent, especially France and Germany, but not in Britain. See Alexander Schölch, Palestine in Transformation 18.56-1882: Studies in Social, Economic and Political Development, trans. William C. Young and Michael C. Gerrity (Washington 1993), 66.
57. Lawrence, op. cit., 453.
58. Official Press Bureau - Instructions to Censors, no. 390 (21 November 1917) and no. 411 (26 December 1917), HO/139/27.
59. CAB/23/4, 21 November 1917 (19), 19 November 1917 (6).
60. see also John Fisher, Curzon and British Imperialism in the Middle East, 1916-19 (London 1999), 208-14. On the work of Curzon's Sub-Committee on Territorial Desiderata in April 1917, and Curzon's memorandum of 5 December 1917 see Friedman, op. cit., 173-4, 164-5.
61. WO to GHQ Egypt, 21 November 1917, WO/33/946, no. 8583.
62. WO to GHQ Egypt, 21 November 1917, WO/33/946, no. 8584.
63. Dawnay to Parker, 16 November 1917, Dawnay Papers, IWM 69/21/2, box 2, 'Egypt 1917-18'.
64. Allenby to wife, 11 December 1917, quoted in Newell, op. cit., 190. Allenby's comment is not altogether clear, considering that the Golden Gate had been walled up since Crusading times.
65. Cf. 'General Allenby and the Arabs', The Times, 14 March 1918, 5.
66. Cf. Balfour to French ambassador, 23 November 1917, FO/371/3061, fo. 415.
67. It did not, however, include representatives of the Egyptian Labour Corps, despite its crucial contribution to the establishment of communication lines and hence to the British victory.
68. Allenby to WO, 11 December 1917, WO/33/946, no. 8693. For the directions issued on 10 December 1917 and given out to each member of the procession, see WO/95/4369, Z/77/027. This document makes no reference to the presence of Indian troops.
69. CAB/23/4, 26 November 1917 (4). This was a reply to Allenby's query.
70. Newell, op. cit., 190n; Luke McKernan, '"The Supreme Moment of the War": General Allenby's Entry into Jerusalem', Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, 13, 2 (1993), 169-80.
71. WO to GHQ Egypt, 21 November 1917, WO/33/946, no. 8582.
72. In March, the Department of Information published a leaflet 'setting out in parallel columns General Allenby's Proclamation to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and a Proclamation issued by the German Military Authorities in Holon, Northern France'. See Ashcroft to Gaselee, 20 March 1918, FO/395/242, no. 52214.
73. Daily Sketch, 11 December 1917, 1.
74. Daily Mirror, 11 December 1917, 6.
75. G.K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem (London 1920), 216
76. The Times, 13 December 1917, 9. The leader opened with a comparison between Allenby's entrance and the Kaiser's
77. Press Bureau Circular no. C.6120, 5 January 1918, FO/395/236A.
78. Daily Express, 11 December 1917, 2.
79. FO to the Vatican, 10 December 1917, FO/371/3061, no. 234308, and numerous other dispatches in FO/371/3061. The telegram to Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador in St Petersburg, maintained that 'While the appeal should be to Russian religious sentiment, it is important that the statements should contain nothing offensive to Moslem feelings. Expressions such as 'Holy War', 'Crusade' etc., should be avoided though the Turks (as Turks, and not as Moslems) may be held up to just execration.' See FO to Buchanan, Petrograd, 8 December 1917, FO/395/152.
80. CAB/23/4, 17 December 1917 (12).
81. CAB/23/4, 2 January 1918 (12).
82. Sykes to Clayton, 7 January 1918, FO/395/237, no. 4282.
83. Sykes, minute on draft sent by Clayton for press publication, n.d., FO/371/3383, fo. 18.
84. Sykes to Clayton, 15 January 1918, FO/371/3383.
85. see also Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia (London 1989), 467.
86. The National War Aims Committee, responsible for propaganda aimed exclusively at the Home Front, was established in August 1917. See Sanders and Taylor, op. cit., 65-70, 77.
87. UK Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th ser., vol. 100, 20 December 1917, col. 2211.
88. David Lloyd George, 'Afterward' to Philip Guedalla, Napoleon and Palestine (London 1925), 48.
89. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error (New York 1949), 152.
90. Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester 1959), 145;
91. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth 1968), esp. 45-58, 427-40.
92. These issues are discussed at length in my current research project, 'Images of the Holy Land in English Popular Culture, 1798-1917'.
93. Anthony Bluett, With Our Army in Palestine (London 1919), 94.
94. Observer, 16 December 1917, 9.
95. Fromkin, op. cit., 562-3.
96. UK Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th ser., vol. 100, 20 December 1917, cols 2212, 2211.
97. John Bull, 29 December 1917, 8.
98. Cecil Hugh and Peter Liddle (eds), Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced (London 1996).
99. On the Great War as an apocalypse see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge 1995), esp. chap. 6-7.
100. Newell, op. cit., 195-203.
101. Armageddon, a war film describing Allenby's campaign in Palestine with some re-enacted scenes, was issued in November 1923. See Rachel Low, The History of the British Film 1918-1929 (London 1971), 130, 293.
102. Matthew Hughes, 'General Allenby and the Palestine Campaign 1917-1918', The Journal of Strategic Studies, 19, 4 (December 1996), 62.