Behind the Bastards - Part Three: How Lawrence of Arabia Invented Modern War

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

Robert tells Margaret how to scientifically shatter a bridge the T.E. Lawrence way, and how Lawrence crippled the transportation infrastructure of a mighty empire using some guys with camels and sacks of flour.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Oh, what's I don't even know. I don't even know. It's like three days before the election. My I had a milkshake. Yeah. You look so happy when you were drinking it, though. Tired. Oh, yeah. No, it's great. Tired of everything. My everyone. I know I'm wearing a hoodie. Huzzah. I'm wearing a hoodie, you guys.

Oh, man. Good stuff. Good stuff. So, how's everyone doing? How are y'all feeling? The aforementioned high on sugar. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I'm uh, great. I've worked out really hard today, so I'm a little sore. That's okay. I worked out a bit I need to finish after this, but you know who never works out Margaret?

Colonialism it never works out. Yeah, I mean that's true. And I mean also none of the people in this podcast Yeah, I mean, that's true. And I mean, also none of the people in this podcast episode work out anymore because they're all dead for decades. Yeah. Because we're talking about World War One. Yeah. There we go. That more or less worked.

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And Faisal and Aouda had decided that with Lawrence's help, they were going to make an attack on the city of Aqaba from the north. Now this is kind of like the major central action scene. It's beautiful in the movie. They shoot it as this absolutely gorgeous cavalry charge. The gist of what's happening here is that Aqaba is this port city. It's got a bunch of guns that are trained on the sea. After the disaster that had been Gallipoli, the British aren't really interested

in trying to take this critical port city by like a naval invasion, because that just doesn't tend to work out very well for them in this period. Right, and so they have to call upon the writers of Rohan. They do have to call upon the writers of Rohan. And the reason why this has a chance of working is that Lawrence is going to kind of,

Lawrence's idea that he and there's some debate here as to like who who specifically decided to attack Aqaba but Lawrence seems to be the one who was like I can take instead of like marching in from either of the sides they expect the kind of back of this city is to this vast desert that is considered impassable because like how would you get a bunch of guys on foot across this, right? Like it's just absolutely some of the deadliest terrain on planet earth. And Lawrence is like, if we get a small force, you know,

we can take this tiny gorilla, and it's literally just a few dozen guys, across this vast desert and then cross into the portion of Syria where the Hawatat keep their spring pastures. And we can find all of the people who live in this area, rally them to our banner and attack Aqaba. According to Lawrence, when he broached this plan to Aota, Aota's response was, all things are possible.

Where was Gondor? Yeah, yeah. Where was Gondor when the Westfold fell? No, although he does give like, I would say an equally cool response to anything in the Lord of the Rings. He says, all things are possible with dynamite and English gold. That's an eternal truth. Enough dynamite and English gold.

I feel like I could do anything too. Hell yeah. Yeah. Enough dynamite and English gold. I feel like I could do anything too. Yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. Now, this is, you know, there's a bit of debate here as to like the extent to which Lawrence was kind of central to all the planning here. In 2014, Iraqi historian Ali Alawi published a biography of Faisal, who after the great Arab revolt went on to be the first king of Iraq.

His reappraisal of Faisal suggests that Lawrence was not the one to suggest Aqaba as a location to attack and that Faisal made that call on his own. Now I kind of feel like the fact that Lawrence gets credit for coming up with the idea of going after Aqaba in the first place is less Lawrence's fault and more sort of the fault of that Peter O'Toole movie, because I went through Seven Pillars of Wisdom and I read the portions of the book which discuss Aqaba and there aren't a whole lot,

there's not a whole lot of Aqaba talk in the book. Not a whole lot of Aqaba talk-aba. And it does not seem like what's in there from what's in there. Come on, come on. I know, I had to do it, I had to do it. Insufferable. It doesn't seem to me like Lawrence was taking credit for the idea itself, just to attack the city.

In fact, he notes that Feisal was unable to participate in the attack, which quote, "'Through the ungrateful load of this Northern expedition upon myself.'" Which sounds like he's saying, it was not my idea, but Feisal had to stay at his base for this. So I had to like handle the implementation, right? Okay.

And he describes the fact that like, he had to be the one on the ground doing it as leading to a dishonest implication, which I interpret as him being kind of uncomfortable with being given credit for dreaming up and executing the whole campaign. Which is like kind of one of the biggest problems with him in general, right?

Is how people like view him as like the one white guy who saved everyone or whatever. Right, right. Which is, I mean, and I hope it's hard in a podcast episode focused on Lawrence because there's so many people involved on every side of this to not have it seem like you are. I mean, and he does play a central role,

but he's also not the only shotcaller. He's not the only shot. He's certainly not the major shot caller on the British side either. Right? Like general Allenby up in Palestine is making a lot of calls and making a lot of direction. Faisal is a major player here. And I think actually seven pillars gives a pretty fair accounting of how that all actually worked out.

And despite how central Aqaba is to the movie, the actual battle, the capture of how that all actually worked out. And despite how central Aqaba is to the movie, the actual battle, the capture of the city, only merits a couple of sentences, really just a sentence, because all he writes about it in the book is, we tricked the Turks and entered Aqaba with good fortune. Right? Which is not, like, to be blown up into the absolute,

like, center of this, like of this four hour epic movie. Very funny. They didn't do this with 36 guys, they did this, but the 36 guys went and got allies from somewhere else. And got other guys, right? Yeah, it was the 36 or so, I think it was like 45 or whatever, that crossed the desert. And this is an amazing feat.

It's one of the most impressive feats of Insurgent Warfare because they cross this massive, absolutely merciless desert with just literally nothing but what they are able to carry on them with their camels, Lawrence and 45 men. And each of his fighters, all they have on them is a 45-pound sack of flour and all of the water they can carry. That's all they have with them to keep them alive. Just a huge sack of flour. Well, it won't go bad, you know,

not in the time that you're out there. And I guess like, yeah, that's all you got, flour and water to keep you moving. I mean, sometimes raw calories will do. She said high on sugar. Yeah, no, that's the, it's completely changed my prepping loadout. All I keep in my truck is 90 pounds of flour

and a bunch of water. Yeah, and the camel trailer was a good touch. Yeah, yeah, I do have a camel. It's miserable here. A horrible place to have a camel. They do not do well in the Pacific Northwest. It's like Huskies in New Orleans. Yeah.

I think a big part of why Aqaba gets so much focus is that it is kind of the first time Lawrence becomes a celebrity because at the time in which they They successfully take Aqaba The Brits are kind of hungry for a win The Western Front is mostly bad like even the good news is really bad news Gallipoli was this catastrophe and so the fact fact that like, they're going to take this strategically important city from the Turks quite easily is a big deal. So after two hideous months, it takes them two months to cross the desert.

Like that's how long they're living off of the sack of flour. It's a big desert, okay, uh-huh. It's a huge desert. Yeah, like this is an incredible feat. Lawrence and his guys reach the outskirts of Aqaba. And by the time they get to the city itself, their numbers have grown to about a thousand. They recruit all these guys

from the local tribes in the area. And the Turks who were slightly more competent in real life than in the movies, the movie just shows Lawrence and his guys writing in this glorious Rohirrim cavalry charge, and they just smash the Turks. That's not at all what happens. They don't even actually fight in Aqaba.

What happens is the Turks send a 550 man relief force to bolster Aqaba's defense. And before they can get to the city, Lawrence and his cavalry fall upon them in ambush, 40 or so miles north of the city in a place named Wadi Aba Al-Lisan. And this battle, there's like a kind of funny, like clown shit moment.

And it like, it starts with this, again, very Lord of the Rings shit. There's this argument between Lawrence, and I think it's Auda, about like who's going to attack where first. And finally, Auda and his guys charge in on one side. And so Lawrence is like, fuck, we have to charge it on the other.

Like just go, just go, just go. We can't let them like beat us to there. And then as they're running, Lawrence is just like emptying his pistol, like while charging on Camelback and he shoots his camel in the head. Oh God. Outta loses his camel too.

Outta has like 14 bullet holes in his gear when this battle ends. And I don't think any of them actually hit his body. Like this guy is just a like a fucking Tolkien character. He's amazing. He's got blood armor. He's got blood armor. Yes, he's got him.

He's the main character. Oh, yeah. So as much of a shit show as that kind of sounds like the battle goes incredibly well. They kill like 300 something Turkish soldiers, absolutely destroy this entire force. And Lawrence and Ata lose two men. Wow. Yeah, which is like, that's a big dub. That's about as well as a battle could go.

So that's part of why this becomes so like famous, you know, overseas is like, wow, what a fucking, what a fucking coup. Now I hope it was a different camel than the one that took him all the way across the desert. I hope you like switched to a battle camel. Yeah, Aragorn like charging at the fucking battle of Pelennor fields and accidentally cuts

fucking horses head off. Yeah. Gandalf blasts a lightning bolt in the shadow fax. Yeah. The king of horses just tumbling as they hit the orc lines. I do also like to imagine that in like Aragorn's version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, like the whole battle of Helm's Deep is just,

the orcs attacked us at Helms Deep and we won. Yeah, totally. We figured it out. We figured it out. It was fine. Our friends came. Yeah. Well, that is kind of like because Gandalf goes off to get help, right?

Yeah. So he's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. He is the equivalent of him going through the desert anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Now a big part of why Lawrence had been so motivated to take Aqaba, because there was debate, should we, should the French help us out with this?

Are the British going to attempt some sort of landing? Lawrence doesn't want any Europeans in the city, because at this point, there's a lot of debate. We don't really know when he became aware of the Sykes-Picot agreement, which we're going to talk about and explain here, but that's basically the British-French agreement that split up the Middle East under their spheres of influence.

We don't know when Lawrence knew about it, but the actual answer is probably that doesn't really matter because he was aware of the debate around what became Sykes-Picot from pretty much the beginning. Maybe he didn't know until late November, you know, 1917 when it got leaked out that like this specific agreement had been signed, but he knew that his leaders and the French were talking about carving up the Arab world and he didn't want that to happen, right?

He was okay with the idea of the British having a sphere of influence in the Arab world. He didn't want the French, because again, the French, the genocide and stuff, he was not happy with them. And he's in general, like he feels like there's this guilt that he's got kind of this whole time with the idea that like I am fighting for Arab independence.

And I'm pretty sure my side is going to betray these people. Right? Yeah. That we're not going to live up to our promises. So a big part of why he wants to take Aqaba and he wants the Arabs to take Aqaba is the more cities that they are in military control of when this thing ends, the better their odds of keeping those cities under their control. Right? Like if the British or the French occupy Aqaba, there's no getting them out, you know? Like they're're not gonna leave, right?

They're gonna set up shop. So yeah, you have to do some terrorism in order to get the British or the French to leave. Yeah. Whereas, you know, if the Arabs are running Aqaba, like they're running Mecca, and then the French are like, okay, well, we're gonna come in there. It's a lot easier to be like, well, no.

Like we already have this set up, we're good. Yeah. What a mind fuck for Lawrence, cause yeah, I mean like at least this version of him that's being presented, which makes sense to me. Yeah. Yeah, he wants what's best, but he's like working within a flawed system

and he knows that not just a flawed system, but an evil system. Yes. And he's like, oh, this is gonna go badly. Yes. But still being like, well, that's better than letting the Turks. What else am I gonna do?

Oh man, that's complicated. Yeah. He is in a very complicated situation. And there's a lot to say about, he is kind of lying to all of these Arab guys that he claims to love and consider brothers, right? He is not telling them the full truth, but he is also lying and actively kind of betraying England,

like in a way, because he's actively trying to like, he's not telling his superior officers, he doesn't tell them that he's planning to even attack Aqaba this way, right? Like they don't find out until the city gets taken because he doesn't want them to make a move that would put them in the city, right? So he is kind of, he's kind of, I mean,

the situation he's in, he's kind of fucking over everyone to some extent. But I think he is overall trying to secure what he sees as a good outcome for the Arabs, right? Again, doing the paternalistic thing, if he's not gonna tell them necessarily, he does, there's some evidence that he eventually does, kind of, that he does talked like Come out about some of this to like Faisal, but it's all very murky right like again

This is skullduggery and spycraft. I mean I want the 16 year old have been secretly planning the whole thing right right yeah Unfortunately, we don't get a happy story ending for dome. Okay. Yeah, it's a bummer so the the British government spins the Battle of Aqaba into this like massive thing for them because they really needed the good propaganda. And when they start doing this, Lawrence, he's got this keen instinctive understanding of the moment that he inhabited.

One of the things that makes him like such a, such an incredible figure here is that he has an understanding not just of all these dynamics of insurgent warfare, but of how propaganda plays into insurgent warfare and plays into actually securing victory here. And he knows that now that the British are invested in his success because they need these wins, this is my best chance to get them to force them to deliver guns and support for my Arab allies, which will allow them to take and hold more cities, which is going to give them the best odds of winning a state of their own and not just being cut apart by the great

powers. So again, Lawrence is kind of aware of the broad strokes of Sykes-Picot. And to be clear, Sykes-Picot never actually gets instituted. When we talk about the significance, it's not because they actually do Sykes-Picot. It's because Sykes-Picot is an evidence of the ways in which the British and French are talking about carving up the Middle East. And what finally gets done looks a lot like what Sykes-Picot was planned to be, right? But it's not exactly the same thing. Just to be clear here, because like actual scholars would be like, well, they never really did

Sykes-Picot. It's just what happened was very similar and it's evidence that this is how Just to be clear here, because like actual scholars would be like, well, they never really did psych speak. It just what happened was very similar and it's evidence that this is how they'd been talking. Right? Yeah. For a long time. So at this point, the Brits are still reeling from several failed assaults on Jerusalem

where the Turks had beaten them back and established a dusty desert version of the trench stalemate on the Western front. A general named George Allenby was brought in to clean up the mess. And Allenby is more competent than most British generals. We'll say that, right? Like, not that he's got a spotless record here, but he's definitely like better than the guys who had been doing this before. Uh, and Lawrence knew that, you know, once Allenby comes in as the only

British officer with a major victory behind him, he was in a position to get a lot out of his new boss. He travels to where Allenby is, and I think Allenby is in Palestine at this point, and he sits down with his boss to get Allenby to send guns to his men. Lawrence's motivation here, according to Scott Anderson, was to sell Allenby the World War I general equivalent of heroin, which is a promise that he can break a stalemate in front, right? Lawrence is like, I can stop the Turks from getting relief forces from Medina up to, I think, Jerusalem. And I can also basically ensure that you have as good a chance to break this stalemate as

possible by carrying out my own offenses that pulls Turkish strength away, right? Just give me the guns. Just give me the guns. Just give me the guns. And here's how Anderson describes it. Lawrence vastly exaggerated both the strength and capability of those rebels already under arms to paint an enticing picture of a military juggernaut, the British advancing up the Palestine coast

as the Arabs took the fight to the Syrian interior. Now that's succinct and overall accurate, but Lawrence's own account of his meeting with Allenby in Seven Pillars is much more colorful. So I'm going to read that here because I just really like the guy's writing. It was a comic interview for Allenby was physically large and confident and morally so great that the comprehension of our littleness came slow to him. He sat in his chair looking at me, not straight as his custom was, but sideways, puzzled. He was newly from France, where for years he had

been a tooth of the great machine grinding the enemy. He was full of Western ideas of gunpowder and weight, the worst training for our war. But as a cavalryman was already half persuaded to throw up the new school in this different world of Asia and accompany Donne and Chetwode along the worn road of maneuver and movement. Yet he was hardly prepared for anything so odd as myself, a little barefooted silk skirted man offering to hobble the enemy by his preaching

if given stores and arms and a fund of 200,000 sovereigns to convince and control his converts. Allenby could not make out how much was genuine performer and how much charlatan. The problem was working behind his eyes and I left him unhelped to solve it. Whoa. I left him unhelped.

I fucking love the way he writes. He's like, yeah, I was lying to him and it's up to him to figure it out, but I'm not telling. He knew I was, but he didn't know how much. Yeah. Not my job to figure that out for him. All right.

Oh, anyway. You know what I'm not gonna leave you unhelped to do, listener, is purchase the products and services that support this podcast. I'm gonna be spending my money on gambling. Yeah, that's where Lawrence would spend all of those sovereigns, you know? That really- Smart money is always on gambling. Yeah, that's where Lawrence would spend all of those sovereigns, you know? Smart money is always on gambling.

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And we're talking T.E. Lawrence. So Lawrence is too canny to believe everything. More like T.E. Lawrence. T.E. Lawrence, that's right, T.E. because he's sneaky. Yeah. So his own ambitions are a lot more modest than what he's trying to sell Alan beyond, right? He doesn't really believe,

he knows the reality of the strength of his forces. And he wants all these guns to build a more disciplined insurgent movement that will be kind of the core of this Arab state, right? And part of what he, he's kind of less focused on these big offensives that Allenby wants because he understands that the tactics, these Western Front tactics had led his, you know, were not the way to win in the desert. So after Aqaba, he takes, he embarks on yet another like historically significant recon campaign.

He takes two men with him and alone against a vast desert. They travel like a thousand miles or something like this massive journey, scouting out all of these Turkish positions. The whole operation was inspired by a recognition on Lawrence's part that thus far the war had involved haphazard playing with men in movements. And he saw that this had worked for them, but largely out of luck and quote, vowed to know henceforth before I moved where I was going and by what roads. The person is a delegator. This guy, he is not, he does a lot on his own.

Like he, I think part of it is that he can't really make these plans unless he feels the ground beneath him, right? Like that's just the kind of thinker he is. I think he just also likes it too. Yeah, totally. The purpose of this recon campaign was to help Lawrence figure out

how to build what he called a ladder of tribes across Syria, eventually leading from Aqaba to Damascus. Describing this plan, James Schneider writes, the nature of the operations would be like naval war in mobility, ubiquity, independence of bases and communications, ignoring of ground features of strategic areas, of fixed locations, of fixed points. Lawrence would command the desert, camel raiding parties, self-contained like ships, might cruise confidently along the enemy's cultivation frontier, sure of an unhindered retreat into their desert element,

which the Turks could not explore." That's so interesting to me that he's thinking about this like a naval war. Each of these small insurgent squads is like a ship, right? Independent, alone on the sea, you know? Yeah, it's so fluid. And you have to think the mind it takes to keep track of this as well as he does.

Not that he doesn't fuck up. He's got after Aqaba, there's a major defeat that like he has kind of when he overstretches his forces. But like, you know, for the most part, this is an extremely successful campaign. So during the ride into Aqaba, he had worked out exactly how far a unit of camel riders could operate with a 45 pound bag of flour and a pint of water. They could operate alone for like six weeks, right? That's his assuming that like-

I guess they're good at getting water. Yes. Yes. They know where there are like places to get water. Yeah. And so these forces- These are life straw. Yeah, life straw. These tiny units of camel riders, just powered by flower and water, have an operational range of 2000 miles

without free supply, right? That's how far they can go. And with- Rules. Yeah, it's fucking cool. And when you look at that range and you compare it to what like an Ottoman company of infantry on foot can handle, which is like a couple of miles past the railway,

you see what a nightmare he's created for the Ottomans with these little raiding parties. Cause they can be anywhere in this vast ocean. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's like you are trying to fight a naval war with infantry treading in the water, right?

That's what the Turks are trying to do. I'm going to quote from Schneider again. Because of longstanding feuds and jealousies, it became virtually impossible to integrate or amalgamate the various tribes, nor could one antithetic tribe operate in the territory of another. To overcome this organizational constraint, Lawrence operated in the greatest dispersion possible, which contributed greatly to his agility, fluidity, and mobility. Maximum disorganization created maximum articulation. As with a box of Legos, Lawrence could create any organization and

function as unique as the new task at hand, for each mission was unlike any other and had to be considered afresh. The Lego-like articulation meant that the enemy response could never develop a classic order of battle, for there was no order, only disorder. His system was unsystematic. That's cool. One of the things I'm really obsessed with strategically is how chaotic forces can integrate into traditional war.

And like, yeah. And how, yeah, like, I think we see this in activism all the time is people try to get all of these groups to be like, oh, if only they were all under one command and you're like, you're not playing to your strengths at that point. Like having diverse movements is stronger if you do it right.

Yeah, cause I mean, cause kind of the difficulty and the trouble with, you know, the kind of activists we know is you need both, you need this maximum articulation, right? As Schneider describes it. But you also do need a vision, a central vision. Because you have this ultimate disorganization, this incredibly flat hierarchy compared to the other militaries of the day.

But you also have Lawrence at the center of this spider web pulling in each direction, right? Like making the actual like pulls, which is very tough. There's not a lot of Lawrence's out there. I do love that line. Maximum disorganization created maximum articulation. I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. So a big part of why these forces work is that unlike the vast conscript armies of the Western Front, Lawrence's soldiers are all either believers or at least there willingly for the money, right? Because like some of these, Lawrence kind of, Lawrence talks them up. You know, he has a line, their only contract was honor, which is debatably true.

Like Auda, who we've been talking about, is going to make an approach to the Turks and be like, hey, if you bribe me, I'll switch sides. And he may have been considering switching sides, but he also just robs the Turkish guy with the money. But it's unclear because of when everyone else finds out what he's done. It's unclear, was his plan from the beginning

just to rob the Ottomans? Or did he decide, well, I guess I'll just rob this guy once he got caught, because he didn't wanna get murdered or whatever, right? Was he actually trying to be turn traitor or was his plan from the beginning, hey, I bet these guys are dumb enough to send a bunch of money my way

and then I just have to kill the guy, bring it, and I don't give a fuck, I am a sand pirate, you know? Yeah, totally, totally. The honor among thieves question is always a fun one. Yeah, and Auda is not the kind of guy who gives a shit about your conceptions of honor. He has his own code, for sure, but I don't think anyone else really fully understands it.

Lawrence wrote, quote, irregular war was far more intellectual than a bayonet charge, far more exhausting than service in the comfortable imitative obedience of an ordered army. Guerrillas must be allowed liberal workroom. In a regular war of two men together, one was being wasted. Our ideal should be to make our battle a series of single combats. Our ranks a happy alliance of agile commanders in chief. Yeah, I like it.

I like that too. So one of the key points here is that unlike most European officers in similar situations, Lawrence had not taken, well, I said he's taken nothing of Western military doctrine. That's not really true. He's just taken some Western doctrine that is not popular with other people. Cause that Austrian Dessacks is kind of someone who had been writing a lot of the same things

and Lawrence is very influenced by Dessacks. But Dessacks is certainly not influencing like British strategy at the Somme, you know? Nothing but machine guns are really influencing that, right? It's all these guys who wanna be Hannibal, but can't think of anything more creative than throwing their men into the teeth of a bunch of German guns.

So what's interesting about Lawrence is that, for all that he is an imperialist, he does not fall to the temptation of imposing British standards on these Bedouin fighters. His only thought is to give them modern English guns so that they can fight their way. And he's writing the whole time, he's trying to argue to his superiors

as to why this is how they should handle the whole Arab revolt. He writes a series of 27 articles meant for publication among British officers stationed in Arabia. Now these are part propaganda. Some of what's in these is Lawrence lying about the strength of the Bedouins to make a case as to why they should be supported.

But he also includes a lot of very good advice on how European officers should change their thinking to avoid bringing Western front problems to this new war zone. He is trying to explain why they ought to respect the Bedouin and how to respect the Bedouin. How to kind of let these people do what works. The next phase of the war sees Faisal's raiders launch this blizzard of attacks against Ottoman positions around the Hejaz railway, destroying sections of track and bridges but also things like watering holes that train operators relied upon for coolant. Lawrence again leads many of these raids from the front. He counted that during this period,

he personally destroyed 79 bridges, which is, that's like hurricane level of bridge destruction. Lawrence is done. Hahahaha. Hurricane Lawrence. Hurricane Lawrence, yeah. Lawrence often would set the charge himself and he became something of an innovator

in the field of explosives by helping to like develop this technique that he called scientific shattering. Now, the point of this, this is very interesting, was to ruin the bridge, making it unfit for transit, but to leave it standing, right? And the logic here is that a standing bridge that's ruined can't just be repaired.

First you have to destroy it before you can rebuild it. Whereas if you just blow it up, then all they have to do is clear records your way, right? Yeah, you don't have to work for them. Right, this extends the time. If you fuck the bridge up scientifically, they have to spend even more time destroying it the rest of the way

before they can rebuild it. Now I know all of you listeners at home are taking notes. How do I scientifically shatter a bridge? I've never blown up a bridge yet, but I can read a quote from Lawrence's book to describe how he did it. Yet. What do you mean yet?

Yet, I haven't yet, Sophie. That's just a factual statement. I haven't destroyed any bridges yet. Consul me before we do this. I once was hitchhiking into Louisville, Kentucky. And the trucker who picked me up was this older, I think Vietnam vet. He's pretty quiet the whole drive

and he's like dropping us off in the middle of the night. And he like does the trucker thing where he just like stops the entire, like when he wants to do something, he just stops the truck and all traffic just has to deal with it, you know? And before we get out, he turns to us and goes, you kids ever blown up a bridge? Amazing stuff.

No, sir. No, no, we're children. So here's how Lawrence describes to blow up a bridge. Hastily, we set about the bridge, a pleasant little work, 80 feet long and 15 feet high, honored with a shining slab of white marble, bearing the name and titles of Sultan Abd El Hamid. In the drainage holes of the spandrel, six small charges were inserted zigzag, and with their explosion, all the arches were scientifically shattered.

So there you go guys. Put some dynamite in the drainage holes and let her rip. You know? Yeah. Now you can go take out bridges, which you shouldn't do. Especially not with someone that you meet at Food Not Bombs or some activist circle. That's gonna go badly for everyone. Don't destroy any bridges unless you find yourself taking part in an Arab revolt against Ottoman power.

If that's the case, you know, if you get transported back in time to 1916 and you have to help the Bedouins fight for their independence from the Ottomans, then it's probably okay to blow up some bridges. Or if it's your bridge, you know. Or if it's your bridge. If you make a bridge, who's to stop you, right? Maybe someone owns a demolition company out there. There's lots of legal reasons to destroy a bridge, right?

Now the bulk of the insurgent work that Lawrence does in this period is done by Camelback. But for his own team of raiders, Lawrence is going to eventually settle on a different mode of transportation, which is these armored Rolls-Royce cars. They are by the end of this, like cruising around in Rolls-Royce's blowing up bridges, which is pretty gangster, right?

Is it the same level of luxury car that it's seen as now? No, I mean, I don't think so at this point. These are armored cars, so. Yeah. These sturdy vehicles allowed the nine man team that he preferred for commando work to carry hundreds of pounds of gun caught and explosives and move rapidly from target to target.

While Lawrence was helping to execute a successful insurgency in the heart of Ottoman territory, the powers that be in the British Empire had started to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The Americans were almost to the Western Front and with the possibility of victory came the sweet prospect of carving up the Ottoman world for European consumption. If you spend literally any length of time talking to people in the Arab world today and asking them in brief, why is everything so fucked up? Every conversation will at some point circle back to Sykes-Picot.

During the fighting against ISIS, I talked about Sykes-Picot with like 12 year old boys, like people know it over there. And it's the thing I think a lot of Americans don't really know much about. It is, as one New Yorker article aptly described it, the curse that still haunts the Middle East. Now the first of the men that Sykes Bicot was named after was essentially a dark mirror of Lawrence. Sir Mark Sykes was the son of Sir Tatton Sykes,

who married an 18 year old girl at age 48 and then disowned her publicly in the newspaper when she spent too much of his money. That's Mark's dad. Yeah. A lot of pieces of shit in the British nobility. Mark was their only child and he spent his childhood moving between his father's 34,000 acre estate and his mother's London home.

He traveled the Ottoman Empire regularly as a tourist with his dad. And then when he became a young man, he joined the military and participated in the Boer War. He became a conservative member of parliament and he writes books about like the Ottoman Empire and the kind of the Islamic world, right? And he is during the first world war kind of one of the first major,

he's a major advocate within the British government for the independence of Arabs, Armenians, Jews and Turks. So long as that independence existed under European control and profit. And his thinking here is less, these people deserve their independence and more, if we cut them up into individual little quasi states under our control, it's going to be a lot easier

to keep everyone dominated, right? Oh shit, uh-huh. Yeah. Over the last few pre-war years, Sykes had become the empire's resident expert on the Arab world, based on the strength of him like vacationing there a bunch, right?

And the fact that he was a baronet. He was referred to- I can just picture this character so easily. They're like, daddy. Daddy, daddy. He was referred to as the Mad Mullah as he rushed around London building support for this Arab revolt against the Ottomans,

who he hated for the squalor and poverty that he saw in cities like Damascus. Now he's not entirely misguided here because the Ottomans are not good rulers, but his feeling that the way to improve things was to set Europeans up over the poor bumbling Mohammedans. Sykes was paired with Francois-Georges Picot, a French diplomat, to portion out the Ottoman

Empire into little bits to various powers. As the war worked towards a close, there were a lot of hopeful claims. Italy wanted the Aegean islands. Greece wanted traditional Byzantine territory in modern Turkey. Russia wanted some of that good Asia minor shit as well, although they're not going to be at the table for very long here because of that whole Bolshevik revolution. And of course the Zionists wanted a Jewish homeland

in Palestine. And it's interesting, one of the big, I was actually kind of unaware of this. One of the big, like one of the reasons why there's a support for the Zionists is people who are, is like people in the British government who are scared that Russia is going to collapse under a socialist revolution and are like, well, if we give the Jews a homeland, obviously all socialists are Jews, right? So if we give them a homeland, you know, in Palestine,

then maybe they'll leave Russia and they won't destroy Russia, right? Like that's literally why there's a lot of early support for Zionism among the British government. It's like this super concentrated racism. God, I love how the Schrodinger's Jew where you're either a capitalist or a communist or somehow both at once. Yes, yes, you control all the money

and are a left-wing radical. Yes. Yeah. So this was, to put mildly, if you are people like Sykes and Picot, any of the people in the British government above Lawrence's level who are trying to figure out what the post-war is going to look like for this region,

there's a lot to keep in mind, right? There's a lot of competing claims. There's a lot of different national groups that are kind of agitating for independence too. And they're just gonna ignore it all and just carve it up willy nilly. Yeah, that's more or less what Sykes has got to do because he's British, right?

So he's only focused on- I've read about Korea. Yeah, yeah. He's mostly focused on his country's closest ally, France. And France wants something they called Greater Syria. They think, obviously, this is natural French territory. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. the 50-50 genocide ratio in the Muslim majority areas that they had governed in the past should have been a warning that like, this is not going to go well, but no one anywhere has ever learned a lesson ever. That's the primary lesson of history

is that no one learns lessons and no one has learned any lessons from France fucking around in Algeria. Certainly. I haven't even learned this lesson. Now, it would have been obvious at the time that what the planning going into Sykes-Picot would lead to catastrophe. The Ottoman Empire had been collapsing for some time.

In 1830, France had taken Algeria and immediately done a genocide to put down the rebels there. They had gained control of Tunisia in 1881, and they actually waited until 1958 before they did a genocide in Tunisia. So really, I mean, it's kind of impressive. They've got, you know, they got more responsible. That's nice of France. The French have patience. Yeah, they have patience.

They waited almost a whole century before they did a genocide in Tunisia. Now, under the final agreement between France and England, a large region of the Ottoman heartland directly above Syria would be under direct French control, while a triangle that included Aleppo, Damascus, and Mosul would be like kind of independent but under heavy French influence, whereas the British would have an area of influence that was like this large chunk of the desert on the peninsula south of the French mandate, and they would hold direct control over much of modern Iraq, stretching to the Arabian Gulf. Sykes would go on to solidify his role

as one of the most harmful dudes to ever cause harm by also pushing the Balfour Declaration to the British cabinet in November of 1917. He's like one of the forces behind the Balfour Declaration. And this is like the early Zionists. Yes, yes. Although the actual declaration itself spends more time talking about like Jewish populations

in European countries, right? Because a lot of, in the chaos in Russia, a lot of like Jewish people had fled Russia and like wound up in England, wound up in other European. Like that is actually more of what the declaration is, but kind of the outcome of the declaration is this is the first time that there's official British government support behind the Zionist desire for a homeland in Palestine. Now the actual text of the declaration, like of the agreement being made is like, of course,

no one will be displaced. None of the current like inhabitants of Palestine will be displaced as a result of this. Yeah. In true magic of this. Yeah. Through magic. Yeah, yeah, through magic. In true imperial fashion, Sykes' primary justification for supporting the Balfour Declaration

was his own rampant anti-Semitism. He believed that if great Jewry was against us, the Allies had no hope for final victory, right? Because again, these guys are both communists and they control all the money, right? Yeah, and they're also both incredibly strong and they're weak, sniveling, effeminate people who will absolutely destroy us if they get the chance.

Right, it's the common proto-fascist bullshit. Yeah, which we're dealing with right now in America about the left, antifa and stuff. Yes, yes, I mean, it's just kind of these people, right? Sykes is the kind of guy you see all throughout history. And in this case, he's anti-Semitically talking himself into Zionism, which is a fascinating part of the history

of this whole moment. Yeah, very common message of encouraging Zionism at this time. Yeah. Now, after setting up like a third of the 20th and 21st centuries worst dominoes, Sykes lives happily until, in a rare win for humanity, he dies of flu in 1919. So again, I have to keep going back to like,

is influenza so bad, you know? Yeah, Spanish flu got somebody. It took out Sykes, that's not the worst, you know? So back to our boy T.E. Lawrence. We don't know precisely when he found out that Sykes-Picot was a thing. The agreement first entered public awareness in late 1917 after the October Revolution led

to the overthrow of the Tsar. The Bolsheviks get a hold of a bunch of different like paperwork, right? That, you know, had been in the hands of the Tsar's government. And some of that is the Sykes-Picot agreement. And yeah, Lennon- If you overthrow your government, you get the notes.

Yeah, Trotsky actually leaks a copy of Sykes-Picot to a newspaper, right? And then the Guardian publishes the details in English media for the first time after this. In early reporting on the matter, Lennon called Sykes-Picot, quote, the agreement of colonial thieves. And there's really no fact-based argument against that.

You know, that's that. He was just right. He was just correct on that. Well, didn't they, weren't these the like, I think they were called protectorates or something. There was like a different word. They were like, oh, we don't, we don't own this. We're just gonna help you.

A lot of these are spheres of influence, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So when, and again, this is not, Sykes-Picot is not what actually happens specifically because like they get carved up, you get like Iraq, you get Jordan and right, none of that's in Sykes-Picot, that all comes later.

But Sykes-Picot is kind of evidence of what they've agreed to basically, right? It's the broad strokes of what's going to happen. So when Lawrence had left Cairo, this had not all been as settled as it was by November. The British government's official line still was that it was inciting an Arab revolt to secure their total independence.

Lawrence clearly knew that there was some extent to which this was bogus from the beginning, which is why he wrote in Seven Pillars, hardly one day in Arabia passed without a physical ache to increase the corroding sense of my accessory deceitfulness towards the Arabs and the legitimate fatigue of responsible command. Right? So the fact that this is all a lie is wearing on Lawrence, especially since the greater

part of his job was to personally negotiate deals with various Arab tribes to fight the Ottomans with the promise of independence after the war. In letters back to his superiors, Lawrence protested what became Sykes-Picot. Anthony Satin describes this for an article in Al Jazeera. He objected loudly to the agreement for several reasons. He thought that the French should be allowed nothing, having behaved so badly in Algeria and elsewhere in Northwest Africa. He thought a post-war commonwealth of Arab states under British tutelage might work.

And he protested at having to ask Arab forces to fight on what he called a lie. I can't stand it, he insisted. And yet he continued." And if we're looking for like Lawrence as a bastard, this is getting into some of the better cases for it, right? Because he talks about how much he hates this. He is trying to work against Sykes-Picot on the ground, but he also knows what his government is planning.

And he's kind of being a Pied Piper to these guys that he cares about as it goes on. Oh, that's wild. Because he's also, overall, he's wild. Cause he's also overall, he's someone who's trying to act based on morality rather than like cold strategy. He's obviously a strategic thinker, right? But he's like, he's thinking,

cause geopolitically you have to give the French something. And he's like, no, they don't deserve anything because they're terrible. But they're dicks, fuck them. Yeah. Like, whereas he's able to sell himself on the idea that a British protectorate or a sphere of influence won't be as bad.

Yeah. And some of that might be even some of his own, like chauvinism from being from that culture, but also it might've been a honest appraisal of the situation. But then, yeah, like he's like trying to act more from a moral position, but he knows he can't. Oh, that's so right.

I mean, he could have, he could have just been like, I have entirely abandoned England and you know, but. He doesn't. Yeah. So. So he's canceled. So he's canceled. Yes, we're canceling T.E. Lawrence.

We've decided. The fight against Sykes-Picot was to dominate the next years of Lawrence's life, but he would have missed the public reveal of Sykes-Picot in November for a very unfortunate reason, which is that that month he was captured by the Ottomans. This is actually one of those ifs, because this may be something he lied about. But if it happened, this happened while he was conducting one of his many recon missions. He describes in Seven Pillars of Islam that he was hiding himself as a Circassian in the city of Daraa when he was drafted.

Basically like they see a young man walking around and they're like, you're in the army now buddy, right? Because he's good enough at hiding that he's like a Circassian, right? That they think, okay, well, we got a time for you to be a member of the army that you're fighting. Now, Lawrence says basically like the draft was just kind of an excuse to take me in the custody. What happened really is the governor wanted to fuck me. Right?

And he describes lengthily how he was beaten and tortured and then gang raped by the governor and his guards in seven pillars. This is like, and it's interesting because like, this is a pages long description of like torture and rape. He doesn't quite describe openly sexual penetration, but basically everything else, right? And it is ultimately published in 1922.

I don't know if Lawrence was the first famous man of the 20th century to write publicly about being raped, but the list ahead of him can't have been long, right? Like there can't be a lot of competition for that role. People were really, really into like, and then the curtains are drawn historically with their writing. Yeah, and he does that a bit, right?

Like he's not as open about, like he doesn't describe it in, but he's like, this is like, it's a very detailed description of like the torture and stuff to the point that the people who think this is faked is kind of like, Lawrence is sort of like writing his own sexy fan fiction here.

Oh, cause he's a masochist. Maybe, right? Maybe. Or this is why he's a masochist is to try and recreate this. Or this is why he's a masochist because he's and recreate this. Or this is why he's a masochist because he's raped and tortured, yes. Yeah, as a way to experience the same thing

but under his own control. Right, right. And I'm gonna tell you right now, what actually happened here is unknowable to us, right? Now, I am going to give the best arguments as to like why this is fake because I think that's responsible. I tend to think it was probably real

but I'm not a historian. Yeah. So I debated whether or not to read some quotes from this portion of Seven Pillars. I opted not to because like it's really upsetting stuff. Like this is a legitimately upsetting description of torture and sexual assault. In recent years, some Lawrence biographers,

namely James Barr who authored Desert on Fire have argued that Lawrence could not have been in DeRoy when he claimed this happened, and have even found evidence that he doctored his notes to further this lie. Barr's argument is that Lawrence came up with this story later, after the war, to quote, discredit Arab militants in the precarious post-war climate. I find this an odd argument, which is not really in line with Lawrence's other post-war behavior. But in my research for this, I did run across a couple of pieces of evidence that might be seen as evidence that Lawrence's lie continues to work in the present day, like discrediting not Arabs,

but like these kind of like some of these local fighters. Here's a segment I found on the website firstworldwar.com. This is talking about the Ottoman use of rape as a weapon. This indignity was more often inflicted on members of the officer class and the belief that it robbed them of their authority as a leader of men, sometimes resulting in the victim's suicide. The Ottoman Turks were infamous for inflicting it throughout the Great War on captured Indian troops, beating and gang raping enemy officers often as a matter of due course. Prisoners and garrisons often had personnel who specialized in this abuse, although there was nothing homosexual about it." And this is kind of contra to Lawrence's description because he does describe this as being a very like the governor and his men are homosexual, right?

Like they want to fuck Lawrence. And that's kind of the result of all this. Well, you just get into ideas of like what counts as homosexual being like in a lot of different places, the active person is not the gay person. Right, yeah. And there's a, yeah, we'll talk more about this,

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Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So, you know, we're talking about, was Lawrence of Arabia gang raped? And the answers- Light dinner topic. Yeah, light dinner topic. Now, when it comes to like the anti side of this, Barr is joined in doubt by academics like Adrian Greaves. Greaves makes some points that I find compelling,

particularly that the Turks were unlikely to have believed for days that Lawrence was really an Arab captive or a Circassian captive. But he also takes issue with the fact that Lawrence didn't bring this up until 1919, right? That's one of Barr's pieces of evidence that like this is probably fake

is that Lawrence doesn't talk about it. And I'm like, no, it's not really weird that you'd wait like a couple of years to talk about your gang rape. Like that's not- Yeah, most people take that to their grave. Yeah. Yeah, that's not, I don't really think that counts

the way that you seem to think it does. Yeah, and there's also some gay panic adjacent stuff in some of these arguments. Historian David Fromkin has suggested Lawrence made up the rape to explain whip marks from his alleged sadomasochistic kink. I don't know who is right here, but I do want to read this line from an article

on Cleo's visualizing history website. Biographer John E. Mack, however, accepts the story and Lawrence's later assertion that what happened to him at Daraa apparently did permanent damage to his psyche. And there is compelling evidence for this damage, although separating what might've been caused from the rape, what was PTSD, right?

Because of the war and all of the illness, right? Like you get PTSD from nearly dying repeatedly of various like shit yourself to death illnesses. There's no way to separate this, right? Like Lawrence is after about a year or so, because he's really not there all that long. He's there like two years and all. He is just a pile of PTSD stitched together

into the crude image of a man. On one of his best days, he shot his own camel in the head by accident. That was one of the best days he had there. That was one of his wins. He is just destroyed as a person. And it is, I think, very consistent. Now, Barr has a really good point

when he kind of pieces out, it can't have happened exactly the way Lawrence describes it in the book, right? Because we know there's just some things about the timing of where he was when that don't work out. That doesn't mean it didn't happen in another city and he lied and said it was Dara for some reason. Also just like people fuck up, right?

Like Lawrence is going to- Classic thing to remember really well. Yeah, we'll talk about this in the next episode. Lawrence is going to like destroy his notes several times and lose drafts of this book and have to rewrite it. So like some errors probably got introduced, but it is now agreed and even Bar even writes that like broadly speaking,

Seven Pillars is quite accurate as in its descriptions of what happened in the Arab revolt, right? And I tend to think this probably happened to Lawrence. And part of why is because he has a personality shift after this point and it kind of loses his mind in a way that seems very much like, oh yeah, I bet if you were gang raped and then suddenly had an army

and a bunch of Turkish soldiers surrendering to you, this might be how you'd act, right? Oh, is this where he's gonna go bastard? Is he gonna kill his shit out? He is going to kill a lot of people in part act, right? Oh, is this where he's gonna go bastard? Is he gonna kill the shit out? He is going to kill a lot of people in part four, Margaret. Oh shit, oh my God. He is going to kill a ton of dudes. Okay, cause like the bastard's formula

is to get you to become sympathetic with a terrible person and then like about halfway through. But you've had me for the first three acts, you know? I don't know, I still, he's going to commit war crimes. But everyone in war does. I still don't know that this makes him a terrible person. Yeah, fair enough. Like it's a bad thing to have done.

Yeah. Right? But, ow. I don't know that anyone who is capable of doing the things that he's done up to this point in a war who is capable of the competences that he showed would by this point be able to have better judgment in this way, right? Which isn't to say like, it's fine that he did this.

It's just that like, well, anyone in this position would be out of their minds by a certain point. Because that's just what, like personally, like orchestrating an insurgent campaign in the desert while shitting yourself to death and nearly dying every single day in gunfights, like it just ruins you, you know? Like he is just shattered as a man

and there's a very good chance part of that is that he's tortured and gang raped. Yeah, like who would be doing well after this? Yeah. They didn't blow up the bridge, they just dismantled it. They just messed it up. Yeah, they dismantled it. But they left the shape intact, right?

Again, he's just like a bunch of trauma piled into a bag shaped like T.E. Lawrence at this point. Yeah, god damn. Yeah, this man is so fucked up. Speaking of fucked up, Margaret, let's go get fucked up and then come back to record part four. And by fucked up, I mean- I'm actually gonna brush my teeth.

I'm actually gonna brush my teeth. The only drug I do is sugar, but I've had a lot of it. I'm high on life, Margaret, which is a powerful mix of heroin and- I was gonna say, that's all life? Is that what we're calling it? It's a new gas station drug. Yeah, it's a new gas station drug.

That's what I call it when I mix Kratom and those Yellow Jacket pills, and then just a bunch of five hour energy and grind that up into a shake with a little bit of milk, little bit of oat milk, you know, just for flavor. Wow. Yeah. Odd guesses.

Don't do that, friends. Do that, friends. Instead, you should purchase Margaret Kiltre's new book. If they sell it in the, yeah. Purchase Margaret's new book, you know, The Sapling Cage, it's excellent. And if you're listening to this several weeks ago, you can go see Robert and I talk in Portland. Yes, yes, yeah.

This will have happened long before by the time this airs, possibly in a world where we're all preparing for fascist takeover of the government sounds great this will be great also I really want to plug something we just did on it could happen here James Stout who is a phenomenal journalist that works on the show just check that out. Check that out. Check that out. I haven't listened to it yet. I've talked to James about it the whole time. It's amazing. Yeah.

It's amazing. So please check that out. Yeah. Bye. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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