Dan Snow's History Hit - Lawrence of Arabia

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

The famed British officer who fought alongside Arab guerrilla forces in WW1. Best known for his legendary exploits as an intelligence officer in the Middle East, Thomas Edward Lawrence was also an archaeologist, scholar and photographer. His life was one of adventure and espionage, where fact went hand in hand with myth.In this explainer episode, Dan tells us the real story of who Lawrence was, and what he did.Written by Dan Snow and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm in the desert. Actually, I'm in a medieval castle in the desert. It's a hot, dry place. I'm looking up at the castle walls around me, towering above me. They're made out of this rough, hewn, black rock. The mortar in between holding these rocks together, mud and straw. The castle in Arabic is Kasar al-Az straw. The castle in Arabic is Qasr al-Azraq.

It's in the Arabian desert, just inside what is now Jordan, the north of Jordan. And it was here that the subject of today's podcast spent a memorable winter. He was plotting, he was planning, he was playing his part in the great reordering of this part of the world it was a time of upheaval which still very much shapes our present winston churchill said of this man i deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time i do not see his like elsewhere general edmund allenby he was the british commander in this part of the world the middle east during the First World War. He once said, there is no other man I know who could have achieved what Lawrence did.

He was talking, of course, about Thomas Edward Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence, the man who spent the winter in this fort. In fact, he spent the winter in this very room I'm in now. And if I look up, I can see on the basalt rocks of the ceiling I can see black stains where countless campfires have left their mark and I wonder if some of them date from that winter of 1917 to 18 when Lawrence might have been huddled around a fire up here trying to keep warm planning with Prince Faisal planning his campaign for 1918. Lawrence was the military liaison between the conventional force of the British Empire and the irregular Arab tribesmen who'd risen up against Turkish rule during the First World War and who were helping to prize Arabia, Syria and Palestine from the Ottoman grip.

Lawrence describes this castle in his memoirs. Azraq, he said, lay favourably for us and the old fort would be a convenient headquarters if we made it habitable so he stays in the room where i am now and he describes the a particular feature of so many of these desert fortresses and i've visited a few of them on this trip to jordan i've seen this in other places massive solid basalt doors which still pivot and shut on enormous hinges he describes it the door was a poised slab of dressed basalt, a foot thick turning on pivots of itself, socketed into threshold and lintel. It took great effort to start swinging. At the end went shut with a clang and a crash which made tremble the western wall of the old castle. And that basalt door is still moving on its hinges today a hundred years later i'm off to

give them a push now now i'm pushing these big basalt doors yes they're still moving there we go nothing's coming through there and there's a great socket behind these doors you could put a big wooden beam in to fix them shut now the doors are shut and I'm safely holed up in the fort now. On Lawrence's death, Winston Churchill wrote, I fear whatever our need, we shall never see his like again. Well, this is the story of Lawrence of Arabia, the history of a man and a career in which it is actually very difficult indeed to separate fact from myth. And much of that myth has come from Lawrence's own pen and those of friendly wartime journalists who wanted to find a hero amid the unutterable slaughter

and misery of the First World War. Well, they succeeded in doing so. I think Lawrence Day is the only soldier who we in Britain still recognise and celebrate from that mighty struggle. The Western Front destroyed reputations as certainly as it destroyed lives. But not so the wide open spaces of the Hejaz, not out here. Wartime propagandists were told to find a hero to inspire audiences at home. They headed east and they found their man.

So in this podcast, I'm going to try and tell the real story of Lawrence, who he was and what he did. And I'm doing so at a time when the region is once again thrown into turmoil. It's a direct result of those events that he was part of and even shaped. Enjoy. Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in 1888 in Tremadoc, Carmarthenshire in North Wales. An excellent start for anybody. Same town as my mum. Her life stories diverge somewhat after that. He moved around a fair bit as a child. The family lived in Scotland, in Brittany, the Isle of Wight. And then they settled into a sort of respectable,

upper middle class, comfortable home in North Oxford. But I say settled. He, unlike his brothers, I don't think ever really did settle. He seems to have had a restless spirit. The trouble is it's that same restless spirit that's often attributed to those who grow into significant adults, into great men. Perhaps that's just us projecting backwards. But there is something about young Lawrence that was remarkable, and perhaps he sensed the unease that girded his family. There was a dark secret that marked them apart from their respectable neighbours. You would find out years later, but perhaps he felt it. His father and his mother, get ready for this, were not married. Shocking stuff. As I say, he'd always suspected something was a little strange, and his father died in the great influenza of 1919. Lawrence received a letter from him,

from beyond the grave. The truth was laid out. It turned out his mother's maiden name was Sarah Junner. She'd been a governess, a sort of super nanny, hired by the family of Thomas Chapman. He was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat. She was brought in to look after his four daughters. Now, shockingly, Chapman left his wife and his family in Ireland to cohabit with Sarah Janna. They ran away. They eloped. They called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence, using the surname of who we think was Sarah's father. Her mother had been employed as a servant in the Lawrence family when she became pregnant with Sarah. So beneath the veneer of respectability, they lived with the knowledge of their mortal sin.

Edwardian society would have ostracised them if anyone had found out. Now, some of Lawrence's biographers have suggested that there was this yawning lie at the heart of family life, and that somehow pushed young Lawrence into an obsession with escapism, with romance, of Arthurian knights, of princesses being saved from their imprisonment in towers, of unimagined Middle Ages. And once he outgrew his sibling stories, he began to make a serious study of history itself. This is very relatable. At age 15, Lawrence and his school friend cycled around the countryside. They tried to visit every village's parish church. They made observations about their carvings and antiquities. They did brass rubbings. He's a loner, you may be able to tell.

He did not thrive in a team sport environment. Instead, he rebuilt Victorian pots with shards found during roadworks in Oxford. He donated the result to the Ashmolean Museum. He sounds like my kind of kid. His love of bike riding grew and grew. He had freedom and autonomy on that bike. He goes on massive rides. He once went to the south of France. He wasn't yet 20 years old. It was 1908. And he bicycled something like two and a half thousand miles. He covered all that distance in 50 days and visited more than 50 medieval castles. He went to university, studied history very wisely. He became obsessed with magiculations, for which I cannot really blame him.

They are fascinating. They are those slits, which you see at the bottom of a projecting parapet on the tops of a castle walls. You see them around the base of the upper battlements. They look like protruding cheese graters. They have a checkerboard aspect to them. But they're not superficial adornment. They are the openings through which stones, sewage, burning objects can be dropped down on attackers. So they're kind of projections of the fighting platform on top of the battlements and that means you can drop things on the attackers

below at the base of the castle walls never boiling oil of course it's one of the great myths far too valuable boiling water sure no point wasting the oil in his second summer of oxford university he decides to ditch his bicycle and go for an extraordinary walk. He walks through the Levant, what we now call the Middle East, looking at castles. This is 1909. He is five foot five. He takes a change of clothes. He puts him in his backpack, takes a little camera, and he writes a thesis as a result of that research. He develops on that remarkable journey a strong disdain for the Ottoman Turkish authorities, who at that stage still governed this vast empire from Southeast Europe,

parts of the Balkans, across the Bosporus through modern Turkey and down Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the works. Huge empire. But Lawrence was not a fan. He stays with local families. He learned some Arabic. And over three months, he travels relentlessly, sometimes 20, 30 miles a day in 40 degree heat, absolutely roasting hot. He's on terrible roads. It's an unforgiving country. We know he was mugged. He was shot at, apparently. But that journey fired an enthusiasm, a passion for that region that would never leave him. He arrived back in Oxford three weeks late for the start of his term.

But, as you can imagine, they were pretty pleased at his work. He wrote it all up in a thesis. Then he got himself a first. pretty pleased with his work. He wrote it all up in a thesis, and he got himself a first. Lawrence formed important relationships with senior figures whilst at Oxford. He had a mentor, David Hogarth. He was the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. He's the lead curator. And he will end up in the First World War being sent to Cairo to do a top intelligence job, and he'll take Lawrence along with him. But before that, after university, there's still a few precious years left of peace. Lawrence goes

on an excavation, Kharkhamish, which is a Hittite site in North Syria, what is now North Syria, right next to where they were building the Berlin to Baghdad railway. So his main job was interacting with the Arab workforce. He'd learned some Arabic on his great adventure. He probably, more than any of the other British people on the team, he sort of had a sense of what made people tick in the Middle East. And so he spent time with Arabs, with the Bedouin. And he develops what could be described, I guess, quite a condescending view of Arabs living in this sort of uncorrupted, unblemished, medieval life that is not sullied with the dirt of modernity.

He goes into people's homes and he is reasonably enlightened by the sounds of his time. He says the foreigners come out here always to teach, he wrote to his parents, whereas they'd much better learn. So he's open, his mind is open to new ways of doing things, new ideas. He also dips his toe into the politics of great power rivalry. The Germans had been trying to cozy up to the Ottoman Empire. It was a German team who were building the Baghdad to Istanbul railway. It was a vast strategic project, a huge piece of infrastructure that would eventually link the Middle East directly with Berlin. Astonishingly ambitious. There was never any violence, but Lawrence had lots of run-ins with the railway men competing, for example, with local workers. In January 1914, Lawrence and one of his colleagues were actually brought

even further into the great game of imperial rivalry. They were sort of co-opted by the British military. The British had a good idea that they would use these archaeologists, the perfect cover story, for a careful military survey, a mapping of the Negev Desert in what is now southern Israel. They would employ these archaeologists to survey the deserts looking for sites, ostensibly to try and establish the location of what the Bible called the Wilderness of Zin. And the army, as you may have guessed by now, were a lot less interested in finding the Wilderness of Zin or any ancient sites than they were in the maps that this expedition were able to produce. Any future conflict between the British Empire, which

occupied the Suez Canal, very importantly, and Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire would inevitably take place across this inhospitable landscape. So Lawrence and his colleague, they mark all the important water sources, for example, vital if you're planning a military campaign, and which were hitherto unknown. And on that trip, Lawrence first visits the port of Aqaba, which sits very strategically, snug, right at the top of the Gulf of Aqaba, which is that finger of water that joins to the Gulf of Suez that runs south between what is now Saudi Arabia and Israel. It runs south to the Gulf of Suez, which comes down from the Suez Canal and then becomes the Red Sea. Aqaba would play an important role in Lawrence's later career. A few months later, in the summer of 1914,

as we all know, the First World War broke out. It was not clear what side Turkey were going to be on. It was a massive empire, millions of subjects of different ethnicities, controlling vast oil reservoirs, which were already at that point of history very important. The Royal Navy, for example, had switched its battleships from coal to oil. It's one of the greatest what-ifs of recent history. What would have happened if that empire had stayed neutral or joined the Allies? Would it have endured? But they did not do either of those two things. And the ripples go on, pushing ever outwards to this day. The violence of its defeat, its breakup, and its partition endures. The Turkish Ottomans threw their lot in with Germany,

partly through bad luck, really. Winston Churchill, that man who seems to have his fingerprints on nearly every single important event in the 20th century, was first Lord of the Admiralty in 1914. And he impounded two massive warships that were being built on the Tyne, the River Tyne, the north of England. He was freaking out in the summer of 1914 about the closeness in battleship numbers between the British and German fleets in the North Sea. The Germans still had the smaller fleet, but they were in touching distance of parity in those first few months of the First World War. And those two big ships on the Tyne, well, Winston Churchill wanted them. The problem is they weren't being built for the British Royal Navy. They were being built for the Turkish Navy. They were going to be

the two most prestigious, powerful battleships in Turkey's fleet as it desperately tried to modernise itself and become an empire that could survive the 20th century. One of them was pretty much finished. She entered service immediately as HMS Erin. She would end up fighting at Jutland, but very embarrassingly, never fired a shot from its main armament. The only battleship not to do so. The other was broken up for scrap, actually. In retrospect, their seizure was certainly not worth the row that it caused. These battleships had cost the Ottomans a gigantic amount of money. They were a symbol of imperial prestige and renewal. Now the Brits had just taken them off them. It was pretty terminal for Anglo-Ottoman relations and things got worse.

Another great what-if in fact. Two German warships gave a British squadron in the Mediterranean a slip, and they arrived in Istanbul. Almost intercepted, but they arrived. What follows is a little bit complicated, but that massively boosted the pro-Germany party in government, as the confiscation of Turkey's warships on the Tyne had hobbled those who said they should throw their lot in with Britain and France. The Turks went through a strange charade of purchasing those German ships, but then those German ships, under their own captains and crews, pushed into the Black Sea and started to attack Russian targets. Russia declared war on Turkey. Turkey

was in the war on the same side as Germany and, very bizarrely, its old nemesis, the power that had spent generations, centuries fighting against, Austria-Hungary, one of the more unlikely alliances in history. So Turkey's in the war. Turkey has chosen poorly. Britain is now worried about its great artery of empire, the Suez Canal. Half of all British shipping to the Far East goes through the canal. And Britain also had to move very fast to the oil fields around Basra in southern Iraq and neighbouring Persia, just to be sure, to secure its oil supply. And I say fast, within three months of war being declared, Royal Marines and troops from British India were storming ashore on the Al-Fur Peninsula

in Iraq, near the Shat al-Arab, on their way to Basra, and passing Umm Qasar and other places that subsequent generations of British soldiers would come to know only too well. Lawrence and his brothers, well, they signed up. Lawrence got a position as second lieutenant in the map room in Cairo, in the Arab Bureau, it was called. It was under the command of Lieutenant Commander David Hogarth, who I mentioned earlier, who'd met at the Ashmolean. All of Hogarth's bright young things, all the young archaeologists had been co-opted. So you've got a very interesting bunch of clever, eccentric, slightly weird people all working in this place in Cairo together. One of them was Gertrude Bell. She was a pioneering Arabist,

about whom I really should do another podcast on a separate occasion. Lawrence's job is to update the maps of the region with intelligence that he receives. Any prisoners who are brought in, he can interrogate them in Arabic, and he can work out where the Turks are placing their men, their military units. And he's also, as part of his role there, swept up in this very wide, much bigger discussion about what on earth Britain should do with the Eastern question. It was a question that people have been talking about for some time as the Ottoman Empire looked a bit shaky. What do you do in the aftermath of an Ottoman collapse?

This is an empire that has dominated this area for 400 years. You take Turkish control away and what have you got? Is it a matter of imperial partition? Do you just carve it up like European powers and carve it up much the rest of the world? Do you encourage the emergence of new nation states, states that never existed before? Do you do some combination of both? Lawrence seems to have come down more on the Arab nationalist side. He believed that the Arabs, who roughly speaking live in what we call the Saudi Peninsula and up into Syria, they ought to have sort of autonomy, perhaps even

full independence. Perhaps as a kind of liberal imperialist, he believed that they could enjoy a large amount of autonomy, but within the overall European imperial architecture. but within the overall European imperial architecture. He said as early as 1915 that he wanted to gather the Arabs together, help them to realise their ambition, help them to dash up to Damascus, which historically has been the sort of centre of political power for the Arab world, and particularly deny it to the French. Lawrence's long bicycle trip around France

has certainly not made him a big Francophile, and he was a British officer through and through in that respect. He didn't want Turkish rule of the Middle East to be replaced by French. He also, in 1915, shows some foresight. He tries to lobby Winston Churchill to land not on the Gallipoli Peninsula, but around halfway up the Mediterranean coast. You'll have heard of the Roman city of Antioch, right in that area, the kind of armpit, if you like, where the east-west Turkish coast meets the north-south coast that will turn into Lebanon and Israel. He says that if the Allies were to land there, they would be able to cut the Turks off from the Arab world. The Arabs could rise up and the Arabs would gain their independence. It's a very strategic corridor. It's where

Alexander the Great won one of his more important battles against the Persian Empire, Issus, right in there between Anatolia and the Arab world further south. Churchill, well, he could have done worse than to listen to him because obviously the Gallipoli landings that did take place with the aim of passing through the Bosporus and threatening the Turkish capital at Istanbul, they didn't go well. threatening the Turkish capital at Istanbul, they didn't go well. Lawrence experienced personal trauma. Two of his younger brothers were killed in quick succession on the Western Front. He wrote to a friend, they were both younger than I am. It doesn't seem right somehow that I should go on living peacefully in Cairo. He did get a whiff of gunpowder. His first active job, he was sent in the spring of 1916 to Kut

Alamara. Now this is where, very interesting moment, this is where the Ottomans have actually surrounded a British force. In fact, it's that British force I mentioned earlier, the one that's pushed up from Basra. They've pushed up the great rivers of Iraq to threaten Baghdad, but in appalling conditions, hugely complex logistical challenges, great expression about the Mesopotamian campaign. It was too wet for the army and not wet enough for the navy. It's just marsh and bog, savage terrain over which to fight. And at Kut-el-Amar, the British imperial forces found themselves surrounded by the Ottomans. Lawrence went to try and get them off the hook, basically. He tried a bit of bribery, tried to get the Arabs to come to their aid,

organise a fomentic Arab uprising. It was a complete failure. Kut fell to the Turks. The British and imperial forces went into an appalling captivity. It was a moment of humiliation for the world's largest empire. Lawrence goes back to Cairo. He's obviously quite difficult. He's quite ungovernable. His commanding officer said, that man needs a good kicking. But then suddenly everything changes because in the summer of 1916, Arabia exploded.

In June of that year, a 63-year-old descendant of the Prophet Muhammad clambered up to his rooftop in Mecca and he fired a rifle into the air. He was Sharif Hussein of Mecca, the custodian of the two most holy sites in Islam. The Al-Kharam Mosque in Mecca, which every Muslim is supposed to visit once in their lives, is the first mosque on earth established by the Prophet himself. And also the Nabawi Mosque, the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, also established by Muhammad. The Sharif had decided that June, now is the time to rise up and throw off the yoke of the Ottomans. His sons, Ali and Faisal, led his tribesmen against a small but better armed Ottoman garrison and after a month of street fighting, of destruction, they seized control of the holy

city of Mecca. The Sharif's uprising didn't take the British entirely by surprise. He'd been showing a bit of leg for some time. In 1909, a few years before the outbreak of the First World War, the empire, it tried to modernise. It was seen as the sick man on the world stage. And a bunch of young, thrusting new administrators came in. They were called the Young Turks, which is where we get that expression from. They try and modernise the empire. And of course, as every time this happens in history, modernising the empire from the centre means that local elites, who are used to being rather sort of left on their own to run things,

get very antagonised and annoyed. You don't want Young Turks coming in telling you how to run the show, making you send more taxes back to the imperial centre. You don't necessarily want that if you are wielding power like a satrap in the provinces. The Sharif did not like these young Turks. And also they've done things like confiscated real estate to drive a new modern railway through his lands. He feels that his own local power, his interests are under threat. And in fact, he is worried that they will depose him and murder him and install someone more pliant in tune with their interests. So the Sharif has been talking for a while to the British. When war breaks out, that conversation becomes urgent. And the British write to the Sharif and

basically promise him independence. They promise him a kingdom that will cover most of the Arab lands. So that's what we now sort of loosely call the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, up into Syria and Lebanon. And it's conditional on the Sharif rising up, allying himself with the Brits and fighting the Ottomans, their common enemy. The Ottoman Turkish Empire was caught by surprise. This uprising was extremely inconvenient to them and perhaps they'd been hoping that the Arab question was not one they'd have to answer while they were locked in a war with, well, three global superpowers, Britain, France and Russia. Perhaps as a result of their

unpreparedness, Hussein's rebels captured the holy city of Mecca. They also captured the port city of Jeddah, in which the Royal Navy played a supporting role, as it has done on so many occasions in history. The British and French didn't just send naval help, they sent weapons, they sent money, supplies, they released Arab prisoners of war, so captured Ottoman troops that were Arabs. They released them, sent them to Hussein. They also sent advisors and envoys. The remarkable Gertrude Bell, who I mentioned earlier, she was sent to operate in kind of northern Arabia. She gathered intelligence among Arab tribes, people for the march on Baghdad, the push up the rivers, the great rivers from the Persian Gulf to Baghdad. There were French advisors sent to help. There were

other Brits. There was Colonel Cyril Wilson. There was Colonel Pierce Joyce. Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Francis Newcomb. But all of those men and women have been eclipsed by the contribution of one man, one individual, who was sent from Cairo in October 1916, and that is T.E. Lawrence. He had already been to Iraq, as I said, he'd been to Mesopotamia, but this was his first trip to Arabia proper. His first impression seems to be one of heat. He talks about the searing heat as he approached the Red Sea port of Jeddah on the morning of the 16th of October 1916. He wrote, the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless. When he got to the interior of Arabia, he found that the rebellion was sort of foundering really. By October, the

Turks might have lost Mecca, but they remained in control of much of the Arabian interior, including the city of Medina. And they appeared well-placed to crush the rebellion. So the revolt is hanging by a thread, and the Brits need to decide what to do. And it's on that visit that Lawrence decides that the best horse to back is Faisal. He's one of the Sharif's sons. And Lawrence reports that Faisal is a man capable of turning around this rebellion. He heads back to Cairo. He goes back again to Arabia in December 1916. And a strong connection is forged by this time between Lawrence and Faisal. And Faisal requests Lawrence specifically as a liaison officer. The Brits say, sure. And that's the start, really. You listen to Dan Snow's history hit, The Best Is Yet To Come. Stick with us.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Lawrence joins these Arabs. They launch raids out of the desert on, well, mainly on the great artery of Turkish power in Arabia, which is the Hejaz Railway. The Hejaz Railway ran from Damascus south along the edge of the Red Sea down to Medina. It was the main supply route for Turkish forces in this part of Arabia. And it was also just incredibly vulnerable. You've suddenly got a huge,

big, immovable railway line, which is impossible to defend at all times along its full length. And the Arabs can attack and retreat. They can launch raids. They can sting and retreat back into the desert. And so this railway, which seemed to represent the future, this super efficient way of delivering supplies to large numbers of troops in Arabia, now becomes a millstone around Turkish necks. The resources required to protect it are greater than the resources it was designed to sustain. Lawrence takes part in these attacks. He rides alongside the Arabs. He rides alongside Faisal. He learns the nature of desert warfare. And by May 1917, he later claimed that he came up with the idea of attacking not just the railway, but the key port on the Gulf of Aqaba, Aqaba itself.

Other sources test that Lawrence may have been slightly more an observer rather than the progenitor of this plan. To be fair to Lawrence, he had been there before, remember, he knew its importance. He had travelled out of Aqaba in the past, and he would have seen that it is strategically hugely important. If you have pretty much uncontested use of the oceans, which Britain's Royal Navy had, then Aqaba is the furthest point into the Middle East, if you like, up towards Amman, towards Damascus. It's the furthest point to which ships can reach. So it transforms the kind of resupply options. If you're hoping to sustain an Arab revolt up into Syria and Palestine in what is today Jordan, then to do so from Aqaba is a lot easier than doing so from way south in Jeddah. It is a

natural gateway to the southern reaches of Syria, the heartland of the Arab world. Now, the French did not want the Arabs in Aqaba. That was too threatening. The French rather fancied that they would control Syria after the First World War. They wanted the Arabs confined to Arabia. So the idea of an Arab attack and occupation of Aqaba was, well, rather threatening to the French in particular. Perhaps that's why Lawrence liked it. In fact, he seems to have disobeyed instructions from Cairo, which had told him, in a rather brilliantly British way of putting it, that Faisal's occupation of Aqaba was not desirable at this time. Which, to my North American listeners and elsewhere, is British for,

for God's sakes, don't let Faisal anywhere near Aqaba. Lawrence ignored that. In May 1917, he went dark. No one knew where he was for about two months. He had no way of communicating with the outside world. With about 50 Arab fighters, he travelled something like 600 miles through the desert. He raised new recruits, convinced other desert tribes to join him, and then descended like a vulture out of a clear blue sky on Aqaba. They carried out diversionary attacks along the way to confuse the Turks. They actually rode all the way north just to outside Amman in what is now Jordan to attack this railway again. And then they swung to the south and west. They had only what they could carry with them apparently, which included a skin of water and a 45 pound sack of flour

as their provisions to live on. The crucial battle for Aqaba took place actually some way outside the city, not like it appears in the famous film Lawrence of Arabia. It's about 40 miles north, a place called Aba El-Lisan. And here Lawrence and the Arabs came across a Turkish relief force which was heading for the port. And I say battle, it was really more of a massacre. It was a hugely dramatic cavalry charge, the 2nd of July, 1917. And they stormed down on this Turkish force. Lawrence's path in this was certainly not as is portrayed in the film. It was less than glorious. He actually, during the charge, shot his own camel in the back of the head

and played no further part in the action. The entire Turkish force was killed or captured, and only a couple of Faisal and Lawrence's men were lost. Days later, they seized Aqaba from the desert. Its supports, its defences were all pointed out to sea, and the camels struck out of the desert and swatted aside Aqaba's sparse, land-facing defences with hardly a shot fired. sparse land-facing defences with hardly a shot fired. The Arabs had Aqaba. The strategic position in the Middle East was significantly changed. Lawrence was keen to take news of this back to the British in Cairo. So he embarks on what would become a significant part of the Lawrence legend, or perhaps I should say myth. Accompanied by eight others, he travelled 160 miles across the Sinai Peninsula to Suez. He claimed it in 49 hours. In fact, people now think it took about 70

hours, and they did stop for a snooze here or there. From Suez, Lawrence took a train to Cairo, and there he reported to the Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East, General Allenby. And that conversation is hugely important. He pitches to Allenby the idea of an irregular Arab force guarding the flank, harassing the Turks, interrupting supplies, causing a nightmare, much as the Spanish guerrillas had worked with Wellington's conventional force in the Peninsular War 100 years before. He knew that Allenby was going to launch a conventional invasion, effectively of the Middle East, cross the Sinai Desert, push up through Palestine, capture Jerusalem, and then on to Damascus.

Lawrence knew that was the British plan. Well, he told Allenby, he could make that plan run a lot smoother by operating this shadow army on the desert flank of the British imperial force. To do that, he would need weapons. He would need a lot of cash, something like 16,000 pounds of gold to pay the debts that he'd incurred and fulfill the promises that he'd handed out. And he'd also need lots of money after that as well. Money is the sinews of war, folks. So that conversation is as old as the hills. Send money and guns and I'll make things happen.

Lawrence later recounted in his book, he describes Alan B's reaction to him, to Lawrence. Alan B 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. He must've solved it in some ways because he agreed with Lawrence.

He thought it sounded like a splendid idea and he told Lawrence he would do what with Lawrence. He thought it sounded like a splendid idea. And he told Lawrence he would do what he could. He wrote to London, even the partial success of Captain Lawrence's scheme would seriously disorganise Turkish railway communication south of Aleppo, while its complete success would destroy effectively his only main artery of communication. Whilst he was in Cairo, there is an episode, which is reasonably faithfully portrayed in the famous movie.

Lawrence took some of his Arab comrades into the officers' club and demanded that they were served. The rules at the time were only white British officers could drink in the officers' club. After causing a bit of trouble in Cairo, convincing Allenby, he heads back to Arabia with a lot of gold in his saddlebags. And his job is then to funnel gold, guns, and supplies to the revolt. But he increasingly takes an active part, perhaps even a leading part. And he has a voice within the leadership councils of the Arab revolt. And that revolt, stimulated with British gold coming from Lawrence and other liaison officers, grows and grows. Other Arabs join

from places like Egypt and further afield. They swell the ranks of the Arab forces. And Lawrence comes up with an expression about how to use those men. He said, the Turkish garrisons are like plants. They're rooted. But what if we could be a vapor? We could waft around and kill them. He later wrote that the real sphere of the Arab tribes was guerrilla warfare. They are intelligent and very lively, almost reckless, but too individualistic to endure commands or fight in line or help each other. The Hejaz war is one of dervishes against regular forces and we are on the side of the dervishes. Our textbooks do not apply to its conditions at all. And so Lawrence and Faisal unleashed this kind of war on the Turks, particularly on that Hejaz railway, 800 miles long,

a target rich for the plucking. Lawrence claims that he blew up 79 bridges along the railway. And in fact, until quite recently, certainly in the Arabian Desert, you can still see twisted, rusting metal. Old railway cars, stranded, rotting away. It's tragic on one level. It was a great symbol of modernity. A train that once ran from Istanbul to Medina, now destroyed during the war and never reconstituted.

It's a war of hit and run, a war of ambush, a war of explosives in the night. And Lawrence made good on his promise to Allenby. It divided the attention of the Turks exactly the time when they were trying to prepare themselves to defend their southern frontier against the massed forces of the British Empire. In the late summer and early autumn of 1917, the British offensive through the Sinai into Palestine got going. Until that point, there'd been something very like the stalemate of the Western Front, but now the British army started to grind forward, advancing across Sinai and pushing at the so-called Gaza-Bershiba defensive line, fighting into southern Palestine, including what is now the Gaza Strip. As Allenby tried to force the front door, Lawrence was climbing in through an open window around the back of the house.

On the 18th of September, for example, 1917, Lawrence destroyed an important resupply train on that railway track near the town of Mudawara, which is today just inside the Jordanian-Saudi Arabian border, perhaps 100 or so kilometers inland from Aqaba. His Arab raiders blew up the bridge as the train was crossing, and then they stayed to ambush the Turkish repair party. A couple of months later, Lawrence was with a raiding party deep into the Yarmouk River Valley, which ambushed and destroyed a train carrying a senior Ottoman general. So he's making an absolute nuisance of himself. But it was in late 1917 also, as he was enjoying some success in his guerrilla war, that Lawrence was hit by a

thunderbolt that would force him to question his loyalties and throw him into despair. The news was published in the Guardian newspaper in late 1917. The Bolshevik revolution had just torn through the Russian empire, and having seized control, the Bolsheviks published details of a secret wartime agreement between the Russians, particularly the French and the British, as to the future post-war division of the Middle East. Lawrence and the Arabs were appalled to discover that even though the Brits had promised the Arabs their own kingdom in the Middle East, the Brits had also promised the French that they could incorporate parts of the Middle East into their empire as well. Two simultaneous promises that were completely incompatible. This infamous agreement

known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, after the British and French officials who negotiated it, would see a future Arab nation, but it would be sort of relegated to the wastelands of Arabia, while all the rich pickings of the Middle East, Iraq, Syria, were going to be given to the imperial powers, Britain and France. This was a catastrophe. He'd encouraged the Arabs to fight alongside the British

by promising them that they would have control of their own destiny. A glorious Arabian kingdom would emerge from the wreckage of war. Now it was clear the Arabs were fighting and dying to enlarge the British and French imperial projects in their own homeland. Lawrence immediately dashed off left to Cairo saying, we're getting these Arabs to fight on a lie. And he announced dramatically that he was off to get himself killed. And he did disappear for a few days. And now comes one of the strangest, most contested moments of Lawrence's career. On the 20th of November, he's off by himself, apparently kind of reconnoitering in a place called Dera, which is just inside the modern border between Syria and Jordan. And of course, those borders

meant absolutely nothing back then. He says that in Deraa, he was captured, he was taken to the local Ottoman commander, he was interrogated, he was beaten up, and he was raped. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Historians have pored over this account. Is this real? Is it metaphorical? Is this part masochistic fantasy?

There are many different theories. What seems to be true is that the Ottomans perhaps didn't realise the high value of the man that they'd captured, and they decided to release him. The abused Lawrence rejoins the Arab revolt, but he never, from this point on, manages to square his duty to king and empire and his friendship with his Arab comrades. The war in the Middle East is going the Allies' way. Just before Christmas 1917, the British captured Jerusalem as they push up through Palestine for lots of reasons. As we've just heard, Lawrence didn't feel that he could celebrate that unambiguously. He kept fighting though. In late January 1918,

a couple of months later, he fought at the Battle of Tafila. It's a region just the south of the Dead Sea. It was a battle against an Ottoman detachment. It was described by the official British history of the war as a brilliant feat of arms. Lawrence was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his leadership and promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. And if he was torn, if he was conflicted, he was clearly managing to hide it in some way, because not only was he decorated by the British promoted, Allenby was happy with his work. Allenby later wrote, I gave him a free hand. His cooperation was marked by the utmost loyalty. I never had anything but praise for his work, which indeed was invaluable throughout the campaign. He was the main spring of the Arab movement and knew their language, their manners,

and their mentality. The offensive petered out a little bit in the spring of 1918 because of the Arab movement and knew their language, their manners, and their mentality. The offensive petered out a little bit in the spring of 1918 because of the great crisis on the Western Front in the spring of 1918. The Kaiserschlacht, the great German spring offensive, which pushed the Allies arguably to breaking point on the Western Front. Allenby was stripped of troops. They were sent back to Europe. So he was forced to slow down the tempo of his operations. But with the situation restored in Europe by the late summer of 1918, Allenby was sent reinforcements and he was free to go on the offensives. He launched a big set-piece battle in what is now northern Israel, which he called the Battle of

Megiddo, because it had a sort of cool biblical echo. Megiddo gives its name to Armageddon which is the final battle foreseen in the Book of Revelation and Allenby called his battle Megiddo basically because it sounded cool. The Ottomans call it the Breakthrough at Nablus and that's probably a more accurate description. Megiddo is the site of an ancient city and actually there wasn't much fighting there at all. The battle took place in mid-September 1918 and the Turkish defences collapsed reasonably spectacularly. They retreated but there was no safety in flight because behind them, blocking their retreat, were the Arab forces, was Lawrence and Faisal. The Turks fled north and they fled east, sort of up towards Damascus and towards now Syria.

But as they neared Dera, which was the place where Lawrence had been so terribly abused the year before, they ran straight into the Arab forces. And what followed was a particularly terrible encounter. The Turks had marched through the village of Tafas on their retreat and they'd massacred, they made a decision to massacre everybody in that village. It's hard to say why. Perhaps that's what traumatised, dehumanised young men do after months of battle. Perhaps they hoped that an act of terror would warn the Arabs to leave them alone. If it was the latter, it was a terrible misjudgment. They had signed their own death warrants. The Arab forces, with Lawrence who was sort of shadowing this Turkish force and readying to pounce, entered Tafas after the Turks had left, and they witnessed the aftermath, the massacre.

Lawrence describes crimes which actually I don't really want to describe on this podcast, but it was hideous. They'd murdered the population, they'd mutilated the bodies. hideous. They'd murdered the population, they'd mutilated the bodies. The enraged Arabs caught up with the retreating Turks and they hunted this ragtag column of retreating Turks through a long and bloody day. Lawrence himself admits that he gave the order, no quarter, no prisoners were to be taken. He wrote that he called to his men the best of you brings me the most turkish dead the retreating column numbered about 4 000 men and it's thought that nearly every single one of them was slaughtered there was one group of a few hundred turks and german military advisors that were taken prisoner. And Lawrence notes in a battlefield report written

after battle, we turned our hotchkiss, our machine guns on the prisoners and made an end of them. Lawrence then adds more detail in his book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which he wrote after the war. In a madness born of the horror of Tafas, we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of the fallen and of the animals, as though their death and the running blood could slake our agony. This hammer of Allenby's advancing army and the anvil of the Arab forces helped ensure that the Ottoman position in Arabia collapsed in the space of 10 days. Allenby certainly knew how valuable the Arabs had been. He wrote to Faisal, Prince Faisal, I send your highness my greetings and my most cordial congratulations upon the great achievement of your gallant troops. Thanks to our combined efforts, the Ottoman army

is everywhere in full retreat. The big prize then was Damascus, the city that really held the key to Arabia. Various groups arrive at various different points, rather confusing. Some Arab groups arrived alongside a British regular cavalry unit on the 30th of September 1918. The city formally surrendered on the 1st of October. Lawrence rode in later that day. The Turkish hold on the Arab world, which had been secure for nearly 500 years, was broken. But as so often, that victory left, well, something of a vacuum. And it was an opportunity for different groups to seize the narrative, to build their vision of the future. Lawrence clearly preferred a future where the

Arabs ruled Arabia and not the French. He was instrumental in establishing a provisional Arab government under Faisal in Damascus, which they both envisaged would be the future capital of an Arab state. But interestingly, as soon as Allenby arrived in Damascus, he got there two days after Lawrence. He summoned Lawrence and Faisal to the Victoria Hotel and informed them that according to the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, this Anglo-French agreement, the city was to be placed under French administration. Faisal was gutted. He pretty much stormed out of the room. Lawrence immediately begged Allenby to be relieved of his command. It was such a depressing end to his remarkable wartime service. Faisal ignored Allenby, really. He did establish the Arab Kingdom of Greater Syria.

Faisal ignored Allenby, really. He did establish the Arab kingdom of Greater Syria. That kingdom, short-lived, covered much of what is now Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and Lebanon. He even, fascinatingly, met with the leader of the Zionist movement, Dr. Haim Wiseman, to try and accommodate the Jewish ambitions for a Jewish homeland within Palestine. Faisal imagined a future where the Jews would be allowed to settle under the protection of his monarchy, which would control this greater Syria. There was a glimpse of a future where the Jews could realize their ambitions for a homeland under the aegis of a strong regional Arab monarchy.

The capture of Damascus was pretty much marked the end of the fighting in that part of the Middle East against the Ottoman Empire. The war ended in November 1918, although the end of the war with the Ottomans was a little bit more messy. Lawrence then did what he could, I think, to try and help Faisal. He took him to the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. He tried to lobby in Paris on behalf of Faisal, on behalf of this greater Syrian kingdom. But I think Lawrence saw that kingdom existing under the kind of umbrella of the British Empire, so he felt he was still able to marry his duty as a British officer with his loyalty to Faisal and the Arabs. Unfortunately, Lawrence and Faisal were outgunned in Versailles.

They were unable to prevent the French from pressing their claim to Syria, and the French were determined to enact the terms of the Sykes-Bicot Agreement. In 1920, the French invaded Syria after a brief, fierce battle. The French forces of General Henri Gouraud entered Damascus. The French forces of General Henri Gouraud entered Damascus. Faisal's dream of an Arab kingdom was destroyed. So you see, just like on the Eastern Front, in the Middle East, 1918 wasn't really an end to the fighting.

The Middle East was remade. And the years that followed, many of the inhabitants rose up against the new imperial powers. They fought the British, they fought the French, they fought each other. Faisal's Hashemite family, the family of the Sharif of Mecca, they actually lost control of much of Arabia. They were attacked by the House of Saud who occupied Mecca and Medina and rule over Saudi Arabia to this day. There were revolts against French rule in Syria. There was a rebellion against British rule in Iraq in 1920. There was a huge Arab revolt in Palestine against the British authorities. And Lawrence watched all this play out, tormented. He did work with Winston Churchill

in 1920 to try and reorder the Middle East. He was not a success. He despised bureaucratic work. Having been kicked out of Syria, he managed to get Faisal placed on the throne of Iraq as a runner's up prize. And he got Faisal's brother Abdullah placed on the throne of Transjordan, a kingdom made up in Whitehall. But as Lawrence was doing this work, something else was going on in parallel. And that was that Lawrence was becoming incredibly famous. Lawrence was turned into a phenomenon by a man called Lowell Thomas. He's an American journalist. He'd met him in Jerusalem in 1918, just before the end of the war.

Thomas had been sent out to find stories that would get Americans excited about the war. out to find stories that would get Americans excited about the war. And Lord knows there was precious little to get excited about chewing barbed wire on the Western Front. He would have to look elsewhere. And he tried the Eastern Theater. And that's where he met Lawrence, in Jerusalem. Lawrence took him into the deserts. They went on operations for several weeks. Thomas shot a great deal of film, photographs, Lawrence featured in them. When the war ended, Thomas decided to use all this content, this evergreen content, folks. So he decided to recycle it. And he produced a kind of weird stage presentation called With Alan B in Palestine. And there was a lecture, there was dancing, there was display of some of his photographs, and there was music. It was fully Orientalist. The Middle East was presented as kind of fantastical

place, a weird, romantic, almost a gothic version of reality. And the show premiered in New York in March 1919. And then he brought the show to the UK that summer. The audiences loved it. But what they particularly loved about it was Lawrence. In the early run-throughs of this show, Lawrence had a kind of cameo. The main focus was on Allenby and the formal military campaign to wrest Syria and Palestine off the Turks. But the audiences adored these pictures of this handsome Brit dressed as a Bedouin, staring dreamily into the empty horizon. For some reason, it just captured the public's imagination. And so to bulk up Lawrence's role in the show, Lawrence did a photo shoot in London, dressed as an Arab.

And with this new material, Thomas kind of did a relaunch, a reboot of the show. And the title this time was With Alan B in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia. This was now early 1920. And Lawrence was now the co-star. He was on the top of the bill. And Lawrence, who was reasonably obscure during the First World War, became a household name. Audiences absolutely loved him. He rocketed to global stardom. Given that was

happening alongside various setbacks and catastrophes that were afflicting his former wartime comrades, the Hashemite family, Faisal, Abdullah, his brother. Lawrence found this very, very difficult to cope with. In fact, he became quite sort of appalled with his new stardom. He changed his name. He enlisted in the RAF as an airman, the lowest rank in 1922. He called himself John Hume Ross. Fascinatingly, like his father, he finds himself disguising his true identity. But that was a bit chaotic, and then the newspapers found out it was him and published he forces him to leave, and then he re-enlists again. He served in the Tank Corps under a false name, and then he joined the RAF again. It was up and down. In the mid-1920s,

he wrote an account of the revolt, called it Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It became a massive, massive bestseller. All the money, I think, went to the Benevolent Fund. He said he refused to enrich himself off the back of the revolt. He actually had an interesting role in the RAF as a forward-thinking person. He played an important role in the development of fast rescue boats so the RAF could pluck down pilots out of the channel before they come to hypothermia. He seems reasonably happy in the RAF doing this kind of work, and he was sad to leave in 1935. I don't think he was cut out for life beyond the forces. In the end, he met a tragically early death. He was on a pretty country lane in Dorset. There's a cottage there, a tiny little place. There's two small rooms on each floor. It's a steep staircase between the two stories.

Oddly, there's no toilet. There's no kitchen. It's known as Clouds Hill. And it was the home of a man who called himself T.E. Shaw. He was a reclusive ex-serviceman. The only time any of the neighbours saw him, he was driving his big, beloved motorcycle through the countryside. Shaw, you may have guessed, was Lawrence. He'd bought a house in the late 1920s. It was a place where he thought he could escape from the glare of publicity. He could have spent pretty lonely days there reading, thinking. And on the 13th of May 1935, he was riding his beloved motorcycle along the narrow, picturesque, winding roads of Dorset. He'd left the military just two months before, and there was a dip in this road, and his view was obstructed. He came over the crest of the hill and there in front of him were two boys on

bicycles. He swerved to avoid them. He lost control. He was thrown over his handlebars and fell and sustained terrible head injuries. He died six days later on the 19th of May 1935. He was 46 years old. Interestingly, all the surgeons who attended him, trying to save his life, developed a keen interest in the use of motorcycle helmets to prevent brain injury. And a lifetime of campaigning by this surgeon eventually led to mandatory helmets for motorbikes in the UK. So there was some positive legacy of a tragically premature death. At Lawrence's funeral, Winston Churchill turned up, he spoke. He said that Lawrence was one of those beings whose pace of life was faster and more intense than what is normal. And Churchill knew exactly what he was

talking about in that department. He made the extraordinary claim saying, we will never see his like again. Lawrence was celebrated as one of the greatest Britons of his generation. And interesting, I think, like Churchill at the end of his life, Lawrence believed that in many ways he'd failed. I'll leave the final thought to Lawrence himself. In the 1990s, very excitingly, an early draft of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom was found. And in it, Lawrence

wrote this passage, which was omitted, interestingly, from later versions. And I think it's the best description of how he felt during the revolt, when it became clear that he couldn't remain true to both his majesty's government and his Arab comrades. For my work on the Arab front, I determined to accept nothing. The cabinet raised the Arabs to fight for us by definite promises of self-government afterwards. Arabs believe in persons, not in institutions. They saw me as a free agent of the British government and demanded from me an endorsement of its written promises. So I had to join the conspiracy and, for what my word was worth, assured the men of their reward.

In our two years partnership under fire, they grew accustomed to believing me and to think my government, like myself, sincere. In this hope, they performed some fine things. But of course, instead of being proud of what we did together, I was continually and bitterly ashamed. Thanks for listening. See you next time. you you