Members of an International Brigade in formation during the Spanish civil war.

On17 and 18 July 1936 Spanish generals, soon to be under the command of General Francisco Franco (1892– 1975), staged a coup against the Republican government, which had become strongly left wing after the Popular Front’s legitimate electoral victory the previous February. The Soviet Union quickly decided to help the Spanish Republicans do battle against Francoism, which was widely viewed as a Spanish brand of fascism; but it acted cautiously, in consideration of English neutrality and French hesitation. Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) decided to supply the Spanish government with limited military aid— weapons, pilots, tank drivers, and military advisers (to total two thousand men for the entire war)— while entrusting to the Communist International (Comintern) the task of forming an international volunteer army. On 18 September 1936 the Communist International’s executive committee met and decided, according to terms in the transcript, ‘‘to proceed with the recruitment, among workers of all countries, of volunteers with military experience, in preparation for their deployment in Spain.’’ But the Comintern did not wish to be recognized as initiating the formation of foreign brigades, which only became official on 22 October 1936 by decree of the Spanish government.

A total of almost 32,000 foreigners from nearly fifty countries enrolled in the brigades. Among them were nearly 9,000 French; 3,000 Poles; 3,000 Italians; 2,300 Americans; 2,200 Germans; and 2,100 citizens from the various Balkan countries. There were 1,800 British; 1,700 Belgians; 1,000 Czechoslovakians; 900 from the Baltic region; and 900 from Austria. Scandinavian countries accounted for 800; 600 came from the Netherlands, 500 from Hungary, 500 from Canada, 400 from Switzerland, and 100 from Portugal. Jewish volunteers had a special presence. They numbered some 5,000, many of them Polish volunteers with the Botwin Company of the 13th Dombrowsky brigade, which published its own Yiddish newspaper.

Generally, the term International Brigades designated all the anti-Francoist foreign fighters, and it should be noted that other foreign units, and Spanish units that included foreigners, participated outside the international brigades formation. About two thousand such foreigners enrolled in the regular Spanish army. In addition, about one thousand non-Spanish fighters fought with various militias, whether anarchist, anarchist-syndicalist, or part of the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification). This brought the total number of foreign fighters to thirty-five thousand or about one-third of the foreign contingent (composed of Portuguese, Italian, and Germans) enlisted by the pro-Franco nationalists. Of those thirty-five thousand, about five thousand were killed. Finally, the International Brigades were not limited to foreigners; from December 1936, they were open to Spanish volunteers and draftees, and by the autumn of 1937 they represented the bulk of brigade combatants.

Essentially, although modifications of the scheme were numerous, there were five International Brigades. Each brigade was divided into four to six battalions and each of these, usually into five companies. None was homogenous in national or linguistic composition. German was the prevailing language spoken in Thaelmann Brigade; Italian predominated in the Garibaldi Brigade. The Dombrwoski Brigade was largely Polish; the Marseillaise Brigade, French; the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was predominantly English, even though its commanders were in succession Yugoslavian, German, Spanish, and Brazilian.

A sociological profile of recruits can be sketched from the largest contingent, from France. The average age of a volunteer was twenty-nine years, nine months; the modal age was thirty. More than half the combatants were young men between twenty-six and thirty-four years old. Unmarried men were overrepresented, but the most striking statistic concerned the overwhelming participation of the working class. They represented 65 percent of the French volunteers, to which can be added some 17 percent manual and unskilled laborers. Politically, two-thirds of the French volunteers were communists or declared fellow- travelers, the proportion was even higher in the other national contingents. In addition, proportionally more communists filled positions in the higher ranks of command. Some 52 percent of French combatants were card-carrying members of the Communist Party; that figure jumped to 68 percent for lower-grade officers, 79 percent of junior officers, and virtually all of the commanders and political commissars. In Spain, the French-Belgian communist André Marty (1886–1956) was appointed organizational leader of the International Brigades, assisted by Palmiro Togliatti (1893–1964), a member, like Marty, of the executive of the Comintern.

In the end, although communist participation in the Brigades was essential, the Comintern’s appeal had reached beyond the communist sphere to touch a highly popular antifascist sensibility. In the 1920s Italian fascism could seem to be an historical exception. But this view changed during the 1930s with the rise of authoritarian regimes in Western and Central Europe, and with the development of protofascist movements in the European democracies. Most important, of course, were Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and Franco. Carlo Rosselli, fighting in Spain in a unit independent of the International Brigades, encapsulated the antifascist sentiment with his slogan: ‘‘Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy.’’ Posterity offers the best evidence of the success of the International Brigades on a symbolic level. While their existence was proof of the success of the communist strategy, their archetypical antifascism was sustained by literary and cinematic creations not strictly communist, such as Andre´ Malraux’s novel L’espoir (1937; Man’s Hope), Joris Ivens’s film Terre d’Espagne (1937; Spanish Earth), Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938).

But neither political nor symbolic successes were sufficient on the battlefield. While acquitting themselves well despite high casualties, in Madrid in November 1936 and on the Ebre River in July 1938, the International Brigades were, like the regular Spanish army, eventually defeated. On 25 September 1938 they were withdrawn from the front, then dissolved. Brigadists gradually left the country, but more than five thousand former volunteers from countries with authoritarian or fascist regimes were incarcerated by the French government. Several years later, a considerable number of these fighters would enter the anti-Nazi Resistance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Castells, Andreu. Las brigadas internacionales de la guerra de Espan˜a. Barcelona, 1974. Ranzato, Gabriele. ‘‘Brigate internazionali.’’ In Dizionario del fascismo, edited by Victoria De Grazia and Sergio Luzzatto, vol. 1, 198–199. Turin, Italy, 2002. Skoutelsky, Re´mi. L’espoir guidait leurs pas: Les volontaires franc¸ais dans les Brigades internationales, 1936–1939. Paris, 1998. Zaagsma, Gerben. ‘‘‘Red Devils’: The Botwin Company in the Spanish Civil War.’’ East European Jewish Affairs 33, no. 1 (2003): 83–99.

Greek Air Force  Breguet Br. 14 A2 circa 1921

Greece finally entered World War I, in its very last phase, on the side of the Entente. Greece’s territorial gains this time proved to be short-term. After the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) Greece took over the administration of the Smyrna region in Asia Minor, a former Ottoman land. Despite Venizelos’s diplomatic triumph in the elections of 1920 he was defeated by the royalists, who took advantage of the war weariness of the population, and Constantine returned to the country. Greece sent troops to Asia Minor to defend its territorial gains against the rising tide of Turkish nationalism led by Mustafa Kemal. The Greek military campaign against the Turkish troops failed, and the Turkish counteroffensive resulted in the defeat of the Greek army and the expulsion of the entire Greek populations from Asia Minor in 1922.

After WORLD WAR I, the Allied Powers supported Greek occupation of Smyrna, which had been part of the German- allied Ottoman Empire. In the meantime, Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938) (later renowned as Kemal Atatûrk) successfully led a revolution against the government of Sultan Muhammad VI (r. 1918–22) and set up a new provisional republican Turkish government at Ankara in 1920. For their part, the Greeks wanted to expand what the post–World War I Treaty of Sèvres had given them, Smyrna, to include Thrace and as much of Anatolia as they could manage to acquire. On June 22, 1920, the Greek army under Alexander I (1893–1920) began its advance inland, taking Alasehir on June 24. The advance paused here while Greeks and Turks negotiated at Constantinople (later Istanbul). Muhammad VI had agreed to certain concessions, which Kemal now refused to honor. The negotiations broke down, and the Greek offensive resumed on March 23, 1921.

At Inönü 150 miles west of Ankara, a Turkish force under Ismet Pasha (1884–1973) retarded the advance of 37,000 Greek troops. By August 24, 1921, however the Greeks had reached the Sakarya River, 70 miles outside Ankara, where they would fight the decisive battle of the war. The battle commenced on August 24, 1921, and pitted 50,000 Greeks against 44,000 Turks, who were subsequently reinforced by an additional 8,000. Although the Greeks initially succeeded in driving back the Turkish center, on September 10, Kemal led a small reserve force in an attack on the Greek left flank. Fearing envelopment, the Greeks disengaged and withdrew to Smyrna, having lost 3,897 killed and 19,000 wounded. An additional 15,000 had been captured or were missing in action. Turkish losses were 3,700 killed, 18,000 wounded, and 1,000 missing or taken prisoner.

Following their victory at the Sakarya, the Turks intensified their counteroffensive, beginning on August 18, 1922, laying siege to Smyrna. It fell to the Turks on September 9, and the Greek forces were expelled from the island.

The flight of about 1.3 million Greeks from Turkey was later ratified by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which also provided for the transfer of 380,000 Muslims to Turkey in the framework of the forced exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. The defeat in Asia Minor caused a major political crisis. A Revolutionary Committee of officers forced Constantine to leave the country for a second time and a Commission of Inquiry put the blame for the Asia Minor debacle on leading royalist ministers and officers: six of them were sentenced to death and executed. Constantine abdicated and retired to Sicily, where he died soon after. After a plebiscite in April 1924 the monarchy was abolished and Greece was proclaimed a republic.

Further reading: Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City (New York: New Mark Press, 1999).

Orde Wingate

A Haganah poster from the 1940s.

Israel’s armed forces have evolved from prestate vigilante bands to the paramount strike force in the Middle East. In 1908 Jewish settlers formed an ad hoc society of armed sentinels, called Ha-Shomer, or Guardsmen, to replace mercenary, untrustworthy hired Arab watchmen in thwarting robbery, cattle-rustling, and poaching. The Jewish farm laborers on the settlements (the Shomrim would not protect farms with an Arab or mixed workforce) comprised a reserve to assist the patrol cadres, who were equipped with a motley collection of obsolescent firearms. Another armed band, the Jaffa Group, provided security for the Jews of that community and Tel Aviv.

These organizations kept a low profile during World War I, as the Turks (and Palestine) were formally allied with Germany, and Jewish loyalties were suspect. Nevertheless, the Palestine-based spy ring NILI—an acronym for the Hebrew verse Netzah Yisrael Lo Yeshaker (The strength of Israel will not lie [1 Sam. 15:29]), which served as its password—comprised of a former Zionist youth corps, worked for British interests, while other Palestinian Jewish adolescents were conscripted into the Turkish army. Zionists expelled from Palestine by the Turks formed the Zionist Mule Corps, providing logistic support in the Gallipoli Campaign. Veterans of the Mule Corps created the nucleus of new all-Zionist battalions, the British 38th and 39th King’s Fusiliers, which met the test of fire in Allenby’s Palestine Campaign, 1917–1918.

All of these ventures provided valuable military experience for a proficient cadre, which returned to postwar Palestine, now under the British Mandate, whereby a Jewish homeland was to be established alongside an Arab nation. The British high commissioner encouraged the Zionist administration in Palestine to set up an executive framework under the auspices of the formally sanctioned Jewish Agency for Palestine. Independent of but allied to these was the Histadrut, nominally a populist labor society, but in reality the linchpin of Zionist industrialization and agricultural expansion in Palestine.

Established by the labor mainstream, Histadrut, after the murderous Arab riots in 1920, set up the Hagganah (self-defense force), which rapidly became a country-wide Jewish army as Jewish immigration swelled to a flood upon the rise of Hitler, and Palestinian Arab resistance hardened in response. Armed defense organizations were illegal under the mandate, so Hagganah had to organize, train, and procure weapons covertly. The organization even managed to establish a backyard armaments industry producing bullets and crude submachine guns and mortars.

After the Arab riots of 1929, Hagganah was transferred from the authority of Histadrut to the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, which had formerly spurned any connection with outlawed clandestine groups. This progression entailed splitting Hagganah high command into left and right political factions. Although illegal, every Jewish town and neighborhood in Palestine was affiliated with a district command of Hagganah. Elements of the conservative wing split from the labor-left mainstream and allied themselves with Zeev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Party, the foundation of today’s Likud, thereby forming the renegade National Military Party, or Etzel (alternately, Irgun).The latter, at most consisting of 250 firebrands, were ruthless in their attacks on Arabs, while Hagganah counseled restraint so as to forestall unwelcome British attention.

The Palestinian Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, largely directed at the British Mandatory government, brought a measure of unusual cooperation between the colonial counterterrorism effort and specially constituted Jewish Supernumerary Police, developing commando expertise under the able direction of the New Testament Zionist Orde Wingate. In 1938 and 1939, Hagganah benefited by the appointment of a nonpartisan nationwide commander and the establishment of a professional military general staff to coordinate the formerly diversified elements.

During World War II, Hagganah and segments of the Irgun collaborated with the British authorities in fighting the Nazi menace; however, a renegade sector of the Irgun, Lehi, informally the Stern Gang, rashly attacked British and Arab civilians. (The British high commissioner for Egypt was assassinated by Jewish terrorists in 1944.) Also during the war, the left wing of the Hagganah formed an elite strike force, or Palmach, sanctioned because it would embody a potential guerrilla resistance to Rommel’s advancing Afrika Corps. In addition, 30,000 Palestinian Jews gained invaluable experience serving with the British armed forces, including a Jewish Brigade Group. Hagganah meanwhile developed a field corps, a medical service, a signals corps, an arms industry, and an intelligence section, the last assisting illegal immigration of Holocaust refugees. Intelligence became paramount in the postwar years when Hagganah conducted an effective insurgency campaign against British military and police logistics, while the Irgun and Stern groups focused on terrorizing British individuals.

During the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, Israeli political leader David Ben-Gurion remodeled Hagganah as the national defense force of the newborn state. Early in the war, Irgun was forcefully integrated into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), the new designation for the armed forces of Israel. In the course of desperate fighting, the patchwork geographical structure of company-sized lots amalgamated into battalions, then regiments, which nonetheless retained their regional identification. Makeshift aviation and naval assets were likewise “born in battle” and integrated into the whole. The IDF would win every one of its subsequent conflicts against its hostile Arab neighbors, and such success would be studied in some detail by military academies around the world (with the conspicuous exception of Arab military academies). But the reason for the IDF success, aside from the numerous Arab military deficiencies (lack of coordination, unprofessional officers, untrained troops, etc.), came down to a simple point: Israel had no alternative to victory. Defeat meant literal death.

References and further reading: Allon,Yigal. The Making of Israel’s Army. New York: Universe Books, 1971. Dupuy, Trevor N. Elusive Victory: The Arab-Israeli Wars, 1947–1974. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Schiff, Zeev. A History of the Israeli Army (1870–1974). San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1974. Van Creveld,Martin. The Sword and the Olive: A Critical History of the Israeli Defense Force. New York: Public Affairs, 1998.

Fraternal conflict that brought in U.S. armed intervention. In September 1963, a military coup removed freely elected president Juan Bosch after only seven months in office and replaced him with a three-man junta headed by Donald Reid Cabral, a prominent Dominican businessman. In less than two years the Cabral government lost popular support, due largely to widespread corruption. On 24 April 1965, disgruntled factions of the armed forces, led by Colonel Francisco Caamaño Deñó and supported by the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) and some elements of the Christian Socialist Party, took over the government. Bosch’s supporters, the Constitutionalists, called for his return to the presidential palace, a move that had some popular support. However, the U.S. ambassador, William Tipple Bennett, opposed the return of Bosch, as did some factions of the Dominican armed forces, especially the air force.

General Elías Wessín y Wessín ordered the bombing of Santo Domingo by the Dominican air force and attempted to take control of the presidential palace in the colonial part of the capital. The Constitutionalists resisted fiercely and soon appeared to have the upper hand. On 28 April U.S. President Lyndon Johnson ordered an intervention by 500 marines to protect American citizens. The marines reported that the country was on the verge of collapse and that the level of violence was higher than anticipated. Johnson then ordered 23,000 additional troops into the country to keep Bosch from returning and to prevent a possible communist takeover as had happened in Cuba.

Despite the U.S. intervention, the conflict between the Constitutionalists and the Loyalists (supporters of Cabral) raged on. Johnson’s actions and policies drew heavy criticism from Mexico and Chile (not to mention opposition in the U.S. itself). By July Johnson realized that Bosch had little chance of returning and he called for a peace-keeping force from the Organization of American States to enforce a ceasefire. Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Brazil sent troops to serve as peace keepers.

The Act of Dominican Reconciliation was agreed to on 31 August 1965, and an interim government was established. In 1966 Dr. Joaquin Balaguer was elected president. Balaguer brought a measure of stability to the island republic during two consecutive terms as president.

References and further reading: Gleijeses, Piero. The Dominican Crisis: The 1965 Constitutionalist Revolt and the American Intervention. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Lowenthal,Abraham F. The Dominican Intervention. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972. Slater, Jerome. Intervention and Negotiation: The United States and the Dominican Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

LINK

General Draza Mihailovich, center, with American OSS officers

Neither Chetniks nor Partizans were ever in any position to engage the occupying forces in head-on fighting. The chronological backbone of the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle is formed by the seven major Axis offensives against the Partizans. The first two, launched in September 1941 and lasting until February 1942, set a pattern for the rest of the war. Four German divisions and six (later eight) Italian divisions were joined (in November 1941) by Chetnik formations, and together they chased Tito’s forces out of Serbia, Montenegro and the Sandzak to a new temporary base in the Foca triangle, where their borders meet Bosnia and Hercegovina. By mid-June 1942, the Partizans were again on the move, in a north-westerly direction, along the line dividing the Italian and German occupation zones of the NDH. It ran from just west of Zagreb, bisecting central Bosnia, to intersect the northern border of Italian-occupied Montenegro. The line placed the main cities of Banja Luka and Sarajevo within the German zone, leaving the Italians to police the remote and vertiginous mountain country separating the western hinterland of Bosnia-Hercegovina from Dalmatia and the sea.

Italian troops were spread thinly in those parts, and the Partizans were reinforced by a flood of recruits fleeing from Ustasha massacres and German reprisals. The 3000 or so fighters who set off on the march from Foca had increased threefold by the time they arrived in north-western Bosnia, at the beginning of November. Tito seized on this breathing space to summon an Anti-fascist Council for the Peoples’ Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ), in the town of Bihaç (26–27 November 1942). The Anti-fascist Councils of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina were also founded at this time, the first to be established for the post-war republics. It was a typical mixture of bluff and ambition. The Partizans were a magnet for the desperate Serbs of the Independent State of Croatia during their march up-country, and they were now also pulling in an increasing number of Muslims, but they hardly amounted to a major military threat. Even if Stalin was deceived by Tito’s fanciful accounts of Partizan strength, he was determined to keep things quiet for fear of offending his capitalist allies. Moscow also rejected the suggestion that a provisional Yugoslav government in the form of a Peoples’ Committee should be proclaimed, and so AVNOJ presented itself simply as the parliament of a popular resistance movement.

To the extent that the western Allies took much notice of the Balkan theatre of operations during the first year of the war there, their attention was caught by the Chetniks. Mihailoviç was the accredited military head of the Yugoslav government-in-exile, and hardly anyone had heard of Tito. The Allied invasion of French North Africa in November 1942, and the defeat of Rommel at El Alamein, changed all that. Yugoslavia was suddenly thrust into prominence as a possible choice for a landing to secure the bridgehead of an advance into occupied Europe across the Mediterranean. The Italians increased their presence in Bosnia-Hercegovina to 16 divisions during the autumn of 1942, to add to the Germans’ four, initiating a Third Offensive, an extensive sweep through south-eastern Bosnia and Montenegro, in preparation for an attack on the Partizan stronghold around Bihaç.

The crucial Fourth Offensive (January–May 1943), which included Chetnik forces in support of six German and eight Italian divisions, almost trapped the Partizans, but their main force of about 20 000 fighters succeeded in breaking out at the battle on the River Neretva in early March. They penetrated the cordon at a point held by Chetniks, and inflicted severe losses on Mihailoviç’s units, pursuing them all the way back to the Foca triangle, only to be cornered in turn by the Italians and Germans, who launched a Fifth Offensive lasting throughout May and June. Faced by overwhelmingly superior firepower, and outnumbered six to one, the Partizans had to beat the same line of retreat as in the previous summer – back to the safety of central Bosnia, to Jajce, the medieval capital. Once more they had to break out of encirclement, this time across the River Sutjeska, taking appalling casualties: the division escorting the sick and wounded was cut to pieces, and total losses were of the order of one-third.

The crossing and re-crossing of the Neretva was a high point of Partizan heroism in a brutal and exhausting war, and all this commotion behind enemy lines attracted the attention of the British, who in April and May parachuted in liaison officers to the Partizans, personally selected for the job by Churchill. Two of them had his private ear, and they gave Tito a glowing testimonial. Whether their reports caused or only served to justify what followed is unclear, but in any event the decision was taken in September to support Tito and Mihailoviç equally, and in December supplies to the Chetniks were cut off. The reports would presumably have been less enthusiastic had the authors known that, after breaking out across the Neretva, Tito sent his lieutenants to negotiate with the Germans for a free hand in dealing with the Chetniks, and broached the possibility of common action against a landing by Anglo-American forces. The Communists wanted a Soviet victory in the Balkans which would secure their grip on Yugoslavia, even if that meant keeping the Nazis fighting long enough for the Red Army to arrive as saviours.

Allied landings in Sicily and the Italian mainland (July–September 1943) were followed by the capitulation of Italy on 8 September. Large quantities of Italian military equipment fell into the hands of the Partizans, but even this major windfall was less important than the political eclipse of their rivals. Tito felt assured enough of western support to call a second meeting of the Anti-fascist Council for the Peoples’ Liberation of Yugoslavia on 29 November 1943 at Jajce, while Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were meeting in Teheran. This time, he forestalled any hesitation by his Soviet backers, who were not represented at the meeting of AVNOJ, by proclaiming a Peoples’ Committee as the sole legitimate government of Yugoslavia, and by conferring on himself the rank of Marshal of Yugoslavia. Allied recognition and supplies gave a huge boost to recruitment between October and December, when German estimates put the number of Partizans at 110 000.

The Allies’ decision to cut off all support for Mihailoviç has provoked the charge that Churchill and the western Allies cynically abandoned Serbia (and Yugoslavia) to communism, when they might have saved both by continued support for Mihailoviç. But even after the Italian surrender, a lot of hard fighting remained to be done in order to defeat Hitler, and independent signals’ intelligence indicated that the Partizans were doing most of it in a strategically sensitive area – it was important to keep the Germans guessing about the likelihood of a supporting landing in Dalmatia to cut off the Axis rear. The Chetniks in Serbia were potential allies only on their own soil, then still far beyond the reach of the massive Allied assault required to give a popular rising there any hope of success. Furthermore, it was by no means clear who now represented the wishes and interests of Yugoslavia. King Petar’s government in London was torn apart by Serb–Croat divisions, particularly as it became obvious that the Chetniks were fighting for a Great Serbia, whereas the federalist stance of the Partizan leaders seemed to offer a genuine chance of unified resistance to the occupying forces.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this particular argument, it is beyond question that the Allies’ switch of support dealt a terrible blow to Mihailoviç. The Chetniks were still a force to be reckoned with as the war entered its final months. The Partizan presence within Serbia itself was tiny, just 1700 fighters in January 1944, while the Chetniks numbered between 60 000 and 70 000 on active service, and 10 000 of them were fully armed, according to a British liaison officer on the spot. Never a unified movement, the Chetniks fragmented completely when starved of supplies and Allied political backing. Some of their commanders entered into open collaboration with the Axis against the Communists, so confirming the judgement made about them, while many individual fighters either joined the Partizans or melted away into the civilian population to await the end of the war.

Rashid Ali meeting Hitler

As far back as 1933, immediately after Hitler’s accession to power, the British-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni, made contact with the German consul to declare his support and offer his help. After years of uncompromising struggle against the British and the Jews, the Mufti left Palestine, and with stops in Beirut, Baghdad and Tehran en route, reached Berlin in 1941. The most important of these stops was Baghdad, where in April 1941, an Iraqi politician called Rashid ‘Ali al-Gaylani, with military support, seized power and established a pro-Axis regime. Despite some help from Syria, at that time still controlled by the Vichy authorities, the Axis powers were too far away to save him, and his regime was overthrown by British and British-led forces. In Syria a committee was formed to mobilize support for the Rashid ‘Ali regime. This was the nucleus of what later became the Ba’ath party, rival branches of which came to govern both Syria and Iraq.

Rashid Ali fled and later joined the Mufti in Berlin. Among the many who supported or sympathized with the Axis during the war years were some who later became famous. Nasser recorded his sympathy and his disappointment at Germany’s defeat; Sadat according to his own memoirs, was a willing co-operator in German espionage. Even Rashid ‘Ali has been resuscitated as a hero in Saddam Husayn’s Iraq.

At first sight, this enthusiasm for the Nazi cause seems very strange. Nazi racism cannot have had much appeal for a people who, according to Nazi pseudo-science, were themselves racial inferiors. Nazi propaganda, in so far as it was specifically anti-Jewish rather than generally anti-Semitic, had considerable support. But it was, after all, the persecution of Jews by the Nazis in Germany and their imitators elsewhere that was the driving force of Jewish migration to Palestine and the consequent strengthening of the Jewish community in that country. The Nazis not only caused this migration; they even encouraged and facilitated it until the outbreak of war, while the British, in the forlorn hope of winning Arab good will, imposed increasing restrictions. Nevertheless, significant numbers of Arabs favoured the Germans, who sent the Jews to Palestine, rather than the British, who tried to keep them out.

The Axis powers tried in different ways to profit from this mood. First Fascist Italy and later Nazi Germany launched massive programmes of propaganda and penetration in the Arab world, with considerable impact on the new generation of political thinkers and activists. The Nazis in particular, by preaching hatred of Jews, were able to exploit a problem which they themselves had in large measure created.

While the former Spanish colonies may have rejected Madrid’s rule, they accepted the doctrine of uti possidetis juris de 1810, the notion that newly minted republics would accept as their frontiers the boundaries that Spain had used to delineate its former colonies. Agreeing on boundary lines proved quite complicated because over the years various military, religious, and political organizations had created often conflicting versions of the same maps. As Chile’s Diario Oficial noted, the cartographers often had only a vague idea where the boundaries lay. The frontier separating Bolivia and Chile, for example, ran through the Atacama Desert, one of the world’s more desolate territories. During their early years neither Bolivia nor Chile had disputed too vigorously the precise location of their common border: the ownership of a few feet of an arid wasteland simply could not excite even the most avid jingo. But thanks to the discovery of guano and, later, nitrates, both highly prized sources of chemicals needed to manufacture fertilizer and explosives, the Atacama suddenly became alluring. Consequently, beginning in the 1860s Santiago and La Paz began to press their claims to this potential economic bonanza: Bolivia demanded the land down to the twenty-fifth parallel south latitude, and Chile, the territory north to the twenty-third parallel south latitude. Anxious to assert its sovereignty, Santiago’s minions occupied Mejillones in 1861, replacing the ousted Bolivian officials with Chileans who issued rights to mine the guano in the disputed area. In 1863 Bolivia’s legislature, eager to assert its claim to the desert, gave the president, Gen. José María de Acha, permission to use force if Chile refused to recognize Bolivian sovereignty over the disputed land.

The border issue might have plunged the nations into a war but for an unexpected revival of imperialism: an 1864 Spanish scientific expedition, in fact a naval task force, used the supposed maltreatment of its citizens as an excuse to seize Peru’s Chincha Islands. The incident so inflamed both Chile and Bolivia that they set aside their own squabbles to repel the Spanish invasion. Pending a final solution, the border was drawn on the twenty-fourth parallel. Eventually, Peru’s coastal batteries in Callao drove Madrid’s fleet from South American waters but only after it had seriously damaged Chile’s principal port, Valparaíso. With peace restored to the Pacific, a new Bolivian government under Gen. Mariano Melgarejo tried again in 1866 to solve the boundary issue. Santiago, perhaps in thrall to the spirit of “Americanism,” agreed to accept the twenty-fourth parallel as the border. Chile, however, retained the right to share equally in the revenues generated by anyone exploiting those minerals mined in the territory located between the twenty-third and twenty-fifth parallels.

By the early 1870s numerous Chile-based companies mined not only guano but also, increasingly, nitrates from the Atacama. Similarly, Chilean interests also extracted from Bolivia’s Caracoles mines silver ore, which they sent to Chile, where it was smelted, processed, and then exported to Europe. Believing itself to be the victim of greedy Chilean capitalists, the Bolivian legislature decided to protect their nation’s economic future by seeking more control of its desert resources. It began by nullifying Melgarejo’s 1866 pact.

Normally, the Chileans would have responded aggressively, but the Chilean government, feeling threatened by Peru’s recent naval rearmament program and Argentine territorial demands, considered it prudent to resolve peacefully its dispute with Bolivia. Thus, Chile’s new president, Federico Errázuriz, sent Santiago Lindsay north to La Paz with orders to settle the boundary issue. The resulting 1872 accord, the Lindsay- Corral pact, seemed almost a repeat the 1866 agreement, although La Paz did agree to include nitrates as one of the minerals that Chileans could mine duty free in return for some financial concessions. Not surprisingly, many Bolivians feared that the Lindsay-Corral pact would not truly inhibit Chile from attempting to control the contested area: obviously Bolivia needed more than words to keep its territory out of Chile’s clutches. Bolivia quickly discovered an anti-Chilean soul mate in Peru, which viewed Errázuriz’s decision to acquire two armored warships as jeopardizing its maritime interests. Thus, in February 1873 Bolivia and Peru signed a secret military agreement pledging to aid each other if Chile threatened either signatory.

Perhaps emboldened by this alliance, the Bolivian congress refused to ratify the Lindsay-Corral accord. Errázuriz, fearful that Bolivia and Peru might entice Argentina to join their anti-Chilean coalition, again compromised: in August 1874 Bolivia and Chile again set the boundary between their territories at the twenty-fourth parallel. Chile surrendered its territorial claims and its right to share any revenues derived from taxing enterprises mining the Atacama, and in return the Bolivian government vowed not to raise taxes on any Chilean corporation mining the desert for a period of twenty-fi ve years. Some Bolivian deputies wanted to reject the treaty, but the threat of the then president, Tomás Frías, to resign forced the legislature to acquiesce.

Regrettably, the 1874 treaty did not end the friction. Chile’s miners, who had long complained about the rough treatment they received at the hands of the Atacama police, continued to carp. And following the murder of their countryman Eliseo Arriagada, whom the local police had shot, the Chilean miners begged the Pinto government to protect them. Although this matter came to the attention of the Chilean Chamber of Deputies, the abuse did not cease, much to the dismay of many Chileans who still considered the Atacama to be theirs. What particularly galled some Chilean journalists was the fact that the Errázuriz government’s concessions to Bolivia had accomplished nothing: Bolivia continued to maltreat its Chilean workforce. In short, just as Christ died on the cross, “to redeem humanity,” wrote a Copiapó newspaper, “Chile in the name of American solidarity, had given its land to Bolivia.” Yet Chile still suffered from “offenses which daily wound its sons.” Thus in 1879, after years of not-so-silent suffering, Chile responded to Bolivia’s newly “elected” president Hilarión Daza’s latest insult—the unilateral imposition of higher export taxes—by seizing the land it had earlier ceded to Bolivia, thus causing the War of the Pacific, a contest that would soon involve Peru as well.

Casus foederis is derived from the Latin for “case of the alliance”. In diplomatic terms, it describes a situation in which the terms of an alliance come into play, such as one nation being attacked by another.

Thus, in World War I, the treaties between Italy and Austria-Hungary, and Romania, which purported to require Italy and Romania to come to Austria’s aid if Austria was attacked by another nation, were not honored by either Italy or Romania because, as Winston Churchill wrote, “the casus fœderis had not arisen” because the attacks on Austria had not been “unprovoked.”

Also the Turco-German alliance involving the Ottoman Empire and German Reich in WWI worked on this basis, as the Ottomans attacked Russian Black Sea ports on 28 October, 1914.