Episode
The Ottoman March on Egypt 1915
- Podcast
- Explaining History
- Published
- Jun 3, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1797
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- http://explaininghistory.org
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/explaining-history-7091240/episodes/the-ottoman-march-on-egypt-1915/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/explaining-history-7091240/the-ottoman-march-on-egypt-1915.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we examine the opening moves of the Ottoman Empire’s war against Britain – a desperate, audacious campaign to seize the Suez Canal that has been largely forgotten but which revealed the fragility of the British Empire and the resilience of the Ottoman army. At the outbreak of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire saw itself surrounded by enemies: the British in Egypt, the Russians to the north, a hostile Habsburg Empire to the west, and a recently hostile Italy in the Mediterranean. The Young Turk government initially hoped to stay out of the war. But when they looked at Britain, France, and Russia, they saw voraciously hungry powers intent on dismembering their empire. Germany offered a security guarantee – unreliable, but the best available. The German High Command placed a high priority on cutting the Suez Canal. Between August and December 1914, 376 transport ships carried nearly 164,000 Allied troops through the canal. It was the vital artery connecting the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean – the lifeline of Britain’s Asian empire. If the Ottomans could pinch it off, they could deal Britain a mortal blow and perhaps inspire a pan‑Islamic jihad against British rule. The man chosen to lead the attack was Cemal Pasha. In November 1914, he stood in Istanbul’s central train station and publicly proclaimed his intention to conquer Egypt. The British dismissed his pledge as empty rhetoric. They did not believe he could raise an army large enough or cross the waterless, hostile Sinai desert. But Cemal assembled a heterogeneous, multi‑ethnic force – regular soldiers from the Arab provinces, volunteers from Bedouin, Druze, Circassian, Kurdish, Albanian, and even Jewish communities. He wrote to the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein…