Hamburg-American Line, General von der Goltz, Baron von Wangenheim, and the Ottoman ambassador at Berlin.[8]
The watchdogs of British imperial welfare, however, were not asleep. Lord Crewe, the Secretary of State for India, was busily engaged in plans for safeguarding British economic and strategic interests in Mesopotamia. Early in September, 1914, General Sir Edmund Barrow, Military Secretary of the India Office, prepared a memorandum, "The Rôle of India in a Turkish War," which proposed the immediate occupation of Basra on the grounds that it was "the psychological moment to take action" and that "so unexpected a stroke at this moment would have a startling effect" in checkmating Turkish intrigues, encouraging the Arabs to revolt and thus forestalling an Ottoman attack on the Suez, and in protecting the oil installations at the head of the Persian Gulf.[9] Supporters of a pro-Balkan policy, in the meantime, were urging an attack on Turkey from the Mediterranean. Winston Churchill, Chief Lord of the Admiralty, for example, in a memorandum of August 19, 1914, to Sir Edward Grey, advocated an alliance with Greece against Turkey; by September 4 he had completed plans for a military and naval attack on the Dardanelles; on September 21 he telegraphed Admiral Carden, at Malta, to "sink the Goeben and Breslau, no matter what flag they fly, if they come out of the Straits." Mr. Churchill, with whose name will ever be associated the disastrous expedition to the Dardanelles, believed that, whatever the outcome of the war on the Western Front, the success or failure of Germany would be measured in terms of her power in the Near East after the termination of hostilities. To destroy German economic and political domination of Turkey it was necessary to have an expedition at the head of the Persian Gulf and, possibly, another in Syria, but
