Herbert Kitchener
Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl of Kitchener (Ballylongford, Ireland, June 24, 1850 - Orkney Islands, June 5, 1916) was an important British soldier and politician of Irish origin.
Early Years
Kitchener was born in Ballylongford, County Kerry, Ireland, the son of Henry Horatio Kitchener and Frances Anne Chevallier-Cole. After completing his studies in Switzerland and at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich he served as a volunteer in the French army during the Franco-Prussian War and in 1871 enlisted in the Royal Engineers of the British Army. He then served as an appraiser in Palestine, Egypt and Cyprus, where he learned to speak Arabic and made various topographical maps of these regions.
Later, he was British vice-consul in Anatolia and in 1884 participated as aide-de-camp in the failed expedition against Khartoum that hoped to save Governor Charles George Gordon from Sudanese rebels led by Muhammad Ahmad. At this time his fiancée Hermione Baker died in Cairo, a victim of typhoid fever, so Kitchener married his young niece Bertha Chevallier-Boutell, daughter of his cousin Francis H. de Chevallier-Boutell.
Second expedition to Sudan
He achieved fame in his country by participating in the recapture of Sudan for the British Crown between 1886 and 1899, again as an aide-de-camp. He entered the Order of the Bath and was made Sirdar of the Anglo-Egyptian army, which he led in the Battle of Omdurman against the Sudanese on September 2, 1898. The Anglo-Egyptian victory was largely due to measure to the facilities created by the construction of railway lines in the area that Kitchener himself had promoted.
That same year, he bloodlessly resolved the Fashoda Incident with the French colonial forces that intended to extend their area of influence to the Nile River, avoiding war between the two countries.
On November 18, 1898, he was made Baron of Khartoum and Aspall (Suffolk, England) and charged with creating a colonial government to keep peace in Sudan. In order to win over the local population, Kirchener promoted the creation of schools and other educational institutions such as Gordon Memorial College, in which children of all social classes were authorized to study. He also ordered the rebuilding of the Khartoum mosque and passed laws recognizing Friday (the day of prayer for Muslims) as an official holiday and freedom of worship in Sudan, and opposed the claims of evangelical Christian missionaries to convert Muslims. Sudanese to Christianity. In addition, he carried out a small tax reform aimed at reducing the taxes that the Sudanese had to pay to the Khedive of Egypt (the puppet ruler of the British) and gave a few lands and farm implements to the farmers of the region, who lived until then in a feudal regime.
All this led to the fact that in 1899, one of the small islands of the Nile as it passed through Aswan was named Kitchener Island in his honor.
Boer Wars
Kitchener joined Frederick Roberts' British reinforcements sent to South Africa in December 1899, after the outbreak of the Second Boer War. In November 1900 he replaced Roberts as Commander-in-Chief of the British troops, as Roberts had fallen ill.
The conventional Boer troops were quickly defeated, but an attempt to sign a peace and reconciliation treaty in February 1901 failed due to a veto by the British government. The war then resumed, now a guerrilla war against the Boer farmers, in which Kitchener put Roberts's tactics into practice after modifying them to make them more effective.
The ensuing campaign was brutal. An attempt was made to destroy from scratch any support that the civilian population could provide to the Boer soldiers, practicing a scorched earth policy. The farms were burned down and the construction of blockhouses (prefabricated wooden forts, capable of being disassembled, transported and reassembled wherever they were needed) spread. Kitchener also had the dubious honor of organizing the first concentration camp system in the 20th century, where nearly 20,000 Boer women, children and men, all civilians, died of starvation and mistreatment between 1900 and the end of the war. in 1902. Even his previous popularity could not save him from widespread criticism in Britain, the rest of Europe and, obviously, South Africa. His biggest scourge in this regard was humanitarian worker Emily Hobhouse, originally from Cornwall.
The vast majority of the Boer guerrillas were not professional soldiers and therefore did not wear military uniform, but fought in civilian dress. After long campaigns, this unsuitable clothing was left in tatters and the rebels were forced to don the uniforms of the British soldiers they captured or killed, since they were unable to obtain clothing on the farms that the English had burned down. The British then accused the Boers of trying to pass themselves off as Crown soldiers in order to go unnoticed and thus attack the enemy behind their lines. Kitchener then ordered any captured military or civilian wearing a stolen British uniform to be executed instantly, although he later regretted this and tried to deny in public that he had written such an order. The scandal reached its heights when numerous Australian soldiers, among whom was the trooper and famous poet Breaker Morant, were arrested and tried by a military court after executing numerous Boer prisoners (including children) in cold blood. several African natives and even a German missionary, excusing Kitchener's order regarding uniforms.
Lieutenants Breaker Morant and Peter Handcock were found guilty and shot at Pietersburg on February 27, 1902, their death sentences being signed by Kitchener's own fist. This decision is a source of controversy even today, especially in Australia, where it is claimed that the two soldiers were simple scapegoats in Kitchener's fight to overcome his popularity, which was then plummeting.
After six tense months the Treaty of Vereeniging of 1902 was finally signed. In the previous days Kitchener had repeatedly clashed with the Governor of the Cape Colony and the British government in his attempt to end once and for all with the war, even if it meant signing a peace that recognized certain rights for the Boers, including a future self-government and the reconstruction of their properties at the expense of the British Crown. Six days after the agreement, Kitchener was created Viscount of Khartoum, Aspall and Vaal (Transvaal, South Africa).
Stay in India and return to Egypt
Kitchener was next appointed Commander-in-Chief of British troops in India, a role he would hold from 1902 to 1909, during which time he restructured the disorganized colonial forces operating in the country. This brought him into a bitter confrontation with the viceroy, Lord Curzon of Kedleston, who feared losing his position to the newcomer. In 1910, Kitchener rose to the rank of field marshal, but Curzon successfully fended off his bid to become viceroy in 1911.
Unable to be head of the main British colony, Kitchener had to content himself with the post of Governor General of Egypt and Sudan, nominally under Abbas Hilmi II, Khedive of Egypt and King of Nubia, Sudan, Kordofan and Darfur.
On June 29, 1914, Kitchener was made the first Earl of Khartoum and Broome (Kent, England). Exceptionally, he was allowed to pass his title to his brother and his nephew, as Kitchener was not married or had children at the time.
World War I
At the outbreak of World War I, Prime Minister H. H. Asquith promptly appointed Horatio Kitchener as the new Secretary of State for War. Unlike the rest of his colleagues, Kitchener predicted that the war would be long, lasting at least three years, would have a large number of casualties, and would require large armies with which to defeat Germany.
He then led a large recruitment campaign in which posters with his image were spread out, pointing out potential recruits under the banner Britons wants you ("Britons, [Kitchener ] needs you"), which would be the model for the famous I want you starring Uncle Sam in the United States from 1917.
After the Ottoman Empire entered the war and the consequent closure of the Dardanelles to the allies, Kitchener proposed opening a new front in the city of Alexandretta, which would be invaded by ANZAC troops, the New Army and Indian reservists. The chosen city was home to a significant Christian population and the strategic center of the Ottoman railway network. However, the plan was scrapped and replaced instead by the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign (1915-1916) masterminded by Winston Churchill.
This failure, coupled with the political crisis of 1915 in Great Britain, put Kitchener's reputation back to low, to the point that he even offered his resignation to Asquith. The prime minister, however, refused to accept it, although he withdrew responsibility for munitions, which he transferred to a new ministry under David Lloyd George. In May 1916 preparations began for a diplomatic mission to Russia to which Kitchener and Lloyd George were originally to attend, but the latter, at the last moment and too busy with his new ministry, abandoned the initiative and relinquished control entirely to the former..
A few days before embarking, Kitchener informed Edward Stanley of his intention to put diplomatic pressure on both sides in order to reach a compromise that would put an end to the war in a short time, fearing that if he left the matter in the hands of politicians, the situation would not only drag on but would end with a peace that was too "bad" that would only precipitate new confrontations in the future.
On June 4, 1916, he went to Parliament to answer questions from politicians about how the latest decisions about the war were progressing. The situation could not be worse on some issues, such as the two million rifles that Kitchener had ordered from various arms industries in the United States at the beginning of the war and of which only 480 had been delivered to date. The construction of hulls for warships was not faring much better either.
Nonetheless, Kitchener detailed a series of steps he had taken to secure alternative supplies. Thanks to this, he managed to win the resounding support of more than 200 parliamentarians, including George Arthur, the same one who had launched a motion of no confidence against Kitchener in the House of Commons a week before his appearance in parliament..
Death
After calling at the Scapa Flow naval base, Kitchener boarded the armored cruiser HMS Hampshire for a diplomatic mission to Russia. On June 5, 1916, while en route to the port of Archangel, the Hampshire collided with a sea mine and sank west of the Orkney Islands. Only 12 men of the more than 650 on board survived, among whom were not Kitchener (whose body was never found) or any of his cabinet members. On the same day, the last division of Kitchener's army crossed the English Channel and took up positions in Flanders and northern France, where they would help defeat the German Empire in 1918.
Upon news of his death, the small town of Berlin, Ontario, Canada, was renamed Kitchener in his honor. Mount Kitchener, in the Rocky Mountains, was also named in his memory, and a monument dedicated to Kitchener was built nearby.
A month after his death, the Lord Kitchener National Memorial Fund was founded to help war victims, either by providing medical care or financial aid. After the armistice, the foundation went on to grant university scholarships to soldiers, ex-soldiers and children of military personnel, a task that it continues to carry out today.
Conspiracy Theories
Kitchener's sudden disappearance, coupled with the fact that his body was never recovered, immediately gave rise to multiple conspiracy theories that have continued to a greater or lesser extent to the present day.
Central to these theories is the fact that then-Munitions Minister and later Prime Minister David Lloyd George had planned to embark with Kitchener, but canceled his trip at the last minute, thus escaping certain death. This, together with an alleged excessive delay of the means of rescue, has led certain authors to speculate that Kitchener was actually assassinated by the British Government itself, or that at least his death was convenient for London, which he saw himself as an old-fashioned military man who could only be a hindrance in the development of modern warfare. However, considering that Kitchener's death caused a deep impact in British public opinion and was widely perceived as a disaster for the conduct of the war, this idea must be considered at least implausible, to say the least.
After the war, the poet Lord Alfred Douglas suggested a new conspiracy in which he claimed there were connections between Kitchener's death, the Battle of Jutland, and an agreement between Winston Churchill and certain Jewish organizations. Churchill then sued Douglas for libel and got the writer committed to six months in prison. Others claimed at the time that HMS Hampshire never collided with a mine, but was sunk by the detonation of a bomb surreptitiously shipped by agents of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), for whom Kitchener, Irish himself but totally devoted to the cause of the British Empire, he represented an inescapable threat to the independence of Ireland. It is worth mentioning that the failed Easter Rising had taken place only a few months before the incident.
General Erich Ludendorff, head of the German High Command (along with von Hindenburg), claimed that Russian communists working to overthrow the tsar delivered Kitchener's travel plan to Germany. He also claimed that Kitchener was killed "because of his skill," as it was feared that he could aid the recovery of the Imperial Russian Army.
In all probability, the most spectacular of the conspiracy theories related to the death of Kitchener is the one defended in 1926 by the con artist Frank Power, who claimed that Kitchener's body was rescued after the disaster by a Norwegian fisherman. Power even went so far as to have a coffin brought from Norway and a solemn burial arranged in St. Paul's Cathedral. However, the authorities intervened and ordered the opening of the coffin in the presence of the police and a distinguished pathologist, who only found a lot of tar inside in order to make it heavier. Although Power was fiercely attacked by public opinion, the fraudster was never prosecuted for any crime.[1]
In 1969, the film Fraulein Doktor by Dino De Laurentiis suggested the existence of a German spy who discovered Kitchener's preparations for the trip and later informed the captain of U-Boat 75.
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