Dominic Sandbrook

And as one historian puts it, the jihad is, and I quote, a miserable failure.

So basically, it doesn't get anywhere.

Exactly.

So how does the war go at first for the Ottomans?

It does not go well at all.

So Enver takes 100,000 men and he leads them east to face the Russians in the Caucasus.

And his plan is that he will encircle and destroy the Russian Caucasus army at a place called Sarakamush, which is a border town close to the border with modern day Armenia.

And the conditions at Salekhamish are absolutely awful, even by First World War standards.

So they're 10,000 feet high.

There are snowstorms.

The temperature goes down to minus 26 degrees Celsius.

By mid-December 1914, thousands upon thousands of men on both sides are dying of hypothermia or frostbite or typhus.

Anyway, the Russians do end up getting encircled.

So on the 1st of January, the Russian Supreme Commander, Grand Duke Nikolai,

He sends a message to Britain and he says,

you know, we're in a mess against the Ottomans.

Could you please stage a diversionary attack?

Could you do something against the Ottomans to relieve the pressure on us?

And this is where Churchill comes back into the story.

Because Churchill has been thinking about striking East even before the Ottomans entered the war.