T.E. Lawrence
Thomas Edward Lawrence, more famously known as T. E. Lawrence, was a British Army officer most famous for his part in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign and the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turkish rule of 1916-1918. His variety of skill, experiences and his ability to describe them in such clear detail in writing, earned him international fame and title as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, which later became a film about his journeys during World War I. Lawrence was born in Tremadog, Wales, in August 1888 to Sir Thomas Chapman and Sarah Junner, but Sarah and T.E. both were born illegitimately, so dubbed themselves the Lawrences. In the summer of 1896 the Lawrences moved to Oxford, where in 1907-1910 Lawrence studied history at Jesus College, graduating with First Class Honours. He became an archaeologist in the Middle East, working at various dig sites with David George Hogarth and Leonard Woolley. In 1908 he joined the Oxford University Officer Training Corps, where he went a two-year training course. In January 1914, prior to the outbreak of World War I, Lawrence was co-opted by the British Army to undertake a military survey of the Negev Desert while doing archaeological research.
At the start of the First World War, Lawrence was a university graduate researcher who had travelled all around the Ottoman Empire provinces of the Levant and Mesopotamia under his own name through which he had revealed himself to the Ottoman Interior Ministry authorities and their German technical advisors, travelling over the German-designed, built, and financed railways during the extent of his research.
The Arab Bureau of Britain's Foreign Office launched a campaign of internal insurgency against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. The Arab Bureau had recognized the strategic value of this idea. In short, the Arab’s were going to revolt against the Ottoman Empire, and were to be led by T.E. Lawrence. The Ottoman Empire would have to have spent unrealistic amounts...