Action at Rafah

On 9 January 1917 the Desert Column of Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode surrounded and took the Turkish redoubts at El Magruntein, on the hills south of Rafah, right on the border between Sinai and Ottoman Palestine. After a whole day’s fighting almost the entire garrison, more than 1,600 men, was taken prisoner. The British chronology of the war records the engagement at Rafah under this date and adds that the last Turkish troops in Sinai withdrew across the border that day. The British official history (MacMunn and Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. I) calls it the Action of Rafah (the Action of Rafah).

A second Magdhaba

After the occupation of El Arish General Archibald Murray’s forces again had to wait for the railway and the water pipeline to catch up with them. On 27 December airmen spotted the Turks digging trenches at El Magruntein. According to Murray the position was held by a force equal to roughly two battalions, with mountain guns, and there was no other Turkish camp within a radius of a dozen or so kilometres. Once again the enemy had put out an isolated detachment within reach of the British mounted troops, so Murray decided to repeat the success at Magdhaba. On 7 January he passed this decision to General Charles Dobell, who entrusted the operation to Chetwode.

On the evening of 8 January General Harry Chauvel’s Anzac Mounted Division (less one brigade), the British 5th Mounted Brigade made up of yeomanry, the Imperial Camel Brigade and the Hong Kong and Singapore mountain battery set out from El Arish. Before midnight the column surrounded the village of Sheikh Zuweid, so that the Bedouin could not warn the Turks, and at 1 a.m. it moved on. At 6.15 a.m. the New Zealand Auckland regiment was the first to cross the border. The official history calls this a dramatic moment of the campaign and notes that the battle was fought on two continents, in Asia and in Africa. At dawn the soldiers, who had been riding through sand for months, saw grass, young barley and wild flowers around them.

The Turkish position looked formidable. On a smooth, grassy hill stood a central redoubt, surrounded by three groups of well-dug works with a field of fire of up to 2 kilometres in almost every direction. The approaches were completely open. Chetwode later admitted in his report that he had considered the task almost beyond the powers of dismounted cavalry. The works, however, had no wire. According to the official history they were held mainly by two battalions of the 31st Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Division, while the Australian official history (Gullett) puts the garrison at about 2,000 men.

An order that came too late

By 7 a.m. patrols had cut the telegraph lines to Khan Yunis and Shellal. At 10 a.m. the attack began. The New Zealanders galloped into Rafah and captured a group of fleeing Turks, and with them six Germans. The Australian light horse and the cameliers approached from the east and south, and the yeomanry from the west. By early afternoon the ring was closed, but the attack stalled. The Turks defended themselves stubbornly and bravely, although they shot poorly. The dismounted troopers lay on the open slope, and in time ammunition began to run short, especially for the machine guns and the artillery.

In the afternoon bad news arrived. A captured Turkish officer and several Germans stated that as soon as the fighting began, the 160th Infantry Regiment had set out from Shellal to the relief. Patrols saw about two battalions approaching from the east, and at about 4.15 p.m. reported roughly 500 men coming from Khan Yunis. At about 4.30 p.m. Chetwode, after a telephone conversation with Chauvel, decided that the fight would have to be broken off. The sources describe this somewhat differently. According to Gullett, Chetwode gave the order to withdraw and himself rode off towards El Arish. According to the official history, Chauvel’s staff wrote out the orders but had no time to issue them. Murray wrote in his report that Chetwode had ordered the action broken off if the position had not fallen by 5 p.m.

At that very moment Brigadier-General Edward Chaytor’s New Zealand brigade charged the central redoubt with the bayonet. It crossed more than a kilometre and a half of bare slope, covered the last few hundred metres in two rushes under cover of machine-gun fire, and after a few minutes of fighting took the hill. Almost simultaneously the cameliers captured the main work of the southern group from the south. As they approached, the Turks fixed bayonets and showed them above the parapet, and when the attackers reached them they hoisted white flags. With the fall of the redoubt resistance collapsed throughout the position, and by about 5.30 p.m. it was all over.

The toll

According to the official history 35 officers, including the Turkish commander, and 1,438 unwounded men, among them 10 Germans, were taken prisoner, together with 162 wounded, 1,635 men in all. The number of Turkish dead was estimated at about 200. Four mountain guns, machine guns and nearly 600 rifles were captured. The British lost 487 men: 71 killed, 415 wounded and one missing, more than three times as many as at Magdhaba. According to Gullett, airmen for the first time on this front directed a battery’s fire by wireless. For fear of Turkish reinforcements the column returned to Sheikh Zuweid that same night, leaving the ambulances on the battlefield under the protection of the light horse. The Turkish reinforcements turned back when they learned that the position had fallen.

Murray wrote that after Magdhaba and Rafah, Sinai, partly occupied by the Turks for two years, was free of all organised Turkish forces, and that the enemy made no attempt to return to Rafah. According to the official history, the German commander of the Turkish forces in Sinai, Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, had in fact advised abandoning the whole peninsula, but Djemal Pasha refused for political reasons. The Sinai campaign had come to an end, and the front now stood on the threshold of Palestine, before Gaza.