Arabs destroy the Dead Sea flotilla

At first light on 28 January 1918 about 70 Arab horsemen burst into the Turkish landing place of Al-Mazraa on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. They had ridden all night along a narrow path between the mountains of Moab and the shore of the lake. They captured and sank the whole flotilla stationed there, which carried grain for the Ottoman troops in the Jordan valley. This date is given by the British official history (Cyril Falls) and by T. E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The British official chronology of the war gives 27 January.

Shipping grain across the Dead Sea mattered to the Turks. The boats picked up grain from the fertile district of Kerak and carried it to the northern end of the lake, to the troops who after the loss of Jerusalem were holding out against the British around Jericho. According to Lawrence, General Edmund Allenby had asked the Arabs in December to stop this traffic by mid-February. The opportunity came after the victory of 25 January on the plateau at Tafileh, where Emir Zeid’s Arabs routed a Turkish column coming from Kerak. Lawrence sent news of the victory and a plan to raid the landing place to Abdullah al-Fair (in British sources Abdulla el Feir), who was camped in a warm, fertile valley at the southern end of the lake, only about 10 km as the crow flies from snowbound Tafileh, but a kilometre and a half lower down.

Abdullah al-Fair picked about 70 horsemen from among the Beersheba Bedouin. According to Lawrence, the boat crews, sailors of the Ottoman navy unprepared for fighting on land, were sleeping on the beach and in reed huts. They were woken only by the thunder of horses charging out of the undergrowth, and that was the end of the fight. The Arabs burned the huts and looted the stores, and towed the boats out into deep water and sank them. According to the official history, the flotilla consisted of a motor launch and six sailing boats, and the booty amounted to 60 prisoners and about 10 tonnes of grain. Lawrence wrote that the raiders did not lose a single man.

Falls called the raid “another remarkable feat” after the defence of Tafileh. Lawrence, who later judged the battle of 25 January critically as needless slaughter, considered the raid on Al-Mazraa a “good and serious thing” that partly saved their honour. The second of the aims set by Allenby, stopping the shipping on the Dead Sea, had been achieved, as he stressed, two weeks ahead of time. The third aim, reaching the mouth of the Jordan near Jericho by the end of March, proved out of reach, because blizzards and reluctance to suffer further losses kept the Arabs pinned at Tafileh.