Attack on Amman

On the morning of 27 March 1918 the Anzac Mounted Division of Major-General Edward Chaytor and the Imperial Camel Corps Brigade set out from the village of Ain es-Sir towards Amman. Behind them lay three nights of marching in rain and snow along goat tracks from the Jordan valley, during which the infantry had occupied Al-Salt. The aim of the expedition was to destroy the viaduct and tunnel near Amman on the Hejaz Railway, by which the Turks supplied their garrisons in the south. On the sodden ground the horsemen advanced slowly, but by 10.30 a.m. the New Zealanders were already a mile and a half from the town. Chaytor at once gave the order to attack. The New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade was to take Hill 3039 from the south, the Camel Brigade to strike from the west, and the Australian 2nd Light Horse Brigade from the north-west. The only artillery was the Hong Kong and Singapore mountain battery.

Amman, a small town among Roman ruins, surrounded by hills, with a citadel on a height, proved a difficult objective. According to the British official history (Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. II), the Turkish garrison that day numbered about 2,150 rifles, 70 machine guns and 10 guns, including the German 703rd Battalion, which had just returned from the expedition against Arab-held Tafileh. The defenders placed their machine guns at different heights and stopped the attack along the whole line. The Camel Brigade got to within about 550 metres of the hill closing the road to the town, but could go no further under fire from the front and both flanks. A New Zealand squadron tried to cut off a train approaching from the south, but got stuck in the mud a few hundred metres from the line, and the train steamed whistling into Amman. Sappers blew up the line south and north of the town, cutting it off for a time, but did not reach the viaduct. That day the British lost 26 killed and 183 wounded and took 54 prisoners. Meanwhile the infantry column from Al-Salt was held up at Suwaylih, where it had to separate Arab Christians and Circassians fighting each other.

The next day Chaytor renewed the attack, now with two battalions of London infantry and three mountain batteries. Their commander advised attacking after dark, but Chaytor insisted on taking the town before nightfall. The attack at 1 p.m. across open ground again stalled a few hundred metres short of the Turkish trenches. Meanwhile reinforcements were pouring into Amman by rail from the north. The army group commander, General Otto Liman von Sanders, ordered all available units to be sent there, and the defence was taken over by the commander of the Fourth Army, Mehmed Cemal Pasha, known as Little Cemal. A Turkish detachment also crossed the Jordan in the north and threatened the British communications near Al-Salt.

On the night of 29–30 March, in pouring rain, Chaytor threw all his forces, reinforced by three more battalions, into a final assault. The New Zealanders, with a battalion of the Camel Brigade, took Hill 3039 with the bayonet, and the London 2/22nd Battalion took 80 prisoners and beat off a counter-attack. The citadel, however, held, and its machine guns stopped the rest of the attack. In daylight the Turks, led in places by Germans, recovered some of the lost positions, and a last attack on the citadel at 2 p.m. failed. Major-General John Shea asked Chaytor whether there was a chance of taking Amman by night and, on hearing that there was little, broke off the fighting. At 5.45 p.m. on 30 March the order came to withdraw across the Jordan.

The withdrawal in cold and rain, with the wounded strapped to camels and a crowd of Christian refugees from Al-Salt, lasted until 2 April. The whole expedition cost the British, Australians and New Zealanders 1,348 killed, wounded and missing. The Turks lost 986 prisoners and four guns. For them it was the first victory after a long series of defeats in Palestine. The commander of the German battalion, Captain Grassman, admitted, however, that had the British followed up their blow on the morning of 30 March, nothing could have stopped them from entering the town.