Defence of Jerusalem

The Defence of Jerusalem was the last battle of the 1917 Palestine campaign. Two and a half weeks after the surrender of Jerusalem, Erich von Falkenhayn, the German commander of the Ottoman “Yıldırım” Army Group, tried to retake the Holy City. On the night of 26/27 December 1917 Turkish divisions attacked the British positions along the road to Nablus, north of the city. The British, however, knew their plan from intercepted wireless messages and from prisoners. Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode’s XX Corps beat off attacks around the hill of Tell el Ful all day, and at the same time, following a plan prepared in advance, struck the western flank of the Turks. The next day it went over to the attack along the whole front, and by 30 December it had driven the Turks back beyond El Bireh and Ramallah. Jerusalem was safe.

Name and dates

The British Battles Nomenclature Committee recognised the Defence of Jerusalem as one of the battles of the so-called Jerusalem Operations, alongside the Battle of Nebi Samwil and the Battle of Jaffa, and dated it 26 to 30 December 1917. The Turks moved to the attack on the night of 26/27 December, at about 1.30 a.m., and the last British attack was halted on 30 December. The British official history (Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. II), on which the account below is based, dates the fighting itself to 27–30 December. The name can mislead for two reasons. First, the British did not merely defend: most of the battle consisted of their own attack. Second, the official history uses the term “Turkish counter-attacks in defence of Jerusalem” for entirely different fighting, at the turn of November and December, when the city was still in Ottoman hands. In English-language works the Defence of Jerusalem is also sometimes described as the last phase of a more broadly defined “Battle of Jerusalem”, lasting from 17 November to 30 December.

Background

After the capture of Jerusalem on 9 December and Allenby’s formal entry into the city on 11 December, the front came to rest just beyond its outskirts. To the north, on the hills along the Nablus road, and to the east, towards Jericho, Turkish outposts stood only a few kilometres from the walls. General Sir Edmund Allenby wanted to push them further away before undertaking further operations. First, on 21 and 22 December, XXI Corps drove the Turks back on the plain and secured Jaffa. Now it was the turn of XX Corps in the hills.

On 14 December Chetwode presented his plan to his divisional commanders. The corps was to reach a line from the village of Beitin, the biblical Bethel, about three kilometres north-east of El Bireh, to the village of Deir Ibzia, ten kilometres west of it. Major-General John Shea’s 60th (London) Division and Major-General Stuart Mott’s 53rd (Welsh) Division were to advance north along the Nablus road (the “Right Attack”). On the western flank Major-General John Longley proposed an advance by his 10th (Irish) Division eastwards along three parallel ridges running down from the watershed towards the plain. Chetwode thought so highly of the idea that he also placed at Longley’s disposal a brigade of Major-General Eric Girdwood’s 74th (Yeomanry) Division. The whole was called the “Left Attack”.

The preparations required at least ten days of hard labour. The sappers of the 53rd Division maintained the road from Hebron and repaired the ancient aqueduct from Solomon’s Pools, from which Jerusalem drew its water. The 60th Division, with hired local labourers, worked on the Jaffa road, and the 74th Division turned the track from Qaryet el Enab to Biddu, along which mules had struggled to pass in November, into a road for wagons. Most important, however, were the roads that the 10th Division, experienced in the mountains of Macedonia, built along the valleys on the western flank. Thanks to them a force of all arms with wheeled transport could operate in country through which until then only pack animals had passed with difficulty. On the night of 16/17 December the 53rd Division occupied the hills east of Abu Dis, and on 21 December its 160th Brigade, in fierce fighting with bombs, bayonets and rifle butts, took the hills of Ras ez Zamby and White Hill, five kilometres north-east of Jerusalem, losing more than a hundred men.

The attack was planned for 23–25 December, but the weather broke. On 24 December rain poured down and went on falling throughout Christmas Day. The roads on which so much labour had been spent became almost impassable again: where earth and metalling had not been washed away by mountain torrents, the mud was fifteen centimetres deep. The attack was postponed. For the soldiers spending Christmas a few kilometres from Bethlehem it was a day of misery. The turkeys and puddings were stuck on the flooded plain, and for most of them Christmas dinner consisted of biscuits, cheese and Jaffa oranges.

Falkenhayn’s plan

Meanwhile the situation had changed. From decoded wireless messages, the interrogation of prisoners and agents’ reports the British pieced together Falkenhayn’s plan. The Turks intended to retake Jerusalem. The main blow was to be delivered along the Nablus road and to the west of it by the crack 19th Division, while Ali Fuad Bey’s XX Corps was to make subsidiary attacks north-east, east and south-east of the city. According to the Turkish orders, which the official history quotes in an appendix, the first day’s objective was the hill of Tell el Ful for the 53rd Division, the villages of Beit Hanina and Nebi Samwil for the 19th Division, and for the 24th and 1st Divisions, standing further west, the villages of Beit Izza and Beit Dukku. Falkenhayn counted on this attack so much that after the British crossing of the Nahr el Auja he gave up a counter-attack at Jaffa so as not to weaken his forces at Jerusalem.

The forces were not evenly matched. Counting from the west, the 3rd Cavalry Division, the 1st, 24th, 19th, 53rd and 26th Divisions and the 7th Cavalry Regiment took part in the fighting against XX Corps. The freshest of them, the 1st Division, had recently arrived from the Caucasus. The official history estimates that Fevzi Pasha’s Seventh Army had perhaps 30,000 men on its ration strength and no more than 20,000 in the line. The British XX Corps had about 33,000. According to Falls, the attack was therefore a desperate undertaking.

Chetwode judged that his own plan was perfectly suited to meeting such an attack. The Turks could receive reinforcements of at most one division. He decided to let them strike and then, once they were thoroughly committed at Jerusalem, to launch the Left Attack against their western flank. On the afternoon of 24 December Allenby visited him in Jerusalem and approved the idea. On 26 December the weather improved, and fresh information indicated that the Turks would attack the next day. Chetwode was so sure of it that he ordered Longley to move on the morning of 27 December.

Course of the battle

27 December: the Turkish attack. Immediately north of Jerusalem the ground is very broken, and the Nablus road winds in hairpin bends. Beyond, as far as the point about six kilometres from the city where the Wadi ed Dumm crosses it, it runs fairly straight along the flat crest of the watershed. Only here could troops deploy to fight in open order, and it was here that the main blow fell, on the 179th Brigade of the 60th Division. Before midnight an outpost of the London 2/13th Battalion, pushed forward a few hundred metres ahead of the line, reported that it had made contact with the enemy. At 1.45 a.m. the Turks drove the forward company of the 2/16th Battalion off the hill of Ras et Tawil east of the road, and soon afterwards attacked along the whole sector. They ran forward throwing bombs, which, as the official history observes, they almost always used to good effect. On the right flank of the 2/13th Battalion they knocked out two machine guns and broke into the position, but after a few minutes they were driven out with the bayonet. Everywhere else the attacks broke down under rifle fire and an artillery barrage called down by red rockets.

Then Turkish field guns and 150 mm howitzers shelled above all the hill of Tell el Ful, identified with Saul’s biblical Gibeah. At 3.30 a.m. the Turks attacked the Khirbet Adasa ridge north-east of it and were repulsed. At 5.30 a.m., in greater strength, they took the positions of the 2/16th Battalion and reached the lower slopes of Tell el Ful. Had they taken that hill, from which the whole surrounding country can be seen as far as Jerusalem, the situation would have become dangerous, but they never took it. From the heights they had taken, however, they fired on the neighbouring 2/13th Battalion, which at 9 a.m. drew its line back two hundred metres. Two armoured cars that had only just arrived from the plain helped. One of them, reversing under fire, ran off the road, stuck fast and was destroyed by Turkish artillery. Just before 1 p.m. the Turks again attacked the 2/13th Battalion from behind the ridge north-east of Beit Hanina. Its commander, Lieutenant-Colonel C. M. Mackenzie, had a company of the neighbouring battalion in reserve and led a counter-attack across the ridge. The Turks did not wait for the clash and fled, and many of them were killed by fire.

West of the road, between the Wadi ed Dumm and the Wadi Beit Hanina, the 181st Brigade beat off at 2.30 a.m. an attack on a forward position of the London 2/24th Battalion, and then three more, each stronger than the last, supported by the fire of machine guns skilfully placed on both flanks. The position became untenable and the battalion fell back to the less exposed southern slope of the ridge. At about 6 p.m. the Turks broke off operations along the whole divisional front, and in the evening they withdrew from the Adasa ridge. The official history stresses that the attack by the best Turkish troops, pressed with determination, failed almost completely. Nowhere did it make dangerous progress, and the reserve battalions of both brigades of the 60th Division did not even have to enter serious fighting.

East of the city the Turks attacked only the outposts of the 53rd Division, but there too the fighting was heavy. At dawn they attacked Ras ez Zamby and White Hill, taken by the British on 21 December. Ras ez Zamby fell, but a company of the Middlesex battalion retook it by counter-attack. On the extreme southern flank, east of Bethlehem, a Turkish cavalry regiment surrounded a company of the Middlesex battalion holding out in the old monastery of Deir Ibn Obeid. Mott feared for its fate, but Chetwode allowed at most its withdrawal and forbade moving troops from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. At 6 p.m. the Turks brought up two mountain guns to batter down the monastery walls, but the small shells barely scratched the old stone walls. The next morning the company managed to withdraw. The 160th Brigade lost nearly three hundred men in this fighting, but gave up no important ground.

27 December: the Left Attack. On the western flank Longley’s troops took up their starting positions during the night in the deep wadis running west. The ridges between them rose in places by 250 metres in a distance of 750 metres, but movement along them was easier than along the boulder-strewn beds of the ravines. The 229th Brigade of the 74th Division began climbing the Zeitun ridge at 7.50 a.m. and at 9.20 a.m. took Khirbet er Ras. In places the men hauled one another up the rocks. In the evening the Scottish Black Watch battalion took with the bayonet the hill of Bir esh Shafa west of Beitunia, where the Turks were defending two rows of stone sangars above a sheer rock face. In the centre the 31st Brigade of the 10th Division took the summit of Kereina at 8.30 a.m., and at about 1 p.m. the commanding hill that the British called the Hog’s Back. As long as the Turks held it, the artillery could not move forward along the road then being built. Private James Duffy, a stretcher-bearer of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, earned the Victoria Cross that day for carrying out and dressing two wounded men under heavy fire. On the left flank Brigadier-General R. S. Vandeleur’s 29th and 30th Brigades took the Deir Ibzia ridge and the hills south of the village of Kefr Nima. The Connaught Rangers surprised the Turks with an attack across a ravine while their two leading companies pretended to dig in on the slope they had taken. By evening the Left Attack had reached its first objectives without heavy losses, and after dark the sappers began hauling guns up onto the ridges.

28 December: the British attack. Chetwode hesitated over whether to complete the work with Longley’s troops alone, who could have driven the Turks off the Nablus road by a blow from the west. He decided, however, that in such difficult country the 10th Division would not be in time, and at 9.40 a.m. he ordered the 60th Division to advance as well, covered on the right by the 53rd Division. The Turks, exhausted by the fruitless attacks of the previous day, no longer had the heart even for rearguard fighting. The 179th Brigade retook Ras et Tawil, taking 36 prisoners, and the 181st Brigade occupied, almost without a shot, Bir Nebala and El Jib, the village against which two British divisions had bled themselves in vain in November. Then the 60th Division went on to the villages of Er Ram, Kalandia and Rafat, about two kilometres further north. Only at Er Ram, one of the strongest positions along the road, did the Turks resist, but ten minutes of artillery fire drove them out. At 4 p.m. the 53rd Division took the village of Anata north-east of Jerusalem, covering the right flank of the advance. On the western flank the Black Watch took Beitunia. The hardest fighting of the day took place in its streets, and one party of Turks, barricaded in a house, surrendered only when bombs were thrown in through the windows. Here 70 prisoners and 7 machine guns were taken. The 10th Division occupied the hills north and north-east of the village of Ain Arik.

29–30 December: El Bireh and Ramallah. On 29 December the 60th and 74th Divisions pressed on northwards. At 9.15 a.m. the 230th Brigade of the 74th Division occupied Ramallah. In the Latin church the soldiers found about a hundred sick and wounded Turks, starved, filthy and with their dressings unchanged for five days, and among them eight wounded British soldiers. The 60th Division was held up in front of the steep hill of Shab Saleh, a kilometre and a half south of El Bireh, and had to wait for the artillery. At 3.30 p.m. two London battalions took the hill, and after a bombardment that began at 4.15 p.m. the 181st Brigade occupied El Bireh, taking 42 prisoners. The guns of the 60th and 10th Divisions, hauled into position with enormous effort, shelled a dense column of Turks retreating along the Nablus road. At about 9.30 p.m. both brigades moved on in a night march by compass, across further steep, rocky ravines, under a moon almost full but hidden by clouds. At 4 a.m. on 30 December the 180th Brigade occupied Beitin. On the right flank the 53rd Division took Hizma and moved at least six kilometres north. On 30 December the 60th Division improved its line a little further along the Nablus road, after which Chetwode halted the advance.

Losses

According to the official history the Turks left about a thousand dead on the battlefield and lost 558 men taken prisoner, but did not lose a single gun. Some works (among them Anthony Bruce’s) give a figure of more than 750 prisoners and 24 machine guns captured. The official history estimates the losses of XX Corps at about a thousand men. Allenby’s whole army lost 1,360 men in the week ending 29 December, and over two weeks, including the Battle of Jaffa, 1,890 killed, wounded and missing.

Significance

The official history states that Falkenhayn played into Chetwode’s hands. His troops exhausted themselves in attacks on the steady British defence along the Nablus road, and when Longley’s columns drove into their flank they could not repel the counter-attack. Falls suggests that Falkenhayn’s intelligence failed him by not telling him how much the British had improved the roads since the mounted troops had been unable to cross the same ridges in November. Falkenhayn believed that his right flank was protected by the difficult ground itself, and did not foresee how quickly the sappers, pioneers and infantry of the 10th Division would build roads behind the advancing troops. He himself attributed the failure to the stubborn defence of the British, who had been forewarned, and to the defeat of the 1st Division, thrown hastily into the fight and struck by the full weight of the 10th Division’s attack. The Royal Flying Corps also contributed to the Turkish defeat: on 27 December its aircraft scattered Turkish troops and transport at Kalandia, and over the next three days bombed and machine-gunned the columns on the Nablus road. Once again, however, the mountains and the winter weather saved the Turks from the full consequences of defeat.

The battle ended two months of almost continuous fighting that had begun at Beersheba on 31 October. The front moved a further few to ten kilometres north of Jerusalem, and the city was no longer under any threat from the north. The downpours in the hills and on the plain, however, had wrecked the roads and railway lines, and Allenby first had to bring the railway up to the front and build up supplies. The next advance, eastwards towards Jericho, was carried out only on 19–21 February 1918. For Falkenhayn the failed attempt to retake Jerusalem was his last operation in Palestine. According to the official history it was already clear that the German command of the “Yıldırım” group had not proved itself. In early 1918 Falkenhayn was recalled, and on 1 March command of the army group was taken over by Otto Liman von Sanders, the defender of Gallipoli.