Sinai and Palestine campaign

The Sinai and Palestine campaign was Britain’s longest campaign against the Ottoman Empire. It began in January 1915, when an Ottoman army under Djemal Pasha crossed the desert and tried to get over the Suez Canal, and it ended almost four years later near Aleppo, in northern Syria. For the first year and a half the British merely defended the canal. In 1916 they repulsed a second Turkish expedition and, step by step, behind a railway and water pipeline built across the desert, crossed Sinai. In the spring of 1917 they twice broke against the defences of Gaza, but in the autumn General Edmund Allenby turned the Turkish line at Beersheba and took Jerusalem before Christmas. In September 1918 he destroyed two Ottoman armies at Megiddo, and within less than six weeks his cavalry and his Arab allies had taken Damascus, Beirut and Aleppo.

Name and dates

Polish Wikipedia speaks of the Sinai and Palestine campaign, as does English-language historiography (Sinai and Palestine Campaign), while the British official history (George MacMunn and Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vols. I–II) speaks of operations in Egypt and Palestine. The Turks divide the fighting into the “canal operations” of 1915–1916 and the Syria–Palestine front. The British operations against the Senussi order in Egypt’s Western Desert and the Arab Revolt in the Hejaz were separate campaigns, although connected with this one.

We take 26 January 1915 as the start of the campaign, when British outposts near El Qantara first clashed with the Ottoman army approaching across Sinai. This is the date given by the British chronology of the war. The first Turkish units had left Beersheba in mid-January, so some works give a slightly earlier date, while others count the campaign from 28 January. We take 30 October 1918 as the end, when the Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros. The fighting stopped at noon the following day, so some sources end the campaign on 31 October.

Background

Egypt, formally still part of the Ottoman Empire, had been under British occupation since 1882. The Suez Canal carried the shortest route from Britain to India and Australia, and in the autumn of 1914 convoys with troops for the Western Front were passing through it. When Turkey entered the war on Germany’s side, after its fleet shelled Russian ports, the British declared martial law in Egypt and in December a protectorate, severing the country’s tie with the Sultan. The defence was commanded by General John Maxwell, commander of British troops in Egypt. Its core was formed by brigades sent from India, and in December Australians and New Zealanders arrived in Egypt.

For the Turks and Germans, Egypt was the most sensitive point of the British Empire. Djemal Pasha, Minister of the Navy and one of the three Young Turk leaders alongside İsmail Enver and Talaat, took command of the Fourth Army in Syria, which then also included Palestine, at the end of 1914. The attack on the canal was prepared by his German adviser, the Bavarian officer Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, who was to remain on this front until the turn of 1917 and 1918. It was hoped that the appearance of the army of the Sultan-Caliph on the canal, backed by the call to jihad, would provoke a rising against the British in Egypt. It did not.

Defence of the Suez Canal (1915–1916)

The expedition, about 20,000 strong according to Kress, crossed the desert in winter, when the rains had filled the cisterns and wells, dragging sheet-metal pontoons with it. In the night of 2–3 February 1915 the Turks tried to cross the canal near Ismailia, but the fire of Indian troops, Egyptian artillery and British and French warships sank most of the boats. After a whole day of fighting Djemal ordered a retreat, and the army withdrew in good order to Beersheba. The British lost fewer than two hundred men, and Egypt remained quiet.

For the rest of 1915 the defence rested on the canal itself. Kress sent small detachments across the desert to lay mines and harass shipping, but there was no serious threat. Egypt meanwhile became a great base for British and Dominion troops. From here units set out for Gallipoli in the spring, and here they returned after the evacuation of the peninsula at the turn of 1915 and 1916. In March 1916 General Archibald Murray took command of all troops in Egypt, merged into the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. He judged that the canal was more cheaply and more securely defended from deep in the desert, from the oases of northern Sinai, than from its banks. A standard-gauge railway and a water pipeline set out from El Qantara into Sinai, and the troops followed them.

On 23 April 1916 a detachment of Kress’s routed British yeomanry at Katia and Oghratina, but in July a much larger expedition set out across the desert: about 16,000 men of the Ottoman 3rd Division, supported by German machine guns, heavy artillery and aircraft and by Austro-Hungarian mountain howitzers. In the night of 3–4 August it attacked the fortified position at Romani, about 35–40 kilometres from the canal. Two brigades of the Australian Light Horse held up the outflanking move in the dunes all night, and on 5 August the exhausted and thirsty Turks began to surrender. The British took almost 4,000 prisoners, although Kress managed to withdraw his main force and his guns. It was the last Ottoman attempt to threaten the canal. The initiative passed to the British.

Across Sinai to Gaza (1916–1917)

After Romani the advance across Sinai moved at the pace at which sappers and labourers laid track and pipe. At the end of 1916, when David Lloyd George, an advocate of operations in the East, became Prime Minister, London looked ever more favourably on Palestine. On 21 December the mounted troops entered El Arish without a fight, the Turks having abandoned it the day before. Two days later General Harry Chauvel’s Anzac Mounted Division and the Imperial Camel Brigade took the redoubts at Magdhaba, capturing almost the whole garrison, and on 9 January 1917 General Philip Chetwode’s Desert Column repeated that success at Rafah, on the Palestine frontier. No Turks were left in Sinai.

The road into Palestine was barred by Gaza. On 26 March 1917 General Charles Dobell’s Eastern Force tried to take it by a rapid stroke. The mounted troops surrounded the town and Welsh infantry took Ali Muntar hill, but at dusk, fearing Turkish reinforcements and with no water for the horses, the commanders broke off the fight, although the garrison was close to surrender. Murray reported the battle in such terms that London regarded it almost as a victory and ordered him to advance on Jerusalem. Within three weeks, however, the Turks turned Gaza into a fortress and extended their trenches towards Beersheba. The second battle, on 17–19 April, a carefully prepared frontal assault using a few tanks and gas shells, cost the British more than 6,000 men and achieved nothing. Dobell lost his post, and in June Murray was replaced by Allenby, until then an army commander in France.

The front froze for half a year. Allenby, who constantly toured the front and quickly won the confidence of the troops, received new divisions, heavy artillery and aircraft from London and reorganised his force into two infantry corps and Chauvel’s Desert Mounted Corps. On the Ottoman side the changes were even greater. In the summer of 1917 Enver, with German help, created the “Yıldırım” (“Lightning”) Army Group under General Erich von Falkenhayn, the former Chief of the German General Staff. It was meant to retake Baghdad, lost in March, but Falkenhayn soon concluded that the greater danger lay in Palestine, and in September he persuaded Enver to send the newly formed Seventh Army there. Djemal, who wanted neither the “Yıldırım” group nor Falkenhayn in his Syria, kept his powers as viceroy of Syria, but the Palestine front passed under Falkenhayn’s orders.

From Beersheba to Jerusalem (1917)

Allenby decided to turn the Turkish line from the east, through the desert, where the only source of water for tens of thousands of men and horses was the wells of Beersheba. A ruse with a haversack of false plans planted on the Turks confirmed the enemy in the belief that the main blow would fall on Gaza. On 27 October 1917 the bombardment of the town began, and on 31 October XX Corps and the Desert Mounted Corps took Beersheba together with most of its wells. At dusk the issue was decided by the charge of the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade, which became a legend in Australia. On 6 November the infantry broke the positions at Tel esh Sheria, and in the night of 6–7 November the Turks abandoned Gaza. The mounted troops, exhausted by lack of water, could not, however, cut off Kress’s retreating Eighth Army.

The pursuit went up the coast. On 13 November the yeomanry took the ridge at El Mughar with a charge, and the next day the British seized the railway junction linking Jerusalem with the coastal railway. The Ottoman armies separated: the Eighth Army fell back behind the Nahr el Auja river north of Jaffa, which the New Zealanders occupied on 16 November, and the Seventh Army into the hills in front of Jerusalem. On 17 November British divisions entered the Judaean Hills. They took Nabi Samwil hill, from which the city could be seen, but in the cold and rain, almost without artillery, they stalled short of the Nablus road. Falkenhayn repeatedly tried to push them out of the hills, without success. On 8 December a new attack went in from the west and south, during the night the Turks abandoned Jerusalem, and on 9 December the mayor surrendered the city. On 11 December Allenby entered it on foot through the Jaffa Gate. Lloyd George got the “Jerusalem before Christmas” he had asked for.

At the end of December the front moved further still. In the night of 20–21 December the Scottish 52nd Division crossed the Nahr el Auja and pushed the Turks back from Jaffa, and on 26–30 December XX Corps repulsed the last attempt to retake Jerusalem and moved the front north, beyond Ramallah. After two months of almost continuous fighting, winter downpours destroyed the roads and railways, and both sides had to rest.

The Jordan Valley and Megiddo (1918)

In February 1918 XX Corps and horsemen from Australia and New Zealand drove the Turks out of the Judaean Desert and on 21 February occupied Jericho. The Jordan became the front line. On 1 March General Otto Liman von Sanders, the defender of Gallipoli, took over the “Yıldırım” group from Falkenhayn. London wanted Allenby to go further, to Damascus and Aleppo, but on 21 March the great German offensive in France began and everything changed. Allenby had to send to the Western Front two infantry divisions, the 52nd and 74th, nine yeomanry regiments and dozens of infantry battalions, and their places were taken by divisions and regiments from India, which first had to be welded together and trained. In the spring the British made two raids across the Jordan, on Amman in March and on Es Salt at the turn of April and May. Both ended in withdrawal, and the Turks could proclaim their first victories in months.

On the British eastern flank the Arab rebels of Hussein, Sharif of Mecca, had been fighting since 1916. In July 1917 they took the port of Aqaba, and their Arab Northern Army, commanded by the Sharif’s son, Emir Feisal, and supported by British officers, among them Thomas Edward Lawrence, wrecked the Hejaz Railway and tied down Turkish garrisons in Transjordan.

The raids across the Jordan, however, had an effect that only became apparent in the autumn: they convinced Liman that the British were preparing their main blow in the east, towards Amman and Deraa. All summer Allenby sustained this belief with dummy camps and movements in the Jordan Valley, while secretly concentrating superior strength on the other flank, by the sea. On 19 September 1918, under cover of a sudden, overwhelming bombardment, the infantry of XXI Corps broke the front on the Plain of Sharon, and the cavalry poured through the gap. It crossed the Carmel hills by the passes and within a day stood in the Jezreel Valley, behind two Turkish armies. Aircraft wrecked the communications of the Turkish staffs and bombed columns in the mountain defiles. By 25 September the Turkish Seventh and Eighth Armies had ceased to exist, the British had taken Haifa and Acre, and New Zealand and Australian horsemen had captured Amman. The Fourth Army, harried by airmen and by the Arabs, who had cut the railway at Deraa, was falling back northwards in disorder.

Pursuit to Damascus and Aleppo

On 26 September Allenby ordered the Desert Mounted Corps to advance on Damascus. On 27 September Feisal’s Arabs took Deraa, and on 29 September at Ziza the cut-off Turkish garrison of Ma’an surrendered to Australian horsemen. On the morning of 1 October the Australian Light Horse rode through Damascus, and after it Feisal’s Arab horsemen and Lawrence entered the city. Liman moved his headquarters to Baalbek. On 7 October French warships entered the port of Beirut, and the next day Allenby’s infantry arrived. On 13 October British cavalry took Tripoli along the coast, and in mid-October the British and Arabs entered the abandoned town of Homs.

The pursuing force, however, was melting away faster than in battle. Soldiers who had come from the Jordan Valley and the Jezreel Valley into areas where nobody had fought the mosquito fell sick with malaria in great numbers, and from the beginning of October with influenza too. According to the British official history, almost four times as many men of the Desert Mounted Corps died in the hospitals of Damascus as had been killed in action from the start of the offensive to the capture of the city. Only the 5th Cavalry Division with armoured cars, and the Arabs, were still advancing on Aleppo. In the night of 25–26 October the Arabs broke into the city, and in the morning the British General Henry Macandrew rode in. The same day, at Haritan north of Aleppo, Turks under Mustafa Kemal halted the British pursuit. At the end of October the Arabs took Muslimiya railway junction, where the Syrian railway met the Baghdad Railway, and cut the link between Constantinople and the troops in Mesopotamia. Sources differ on the day: the historian of the Desert Mounted Corps gives the 28th, the official history 29 October. Kemal’s new line was not attacked. On 30 October the Armistice of Mudros was signed, and it came into force at noon on 31 October.

Casualties

According to the British official history, the battle casualties of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force from January 1915 to the end of the campaign amounted to 51,451 killed, wounded and missing. The bloodiest fighting was at Gaza and in the autumn offensive of 1917: the First Battle of Gaza cost almost 4,000 men, the second more than 6,400, and the fighting from Beersheba to the capture of Jerusalem almost 19,000. The last offensive, from Megiddo to Aleppo, cost only 5,666 men, most of them in the first infantry assault. Some tallies, including deaths from disease, give much higher figures for the British side, because disease, above all malaria, dysentery and, in the autumn of 1918, influenza, put tens of thousands of soldiers out of action.

Nobody counted the Ottoman losses precisely. Only partial data survive. According to the Turkish General Staff, from 31 October to 31 December 1917 the Ottoman side lost 28,443 men, including almost 15,000 missing, most of them taken prisoner. In the last offensive, according to the official history, the British took more than 75,000 prisoners, including about 3,700 Germans and Austrians, and 360 guns. Many of the prisoners, worn out by hunger and disease, died in camps and hospitals after the battle. Various works estimate total Ottoman losses in this campaign at more than 100,000, and some at more than 200,000 men, counting deaths from disease.

Significance

The campaign began with the defence of the Suez Canal and ended with the destruction of Ottoman rule in Palestine and Syria. According to the British official history, the defeat of the Turkish armies was almost without parallel in modern military history. Cyril Falls also noted that the Egyptian Expeditionary Force did not decide the outcome of the war, which was settled on the Western Front, and that Turkey’s capitulation was determined above all by the collapse of Bulgaria, which cut it off from Germany. The victory in Palestine and the capture of Damascus were nevertheless an important cause of that capitulation. Allenby won thanks to his superiority in men, artillery, aircraft and cavalry, to command of the sea, which allowed him to supply his troops from successive ports, and to skilfully used ruses. The Turks defended themselves stubbornly, especially in the hills, and their soldiers astonished their opponents with their endurance.

The campaign also had enormous political consequences. While it lasted, Britain made contradictory promises: it promised the Sharif of Mecca an Arab state, divided the Middle East with France in the Sykes–Picot Agreement, and in November 1917, in the Balfour Declaration, promised the Jews a “national home” in Palestine. After the war Palestine came under a British mandate, and Syria and Lebanon under a French one. Feisal’s rule in Damascus lasted less than two years. The line on which the armistice found the Turks near Aleppo became for Turkish nationalists the border of an inviolable homeland. For Australia and New Zealand the campaign, in which their horsemen fought from Romani to Damascus, became, alongside Gallipoli, part of the national memory of the war, and the charge at Beersheba one of its legends.