British occupy El Arish

At dawn on 21 December 1916 the brigades of the Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division and the new Imperial Camel Corps Brigade surrounded El Arish, a small coastal town in an oasis in northern Sinai. There was no assault. The Turks had abandoned the town the previous day, and its inhabitants welcomed the newcomers with enthusiasm. El Arish was the objective towards which General Archibald Murray’s troops had been advancing since the autumn, at the pace at which the railway and the water pipeline were laid ahead of them. The capture of the town closed the desert stage of the campaign and opened the way to the border of Palestine.

Water decides

El Arish was the largest settlement in Sinai and had been in Turkish hands for more than two years. According to the British official history (MacMunn and Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. I), it was defended by a garrison estimated at 1,600 men, two battalions of the 80th Infantry Regiment, in well-fortified trenches. Further Turkish camps lay some 35–40 kilometres inland, on the dry bed of the Wadi el Arish, at Magdhaba and Abu Aweigila, covering the end of the Turkish railway at El Kossaima. The Turkish trenches at El Arish took in all the water in the area, and between them and the British water railhead there was none at all. Patrols of Australian horsemen with engineers searched for it at night in the bed of the wadi, but found none. The advance therefore required huge stocks of water to be gathered at the railway, and thousands of camels to carry it after the troops. If the fighting had lasted two days, two infantry divisions and all the mounted troops would have had to be watered from these stocks.

Between 9 and 14 December airmen and patrols reported that the Turks were building new fortifications and that the camps at Magdhaba and Abu Aweigila were growing. Murray speeded up the preparations, but in the absence of rain the water stocks for the striking force were ready only on 20 December. At the same time the climate in London was also changing. On 9 December, two days after David Lloyd George became prime minister, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General William Robertson, telegraphed Murray that the prime minister wanted his operations to be as successful as possible and that a success in the East was badly needed. As late as 15 December, however, Murray was reminded that his main task remained the defence of Egypt.

The night march

On 20 December, the day on which everything was ready, airmen of the Royal Flying Corps reported that the Turks had evacuated El Arish and the neighbouring position of Masaid. Murray no longer had to wait for the slow infantry. That same night General Harry Chauvel’s mounted troops and the Imperial Camel Corps Brigade, formed from Australian, British and New Zealand companies only on 19 December, set out for El Arish. After a march of more than 30 kilometres through a moonless night they stood around the town before dawn. The 1st Light Horse Brigade reached the sea east of El Arish, the cameliers closed it off from the south, the New Zealanders from the south-west, and the 3rd Brigade took position at Masaid. The Australian official history (Gullett) asserts that none of the brigades was out in its reckoning by more than about 180 metres.

For the soldiers that night was a turning point. For the first time in months the horses came down from the loose dunes onto the hard ground of the broad plain by the Wadi el Arish. The commander of the 1st Brigade, Brigadier-General Charles Cox, recalled that when the horseshoes began to strike sparks from the stones in the wadi bed, the men laughed with joy. “Sinai was behind them,” he added. In the morning they saw green patches of wheat and barley, and palm trees.

Without a single shot

When the patrols rode into El Arish, it turned out that the Turks were gone. Elders in colourful robes seized the troopers by the stirrups and kissed their boots, and the chief sheikh formally surrendered the town and handed over one Turk and a few spies. The British official history notes drily that the local Arabs displayed boundless joy at the departure of the Turks. Air reconnaissance found no enemy in the vicinity. The planned co-operation of the navy, which was to have supported the advance with fire from the sea, proved unnecessary. The German commander of the Ottoman forces in Sinai, Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, later explained that his troops had been too weak to defend El Arish, a badly placed town exposed to the fire of British warships. The only casualties that day were not casualties of battle: two Australian troopers, veterans of Gallipoli, were killed on the beach when, while bathing, they touched a mine washed up by the sea.

Airmen spotted some 1,600 Turks marching in two columns in the area of Magdhaba and Abu Aweigila. On 22 December the 52nd Infantry Division entered El Arish, and the commander of the Desert Column, Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode, arrived by boat from Port Said and at once issued orders for a pursuit. Minesweeping began in the roadstead, and the Royal Australian Naval Bridging Train began building a jetty. According to Murray’s report the roadstead was clear after 48 hours, and from 24 December ships from Port Said were unloading supplies. El Arish became a forward base on the edge of Palestine, supplied by sea. Murray wrote in his report that the Turks had slipped away for the time being, so every concentration of theirs left within reach had to be attacked. The nearest stood on the Wadi el Arish, at Magdhaba.