British take Gaza

Before dawn on 7 November 1917 British patrols left their trenches in front of Gaza and met no one. The Turks had abandoned the town, which they had defended since March against three British attacks. At five in the morning the British were on Green Hill and in the Labyrinth, and at seven on Ali Muntar hill, which they had lost during the First Battle more than seven months earlier. The same morning London infantry took Tel esh Sheria with the bayonet, several dozen kilometres to the east, and Australian cavalry passed through the gap in the Turkish front. The Third Battle of Gaza was over, and the army of General Sir Edmund Allenby set off in pursuit.

Empty Gaza

From 27 October British guns and ships had been shelling Gaza, and on 2 November XXI Corps took the belt of dunes west of the town. After Beersheba fell on 31 October and XX Corps broke the Turkish line at Tel esh Sheria on 6 November, the commander of the Ottoman Eighth Army, General Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, obtained permission from General Erich von Falkenhayn to abandon the town. According to Kress, the withdrawal began on the night of 5–6 November and was completed the following night. It was carried out by the commander of XXII Corps, Refet Bey, so efficiently that there was not even rubbish left in the abandoned camps, and the British were left with only a few worn-out guns.

A further attack by the 54th Division had been planned for 7 November, but the trenches in front of Umbrella Hill were already empty by 9.30 p.m. the previous day. Only the Turks in the eastern defences, with the notorious Tank Redoubt, scene of the bloodiest fighting of the Second Battle of Gaza, held out longer, until night. The patrols that entered the town before five in the morning found not a living soul in the streets. The British official history (Cyril Falls) called Gaza a ghost of a city. From a distance it looked little damaged, but almost every house had been hit by a shell, and the Turks had torn the timber out of them for their defences and every scrap of cloth for sandbags. There had been no inhabitants since the spring, when the Ottoman authorities had evacuated the whole town.

The breakthrough in the east

At 3.30 a.m. two brigades of the London 60th Division moved without artillery preparation across the bed of the Wadi esh Sheria. The Turks opened fire as soon as they noticed the movement, but in the half-light their fire was inaccurate, and at close quarters they defended themselves with grenades and bayonets. Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Borton led volunteers against a Turkish battery firing at them at close range and captured it with its crews. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for this. Another battalion took Tel esh Sheria hill itself. At seven the Irish brigade of the 10th Division attacked the strong Hureira Redoubt on the Gaza–Beersheba road and took it. That ended XX Corps’ part in the battle. Since 31 October it had taken 2,177 prisoners and 45 guns, and lost almost 5,500 men.

Allenby ordered Lieutenant-General Harry Chauvel to throw his cavalry through the broken front towards Jemmameh and Huj, where there were wells, and to cut off the Gaza garrison. The pursuit, however, started several hours late, because the orders arrived late and part of the cavalry was still fighting in the hills north of Beersheba. At about nine the Australian 1st Light Horse Brigade passed through a gap in the Turkish line and in two hours took Ameidat station on the Beersheba railway, with almost 400 prisoners, 27 wagons of ammunition and a field hospital. At noon news came of the fall of Gaza. The Australians tried to push on, but were held until dusk by a Turkish rearguard on Tel Abu Dilakh hill. Falls believed that if a second mounted division had followed them at once, the Turks would have met with disaster.

Along the coast

The Gaza garrison split into three detachments. One fell back to the east, the second to the line of the Wadi el Hesi, and the third took up a rearguard position at Beit Hanun, north-east of the town. The Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade, which rode through Gaza in the afternoon, could not dislodge it from there. At about noon a column of smoke rose above Beit Hanun: the Turks were blowing up the ammunition dumps they could not take with them. Meanwhile the Scottish 157th Brigade of the 52nd Division was advancing along the beach, under cover of the coastal cliffs, so as not to let the Turks dig in on the Wadi el Hesi. After dark it crossed the wadi and at 8.30 p.m. took the high dune of Ras Abu Amire. Water was found at the mouth of the wadi.

The battle was a great victory, but not the destruction of the enemy. Kress led the Eighth Army out of Gaza before the cavalry could close the road to him, and the lack of water and the exhaustion of the horses were to slow the pursuit for days to come. On 8 November at Huj squadrons of the Warwickshire and Worcestershire Yeomanry captured Austrian and Turkish guns in a charge, paying for it with heavy losses. On the afternoon of 9 November panic broke out at the ammunition depot at Et Tine, behind the Eighth Army’s front, after which many Turkish soldiers fled as far as Jerusalem and Damascus.