British take Jaffa

On 16 November 1917, at about ten in the morning, the Wellington Mounted Rifles Regiment rode into Jaffa, the old port on the coast of Palestine and the main outlet to the sea for Jerusalem. The Turks did not defend the town, and the New Zealanders were fired on by only a few snipers. The British official history (Cyril Falls) writes that the men rode in good spirits, picking oranges in the groves through which the road led. In the town they were warmly welcomed by about 8,000 inhabitants, according to Falls roughly a third of the usual population. Jaffa, which had often been destroyed in earlier wars, this time survived almost untouched.

The road to Jaffa

Two days earlier, after the victory at El Mughar and the capture of the junction station of the railway to Jerusalem, the Ottoman armies had separated. The Eighth Army of General Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein was falling back north along the coast, the Seventh Army into the hills. On 14 November the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade fought a hard action near the Jewish settlements of Nes Ziona and Rishon LeZion (Arabic Ayun Kara) against the Turkish 3rd Division, which was covering the retreat. The Turks counter-attacked several times, coming in places to within a dozen or so metres and throwing grenades, until a Wellington squadron drove them off with the bayonet. According to the official history the New Zealanders lost 175 killed and wounded, and the Turks left about 150 dead. On 15 November the Australians took Ramleh and Lydda.

The Australian official historian Henry Gullett wrote that the New Zealanders wanted to go straight on to Jaffa, but the plans of General Sir Edmund Allenby did not provide for its immediate capture, and they were ordered to halt a few kilometres south of the town. On the morning of 16 November the Wellington regiment was ordered to reconnoitre Jaffa, not to take it. Meeting no resistance, it rode through the suburbs of white villas among the orange groves and entered the old town by the sea. According to Gullett, several hours passed before the commander of the Desert Mounted Corps, Lieutenant-General Harry Chauvel, ventured to report this successful but unauthorised enterprise to Allenby.

A depopulated town

Before the war Jaffa had been one of the largest towns in Palestine, a centre of the orange trade, and next to it the new Jewish quarter of Tel Aviv had grown up. In the spring of 1917, when the British stood before Gaza, the commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army, Djemal Pasha, ordered the population of Jaffa to be deported, citing fear of a landing and of espionage. The deportation affected many thousands of people, and most severely the Jews of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, whose number historians estimate variously, usually at several thousand to over ten thousand. Many of them ended up in settlements in Galilee, where some died of hunger and disease. The British therefore found the town largely empty. Soon refugees began returning to it and shops reopened, and Gullett noted that the local Christians welcomed the New Zealanders as warmly as the Jews in the settlements on the plain had done.

On the Yarkon

The Turks did not try to hold Jaffa. The Eighth Army fell back behind the Yarkon river (Arabic Nahr al-Auja), which flows into the sea a few kilometres north of the town, and dug in on the hills on its northern bank. On 16 and 17 November the New Zealanders and Australians occupied the German Templer colony of Sarona and the settlement of Wilhelma, and patrols reconnoitred the fords on the river. The Turks did not shell the town, in which, as Falls wrote, some of the most valuable property belonged to Germans and Turks.

The capture of Jaffa gave the British a port on the coast far north of Gaza, although without a sheltered harbour ships had to anchor in the roadstead. Allenby did not stop by the sea, however. He decided to hold the Eighth Army in check on the plain and with the rest of his forces to go straight into the hills after the Seventh Army and take Jerusalem. For several weeks Jaffa lay just behind the front, within range of the Turkish positions beyond the Yarkon, which the British took only in the second half of December.