British take Jericho

On the morning of 21 February 1918 the troopers of the Australian 1st Light Horse Brigade, who had come down a goat track from the mountains to the Dead Sea during the night, rode north along the floor of the valley towards Jericho. At about eight in the morning a troop of the 3rd Light Horse Regiment rode into the little town. It met no resistance. The Turkish garrison had left during the night, and with it the Turkish units had withdrawn from the hills of the Judaean Desert, which for two days the London 60th Division and the horsemen from Australia and New Zealand had been driving from one position after another. Two months after Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem, British troops stood in the valley of the Jordan.

Morning by the Dead Sea

The retreat was no surprise to the British, but it came sooner than they had expected. As late as the evening of 20 February the Turks still held Nebi Musa firmly, a place revered by Muslims as the tomb of Moses, on the road from the monastery of Mar Saba to Jericho. Major-General Edward Chaytor, commander of the Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division, put off the attack until the morning and sent Brigadier-General Charles Cox’s Australian brigade down a gorge to the Dead Sea during the night to take the defenders from the rear. The threat to their line of retreat did its work. At dawn the New Zealand Canterbury Mounted Rifles crossed the gorge in front of Nebi Musa on foot and found the position empty. The Turks had even taken their guns. Major-General John Shea’s infantry reached the edge of the escarpment above the valley without a fight, from Nebi Musa to Mount Quruntul, which Christian tradition regards as the Mount of Temptation.

According to the British official history (Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. II), Cox had hoped to cut off the Turks coming down from the mountains, but was disappointed. Nor did he find any stores in Jericho. The little town, which, as Falls noted, does not stand on the site of the biblical Jericho of either the Old or the New Testament, was in his view a place of “abominable filth”. In the houses lay a few Turks sick with typhus. Special intelligence officers meanwhile searched the area for spies, who were known to be moving about Jericho, and the mounted troops screened the town throughout the following night.

On the bank of the Jordan

The rest of the Australian brigade rode up the valley as far as the Wadi el Auja stream. A squadron of the New Zealand Wellington Mounted Rifles rode south to Rujm el Bahr, a small harbour on the northern shore of the Dead Sea, to which Turkish boats carried grain from the Al-Karak area for the troops in the valley. It found nothing there. The Turks had carried off the grain and had sunk the boats or taken them up the Jordan. Shipping across the lake was in any case already paralysed, because three weeks earlier Arab insurgents had destroyed the flotilla at Al-Mazraa on the eastern shore.

On the western bank of the river, between the Dead Sea and the Wadi el Auja, only two Turkish detachments remained. The stronger held a bridgehead at Ghoraniyeh, by the bridge on the road from Jerusalem through Jericho to Es Salt and Amman. The smaller covered the Makhadet Hajla ford, regarded as the place of Christ’s baptism. Turkish camps could be seen across the river. The New Zealand historian C. Guy Powles recorded that when Chaytor’s staff had set up about 1.5 km beyond Jericho and sat down to morning tea, Generals Philip Chetwode, commander of XX Corps, and Harry Chauvel, commander of the Desert Mounted Corps, arrived. Then a Turkish long-range gun began firing from beyond the Jordan. One of the shells struck the front of the car on whose running board Chaytor was sitting, but the general came out of it unscathed. The British field guns could not reply, because they did not have the range. A photograph of this field breakfast of the three generals has survived.

What next

For soldiers who in three days had come down from the frosty hills around Jerusalem, more than 700 metres above sea level, into a valley lying several hundred metres below it, the change was striking. In February the country around Jericho was green and a pleasant refuge from the mountain wind. Falls pointed out, however, that by May the valley turns into a stifling, scorching hell. The British command did not intend to hold it in strength for the time being. On 22 February the 60th Division pulled its main body back to the hills halfway to Jerusalem, and the mounted troops returned to the coast. The New Zealand Auckland Mounted Rifles remained on the Jordan. On 25 February its patrols established that the Turks had withdrawn men, guns and a pontoon bridge from the western bank.

The capture of Jericho secured the right flank of General Edmund Allenby’s front and gave him access to the crossings of the Jordan. Beyond the river lay the mountains of Moab, Amman and the Hejaz Railway, linking Damascus with Medina, besieged by the Arabs. That was where the next step was to lead. A month later the British crossed the Jordan at Ghoraniyeh and set out on the first raid on Amman.