Capture of Damascus

Early on the morning of 1 October 1918 the Australian 10th Light Horse Regiment rode down a steep slope into the gorge of the Barada river and, swords in hand, galloped towards Damascus. It had not come to capture the city. Its task was to ride through it as fast as possible and close the road north to Homs, along which the remnants of the Turkish forces were fleeing. Even so, it was one of its officers who received, at the town hall, the surrender of the ancient city, which had belonged to the Ottoman Empire since 1516. An hour or two later Emir Faisal’s Arab horsemen rode into Damascus, accompanied by Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence. The British chronology of the war recorded it briefly: Damascus taken by British and Arab forces. The dispute over who was in the city first continues to this day, because the answer decided to whom Damascus should belong.

The race to Damascus

After the victory at Megiddo, General Edmund Allenby ordered the advance on Damascus on 26 September. Lieutenant-General Harry Chauvel’s Desert Mounted Corps set out: the Australian Mounted Division and the 5th Cavalry Division along the road from the Sea of Galilee through Quneitra, and the 4th Cavalry Division from the east, through Daraa, which Faisal’s Arabs had taken on 27 September. The Arab Northern Army covered the British right flank, while Bedouin horsemen harried the fleeing columns of the Turkish 4th Army. Beyond the Jordan the garrison of Ma’an, cut off after the capture of Amman, surrendered.

Although the Turks had won the race to Damascus, they no longer had the strength to defend it. On 30 September the Australians reached the heights above the Barada gorge, through which ran the road and railway to Beirut and Baalbek, the main line of retreat. The machine guns of the 5th Light Horse Brigade, with a French cavalry regiment and New Zealand machine-gunners, opened fire on the columns crowded below. A few kilometres further on, men of the 9th Light Horse Regiment did the same. According to Cyril Falls’s British official history, about 400 dead were later found on the road, and about 4,000 Turks who turned back were taken prisoner. Clearing away the wrecked wagons and the bodies of men and animals took several days. The commander of the Turkish army group, Otto Liman von Sanders, had already moved his headquarters to Baalbek on 29 September. In the city itself chaos reigned: Bedouin rode through the streets firing into the air, and the departing troops could not buy food even for gold. On the afternoon of 30 September someone hoisted the flag of the Sharif of Mecca over the town hall, and the Turks marching past made no attempt to take it down.

The morning of 1 October

Brigadier-General Lachlan Wilson’s 3rd Light Horse Brigade was to move from the Beirut road to the Homs road and close that one too, bypassing the city. Wilson did not know what was happening in Damascus, but judged that he would arrive in time only if he rode straight through its northern part. Falls called the decision exceptionally bold. At Dummar station in the gorge several hundred Turks surrendered from a train standing without a locomotive. The road was strewn with wagons and the bodies of men and animals, including a whole flock of sheep mown down by the night’s fire, so one squadron spent three quarters of an hour clearing a way through. Then Major Arthur Olden ordered the men to ride into the city at the gallop. According to Falls, the head of the brigade was in Damascus before 6.30 a.m. The Australians passed barracks full of Turkish soldiers who did not fire a single shot, and in the narrow streets they had to slow to a walk, surrounded by an ecstatic crowd. Rose petals and confetti were showered from the windows, women sprinkled the riders with perfume, and men pressed fruit and cigarettes on them.

At the town hall Olden found a council presided over by Emir Muhammad Said, a grandson of the famous Algerian leader Abd al-Qadir, who had settled in Damascus. The emir declared that the departing Turkish authorities had appointed him governor the day before, and formally handed the city over to him. Olden declined refreshments, took a guide and rode on. Beyond the city Wilson’s brigade clashed with German machine guns covering the retreat and near the village of Douma took about 500 prisoners and 37 machine guns.

On the western edge of Damascus the 4th Light Horse Regiment approached the great barracks. The Turks surrendered at the first summons. According to Falls, 265 officers and 10,481 men lined up on the square, sick, wounded, starving and exhausted by a ten-day march. About six hundred more who could not move remained in the barracks, and in three other hospitals the Australians found 1,800 sick in appalling misery. In some wards the dead had lain on the floor among the living for three days. At 10.30 a.m. the 14th Cavalry Brigade, with the commander of the 5th Cavalry Division, entered the city from the south, greeted just as enthusiastically by the inhabitants of the southern quarters, who had not seen the Australians ride through.

Lawrence arrived by car at about 7.30 a.m. Already at the town hall before him, having come on horseback, were Sharif Nasir, a relative of Faisal and commander of the Arab column, and Nuri al-Shaalan, sheikh of the Ruwala tribe. After a stormy scene Lawrence removed the two brothers of the house of Abd al-Qadir, regarding them as enemies of Faisal, and in the emir’s name appointed a local notable, Shukri Pasha al-Ayyubi, military governor. At about 8.30 a.m. Chauvel, who had come from his headquarters at Kaukab, agreed that Shukri should hold power temporarily. The Arabs maintained that they had entered Damascus first, and that is how Lawrence later presented it. Falls settled the matter in a footnote: Arab irregular horsemen had been in the city before midnight on 30 September, but they had not attacked the Turks, to whom they were indistinguishable from the local Bedouin. The first unit to enter Damascus as a conqueror was the Australian advanced guard. According to the British historian Matthew Hughes, Allenby’s headquarters in any case wanted Faisal’s forces to enter the city “first”, although it was the British who had won the battle.

Chaos and a parade

The first Arab administration was not in control of the situation. There was looting in the city, Bedouin fired in the streets, and fear was growing among the Christians. When a British supply officer reported to Chauvel that the city was in chaos and that Faisal’s men wanted to persuade the inhabitants that it was the Arabs who had driven out the Turks, Chauvel decided to show his strength. On 2 October the commanders of three mounted divisions and detachments from every regiment marched through Damascus in a parade: British yeomanry, Australian light horse, New Zealand machine-gunners, Indian cavalrymen, French Chasseurs d’Afrique and Spahis, and British horse artillery. According to Falls, the looting stopped and the city quickly returned to trade, doing good business with the British soldiers.

That same morning the 9th Light Horse Regiment caught up on the Homs road near Khan Ayash with a long column that had bypassed Damascus, and forced it to surrender. It took 91 officers, including a divisional commander, over 1,300 men, three guns and 26 machine guns. Falls called this clash the last fight of the Australian forces in the campaign. There were so many prisoners that the new authorities could not feed them. According to Falls, the Desert Mounted Corps took 662 officers and 19,205 men between 26 September and 1 October, and more than 47,000 prisoners since the start of the offensive, while itself losing little more than 500 men in action since 19 September. Allenby estimated that when the pursuit towards Damascus began, more than 40,000 Turks were retreating. The pursuit halved that number.

Victory, however, had a bitter taste. The Australian official historian Henry Gullett wrote that Turks were dying at a rate of 70–80 a day in the main hospital, and that of the roughly 20,000 prisoners taken in and around Damascus, 3,000–4,000 died, many of exhaustion. Among the victors malignant malaria, brought from the Jordan valley, was spreading, and soon Spanish flu as well. In many regiments more than half the men were lying in fever after a few days. According to Falls, almost four times as many soldiers of the Desert Mounted Corps died in Damascus as had been killed in action from the start of the offensive to the capture of the city.

Allenby and Faisal

On 3 October Allenby arrived in Damascus by car. He made no ceremonial entry, as he had in Jerusalem ten months earlier. At the Hotel Victoria he met Faisal, who had arrived in the city the same day. The matter was a difficult one, because under the Sykes–Picot Agreement Damascus lay in the zone where an Arab state under French influence was to be created, while the coast with Beirut lay in the zone of direct French control. Allenby told Faisal that he recognised Arab administration of the occupied territories east of the Jordan, from Ma’an up to and including Damascus, but not west of the Anti-Lebanon, and that while hostilities continued supreme authority rested with him. He appointed two liaison officers, a Briton and a Frenchman, to deal with the Arab government. Faisal, who according to later accounts had heard from Lawrence that the Arabs would receive the whole of Syria including the coast, accepted this reluctantly. Lawrence soon asked to be released and left for England.

Shukri Pasha soon stepped down, and the governorship passed to Ali Rida al-Rikabi, an officer of the Turkish army of Arab origin who on 30 September, instead of preparing the city’s defence, had ridden out to meet the British. For the Arabs, the capture of Damascus was the fulfilment of the dreams of the revolt begun in the Hejaz in 1916. At the same time it opened a dispute between Faisal and France that ended in 1920 with the French occupation of Syria. Allenby’s forces, meanwhile, moved on towards Beirut, Homs and Aleppo.