Capture of Haifa and Acre

On 23 September 1918, the fourth day of the Battle of Megiddo, the British 5th Cavalry Division took two ports on the Bay of Haifa: Haifa and Acre. Acre, the famous fortress that Napoleon had failed to take, fell almost without a fight. Haifa had to be fought for, in an action that the British official history called the most remarkable cavalry action of its scale in the whole campaign: the Indian 15th Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade, made up of units from the Indian princely states, took the town by a mounted charge through a defile defended by machine guns. Allenby needed Haifa as a port through which he could bring in supplies by sea for the further advance north.

A failed attempt

After the capture of Nazareth and Beisan Chauvel’s mounted troops held the Jezreel Valley, but a Turkish garrison still stood in Haifa. During the night of 21–22 September lancers of the 13th Cavalry Brigade at Nazareth beat off an attack by a detachment that was most likely trying to break through from Haifa to Tiberias, and took over two hundred prisoners. On 22 September airmen reported that the Turks were leaving Haifa, and Allenby’s headquarters ordered the town to be occupied that same afternoon by armoured cars and light patrol cars alone. They were led by Brigadier-General A. D’A. King, earmarked as the town’s military governor. The column took 69 prisoners at the railway bridge, but a few kilometres short of Haifa, near the village of Balad al-Sheikh, it came under gun and machine-gun fire from the slopes of Mount Carmel. With its tyres shot through, it turned back with difficulty. It became clear that the town would have to be taken by force.

The charge through the defile

On the morning of 23 September the 5th Cavalry Division set off in two columns. The right column, the 13th Cavalry Brigade with armoured cars, advanced through Saffuriya and Shefa-’Amr on Acre. The left column, Brigadier-General Cyril Harbord’s 15th Brigade, without its Hyderabad regiment, with B Battery of the Honourable Artillery Company, moved along the main road to Haifa. The road ran through a narrow defile: to the south it was dominated by Mount Carmel, to the north by the marshy Kishon river and its tributaries. According to Falls the defile was held by about a thousand soldiers not yet engaged in the fighting, with guns on the slopes of Carmel and by the Karmelheim hostel and machine guns along the road.

At 10 a.m. the leading squadron of the Mysore Lancers came under fire near Balad al-Sheikh. Harbord sent one squadron to outflank the town from the north-east and another to climb the Carmel ridge to attack the guns from above. It was joined by a squadron of the British Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry. The Jodhpur Lancers waited on the plain. The mounted attack was planned for 2 p.m., so as to strike simultaneously from the valley and from the heights.

At 2 p.m. the Jodhpur Lancers moved off at a trot, covered by the fire of the battery, four machine guns and two squadrons from Mysore. When they crossed the railway to Acre the fire grew heavier, so they quickened their pace and galloped straight for the Kishon, to cross the river and fall on the Turks on the far bank. The bank turned out to be steep, however, and two scouts who forced their horses down into the water vanished in quicksand. Falls noted that on the map of Haifa in a secret pre-war military report on Syria this stretch of the river was marked as unfordable, but the information had not reached those who needed it. Under fire from the front and the flank, with horses falling, the regiment wheeled left, crossed the wadi along the railway to Afula and charged the machine guns on the lower slopes of Carmel. The leading squadron rode down the crews and speared them with lances, opening the defile. The second galloped along the road and took two more machine guns on a mound, and the British officer attached to the brigade, Lieutenant-Colonel H. N. Holden, led the remaining two squadrons straight into the town. Shots were fired from some houses and a few Turks were ridden down in the streets, but the matter was already settled. According to Indian accounts Major Dalpat Singh, known in India as the hero of Haifa, was killed in this charge and was posthumously awarded the Military Cross.

At the same time on Carmel a squadron of the Mysore Lancers, which after a difficult climb had only about fifteen men left for the charge, attacked the battery near Karmelheim and captured it. Half a squadron of the Sherwood Rangers did not let the enemy rally. A 150 mm naval gun, two mountain guns and 78 prisoners were taken there. The third Mysore squadron routed a Turkish detachment at the mouth of the Kishon and took two more guns and over a hundred prisoners.

The outcome

According to Falls 25 officers and 664 men were taken prisoner, not counting the sick in hospital, and 16 guns and 10 machine guns were captured. The brigade lost 3 killed and 34 wounded, as well as 60 horses killed and 83 wounded. The history of the 15th Brigade published in 1920 gives 8 killed, and in some accounts the number of prisoners reaches 1,350. Falls judged that a position protected on one side by a steep hill and on the other by an impassable river had been taken in a few hours by two weak cavalry regiments with one battery, and that an attack on foot by such forces would probably not have succeeded. The remnants of the garrison escaped north towards Beirut. Acre, defended according to some sources by about 150 men with two guns, was occupied by the 13th Brigade almost without resistance.

The very next day an infantry battalion of the Indian 7th Division, which was to advance from here along the coast to Beirut, was on its way to Haifa by lorry. The traditions of the Jodhpur and Mysore regiments were inherited by the Indian 61st Cavalry, which celebrates Haifa Day every year on 23 September. The charge is also commemorated by the Teen Murti memorial in New Delhi, dedicated to the fallen cavalrymen from the Indian princely states.

Es Salt for the third time

The same day beyond the Jordan the force of Major-General Edward Chaytor, which since the start of the battle had been pinning down the Turks in the valley, moved forward. When it became clear at dawn that the enemy did not intend to make a stand either in the valley or on the mountain slopes, four columns climbed onto the plateau on a front some 25 kilometres long. New Zealanders of the Canterbury Mounted Rifles Regiment outflanked a strongly held redoubt a kilometre and a half before the town and forced it to surrender, taking 169 prisoners, and at 4.20 p.m. rode into Es Salt. There they took over 500 prisoners, mostly stragglers and transport troops, three guns and large stores. It was already the third occupation of Es Salt in half a year, after two spring raids across the Jordan, the second of which ended in a retreat in May. This time the British had come to stay, and the Turkish Fourth Army was falling back towards Amman and further north.