Capture of Homs

In mid-October 1918 the British 5th Cavalry Division of Major-General Henry Macandrew occupied without a fight Homs (Hims), a town of about 70,000 inhabitants in the fertile valley of the Orontes, roughly halfway from Damascus to Aleppo. The Turks had withdrawn from it earlier. The dates in the sources differ by one day: according to Preston, the historian of the Desert Mounted Corps, the armoured cars of the leading column drove into the town on 15 October and the rest of the division arrived the next day. Cyril Falls’s British official history states that the leading column reached Homs on 16 October. Arab soldiers of Emir Faisal, who were marching north from Damascus along the main road, covering the British right flank, were also already in the town.

Pursuit with sick cavalry

After the capture of Damascus on 1 October the British cavalry halted for several days. Malaria and other diseases were spreading among them, and the 4th Cavalry Division was so weakened that it was fit only for duty in camp. On 9 October General Edmund Allenby ordered the Desert Mounted Corps to take Homs and the infantry on the coast to take Tripoli. He also accepted an offer from Faisal, who undertook to send about 1,500 horsemen and camel troops north to operate against the Turkish lines of communication between Hama and Aleppo. On 10 October British armoured cars found Baalbek, famous for the ruins of its Roman temples, abandoned. Since replacing the 4th Division with the healthy Australian Mounted Division would have taken too long, Allenby ordered the 5th Division to push on, with the 4th Division to follow it.

The march up the Orontes valley

Macandrew divided the division into two columns. The first, with the commander’s headquarters, the armoured cars and a battery of horse artillery, went ahead, the second a day’s march behind it. The successive stages from Baalbek led through Labwe, Al-Qaa and Al-Qusayr. To the surprise of the British, in every place it proved possible to requisition bread, meat and grain for the day. For several days there had been reports that the Turks had left Homs, and this proved to be true. As Falls writes, the inhabitants gave the troops an exceptionally warm welcome, and the town authorities gave a banquet for Macandrew. The general spoke at it of the traditional friendship of noble adversaries, Richard the Lionheart and Saladin.

The Turkish retreat

After the defeat at Megiddo the Turks no longer had an army in Syria capable of fighting. The commander of the Yıldırım Army Group, the German General Otto Liman von Sanders, did not expect to be able to offer resistance before Aleppo. He sent Colonel von Oppen’s German Asia Corps there and ordered Mustafa Kemal to rebuild an army there from the remnants. The remains of the Fourth Army were to hold on at Homs as long as possible to give him time for this, but they went off north before the British cavalry arrived.

The division rested in Homs for three days. Hama, about 40 kilometres further north, was clear of Turks according to the airmen, and on 18 October Allenby ordered preparations for a further advance, so that the 5th Cavalry Division would be in Aleppo by 26 October. The 4th Division, exhausted by disease, was to move to Homs. From then on supplies came to the town by lorry along the road from Tripoli, through the gap between the Lebanon mountains and the Ansariyya range. Homs, however, was still about 190 kilometres from Aleppo.