Capture of Nazareth and Beisan

On 20 September 1918, a day after the breakthrough of the Turkish front by the sea, the cavalry of Lieutenant-General Harry Chauvel came down from the hills into the Jezreel Valley, several dozen kilometres behind the backs of the Turkish armies. By the evening it had taken the railway junction at Afula, closed the road at Beisan on the Jordan and occupied Jenin. At dawn one of its brigades burst into Nazareth, where the headquarters of the Turkish Yildirim Army Group stood, and very nearly captured its commander, General Otto Liman von Sanders.

The charge at Megiddo

During the night the Indian 2nd Lancers of the 4th Cavalry Division passed through the Musmus Pass without a fight, stopping on the way a long column of Turkish transport, whose men surrendered without resistance. At 3.30 a.m. the regiment reached El Lajjun, at the foot of the mound of ancient Megiddo, where it found about a hundred Turks sitting by their fires with their rifles piled. The rest of the division was more than two hours late, because the guide of one of the brigades lost his way and led it several kilometres north, into the wrong valley.

At 5.30 a.m. the lancers set off for Afula. After a few minutes they came upon a Turkish depot regiment that Liman had sent from Nazareth at noon the previous day to block the mouth of the pass. It had arrived too late and was now deploying on the plain in two lines. One squadron pinned it down with fire together with armoured cars and machine guns, while two others charged from the flank, using a slight dip in the ground. The Turkish machine-gunners, unnerved by the speed of the horses, fired too high. Forty-six Turks were killed by the lance and 470 were taken prisoner. The lancers lost one man wounded and 12 horses. At about 7.45 a.m. they rode into Afula, whose station had been taken a little earlier by troopers of the Indian Deccan Horse of the 5th Cavalry Division. At the station stood ten locomotives and fifty wagons, and on the airfield three aircraft. A fourth managed to take off. Soon afterwards another aircraft landed, its crew unaware that the airfield was in British hands. The airmen opened fire but were shot dead, and the aircraft, with its bags of mail, fell into the victors’ hands.

The raid on Nazareth

The task of capturing Liman was given to the 13th Cavalry Brigade of Brigadier-General P. J. V. Kelly of the 5th Division, made up of the British Gloucestershire Hussars and two Indian regiments, the 18th Lancers and Hodson’s Horse. After an all-night march in single file through the hills and along paths barely visible in the moonlight, the brigade came out into the Jezreel Valley at 2.15 a.m. and cut the railway from Afula to Haifa. Its guide, however, led it to the village of El Mujeidil, which he took for Nazareth, and the lancers rounded up two hundred sleeping Turks there before the mistake was cleared up. Some units got lost in the dark or were collecting prisoners, so only a weakened brigade on tired horses reached Nazareth. According to Falls, the author of the British official history, this happened at 4.30 a.m.; Liman wrote of the alarm being raised at 5.30.

The Gloucestershire Hussars, sabres in hand, galloped down the main street looking for the marshal’s quarters. No one could show them the way: the inhabitants, remembering how the Turks had hanged British sympathisers after the spring raid on Es Salt, were afraid to speak. In the Hotel Germania, where many staff officers and officials were quartered and took their meals, a great many prisoners were taken, and piles of documents in nearby houses. The British did not, however, reach the main staff office in the Casa Nuova hospice. Liman, woken by the shooting, according to his landlady’s account first drove off north by car in his nightclothes and came back to get dressed when he decided the situation was not so bad. He himself did not mention this. He did write, however, that German clerks, orderlies and drivers defended themselves from behind walls and from windows and balconies, and that officers fired with carbines. At 8.30 a.m. Liman went to the hills by the French orphanage and ordered the remnants of the depot regiment to counter-attack. Twice this failed; the third attack drove the British from the hills west of the town. Falls did justice to the German clerks, who attacked with desperate courage until almost all of them had fallen to machine-gun fire.

Kelly asked for reinforcements, but the divisional commander, Major-General Henry Macandrew, judged that the horses could not manage it. His decision was probably influenced by Kelly’s own report that Liman had reportedly left the town the previous evening, which proved untrue. At 10.55 a.m. he ordered the brigade to withdraw. In the whole raid the brigade took about 1,250 prisoners, a large proportion of them Germans. According to Falls the Hussars lost 13 men and Hodson’s Horse 9; the lancers’ losses were not recorded. Liman’s staff burned most of its files so that they would not fall into enemy hands. According to Liman, the Germans lost 43 killed in the street fighting. The marshal left Nazareth at 1.15 p.m. with a few officers and, along a road crowded with fugitives, reached Tiberias at 3.30 p.m. He had not been captured, but his command was shattered: he no longer had communications with his armies and could not direct the battle. The next day the British occupied Nazareth without a fight.

Beisan and Jenin

From Afula the 4th Cavalry Division of Major-General George Barrow set off east at 1 p.m., along the railway through the Jezreel Valley, collecting hundreds of prisoners on the way. At Beisan (Beit She’an), where the roads from the hills of Samaria and the Jordan valley converged, it met only token resistance and took about a hundred prisoners and three howitzers, their barrels pointing east. By 6 p.m. the whole division stood in the town, and during the night it collected another 700 prisoners. In 34 hours it had covered about 110 kilometres, losing only 26 horses, although all of them were by then exhausted. In the evening the Indian 19th Lancers rode on north to seize the bridges over the Jordan and the Yarmuk at Jisr el Mejamie, and arrived there at dawn.

On the road from Nablus to Damascus, in the afternoon, when airmen reported crowds of Turks fleeing north, Chauvel sent the Australian 3rd Light Horse Brigade from El Lajjun to Jenin. The Australians galloped 18 kilometres in 70 minutes, took about 1,800 prisoners in an olive grove near Kafr Adan and at dusk burst into the town, where the inhabitants fell upon the Turkish depots. In the evening Lieutenant Patterson, with 23 men and two machine guns, stopped a column of 2,800 soldiers in a gorge south of the town and bluffed it into surrendering. The parley was interpreted by a German nursing sister marching at the head of the column. By morning the brigade had almost 8,000 prisoners.

By the evening of 20 September every road north out of the hills of Samaria was closed. According to Falls, about 25,000 prisoners were already in British hands, and the Turkish Eighth Army, apart from the German group of Colonel von Oppen, had ceased to exist. The Seventh Army of Mustafa Kemal, retreating from the Nablus area, was in the net.