Capture of Tripoli

On 13 October 1918 British troops entered Tripoli, a port town on the coast of Lebanon about 80 kilometres north of Beirut, without a fight. The first to arrive were the horsemen of the XXI Corps cavalry regiment and the 2nd Light Armoured Motor Battery, sent ahead by the corps commander, Lieutenant-General Edward Bulfin. The Turks had already left the town. After the defeat at Megiddo and the capture of Damascus, the remnants of their army were falling back inland, towards Homs and Aleppo, and made no attempt to defend the coast.

The march along the coast

Since the end of September the Indian 7th (Meerut) Division had been marching north along the Mediterranean. It was supplied mainly by sea: food was landed at successive ports and picked up by the passing columns. On 6 October its leading units entered Sidon, and on the evening of 8 October Beirut, where the inhabitants gave them an ovation and handed over to them about six hundred Turkish soldiers. On 9 October General Edmund Allenby ordered the 7th Division to take Tripoli and the Desert Mounted Corps to take Homs. The pace of the advance, he stressed, was to depend on how quickly food could be brought up. On 11 October Bulfin sent cavalry and armoured cars towards Tripoli, and they reached the town two days later. The infantry, the 19th Brigade of Brigadier-General W. S. Leslie, set out from Beirut on 14 October and reached Tripoli on 18 October, followed by the rest of the division.

What Tripoli was for

What the British wanted above all was the port. From Tripoli a road led through the gap between the Lebanon mountains and the Ansariya range into the interior of Syria, to Homs in the valley of the Orontes. Apart from the Beirut–Damascus road it was the only important road across the mountains. A railway also ran that way, but the Turks had managed to dismantle it. Allenby’s cavalry, advancing north from Damascus, was getting further and further from its bases, and its horses and men were collapsing from exhaustion and malaria. According to Preston, the historian of the Desert Mounted Corps, Tripoli had a small harbour with quays at which supplies could be landed in good weather, and a good metalled road to Homs. From then on, therefore, lorries carried supplies from Tripoli for the cavalry division that was to advance on Aleppo, and in the second half of October a casualty clearing station for that division’s sick and wounded was also landed here.

The French zone

In the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916 the coast of Lebanon had been allotted to France. For this reason the French Detachment of Palestine and Syria (Détachement français de Palestine et de Syrie) marched together with the British troops, and in the coastal towns taken Allenby appointed French military governors. In Beirut this was Colonel de Piépape, commander of the French detachment. On 23 October Allenby reported to London the division of the occupied lands into three zones of military administration. The coastal strip from near Acre to Alexandretta, with Beirut and Tripoli, was to be under the French. In memory of this march an inscription was later carved on the rock above the Nahr al-Kalb river near Beirut, next to inscriptions left by the Pharaoh Ramesses II and Assyrian kings: “The XXI British Army Corps with the French Detachment of Palestine and Syria occupied Beirut and Tripoli in October 1918”.