Charge at El Mughar

At three in the afternoon of 13 November 1917 two regiments of British yeomanry, the Bucks Hussars from Buckinghamshire and the Dorset Yeomanry, rode out of the bed of the Wadi Jamus on the Philistine Plain and galloped at the ridge by the Arab village of El Mughar (Al-Maghar). Since morning Scottish infantry had been lying in front of this ridge under machine-gun fire, unable to move. The charge across several kilometres of open ground broke the defence, and the infantry followed it and took both villages on the ridge, El Mughar and Katrah. A Turkish account wrote that the Ottoman Eighth Army faced an “irreparable defeat” that day. By evening more than a thousand prisoners had been taken, and the road to the railway junction station for Jerusalem lay open.

The last line on the plain

Since the capture of Gaza on 7 November the troops of General Sir Edmund Allenby had been pushing north along the coast. The Turks, many of whose units had fled in panic, had nevertheless managed to rally on a line covering Junction Station. Its southern sector was defended by Refet Bey’s XXII Corps, the remnants of two divisions bled white at Gaza, according to the British official history no more than 3,000 rifles. They did, however, have a good position: a narrow, steep ridge with the villages of Katrah and El Mughar, surrounded by gardens and prickly-pear hedges, in front of which stretched a flat valley without cover.

On the morning of 13 November the 75th Division attacked along the road to the station, with the 52nd Division to its left. The Scottish 155th Brigade took the village of Beshshit, and before noon its battalions got to within about 600 metres of Katrah and El Mughar, where they were pinned down. On the left flank the yeomanry cleared the Turks out of the village of Yebna, today’s Yavne. The commander of the 52nd Division, Major-General Hill, ordered a heavy bombardment of both villages for 3.30 p.m. and rode off to ask the commander of the Yeomanry Mounted Division, Major-General George Barrow, for help. It turned out that the 6th Mounted Brigade was already preparing to attack.

The charge

The brigade commander, Brigadier-General Godwin, issued his orders in the bed of the wadi. Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Cripps’s Bucks Hussars were to strike at the ridge north of El Mughar, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Randolf Baker’s Dorset Yeomanry at its farther section, and the Berkshire Yeomanry were to follow in reserve. The wadi bed was so narrow that it held only a single file of horses, so the third regiment could not assemble in it at once. Lieutenant Perkins of the Bucks Hussars galloped under fire along a neighbouring wadi, and a witness wrote that the bullets followed him like a spotlight following a dancer on stage. He found a covered position from which a machine-gun squadron could support the attack, while the Berkshire battery of horse artillery shelled El Mughar from about 3 km away.

The regiments set off at a trot, in column of squadrons, with five paces between riders. After a little over a kilometre and a half the machine guns reached them, but they fired mostly from above and inaccurately, and the riders broke into a gallop. The official history (Cyril Falls) states that both regiments had about 4,000 yards, nearly 4 km, to cover. According to the regimental histories, the Dorsets rode that far and the Bucks Hussars about 3,000 yards. A fox jumped up in front of the Bucks Hussars’ line and was greeted with shouts as if on a hunt in the Vale of Aylesbury. The left squadron of the Dorsets had such tired horses that the riders dismounted below the crest and went up on foot. When the first squadrons burst onto the ridge, the Turks fled. Some of them, seeing how many horses and men the regiments had lost on the crest, opened fire from the flanks, but the supporting squadrons came up, together with the Hotchkiss machine-gun sections that had ridden with the charge. On the ridge several hundred prisoners, two field guns and twelve machine guns were taken. The yeomanry turned some of the guns on the fleeing enemy.

The villages

When the commander of the 155th Brigade, Brigadier-General Pollok-M’Call, saw the horsemen on the plain, he understood that they were drawing the Turkish fire on themselves. He seized a rifle, ran out into the open and signalled to the Scottish battalions of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers to follow him. They ran several hundred metres to the gardens, hacked their way through the hedges and broke into El Mughar. In the northern part of the village they met the dismounted Berkshire Yeomanry, sent to clear it. Who took the village first remained disputed. At 3.45 p.m. the Royal Scots Fusiliers moved on Katrah, and a quarter of an hour later it was in their hands. The Turkish infantry fell back, but most of the machine-gun crews fought to the end and many died at their guns.

At sunset a dozen or so riders of the East Riding Yeomanry galloped through the village of Akir after the fleeing Turks. Near the nearby Jewish settlement of Ekron, today Mazkeret Batya, a second squadron was stopped by the fire of a detachment that Refet Bey himself had gathered from the officers and men of his staff. The British saw the Turkish corps commander on a white horse, placing his men, and fired at him without success. Darkness was falling, and the brigade was ordered to stay on the ridge.

Balance

According to the official history, more than a thousand prisoners were taken in the attack on Katrah and El Mughar, and more than 400 dead Turks were found on the battlefield. The yeomanry regiments give higher figures for the 6th Mounted Brigade alone, almost 1,400 prisoners, but Falls notes that the prisoners from the ridge and from the villages cannot be separated. The British lost 616 men: 486 in the Scottish 155th Brigade and 130 in the 6th Mounted Brigade, which also lost 265 horses. Among the mortally wounded were Captain Harry Hoare, heir to the Stourhead estate, and Major Evelyn de Rothschild of the Bucks Hussars, from the banking family that had founded many Jewish settlements on the same plain. For the Dorset Yeomanry it was the second great charge of the war, after Agagia in the Egyptian desert in February 1916.

In the evening General Erich von Falkenhayn ordered both Ottoman armies to retreat. During the night the 234th Brigade of the 75th Division, led by the Indian 123rd Outram’s Rifles, approached Junction Station and occupied it on the morning of 14 November. The charge at El Mughar soon came to be called the last great charge of the British cavalry, although horsemen, mainly Australian and Indian, were still charging in Palestine and Syria in 1918.