Clash at Wadi Majid

On 25 December 1915 the British Western Frontier Force marched out of Mersa Matruh by night and attacked the forces of the Senussi order assembled a few kilometres south-west of the town. By evening it had driven them from the hills around Gebel Medwa and from the valley of Wadi Majid. It was the first clear British victory in the war on Egypt’s western frontier, although the enemy’s main forces managed to escape.

Before the battle

After the fighting at Wadi Senab, bad weather from 15 to 24 December made any expeditions impossible. Major-General Alexander Wallace used the time to reorganise his hastily assembled forces, which he reinforced with the 1st Battalion of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade, sent from Cairo. Meanwhile the order’s forces had taken up a position astride the Khedivial Motor Road by the hill of Gebel Medwa, about 10 kilometres from Matruh. From air reconnaissance and informants the British estimated them at over 5,000 men, largely regular muhafiziya, with four guns and several machine guns. They were commanded by Jafar al-Askari. According to his later account he had there only three muhafiziya battalions of three hundred men each, four mountain guns and two machine guns, plus numerous Bedouin, who joined the fighting only when they saw that it would be won. Sayyid Ahmad himself and Nuri Bey stood with a further three battalions at Halazin, about 25 kilometres further south-west.

The attack

Wallace wanted to surprise the enemy with a night march. At five in the morning two columns left Matruh. The right, under Lieutenant-Colonel J. L. R. Gordon, with the 15th Sikhs, the New Zealanders, a battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, the Buckinghamshire Hussars and two guns, went straight along the Khedivial Road to Gebel Medwa. The left, the mounted troops of Brigadier-General J. D. T. Tyndale-Biscoe, made up of yeomanry, Australian Light Horse and a battery of horse artillery, was to outflank the enemy from the south and cut off his retreat to the west. From the sea the attack was supported by the Royal Navy sloop Clematis. Around six, at dawn, the order’s pickets lit a large bonfire as an alarm. Surprise was therefore only partial, but it was enough to prevent the enemy from occupying Gebel Medwa itself, which a company of Sikhs took without a fight.

The only gun of the order that opened fire was quickly silenced by the British artillery, and shells from Clematis, directed from an aircraft, began to fall on the enemy positions. The Sikhs, followed by the New Zealanders, moved across the open plateau onto the ridge south-west of the hill and soon after ten held it. The enemy began to flee. Some of his men took refuge in caves and ravines, where they were killed or captured. The fighting then moved into the branching gullies on the edge of Wadi Majid, where the order’s rearguard defended itself fiercely in trenches. For the New Zealand battalion it was a baptism of fire. Its history records that the last position was taken only after four in the afternoon, and that over a hundred bodies were counted in the gullies.

A failed pursuit

The mounted troops did not bring a decision. From eight in the morning the left column fought horsemen and camel-mounted detachments which the order had posted south of Gebel Medwa precisely against such an outflanking move, and afterwards for a long time it did not respond to Gordon’s signals. It reached the area between Wadi Senab and Wadi Majid only at about three in the afternoon. By then most of the order’s forces, with their herds, had already escaped westwards, and the remnants of the rearguard slipped away after dark along the rocky shore, where horses could not go. The infantry spent an icy night bivouacked by Gebel Medwa and on the morning of 26 December returned to Matruh. The British official history judged that had the mounted troops managed to cut off the main forces, the campaign might have ended that day.

British losses were small: according to the official history 13 killed and 51 wounded. Enemy losses were estimated at over three hundred killed. The history of the New Zealand brigade gives 370 killed and 82 prisoners, the latter figure also given in the report of the commander of the troops in Egypt, General John Maxwell, while the war diary of the Western Frontier Force records 20 prisoners. Among the dead were deserters from the Egyptian Coastguard in old uniforms. Jafar’s office and personal belongings fell into British hands, and in the confusion twelve Indian soldiers escaped from captivity, taken by the order from the transport Moorina, sunk in November. The beaten forces withdrew westwards to camps in the Halazin area. A few days later the column of Brigadier-General Lord Lucan dispersed without a fight the Bedouin camps between Matruh and El Dabaa, and the next major battle, at Halazin, took place only on 23 January 1916.