Crossing of the Jordan

On the evening of 21 March 1918, the same day on which the great German offensive began in France, British forces in Palestine assembled on the Jordan east of Jericho. Major-General John Shea’s 60th (London) Division was to cross the river and open the way to the plateau of Transjordan, towards the town of Es Salt and Amman, where the British wanted to destroy the Hejaz Railway. Behind the infantry waited the Anzac Mounted Division and the Imperial Camel Corps Brigade. The crossing of the swollen, torrential river took a day longer than planned, but by the evening of 23 March five bridges stood over the Jordan.

A swollen river

The British had been on the Jordan for a month, since the capture of Jericho. The New Zealand regiment of Auckland Mounted Rifles, which patrolled the valley, identified two places where bridges could be built: on the Jericho–Es Salt road at Ghoraniyeh, where there had been a wooden bridge burned by the Turks, and at the old ford of Makhadet Hajlah, less than six kilometres downstream, which tradition associated with the baptism of Christ. Even in summer the so-called fords here were chest-deep, and March 1918 was exceptionally wet. The river ran fast from bank to bank. The crossing was set for the night of 19–20 March, but it was postponed by two days because the water was too high.

The plan provided for the 180th Brigade to force the river at both places at once. At Ghoraniyeh the sappers were to build a pontoon bridge, a barrel bridge and a footbridge, and at Hajlah a steel pontoon bridge for the mounted troops. Feints were prepared at other fords, and 3 officers and 42 men were to cross the northern part of the Dead Sea in three motor boats and help clear the eastern bank. According to the British official history (Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. II), the crossing was defended by about a thousand Turkish soldiers with six guns and a few squadrons of cavalry. At about 3 p.m. on 21 March airmen saw several hundred Turkish infantry approaching Ghoraniyeh and two squadrons of cavalry approaching Hajlah. The British therefore sent a second battalion to Hajlah.

The night of the swimmers

Punctually at midnight the 2/17th Battalion of the London Regiment launched boats and rafts at Ghoraniyeh. The current was so strong that all of them were swept back to the bank or downstream. After a quarter of an hour swimmers tried, but they too were carried away by the current. The Turks were alert and their outposts opened fire. According to some accounts several men drowned. Despite further attempts during the night, the crossing at Ghoraniyeh failed.

Things went better at Hajlah. Nine picked swimmers of the 2/19th Battalion under Second Lieutenant G. E. Jones and a few Australian sappers swam the river with a rope and hauled a raft across. According to Falls this happened at about 12.30 a.m., and six men crossed on the first raft. The New Zealand historian C. Guy Powles wrote that the swimmers got over unnoticed and that the first raft, with 27 soldiers, crossed at 1.20 a.m. On the far bank the Turks fired on the crossing only with rifles, and for the rest of the night the battalion was ferried over undisturbed. The commander of the 180th Brigade, Brigadier-General Watson, decided to concentrate all his forces at Hajlah and brought the remaining battalions there from Ghoraniyeh.

The bridgehead at Hajlah

At 7.45 a.m. on 22 March the whole 2/19th Battalion was on the eastern bank, and at 8.10 a.m. the sappers of the mounted division finished the pontoon bridge. Before ten the 2/18th Battalion crossed over it. Dense thickets along the river and Turkish machine guns, however, stopped an attempt to widen the bridgehead. In the afternoon, after a night march through Jericho, the brigade’s two remaining battalions arrived. The commander of XX Corps, Lieutenant-General Philip Chetwode, then came to the bank with the Duke of Connaught, uncle of King George V, who happened to be visiting the Palestine front. They congratulated the Londoners on the crossing. Chetwode and Shea judged that a further advance by daylight would cost too much. The men, most of whom had not slept for two days, were given a few hours’ rest, and in the meantime the mountain batteries largely silenced the Turkish machine guns. At midnight the whole brigade attacked and, almost without resistance, pushed the bridgehead out to about a kilometre from the river. A second attempt to cross at Ghoraniyeh, made that night by the 181st Brigade, again failed.

The New Zealanders’ gallop

At four in the morning on 23 March the Auckland Mounted Rifles began crossing the bridge at Hajlah. They were to clear the eastern bank as far as Ghoraniyeh, from where the main road led into the hills. One troop ran into a Turkish squadron. Its commander, Lieutenant K. J. Tait, was killed in hand-to-hand fighting with a Turkish officer, but the New Zealanders, with the advantage of their heavier horses, routed the enemy, leaving about 20 Turks dead on the field and taking seven prisoners. The two remaining squadrons galloped north and charged every outpost they met. They were held up briefly only by machine-gun fire by the main road. At noon they were at Ghoraniyeh, with 68 prisoners and four machine guns.

The river had fallen somewhat, and swimmers of the 2/24th Battalion at last managed to swim across at Ghoraniyeh. By 4.30 p.m. a footbridge for infantry stood there, and by 9.30 p.m. a pontoon bridge and a barrel bridge. A second pontoon bridge was built at Hajlah. In the evening the 179th and 181st Brigades and the first regiments of the mounted division crossed the river. In the morning the motor-boat party also reported in; it had crossed the Dead Sea but had had to lie hidden throughout 22 March. Losses in the crossing were small and fell almost entirely on the 180th Brigade. Falls noted, however, that the day’s delay gave the Turks time to prepare the defence of Amman. The next day the infantry set off into the hills, towards Es Salt.