End of the Battle of Jaffa

At eight in the morning on 22 December 1917 the British XXI Corps advanced along the whole front north of Jaffa. The Turks no longer offered serious resistance. After the night crossing by the Scottish 52nd Division of the Nahr el Auja (Yarkon) river they had lost the hills above its northern bank, and from dawn their guns and transport could be seen withdrawing northwards. By the evening the British had reached the line set for them by General Sir Edmund Allenby, and on the coast they even went beyond it. So ended the two-day Battle of Jaffa.

The last heavy fighting took place on the night of 21/22 December on the right wing, where Major-General Steuart Hare’s 54th Division was to take the fortified Bald Hill. Its trenches faced south-west, so Hare ordered an attack from the south-east. After a five-minute bombardment the Turks manned the trenches on the wrong side, and the 11th Battalion, London Regiment, took the hill by surprise at little cost. Over the next two hours the defenders counter-attacked three times across open ground and tried to retake the trenches with grenades. One of these attacks was beaten off single-handed by Lance-Corporal John Christie, who went out several dozen metres in front of the line and scattered the Turks with grenades. He received the Victoria Cross for it.

In the morning the 54th Division cleared the orchards around Mulebbis, that is, the Jewish settlement of Petah Tikva, took the villages of Fejja and Rantye and reached a line running through Wilhelma railway station. On the coast the 52nd Division advanced at nine with all three brigades. It was supported by the Royal Navy: the old cruiser HMS Grafton with Rear-Admiral Thomas Jackson, three monitors and two destroyers shelled the retreating columns from the sea, and aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps bombed them and machine-gunned them. According to the British official history the Turks fled north as fast as the mud allowed them. The same mud made a pursuit by the Auckland Mounted Rifles impossible, and the gunners had to harness eight horses to each gun to move them at all. The Scots reached without fighting a line from Ferrikhiye on the river to the village of Jelil by the sea.

In the early afternoon the corps commander, Lieutenant-General Edward Bulfin, came to Jelil himself and ordered the 157th Brigade to go more than three kilometres further, onto the hills near Arsuf. Allenby explained in his despatch that the aim was to prevent the Turks from observing the port of Jaffa from them. In the evening the new line, from Rantye through Fejja and Tell el Mukhmar on the river to the cliffs near Arsuf, was being fortified. The battle cost the British little. According to the official history the 52nd Division alone lost only 102 men, and it took more than 300 prisoners and 10 machine guns.

According to Allenby the operation pushed the Turks back from Jaffa from five to about thirteen kilometres. The town and port were put out of range of the Turkish artillery, and the British gained freedom of movement around Lydda, Ramleh and the road to Jerusalem. The official history calls the crossing of the Nahr el Auja one of the most remarkable feats of the Palestine campaign, while admitting that the Scots were helped by a careless enemy shaken by earlier defeats. Calm settled over the plain, but Erich von Falkenhayn had no intention of giving up. A few days later he tried to retake Jerusalem.