End of the Battle of Nebi Samwil

At 7.50 p.m. on 24 November 1917 the general headquarters of General Sir Edmund Allenby sent a telegram to XXI Corps: the attack on the Turkish positions from Beitunia through El Jib to Lifta was to be broken off until fresh troops arrived. A few hours earlier the Scottish 52nd Division had for the second time in two days failed to take the village of El Jib, the biblical Gibeon, north-west of Jerusalem. So ended the first British attempt to take the Holy City, named after the hill of Nebi Samwil. The troops, which a week earlier had entered the Judaean Hills, were to bypass Jerusalem from the north and cut the Nablus road at El Bireh. They got to within a few kilometres of it.

The operation’s most important success came on the evening of 21 November. Two weakened battalions of the 75th Division, the Indian 123rd Outram’s Rifles and Cornish light infantry, took at dusk the hill of Nebi Samwil, with its mosque over the traditional tomb of the prophet Samuel, from which the buildings of Jerusalem could be seen. On 22 November the Turks shelled and assaulted the hill all day. Shells brought down part of the mosque’s roof and smashed the prophet’s tomb, and the Gurkhas of the 3/3rd battalion threw back the Turks with bayonet and kukri, rolling boulders onto them from the terraces. The hill was held, but the four battalions defending it lost 567 men, roughly half their strength.

Nebi Samwil was not, however, enough to go further. The way north led through El Jib, a village on a steep, terraced hill that had to be approached across two kilometres of open plain. On 23 November three battalions of the 75th Division, supported by only three worn-out mountain guns, reached the foot of the hill under fire. A few men of the Somerset battalion broke into the village, but all were killed or taken prisoner. The heaviest losses were inflicted by machine guns firing into the flank of the attackers from the northern slopes of the Nebi Samwil ridge, still in Turkish hands. The division lost 480 men that day.

On 24 November the attack was taken over by Major-General John Hill’s 52nd Division, this time with the support of a dozen or so field guns which the gunners had dragged into the hills with great difficulty. Hill wanted to avoid the previous day’s mistake. The 155th Brigade was to strike at El Jib from the south-west, and the 156th Brigade to clear the ridge beyond the mosque and take the village of Bir Nabala. The attack went in in the afternoon. The Scots of the 155th Brigade reached a walled garden in front of the village, but there they were pinned down by fire from the front and the flank. The commander of one battalion was killed and that of another wounded. The 156th Brigade moved out from the mosque straight into a maze of stone walls and gardens defended by numerous machine guns and mortars, and did not advance even two hundred metres. The Turkish artillery fired on it from three sides. The third brigade found no route by which it could bypass the hills. The division lost 630 men. In the evening Hill reported that the Turks held a continuous line from Beit Iksa to Beitunia, had more artillery than he did and were fighting in a different spirit from that of the last three weeks, and that another attack by a single division must end in failure. The corps commander, Lieutenant-General Edward Bulfin, agreed with him.

On the same day, on the plain, to convince the Turks that the British intended to go on along the coast, New Zealand cavalry crossed the Nahr el Auja north of Jaffa and occupied the village of El Muwannis without loss. The next morning Turkish counter-attacks pushed it and two infantry battalions back across the river. Allenby, who visited the front in those days, concluded that he faced a reorganised Turkish army in a strong position which he could not take without careful preparation. In accordance with his orders of 25 November, the exhausted divisions of XXI Corps were to be relieved by fresh divisions of XX Corps arriving from Gaza. The pause was exploited by Erich von Falkenhayn, who from 27 November threw his troops into counter-attacks, including on Nebi Samwil. The British nevertheless held their positions in the hills, and two weeks later, on 9 December 1917, Jerusalem surrendered.