End of the defence of Jerusalem

At four in the morning on 30 December 1917 the London 180th Brigade occupied the village of Beitin, the biblical Bethel, about fifteen kilometres north of Jerusalem. Its men had marched all night by compass through steep, rocky ravines, carrying machine guns and ammunition on their backs, under an almost full moon that was hidden behind clouds. During the day the 60th Division improved its line a little further by the road to Nablus, after which the commander of XX Corps, Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode, halted the advance. Thus ended the defence of Jerusalem, the last battle of the British campaign in Palestine in 1917.

The battle had begun three days earlier with a Turkish attack. During the night of 26–27 December Erich von Falkenhayn’s divisions struck along the Nablus road to retake Jerusalem, but throughout the day they failed to capture the hill of Tell el-Ful and break the defence of the 60th Division. At the same time the 10th (Irish) Division and part of the 74th Division attacked the western flank of the Turks. On 28 December the British went over to the attack along the whole front. They took almost without a fight the village of El Jib, against which two divisions had bled themselves white in vain a month earlier, and the villages along the Nablus road, and after street fighting Beitunia.

On 29 December came the turn of Ramallah and El Bireh. Ramallah was occupied at 9.15 a.m. by the 230th Brigade of the 74th Division. In the Latin church the soldiers found about a hundred sick and wounded Turks, starved and with their dressings unchanged for five days, and among them eight wounded British soldiers. El Bireh, lying on the Nablus road, was covered by the steep hill of Shab Salah. The Londoners took it at 3.30 p.m., and after an artillery bombardment the 181st Brigade entered the village, taking 42 prisoners. British guns shelled a dense column of Turks retreating north, and for three days airmen bombed and machine-gunned the Turkish columns on the road. In the evening the battalions of the 60th Division set off on the night march to Beitin.

According to the British official history, the Turks left about a thousand dead on the battlefield and surrendered 558 men, but managed to withdraw all their artillery. Other works give over 750 prisoners. XX Corps lost about a thousand men. The official history judges that Falkenhayn played into Chetwode’s hands: his troops exhausted themselves in attacks on a well-prepared defence and were unable to repel the blow to their flank. Once again the mountains and the winter weather saved them from complete defeat. The front moved north by a few to about ten kilometres, and Jerusalem was no longer threatened from the north.

So ended two months of almost uninterrupted fighting that had begun on 31 October at Beersheba. In that time the troops of General Sir Edmund Allenby had advanced from the Sinai border to Jaffa and the hills north of Jerusalem. Now they had to rest, and the downpours that had destroyed the roads and railways on the plain long held up the delivery of supplies. Allenby carried out the next attack, eastwards towards Jericho and the Jordan valley, only in the second half of February 1918. Falkenhayn did not see it in his post. At the beginning of 1918 he was recalled from Palestine, and on 1 March command of the “Yıldırım” Army Group was taken over by Otto Liman von Sanders.