End of the First Battle of Gaza

On 27 March 1917 the First Battle of Gaza came to an end. The day before the British had surrounded the town and taken the hill of Ali Muntar, which dominated it, but at dusk they had broken off the fight, and during the night, owing to a misunderstanding between the generals, the Welsh 53rd Division had abandoned all the positions it had won. In the morning the Turks went over to counter-attacks and retook Ali Muntar. In the afternoon the commander of Eastern Force, Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Dobell, ordered the whole army to withdraw behind the Wadi Ghuzzee, from where it had set out a day earlier. Gaza, which on the evening of 26 March had been practically taken, remained in Turkish hands.

Morning

The withdrawal of the mounted troops went on all night. The units were scattered and intermingled in the darkness, some regiments were several kilometres from their horses, and the wounded still had to be collected. Until dawn the Turks did not interfere. Only at 5.30 a.m. did strong Turkish forces attack the Australian 3rd Light Horse Brigade by the Beersheba road. The brigade’s withdrawal was covered by the 7th Light Car Patrol of the New Zealander Lieutenant W. H. P. McKenzie, which had spent the night not far from Ali Muntar. His crews placed the cars on one ridge after another and fired on the advancing enemy with five machine guns from a range of just over a kilometre. McKenzie wrote in his diary that it was “the best fun of their lives”. Soon after dawn all the mounted troops were across the wadi.

Only at five in the morning did Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode, commander of the Desert Column, realise that the 53rd Division had given up the whole position during the night, and not merely drawn back a flank. He at once ordered a check on whether the Turks had returned to the hills. The British official history (George MacMunn and Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. I) calls this a severe trial for soldiers who had not rested for more than 36 hours, had taken a position and had been withdrawn from it. Ali Muntar and Green Hill, however, stood empty. A company of the 7th Battalion of the Essex Regiment reoccupied Ali Muntar, and two more Green Hill. At 5.40 a.m. the Turks blew up the wireless station in Gaza through which Major Tiller had been sending desperate reports to Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein all night. Kress had promised him that the 3rd and 16th Divisions would arrive at dawn, and he kept his word.

The loss of Ali Muntar

The first Turkish counter-attack was weak, and the Essex quickly recovered the trenches they had briefly lost. More dangerous was what was happening on the right flank. During the night the 54th Division had come down from the Sheikh Abbas ridge to close up on the 53rd Division, and now the ridge was occupied by the Turks, who had attacked the Australian mounted troops in the morning. From the ridge their artillery shelled the rear of the Welsh: the reserves, the dressing stations and the supply camels. At 8 a.m. Dobell took direct command of the 53rd Division. Its commander, Major-General Alister Dallas, reported at 9.15 that if both divisions were to hold on, the Turks had to be driven off Sheikh Abbas, preferably by mounted troops, because infantry from the reserve 52nd Division would be too slow.

Before Dobell had decided, at 9.30 the Turks struck hard at Ali Muntar and retook the hill. Its garrison suffered heavy losses and fell back to Green Hill, and two Essex battalions, almost surrounded, withdrew with difficulty. Dallas straightened his line and pulled it back to the Es Sire ridge, halfway between Ali Muntar and Esh Sheluf. At about eleven Brigadier-General Guy Dawnay of the Eastern Force staff asked him whether the two divisions could hold on for three or four days. Dallas replied that his men would manage, but the position was bad as long as the Turks held Sheikh Abbas, and nothing could be brought across the wadi by day because the roads were under fire. Even so, the Egyptian drivers of the Camel Transport Corps carried food, water and ammunition along this corridor all morning. The official history praises their calm and devotion.

Withdrawal

Dobell agreed with Dallas. He did not want to throw the 52nd Division into the fight, because regrouping would take a long time, and he considered bringing up supplies, especially water, impossible. By telephone he described the situation to General Archibald Murray, who was waiting in a railway carriage at El Arish, and Murray reluctantly agreed that the fight had to be broken off. At 4.30 p.m. Dobell ordered the 53rd and 54th Divisions to withdraw behind the Wadi Ghuzzee. The withdrawal began at seven in the evening under the cover of two brigades. A last Turkish attack on the Essex brigade was repulsed without difficulty. The Turks did not interfere, and before four in the morning of 28 March both divisions were across the wadi. That day the khamsin, the hot wind from the desert, began to blow earlier than usual, and the thirsty, exhausted soldiers suffered badly from the heat.

Kress wanted to follow the British and go over to the attack, but Djemal Pasha, commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army, forbade it. Kress later admitted that Djemal had been right.

The reckoning and the reports

According to a return compiled in mid-April, the British lost 3,967 men: 523 killed and died of wounds, 2,932 wounded and 512 missing, of whom 246 had been taken prisoner. Almost all the losses fell on the 53rd Division and the 161st Brigade attached to it. The British took 837 prisoners, among them the commander of the Turkish 53rd Division and his staff. According to the Turkish general staff, the losses on the Ottoman side, including Germans and Austrians, amounted to 2,447 men, although some returns give fewer, about 1,700.

On 28 March Murray reported to London that his troops had advanced 15 miles, to the Wadi Ghuzzee, to cover the construction of the railway, had fought heavily for two days against some 20,000 of the enemy, inflicted 6,000–7,000 casualties on them and taken 900 prisoners, and that all the troops had behaved splendidly. He did not write that Gaza had not been taken. The official history judges that Murray unwittingly understated the extent of the setback. London took his dispatch as news of a victory and within a few days demanded that he march on Jerusalem. The next, carefully prepared attack on Gaza ended in April in an even greater defeat.