End of the Second Battle of Gaza

On 19 April 1917 British, Australian and New Zealand troops launched the main assault on Gaza. Two days earlier they had occupied the approaches to the town without heavy losses. Now three infantry divisions, supported by naval gunfire, seven tanks and gas shells, were to take the Ali Muntar hill and the redoubts along the road to Beersheba, while dismounted cavalry tied down the Turks on the flank. All day long the infantry and cavalry advanced over bare slopes under the fire of Turkish artillery and machine guns. In several places they broke into the Turkish trenches, but nowhere did they hold on. In the evening Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Dobell concluded that further attacks were pointless. The British lost over 6,000 men, the Turks about 2,000.

The bombardment

At 5.30 a.m. a two-hour bombardment began. The French coastal defence battleship Requin fired at Ali Muntar and two British monitors at the neighbouring defences. For the first 40 minutes the field howitzers fired gas shells, the first on the Palestine front, at the Turkish battery positions and the wooded ground west of Ali Muntar. There were not enough guns or ammunition, however. The 60-pounders and heavy howitzers had a few hundred rounds each, and there were not enough field batteries to cover the whole front. The airmen who were to direct the fire were hampered by clouds, haze and the dust raised by the explosions. It soon became clear that the bombardment, gas included, had not silenced the Turkish artillery. The front commander, the Bavarian Colonel Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, later wrote that the naval fire had some moral effect but destroyed little.

The assault

At 7.15 a.m. the Welsh 53rd Division advanced by the sea, and at 7.30 the rest of the line. The Scottish 52nd Division advanced along the narrow Es Sire ridge. At 8.15 it took Lee’s Hill, but further on, at Outpost Hill, it was held up by machine-gun fire. One of the tanks drove onto the Turkish work on the summit and spread panic in the trenches, but was hit by several shells and burned out. The infantry took the work, lost it, retook it at noon in hand-to-hand fighting led by Major W. T. Forrest, who was killed on the parapet, and held it until evening without communication with the rear. At 6.20 p.m. the 70 survivors came down from it.

The hardest fighting fell to the 54th (East Anglian) Division, which advanced over completely flat, open ground, through ripening barley and red poppies. On its right, beside the 5th Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment, went Australian soldiers of the 1st Battalion of the Imperial Camel Corps Brigade. The Australian official historian Henry Gullett described how they were led by a tank which its crew had named “Nutty”. As soon as it appeared, the fire of every Turkish gun within range concentrated on it and on the infantry following in its tracks. The tank nevertheless drove, overheated and smoking, through the wire into the middle of the redoubt, where it burned out after being hit by further shells. About thirty Australians under Captain A. E. G. Campbell and about twenty Englishmen broke in behind it. According to Gullett about 600 Turks in the redoubt panicked and fled to the main line. The handful of captors held the redoubt for over two hours under artillery and machine-gun fire, until almost all of them had been killed or wounded. Of Campbell’s company, which had numbered 102 men that morning, five came out unhurt.

Further to the right Australian soldiers of the Camel Brigade crossed the Beersheba road and occupied two hillocks named Jack and Jill. This was the furthest point the British reached that day, but they had to come back from there too. Regiments of the Australian Light Horse and the British yeomanry attacked the redoubts at Atawineh on foot, but were held up a few hundred metres short of them. A staff officer of the 4th Brigade recalled that everything was going well when suddenly the whole thing “simply melted away from casualties”. The commander of the Australian 12th Regiment, Lieutenant-Colonel H. McIntosh, was mortally wounded. At 2 p.m. the Turks counter-attacked along the whole cavalry front and drove back two Australian brigades. The gap was closed only by the 6th Mounted Brigade, which arrived at the gallop at the last moment.

The decision

By the afternoon it was clear that the assault had failed. The Welsh had taken only the great dune known as Samson Ridge, and the 54th Division, which had lost nearly 3,000 men, was ordered at 3 p.m. to stand fast. The commander of the reserve 157th Brigade could move only at four o’clock, and Major-General W. E. B. Smith judged that an attack at that hour would achieve nothing. At 4.40 p.m. Eastern Force ordered the attack to be broken off and the troops to dig in. General Archibald Murray, who was following the battle from a railway carriage at Khan Yunis, demanded at 4 p.m. that the ground gained be held at all costs and that the attack on Ali Muntar be resumed at dawn on 20 April under cover of concentrated artillery fire. Murray later believed that if Dobell had thrown in his reserves he might have taken the key to the position, but at the cost of another 5,000–6,000 men.

In the evening Dobell heard his divisional commanders. He learned the state of the troops, that ammunition was short and that losses were approaching 6,000 men. During the night he asked Murray to cancel the morning attack, and the commander of the Desert Column, Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode, and all the divisional commanders shared his view. Murray reluctantly agreed. The infantry dug in on the line it had reached. The 53rd Division held Samson Ridge and Sheikh Ajlin by the sea, the 52nd Division stood at the foot of Outpost Hill, and the 54th Division withdrew from the exposed field near Sheikh Abbas.

Outcome

According to the British official history (George MacMunn and Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. I), from 17 to 20 April the British lost 6,444 men, including 509 killed, 4,359 wounded and 1,576 missing, most of whom died in front of the Turkish trenches. The 54th Division lost the most, 2,870. Dobell gave 5,900 men in his report, and Murray “about 7,000”. According to the Turkish historical staff the Ottoman side lost 2,013 men. The tanks failed: scattered singly along the front, they drew fire on themselves, and several burned out or got stuck. The official history speaks of a “black day” and of a stubborn attack on imperfectly reconnoitred trenches, without sufficient artillery support, against Turkish infantry that defended prepared positions superbly.

On 20 April the Turks did not go over to a general counter-attack. British airmen dispersed a concentration of infantry and cavalry near Abu Hureira with bombs. That day the dreams of a swift march on Jerusalem came to an end. On 21 April Murray sent Dobell back to England, citing his health, and handed command of Eastern Force to Chetwode. The Desert Column was taken over by the Australian Harry Chauvel. Trench warfare began at Gaza and was to last half a year. In June Murray himself lost his command to General Edmund Allenby.