End of the second raid on Es Salt

On 4 May 1918 the second expedition by British troops to the east bank of the Jordan in a few weeks came to an end. Four days earlier Australian horsemen had galloped into Es Salt, but the infantry had failed to take the Turkish position at Shunet Nimrin, and a Turkish-German counter-attack from the river had taken from them the road from the Jisr ed Damieh ford to the town. Until 3 May Major-General Henry Hodgson’s force defended itself in Es Salt on two sides, and its only line of retreat was a steep track running down into the valley below the Umm esh Shert ford.

The decision to withdraw

At 3 p.m. on 3 May General Edmund Allenby arrived at Lieutenant-General Harry Chauvel’s headquarters. He knew that another attack by the 60th (London) Division at Shunet Nimrin had failed, and airmen reported that the Turks in the valley had received reinforcements. An exaggerated report of the loss of one of the outposts near Es Salt had also reached headquarters. Allenby, as the British official history (Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. II) put it, judged that further resistance could achieve little while risking much, and authorised Chauvel to order a withdrawal. Hodgson issued his orders at 5.15 p.m. How seriously he judged his position is shown by an entry in his war diary: he asked corps staff by telephone whether he should try to withdraw “right out of the hills, if he could”. He was told that this was Chauvel’s intention.

The wounded were waiting at a makeshift dressing station in the Greek church in Es Salt. The Australian medical history records that in the afternoon only 42 of the less seriously wounded were sent off from it on horseback, and for the rest there remained 29 camels with litters and riderless horses. At 7.30 p.m., under rifle fire from the townspeople, the column with the wounded set off down the track. Anyone who could keep in the saddle rode. According to these accounts only two dying men were left in the town.

Coming down from the hills

The Australians feared this night most of all, but the withdrawal went more easily than they had expected. Falls attributed this largely to the lesson the Turks had been taught the previous morning on the road to Amman, when the Australian 8th Light Horse Regiment broke up their attack and took over 300 prisoners. Until dawn small detachments fired occasionally on the roads north and east of the town, so that the enemy would not realise that Es Salt was emptying. By 2.20 a.m. on 4 May the town was empty, and at 6.10 a.m. Hodgson reported that all the camels, pack animals and prisoners had already come down the track. A column of donkeys with ammunition and biscuits, the first food sent up to the troops in the hills, reached Es Salt just as the order to withdraw was issued, so the biscuits were dumped by the road for the soldiers to take as they passed. The track was clogged with refugees from the town, and the British 5th Mounted Brigade first had to struggle along a poor path from the main road: it set off at 8.30 p.m. and reached the hill of Jebel Umm Awiya only at 2.45 a.m.

In the morning the Turks entered Es Salt and followed the rearguard, while German aircraft machine-gunned and bombed the column in the narrow gorge. At about 10.30 a.m. the last units came down to the plain. For a moment things then became dangerous, because the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade screening the valley learned too late that its right flank was being uncovered. The Turks pushed its few outposts off the hills, but the New Zealand Canterbury Regiment turned back and took up a position beside the Australians, and the commander of the 6th Mounted Brigade sent them a squadron of Dorset Yeomanry and directed the fire of a horse artillery battery onto the track from Umm esh Shert. Until evening the enemy tried to turn the right flank in the valley, but did not break the defence.

In the evening Allenby dropped the idea of holding a large bridgehead on the east bank, which would have been under fire from the Turkish hill of El Haud. He kept only the old bridgehead at Ghoraniyeh and ordered a second one to be established, with a new bridge, at the mouth of the Wadi Auja. From 6.45 p.m. the units in the valley withdrew in turn, beginning with the left flank, and by midnight the operation was over.

The reckoning

The British lost 1,649 men, including 137 missing, about two-thirds of them in the 60th Division and the infantry from the Indian princely state of Patiala attached to it. Guns and transport abandoned on 1 May were left in the valley, and some equipment in Es Salt. Chauvel’s troops, however, brought back across the Jordan 44 Germans, 898 Turks and 39 Bedouin, so according to Falls the enemy’s losses were almost certainly higher than the British ones. Yet for the second time in a month, after the first raid on Amman, the Turks and Germans could proclaim a victory. General Otto Liman von Sanders called this fighting the second battle of the Jordan, and the commander of the Turkish 24th Division, the German officer Erich Böhme, whose attack on 1 May had driven back the Australians in the valley, received the Pour le Mérite as early as 7 May.

Falls considered the brightest side of the whole operation to be the skill and coolness with which Hodgson’s force extricated itself from a very dangerous position. According to some studies, had the 4th Brigade been destroyed on 1 May, almost the entire Australian mounted force in the Middle East might have been taken prisoner. The raid also had an effect that became apparent only in the autumn: it confirmed the enemy in the belief that the British were preparing their main blow across the Jordan, and from then on the Turks kept a considerable part of their forces on the east bank. For the time being, however, the Australian and New Zealand horsemen stayed for the summer in the hot and malarial Jordan valley.