First Battle of Gaza begins

On 26 March 1917 British, Australian and New Zealand troops attacked Gaza, the first large town on the road from Egypt into Palestine. The mounted troops of Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode’s Desert Column surrounded the town from the east and north within a few hours, and in the afternoon the Welsh 53rd Division took the hill of Ali Muntar, which dominated it. In the evening the soldiers expected the garrison to surrender at dawn, and its German commander was reporting by wireless that the situation was hopeless. Nevertheless at dusk Generals Chetwode and Charles Dobell ordered the mounted troops to break off the fight and withdraw behind the Wadi Ghuzzee. It was the first day of a battle that was to end in defeat.

Fog

Dobell’s Eastern Force had been approaching Gaza for several days, mainly at night. The night of 25–26 March was quiet, cold and very dark. At 2.30 a.m. Major-General Harry Chauvel’s Anzac Mounted Division set off from Deir el Belah towards the prepared crossing over the dry bed of the Wadi Ghuzzee, followed by Major-General Henry Hodgson’s Imperial Mounted Division and the Imperial Camel Brigade. The first infantry brigade crossed the wadi at 3.45 a.m. A quarter of an hour later fog rolled in from the sea, and by five it had thickened so much that nothing could be seen at 20 metres. The British official history (George MacMunn and Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. I) says that such thick fog was rare in March and that the plan had not allowed for it.

It was no longer possible to call off the operation, because the mounted troops were on the move and both headquarters, of the Eastern Force and of the Desert Column, were just moving to a hill near In Seirat. The Australians rode by compass and trusted their sense of direction, so the fog only screened them. It was worse for the infantry. One of the brigades of the 53rd Division reached the wadi almost an hour late because its guide had lost the way. The divisional commander, Major-General Alister Dallas, waited by the wadi for the fog to lift, as he would not issue orders for the assault without a reconnaissance. The fog began to thin at about seven and cleared from the hills at about eight, but it lay in the ravines for a long time. In a telegram after the battle Murray even wrote that it lasted until eleven.

The ring

When the fog lifted, the first squadrons of the 2nd Light Horse Brigade were already near Sheikh Abbas, a few kilometres from the wadi. The first clash took place here: the 7th Light Horse Regiment galloped over a Turkish patrol. The Australians, in excellent spirits, rode across the grassy plain, scattering and rounding up surprised Turkish detachments. They cut the road from Gaza to Beersheba and the telegraph line running along it, and took ten wagons and thirty German sappers with pack horses. At about nine Chauvel’s division reached Beit Durdis, and at 10.30 a.m. the 2nd Brigade occupied the village of Jebaliye north-east of the town. Half an hour later its 7th Regiment reached the sea, and Gaza was cut off.

One of the patrols showed how complete the surprise was. On the road from the north it stopped the carriages in which the commander of the Turkish 53rd Division was travelling with his staff to Gaza to take command there. His escort fled, and the general to his astonishment found himself among grinning Australian troopers. The official history notes, however, that this was not a good omen, because his arrival heralded the approach of Turkish reinforcements. In the east the Imperial Mounted Division stood facing the Turkish camps at ten, and a squadron of the Worcestershire Yeomanry took 60 prisoners in a charge. The 54th Division dug in on the Sheikh Abbas ridge. By 10.30 a.m. the mounted troops had done their part. Now it was the infantry’s turn.

Ali Muntar

Gaza lay among orchards and gardens enclosed by hedges of prickly pear, and to the south-east it was dominated by the hill of Ali Muntar, with a shrine on its summit, about 90 metres above the town. Two of Dallas’s brigades were on the Mansura and Es Sire ridges by 8.30 a.m., but the assault was delayed. The conference of brigade commanders at Mansura met only at 10.15 a.m., and the third brigade was still on the way. Chetwode, who stood with Dobell on a hill beyond the wadi, telephoned and telegraphed Dallas demanding haste. At 11.45 a.m. the attack began. The artillery did not know its targets, because the Turkish trenches could not be seen, and six heavy guns, twelve howitzers and twenty-four field guns had to support three brigades. The Welsh advanced over bare slopes under shrapnel and machine-gun fire from Green Hill and Clay Hill.

On the left the 160th Brigade took the Labyrinth, a tangle of entrenched gardens south of the town, at 1.30 p.m., but the 4th Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment lost its commanding officer and fell back in disorder from the Es Sire ridge. In the centre and on the right the attack slowed before the hedges. The breakthrough came at 3.50 p.m. About forty men of the 5th Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers and as many of the 5th Battalion of the Welsh Regiment suddenly dashed through the machine-gun fire and broke into the trenches east of the mosque on Ali Muntar. They took twenty Germans and Austrians and twenty Turks prisoner and held on despite counter-attacks. The Essex brigade took Green Hill at 5.30 p.m., and Clay Hill had fallen earlier. By about 6.30 p.m. the whole position was in British hands, and the Turks were fleeing into the town.

Mounted troops in the gardens

At noon Chetwode began to fear that the infantry alone would not finish before dark. The airmen saw no Turkish relief forces, so at 1 p.m. he ordered Chauvel to attack the town from the north and east. The order, however, took a full hour by telegraph, and handing over the Imperial Mounted Division’s posts took almost another hour. The attack began at four. The Australians of the 2nd Brigade fought in the gardens on the northern edge of the town, shooting at the Turks through cactus hedges from a few metres. The New Zealand Wellington regiment captured two field guns, turned them round and at close range smashed the houses from which it was being fired on, taking twenty terrified, plaster-covered Turks. A squadron from Canterbury rode into the trenches on Ali Muntar just behind the Welsh infantry. The British 22nd Mounted Brigade galloped along the road from Beit Durdis. At dusk the mounted troops stood in the outskirts.

Relief and the order at dusk

On the other side Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, the German commander of the Turkish forces on this front, learned of the attack at about eight in the morning at his headquarters at Tel esh Sheria. His airman reported two infantry divisions marching on Gaza and a mass of mounted troops with armoured cars that had pushed in between Gaza and Tel esh Sheria. Kress ordered the commandant of Gaza, Major Tiller, to defend the town “to the last man”, and sent the 3rd Division from Jemmameh and the 16th Division from Tel esh Sheria to its relief. According to Otto Liman von Sanders they set off late, and by dusk, according to Kress, they had covered barely half the distance. That was enough, however, to alarm the British. After four the Imperial Mounted Division reported about 3,000 infantry and two squadrons of cavalry advancing from Huj, and at 5.15 p.m. the Turks occupied a hill north of Beit Durdis. Further columns were coming from the north. The Australians, the British yeomanry and the armoured cars held them before dark.

The sun set at six. Chetwode still did not know that Ali Muntar had fallen. Half his mounted troops were fighting in the gardens of Gaza, and the other half were under Turkish attack. The horses had not drunk since midnight, except those that had come upon the few pools, and a deserter claimed that almost all the wells in Gaza had been blown up. Dobell had feared a counter-attack on his right flank from the start, and as early as 5.38 p.m. he ordered the 54th Division to come down from Sheikh Abbas closer to the 53rd Division. At 6.10 p.m., with his consent, Chetwode reluctantly sent Chauvel the order to break off the fight and withdraw behind the Wadi Ghuzzee. As the message went out, Dallas’s report of the capture of the redoubt beyond Ali Muntar arrived, but Chetwode judged that the most important thing was to get the horses out and water them. The Australian official history says that Chauvel protested sharply. Chetwode maintained that no protest reached him.

Messages from Gaza

In Gaza itself things were bad. British intelligence in Cairo knew the key to the Turkish cipher and was reading the wireless messages between the town and Kress’s headquarters. Tiller reported that the English had entered the town from the north and east, and that his officers did not want to fight at dawn. At about midnight he asked Kress for an attack at two in the morning, because his men would not endure another bombardment. Kress replied that he could not, but would strike at dawn with the 3rd and 16th Divisions, so Tiller must hold on at all costs. At least four messages from Gaza reached the staff at Rafah before 6.30 p.m., but Dobell, who stood far away on the hill near In Seirat, received them only at about eleven at night. The official history considers that had they arrived in time, his decisions would probably have been different.

Meanwhile, after dark, patrols of mounted troops and infantry were meeting in the eastern streets of the town. Shortly before seven Chetwode telephoned Dallas that the mounted troops were leaving and that the 53rd Division must draw back its right flank to establish contact with the 54th Division. Dallas protested and asked for reinforcements, but received a firm order. The two generals, however, had different things in mind, and nobody told Dallas of the 54th Division’s new position. At 10.30 p.m. he ordered the whole division to abandon the hills it had taken. Soldiers who only moments before had been counting on the garrison’s surrender at dawn came down in the dark from Ali Muntar, taken at so high a price. That night the wireless operators in Gaza exchanged farewell messages with Kress’s headquarters and agreed to burn the documents and blow up the station.