Second Battle of Gaza begins

On 17 April 1917 Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Dobell’s Eastern Force advanced on Gaza for the second time. Three weeks earlier it had almost taken the town at the first rush, but at dusk it had broken off the fight and withdrawn behind the Wadi Ghazze. This time there was no question of surprise. Dobell planned the battle in two stages. On the first day the infantry was only to take the approaches to the town, the Sheikh Abbas, Mansura and Es Sire ridges, and dig in on them. The main assault on the Gaza defences was to come later, after a bombardment from land and sea. The first stage succeeded: by seven in the morning the line was in British hands and losses were light. The Turks did not defend the approaches, because they were waiting for the main attack in their new trenches.

Three weeks of preparation

After the defeat in March General Archibald Murray reported a success to London, and the War Cabinet demanded that he march on Jerusalem. First, however, Gaza had to be taken, and in three weeks it had changed a great deal. The Turks and their German advisers had turned it into the strongest point of a fortified line that ran from the sea through the town and along the road to Beersheba as far as Abu Hureira, over a length of about 20 kilometres. British airmen reported new trenches and redoubts almost daily, and the camps near Tel esh Sheria grew in a week from 236 to 500 tents. British intelligence estimated the Turkish forces at 34 battalions and about a hundred guns.

The British were preparing too. On 5 April the railway reached Deir el-Belah, eight kilometres from the Wadi Ghazze, and the headquarters of Eastern Force was set up there. Water was brought up in railway tank wagons and pumped by pipeline over the In Seirat ridge to reservoirs in the wadi. The 74th Division, made up of dismounted yeomanry regiments, came up from El Arish and on 7 April took over the outposts on the wadi from the 54th Division. The missing 60-pounder guns arrived, along with a battery of siege howitzers and two novelties: eight tanks of an early type, which had previously been used for training in England, and several thousand gas shells for the howitzers, the first on this front. The weather was still cool, and the official history (George MacMunn and Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. I) says that the men had already shaken off their disappointment after March.

Not everyone believed in Dobell’s plan. Outflanking the Turkish line from the east was out of the question, because on the road to Beersheba there was no water for a large army, so a frontal attack was all that remained. The Australian official historian Henry Gullett writes that the plan pleased neither the commander of the Desert Column, Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode, nor the commander of the Anzac Mounted Division, Major-General Harry Chauvel. According to Gullett, the men sensed the mood of their commanders and went into battle without faith in victory, though determined to do everything possible.

The night march and the approaches

On 15 April Murray moved his advanced headquarters to a railway carriage at Khan Yunis, from where he had a telephone link to Dobell at Deir el-Belah. On the evening of 16 April the infantry left its camps and went down to the crossings of the Wadi Ghazze, and by 4.15 a.m. it was to be ready to advance. Major-General W. E. B. Smith’s 52nd Division and the 54th Division formed the so-called Eastern Attack under Smith’s orders. Their objective was the line from Sheikh Abbas through Mansura to Kurd Hill on the Es Sire ridge. The Welsh 53rd Division, led by Brigadier-General S. F. Mott after the departure of the sick General Dallas, crossed the wadi nearer the sea, west of the Rafah–Gaza road, and pushed outposts forward into the dunes.

The advance went over ground well known from the March battle and met only Turkish outposts. In front of the 52nd Division there had long been a Turkish post at Burjabye, which British patrols drove out every night, so one more such raid did not alarm the Turks. The 54th Division had almost no losses. The tanks fared worst: two of them set off at 4.30 a.m. with the 163rd Brigade along the Sheikh Abbas ridge, and after dawn the leading one was hit three times by guns and put out of action. The two tanks allotted to the 52nd Division stood ready but were not needed. By seven the whole designated line had been taken. The official history states that the Eastern Attack lost about 300 men. Gullett writes that only six men were killed by snipers’ bullets during the march itself, and a further 150 casualties were caused by shellfire during the day.

The infantry began to dig in at once. The exposed ridges were within range of the Turkish artillery near Ali Muntar, which shelled the trenches and the wadi crossings at intervals throughout the day. The official history judged that giving up these ridges in March had been right, because holding them for three weeks would have cost more than retaking them.

Cavalry on the flank

That day the Desert Column was to demonstrate near Abu Hureira, so that the Turks would not move troops from there to Gaza, and to cover the right flank of the 54th Division. For the first time since their formation its two mounted divisions had all their brigades, because the Australian 1st and 4th Light Horse Brigades had joined them the previous evening. At two in the morning the Anzac Mounted Division stood near Shellal and the Imperial Mounted Division near Tel el Jemmi. The 5th Mounted Brigade crossed the wadi at 2.30 a.m. and before dawn took the Turkish outpost of Khirbet Erk almost without a fight. A patrol of the Worcestershire Yeomanry under Second Lieutenant R. F. M. Harvey reached the Gaza–Beersheba road between two Turkish redoubts, cut the telegraph line and dragged away more than a hundred metres of wire. The cavalry reconnoitred the course of the Turkish line from Khirbet Sihan through Atawineh to Abu Hureira, but the Turks did not leave their trenches. At dusk both divisions withdrew behind the wadi, leaving outposts.

German aircraft, superior to the British, bombed the cavalry. A bomb fell on the horse lines of the 2nd Light Horse Brigade near Shellal, killing six men and 17 horses.

18 April

The next day was a day of preparation. The land artillery and the ships, the French coastal defence battleship Requin and two British monitors, bombarded the Turkish positions, while ammunition and water were brought across the wadi. The cavalry repeated its reconnaissance, sparing the horses for the following day. Along the whole front the Turks remained remarkably quiet. Their passivity convinced Dobell that he need not fear an attack on his flank, so he returned to his original plan: the main blow was to go from Mansura and Sheikh Abbas against Ali Muntar and the redoubts along the Beersheba road, while the 53rd Division was to take the dunes between Gaza and the sea. Chetwode asked for part of the reserve 74th Division for the attack on the defences near Atawineh, because he believed that dismounted cavalry alone would not break through them, but Dobell refused. In the evening the orders for the assault were issued.

Gullett observes that the capture of the approaches gave the Turks two full days to complete their defences, fix their fields of fire and register their artillery. The assault of 19 April broke on these preparations. Despite the tanks and the gas, the British took none of the key positions and lost more than 6,000 men.