Start of the Battle of Jaffa

On the morning of 21 December 1917 the Scottish 52nd (Lowland) Division stood on the northern bank of the Nahr el Auja river, today called the Yarkon, a few kilometres north of Jaffa. Only the evening before, the Turks had been sitting on the hills beyond the river, from which for a month they had been able to see the whole town and port. In a single night the Scots crossed the swollen river on canvas rafts, footbridges and by a ford at its mouth, and took with the bayonet the village of Sheikh Muannis, the ruins of Khirbet Hadrah and the sandy hill of Tell er Rekkeit. By dawn the division’s entire infantry was on the far bank. So began the battle that the British later called the Battle of Jaffa, although no one fought in the town itself.

Jaffa had been in British hands since 16 November, but as long as the Turkish guns stood five kilometres from the quays, the port was almost useless. After the surrender of Jerusalem General Sir Edmund Allenby decided to push the Turks back on both flanks. The commander of XXI Corps, Lieutenant-General Edward Bulfin, wanted to begin with a day-long bombardment, but the commander of the 52nd Division, Major-General John Hill, persuaded him to attempt a surprise crossing, by night and without artillery preparation. The sappers built rafts from wooden frames and canvas from army water tanks, and bridges on wine barrels, pulling down sheds in Jaffa for timber. On 14 December the commanding officer of the 6th Battalion, Highland Light Infantry, Lieutenant-Colonel J. Anderson, with one of his officers swam round the river mouth from the sea, came ashore behind the Turkish lines and established that the ford at the mouth was about a metre deep.

The crossing began at 8 p.m. on 20 December, after a day of cold wind and downpour, which swelled the river still further. The rafts leaked and stuck in the mud, and according to the Australian historian Henry Gullett many of them fell apart and the soldiers crossed chest-deep in the water, holding hands. At about 11 p.m. the attack began. The Turkish guard at the ford was taken completely by surprise: according to the British official history two officers were found asleep in a boat and eighteen men in a dugout. By midnight the whole 156th Brigade was across the river, and soon, after fighting among the houses, it took Sheikh Muannis. At the mouth Anderson, whose markers had been washed away by the swollen water, swam about in the dark himself until he found the ford. His battalion crossed in fours, shoulder to shoulder, under the fire of Turkish guns. At 3.30 a.m. the Scots occupied Tell er Rekkeit. The 155th Brigade, in the bend of the river at Hadrah, took the longest to cross, but it too took the hills before dawn, and at 5 a.m. one of its companies won a bridgehead at the destroyed bridge in hand-to-hand fighting.

On 21 December the sappers threw pontoon bridges across the river, and two field batteries crossed by the ford. The Turks shelled the valley all day from the Mulebbis (Petah Tikva) area, but by dusk all the division’s artillery was on the northern bank. Allenby wrote in his despatch that resistance had been overcome with the bayonet without a shot being fired, and praised the division’s discipline. According to him 11 officers, including two battalion commanders, 305 men and 10 machine guns were captured. According to the official history the 52nd Division lost only 102 men. The commander of the Ottoman forces, Erich von Falkenhayn, admitted in a report that the British owed their easy success to the “complete negligence” of the XXII Corps outposts.

For the night of 21/22 December the 54th Division on the right flank was preparing an attack on the fortified hill of Bald Hill, and an advance by the whole corps was planned for the following day. Falkenhayn, as he later wrote himself, considered a counter-attack that would have driven the Scots back across the river, but abandoned it. He needed troops for the attack with which he intended to retake Jerusalem.