Start of the fighting in the Dakhla Oasis

On 17 October 1916 a small British motor column, which had set out from Kharga two days earlier, reached the Dakhla Oasis (Dakhla), the richest of the oases of Egypt’s Libyan Desert. Since February the oasis had been in the hands of the Senussi order. That day the British occupied the village of Tinida (Tenida) on the eastern edge of the oasis, after which the cars drove on to Budkhulu and took an enemy detachment prisoner there. The British chronology of the war records under this date the start of operations in the Dakhla Oasis, which lasted until 22 October.

The order in the oases

While the campaign on the coast that ended with the recapture of Sollum was still going on, the order’s leader, Sayyid Ahmed al-Sharif, carried the war deep into the desert. From the Siwa Oasis two routes led through chains of oases to the Nile valley: a northern one to Bahariya and a southern one through Farafra and Dakhla to Kharga. On 11 February 1916 some 500 of his men occupied Bahariya. At about the same time the order entered Farafra, and at the end of February airmen and police agents reported that it had occupied Dakhla.

The British had no troops capable of fighting in the desert at that time. General John Maxwell withdrew the Egyptian officials from Kharga, which was linked to the Nile valley by a narrow-gauge railway, and confined himself to defending the valley itself and watching the oases from the air. The threat was serious. From the oases the enemy could strike at the Nile in many places at once, and the British official history points out that in densely populated Upper Egypt it was easy to stir up religious unrest. Only when the order’s forces lost heart after their defeats on the coast did the British occupy Kharga without a fight on 15 April, bringing soldiers there by the railway.

Cars and camels

Through the summer General Archibald Murray prepared to retake the oases. A railway was built from Samalut on the Nile towards Bahariya, and blockhouses went up along the route. The most important, however, proved to be the new formations. The Camel Corps, made up mainly of Australians but also of New Zealanders and British yeomanry, patrolled the desert on camels. Light car patrols in Model T Fords and light armoured motor batteries covered hundreds of kilometres where camels covered dozens. According to the official history, the patrols quickly cut the oases off from the Nile valley, and each of them from the others too. In June airmen estimated the order’s strength in Dakhla at about 1,800 rifles. Fuel stocks, brought up by camels several days in advance, awaited the Australian aircraft from Kharga in the desert.

Sayyid Ahmed’s retreat

On 4 October Major-General William Watson took command of the Western Force. A column ready to retake Bahariya was already standing at Samalut. Sayyid Ahmed, who had recently moved there from Dakhla, learned of the preparations and, according to Murray’s report, set out for Siwa on 9 October. Most of his men went ahead, and the rearguard a day later. According to Murray, sickness and hunger, which had undermined his soldiers’ morale, also contributed to the retreat. The British tried to cut off the rearguard with cars, but the distance and the sandy terrain made this impossible.

Intelligence reported that the Dakhla garrison had also shrunk greatly and would probably soon withdraw. Watson decided to take the risk and strike at once with a small motor column, supported by a company of the Camel Corps from Kharga. The camel-mounted infantry, however, could reach the spot only about two days after the cars.

The raid on Dakhla

According to the British official history, the column consisted of one Rolls-Royce armoured car with a supply vehicle, six Fords and twelve motorcycles. They carried 2 officers and 58 men with two Vickers heavy machine guns and two Lewis light machine guns. On 15 October the cars and the Camel Corps detachment set out from Kharga, and on 17 October, after crossing some 110 kilometres of desert, the column occupied Tinida. It turned out that most of the enemy’s forces had already gone. The official history remarks that this was perhaps just as well, because the column was very weak. The cars drove into the interior of the oasis, to Budkhulu, where according to Murray’s report they took prisoner a detachment of the order, 45 men with 10 camels.

The same day, far to the north, a Camel Corps detachment occupied the Harra wells on the edge of Bahariya. Meanwhile the company from Kharga was making a forced march across the desert to join the cars in Dakhla, an oasis inhabited by some 20,000 people.