Third Battle of Gaza begins

On 27 October 1917 the guns of the British XXI Corps opened fire on the Turkish defences of Gaza. The front before the town had stood still for half a year, since the defeat in April, and the bombardment signalled that the British would once again storm the same place. That was exactly what General Sir Edmund Allenby intended. The shelling of Gaza was to hold the Turks’ attention while most of his army marched by night several dozen kilometres to the east, towards Beersheba. The same morning the Turks attacked British outposts between the two wings. According to the British official history (Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. II), the Third Battle of Gaza, which lasted until 7 November, is reckoned from this day.

Allenby’s plan

Allenby issued his orders for the attack on 22 October. He based them on an appreciation of the situation prepared in the summer by Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode and his chief of staff, Brigadier-General Guy Dawnay. Gaza, surrounded by trenches, wire and redoubts, was the strongest point of the Turkish line, while Beersheba was an isolated stronghold at its left end, a dozen or so kilometres from the nearest defences. Chetwode’s XX Corps and the Desert Mounted Corps of Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Chauvel were to take Beersheba in a single day, before the Turks could destroy its wells, and then wheel north-west and roll up the Turkish line from the flank. Lieutenant-General Edward Bulfin’s XXI Corps was to begin shelling Gaza four days before the attack on Beersheba, fixed for 31 October, and to intensify it gradually, and at the right moment to attack the western defences of the town in order to pin down the Turkish reserves.

Throughout October the British did everything to make the Turks believe that the main blow would fall on Gaza. On 10 October an officer of Allenby’s staff, usually identified as Major Richard Meinertzhagen of intelligence, rode out into no man’s land near El Girheir and, pursued by a Turkish patrol, dropped a bloodstained haversack containing false documents. These showed that the British would attack Gaza and land troops on the coast, and would make only a feint cavalry attack at Beersheba. The official history considers that the ruse worked: the Turks began to strengthen the trenches on their right wing and neglected the left. The shelling of Gaza was meant to reinforce this belief.

From 21 October the concentration on the eastern wing was under way. Columns of infantry, cavalry and camels moved only by night, and by day hid in the beds of wadis, while campfires were lit in the abandoned camps by the sea. Engineers cleared the choked wells at Khalasa and Asluj, far to the south of the front, and railway track and a pipeline were laid behind the troops. The official history calls these preparations a monument of staff work. The enemy, however, was not idle.

The shelling of Gaza

Bulfin had 68 heavy guns and howitzers, divided into two counter-battery groups and a bombardment group, as well as the field artillery of the 52nd, 54th and 75th Divisions. This time there was no shortage of ammunition. Three hundred rounds from a 6-inch howitzer were allotted to the destruction of each Turkish battery located, and before the day of the assault the heavy artillery fired about 15,000 shells. Two long-range 6-inch guns, directed from observation balloons, shelled the Turkish railway station at Beit Hanun from about 15 kilometres. The official history regards this as the heaviest bombardment carried out outside Europe in this war. On the sector of the coming assault there was one heavy gun to less than 60 metres of front, the same as the British had on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

From 29 October the ships of Rear-Admiral Thomas Jackson joined in the bombardment: the cruiser Grafton, the French coastal defence battleship Requin, the monitor Raglan with a 14-inch gun, smaller monitors, British and French destroyers and river gunboats. On 29–31 October the artillery shelled the Turkish batteries with gas shells, but without visible effect. The Turks were not even sure whether gas had been used at all. According to the commander of the Eighth Army, the Bavarian General Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, the bombardment destroyed little, but severely tried the nerves of the Gaza garrison.

The reconnaissance at El Buqqar

East of Gaza, on the Wadi Hanafish, the British line of outposts covering the construction of the railway to Karm had been held since the night of 26–27 October by the 8th Mounted Brigade. The sector from El Buqqar westwards, about five kilometres long, was to be held at all costs. At 4.10 a.m. the Turks attacked in great strength the outpost of the Middlesex Yeomanry on a hill west of Bir el Girheir, called Hill 630 in British reports. Reinforcements from the reserve could not break through to it, but they prevented the Turks from surrounding it. A squadron of the City of London Yeomanry under Major L. P. Stedall lay all day behind a barely visible knoll under machine-gun fire that grazed the horses’ saddles. Captain A. McDougall’s troop of the Middlesex held out in a support trench until late afternoon, when the arrival of the infantry of the 53rd Division made the Turks withdraw.

The second outpost, two troops of the Middlesex Yeomanry north of El Buqqar, was less fortunate. Several squadrons of Turkish cavalry worked round its right and forced a battery of the Hampshire Royal Horse Artillery to withdraw. The outpost was shelled again and again, and between the bombardments cavalry charged it. One charge came to a halt almost at the edge of the trench, and 15 dead were later counted in front of it. The last message of its commander, Major Alexander Lafone, read: “I shall hold on to the last.” When five men of the garrison were left, Lafone leapt out of the trench to meet the last charge and was killed, trampled by the horses. The outpost fell after seven hours of fighting, and three soldiers survived. Lafone was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. In the evening, as British infantry and the Australian 3rd Light Horse Brigade came up, the Turks withdrew along the whole line, and the 53rd Division reoccupied the hills. The 8th Mounted Brigade lost 10 officers and 69 other ranks, mostly from the two outposts.

According to the official history, this was a reconnaissance in force, carried out by the 125th Regiment of the 16th Division from Tel esh Sheria and units of the 3rd Cavalry Division from Beersheba on the orders of General Erich von Falkenhayn, commander of the “Yıldırım” Army Group, who was still in Aleppo. Falkenhayn also ordered the Eighth Army to prepare an attack southwards from Abu Hureira for the morning of 31 October. The official history considers that the resistance of the yeomanry prevented the Turks from making full use of the reconnaissance and digging in on the hills from which they could have made the building of the railway impossible.

What the Turks knew

The Turks could see that something was happening on the eastern wing. Their maps of the evening of 26 October showed a cavalry brigade at Asluj, the Imperial Camel Brigade at Khalasa, and infantry and cavalry on the Wadi Ghazze. That evening, however, the “Yıldırım” command reported to Constantinople that the movements towards Beersheba were probably a feint intended to divert attention from Gaza. In the following days the Turks discovered that the camps at Khan Yunis and Rafah were empty, and reconnoitred the British forces in the east fairly accurately. The official history writes that they nevertheless persisted in the belief that the main attack would be on Gaza, because the haversack ruse, and still more the bombardment begun on 27 October, had confirmed them in it. It admits at the same time that the British had such numerical superiority that even after dispersing their forces they were strong enough to make their main attack on Gaza.

The shelling went on through the following days and nights. On the evening of 30 October Chauvel’s 12,000 horsemen set out from Asluj and Khalasa on their last night march on Beersheba, which they took at dusk the next day.