SHRINKING THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
The Australian Flying Corps flew a great number of operations in support of the British and Australian penetration of Palestine and Syria, and the Australian Number 1 Squadron was for a time intimately involved with the Arab force catalysed by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) on the eastern or right flank of the Allied advance on Damascus. On 16 May 1918 the South Australian Ross Smith flew Lawrence from a conference at General Allenby’s headquarters in southern Palestine to his base at El Kutrani on the famous Turkish Hejaz Railway in what is now Jordan, the railway the Arabs (perhaps too often called Lawrence’s Arabs) continually blew up and ambushed. Australian airmen, some operating from Ramleh in the modern-day West Bank, others from El Kutrani, part of Lawrence’s Arab northern army that struck across the desert to Azrak, attacked the important Dera Railway which ran into Damascus. Ross Smith and his squadron were overwhelmingly successful in shooting down German Rumpler and Albatross aircraft which attacked or drew near to Lawrence’s column. The Australian Bristol Fighters also bombed Turkish railway repair work parties trying to restore the lines after Arab attacks, and their presence itself attracted Bedouin groups to the Arab cause. From the air, the Australians observed Arabs and Turks harvesting grain in the Jordan Valley but also saw the Turkish build-up at Amman, now the capital of Jordan, and so bombed that ancient city as well.
This activity in the air was part of the Australian involvement in the conflict with Turkey and of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire, named after its first sultan, Uthman. The Australians had encountered this threatened empire at Gallipoli, and it had rebuffed them in their attempt to clear the way to Istanbul. But the Ottoman Empire still stretched across the Turkish Peninsula, down through Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Arabia and modern Iraq, and westwards into Sinai, where it sat gazing at the British in Egypt. Having previously held all of Egypt, the Turks, often but not always led by German generals, had at the start of the war intended to capture the Suez and Egypt. Their troops were in the Sinai south-west of Jerusalem and had advanced as far as Romani. Over the winter of 1915–16 the Turks were using three traditional and ancient routes to cross the Sinai Peninsula, the triangular desolation between Palestine and the Suez Canal.
As British resistance to the Turkish movements in Sinai began to mature, Australian units of the Imperial Camel Brigade rode twice to Akaba to liaise with the Arabs of the Hejaz. Unlike the Lawrence depicted in David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia, they found the route quite viable for camels and supplied with a number of watering places, though often of alkaline quality. Meanwhile the British were beginning to build a water pipeline and a railway to service their men on what would need to be an ultimate advance into Palestine. The central road through the Sinai was one taken by the Queen of Sheba, and Joseph of the Coat of Many Colours, and—according to tradition—Joseph, Mary and the child Jesus fleeing from Herod. The Turkish general Djemal used this central road for his advance towards Egypt in 1915.
Sinai was a place which from the time of the Hittites and then the Egyptians was to be briskly traversed before a fight could be staged. The systems and wells dug into the beds of wadis in Sinai had been reconditioned by the Turks for their advance on Egypt. But the water supply on this central route was too limited for an army. The coastal one was better, though the sand dunes and rocky earth were very hard on horses, guns and wheeled transportation. Anyone invading Egypt, or marching out of Egypt to invade Palestine, had to secure the wells at Katia, near the coast twenty miles east of the present Suez Canal. This was an eternal rule. Alexander had had to do it, and Napoleon had also seized them so that they could water ambitions which for him never came to fruition. By January 1916 the Turks had 25 000 men in Sinai. It was decided that they must be denied the Katia wells. If the Turks occupied Katia waters they were only a one- or two-day march from the Canal. Some of the Australians and other forces that winter had been engaged not against the Turks, but in Libya against the Senussi tribesmen galloping out south and west into Cyrenaica. But now, a year after Gallipoli, all the pressure was turned against the Turks in Sinai. The German aim in all this was that if the Turks could keep a permanent army around Katia, that in itself would tie up a lot of British troops guarding the Suez Canal. On the other hand, the Russians were also attacking the Turks from the direction of the Caucasus and had captured the Turkish city of Erzurum on 16 February 1916, and this news cannot have been pleasant for the Turkish troops in the Sinai.
The British had their own problems. For the two Light Horse divisions, one problem was that while a day’s ration for a man consisted of only 2 or 3 pounds, that of a horse weighed 20 pounds. The daily water ration for a man washing economically and drinking was at most 1 gallon, but horses required 5 gallons. In order to supply not only the Australians but the entire British force, it was essential to push a new railway out into the desert.
The Light Horse was made up chiefly of men from the bush. It was not a cavalry force because its members were not armed with sword or lance. They were mounted riflemen, a few of whom had served in South Africa only twelve years earlier. Their Australian childhoods had tempered them, making them adept with horses and skilled with rifles. The horses they rode—though generally Walers—were not uniform in appearance. Some Australians rode on stocky, powerful ponies, and so did the New Zealanders, while others rode cross-breeds from draught Clydesdale mares to three-quarter thoroughbreds.
The heat of Sinai was for most of the year—except in the peak of summer—no worse than the heat of many parts of Australia in summer, and both men and horses were used to such conditions. The Australian saddle-horse, according to the official historian H.S. Gullett, was used to a hard life, ‘seldom fed in a stable, and little time is given to its grooming. When an animal is wanted it is usually brought in from a small paddock near the homestead, cleaned, perhaps, of mud or falling coat, saddled, and ridden. The ride finished, the procedure in most seasons was to remove the saddle and bridle and turn the horse back at once into the paddock without grooming or hand feeding.’ It was in this spirit that the light horseman dealt with his mount, and his mount lived. The light horseman himself had survived a raw upbringing and his qualities, as an historian remarks, ‘rendered him impatient of that side of discipline which may be termed purely ceremonial’. He saw military formalities and etiquettes as irrelevant. The British general staff in Egypt and Palestine had complained often enough about it.
The light horsemen referred to the Turk as ‘old Jacko’ and did not get the point pushed by various journalists, British and Australian, that the campaign in Palestine was a ‘new Crusade; to liberate the Holy Land from the infidel’. No Australian commander used such terms, and it is likely that if he had they would have been treated with derision. Similarly the idea that these operations might bring the Ottoman Empire unstrung was not mentioned, even though that was what was to happen very quickly. The chance to see the Holy Land and visit a captured Jerusalem and Nazareth was attractive to all of the Australians, but they did not see the hoped-for Turkish ejection from these places the way their medieval forefathers had.
Near Katia, the British Yeomanry and the Gloucesters of the British army were overrun by Turkish forces in April 1916 and attacked from the air by German aircraft. The British went reeling back through the village of Katia and the camp at Romani, and the Turks left the British wounded to their Bedouin militia, who circled them on horseback as they begged for water and cried, ‘Finish British! Turks Cantara! Turks Port Said!’
The 2nd Light Horse Brigade of the Anzac Mounted Division, led by General Bull Ryrie, a Michelago grazier twice wounded at Gallipoli, rode up to Romani near Katia on 8 April, along with the New Zealand brigade and the headquarters unit of the Anzac Mounted Division, and covered the retreat of the British soldiers on the coast. ‘The only entry into Egypt is by this desert,’ Herodotus had written, and that entry was now about to be denied to the Turks by the undermanned Australian and
New Zealand light horsemen. General Ryrie’s brigade lacked ambulance transportation, except for a herd of seventy camels, to take the British wounded back to the rear from which the Medical Corps slung the badly wounded.
At the Romani sand dunes on the furiously hot night of 3 August 1916, Light Horse regiments lay under a quarter-moon on white sand. Their horses were tethered to horse lines further back. North of them, closer to the coast, were a number of British infantry regiments. Ahead lay hilly country which gave good cover for the snipers or raiders of the Turkish army. To their south a ridge of stone dubbed Mount Meredith dominated the country and General Chauvel, the Grafton-born horseman and Australian regular soldier who commanded the Anzac Division, had been suggesting to his superiors that infantry posts should be put on top, but had been ignored. The Turks themselves intended to occupy it and bombard the British railhead at Romani from it, a plan which was discovered by a light-horse patrol. The Turks subsequently found the entrances to the gullies were held by small parties of light horsemen sent out on their mounts by Chauvel. Many Australians were now bayoneted as they attempted to find their horses and retreat. Major M. Shanahan, out riding between these listening posts, came upon four Australians who had lost their horses and who did not know where the enemy was. He took two of the men up on his horse’s back and had the two other troopers hang on to either stirrup and so was able to ride back through the Turks to the Australian lines. But Sergeant Bingham, a farmer from Tasmania, and Sergeant Tolman, who ran cattle on King Island, had both been bayoneted to death.
About one o’clock in the morning, closer to the coast, the Turks attacked the main Australian line, crying, ‘Finish Australia! Finish Australia!’ By two they were within 30 or 40 yards of the light horsemen. They could not be clearly seen and the Australians had to aim at rifle flashes. The Australians knew they could not hold this major Turkish attack that was now in progress because their own line was not continuous but ran in a series of posts over a number of sand dunes. The Turks had in many cases thrown away their boots to allow them to move with greater speed through the sand, for they were often country boys too, used to this sort of hardship, and they were attacking in particular now those scattered groups on the first part of the spur, Mount Meredith, on the extreme right. If the Turks could outflank the Australians, they could destroy Romani and prepare, with a British-built railway in hand, for an expedition against the Canal.
At 2.30 a.m. there was a large-scale bayonet charge against the Australians at Mount Meredith. The Turks tried to climb the almost-perpendicular southernmost slope and were held back by a small group of men under a young man from Gunnedah named Lieutenant Edwards, who would survive that night but die of disease brought on by desert campaigning before the year was out. Many officers and men were killed and others were driven back to a sheltered dip in the rock between Mount Meredith and its neighbour, Mount Wellington, where their horses were. A light horseman trying to lift a friend up behind his saddle found the man he held was in fact a Turk. The bullets meanwhile made spurts of flame in the sand, igniting the phosphorus with which it was naturally impregnated. Survivors were now retreating, many of them on horseback, towards Romani. But an order was heard above the racket. It was obeyed, a new line was formed. The Anzac front stood, and a flanking route which would have given the Turks the Romani rail and perhaps the Canal was blocked. Anzac officers yelled out promises of reinforcements at dawn, and men scooped out holes in the sand and settled down with the intention to stop the Turks again.
There were further attacks and as dawn broke the light horsemen could see the massed Turkish attack, and the Turks could see the thinness of the Australian defences. They again attacked the right, inland side of the Australian line, firing on men and horses. A retreat was necessary, but it occurred according to drill, troop covering troop, withdrawing from those holes quickly dug in the sand. Chauvel realised that he could not let hand-to-hand fighting break out, because the Turkish numbers were so great. Some Australians had been driven to Wellington Ridge, however, which the Turkish artillery swept with shrapnel and high explosives. By 7 a.m. the Turks had gained the ridge. But it was six hours too late for the Turks. Instead of possessing these vantage points in the cool of night they possessed them in a furnace-like morning.
Chauvel sent a message back that if a British rifle brigade could come up—an infantry brigade was nearly double the rifles of a light-horse brigade because so many men had to be kept behind to guard the horses—the Australians could draw back, water their horses, and then swing round the left of the enemy to cooperate with the mounted New Zealanders and yeomanry brigade in an attack which would envelop the Turks. General Royston, a South African who commanded the New Zealanders, assured them, ‘You are making history today.’ He swore to the New Zealanders and anyone within call that the Turks were retreating. He did not mind having his instructions overheard by Australians either, and they too were making history.
The Turkish troops were beginning to suffer from the heat. They were exhausted by forced marching and hours of fighting in the heavy sand. Most of the prisoners the Australians and others took had been without water for some hours and the food in their haversacks consisted chiefly of green dates they had gathered in the date groves. Many of them were suffering from dysentery.
Ryrie’s Light Horse had by afternoon been fighting for twenty hours. But by nightfall they were incomparably better off than the Turks, who as well as everything else had heard that many layers of defence would block their advance to the Canal. There was only intermittent rest for the Australians that night. Ammunition and water were issued, and the orders were that there would be a bayonet advance at dawn.
Before the battle, a highly civilised message had been dropped by a German plane and happened to fall near Chauvel’s tent. It asked the Australians to mark their ambulances more clearly so that they should not be bombed. Many of the wounded would owe their survival to this message. The arrangement for the transport of the wounded from the railhead to Kantara on the Canal, however, was appalling. No hospital trains were provided. The first lot of Australian wounded reached the railhead at Romani for transportation to Cairo, but found that the trains were to be used for the transport of Turkish prisoners, and so the light horsemen lay for some hours in the sun under artillery attack. They travelled to Kantara in open trucks and, though it was only a matter of 23 miles (37 kilometres), the journey took anywhere from six to fifteen hours. A number of officers and men who had left the ambulances in sound condition died from neglect and exhaustion. In Kantara some of them remained in hospital for nearly two days before being treated. There would be strong complaints from Chauvel and his senior medical men.
At dawn on 5 August, the 1st and 2nd Light Horse Brigades routed the Turks with a bayonet charge and the Turkish retreat was disorderly, as Chauvel unleashed the 3rd Brigade to pursue and harry them. So began a Turkish retreat which would not finish until Damascus and the end of the war.
A troop of Aboriginal light horsemen—nicknamed by some the Queensland Black Watch—arrived in Palestine to reinforce the 11th Light Horse while they were in the Jordan Valley. Major C.A.R. Munro wrote, ‘Some of them were in the squadron of which I had command in May 1918 when the mounted troops, Australians and New Zealanders, charged through the Turkish lines in the Jordan Valley and rode about eight miles to their rear to cut the communication lines. I remember seeing some of the Aborigines well in the front of the advance.’ One of them, Private John Johnston, died of his wounds on 1 June 1918. These twenty reinforcements of the 11th Light Horse was the only exclusively Aboriginal formation within the AIF. But though the numbers of Aborigines in the ranks of the AIF cannot be estimated, we know of many. Private Billy Elsdale, a full-blood Aborigine of the 47th Battalion, was killed in action at Fleurbaix on 7 November 1916. He is one of sixteen Aborigines identified as having been killed in action, though there were inevitably many more Aboriginal enlistees who came to harm.
Two days before Christmas 1916, at Magdhaba the Turks made a last stand to remain in Sinai. The Anzac Mounted Division, operating ahead of the infantry, were subjected to severe fire, but ended by driving the enemy off. The Imperial Camel Corps—made up of Australians, New Zealanders and British, with the major portion, two and a half battalions, being Australian—were also unleashed from the north-west. Soon after 1 p.m., Chauvel called off the attack. But the recall reached the commander of the 1st Light Horse Brigade, Brigadier General Charles Fox, just as his troops were preparing to assault the main enemy redoubt with bayonets fixed. He deliberately misplaced the message until the attack had started. The redoubt fell, and at four-thirty in the afternoon the Turkish garrison surrendered. The Australians set Magdhaba alight to prevent its use again and withdrew back to their camp at El Arish. The 1st Light Horse next captured Rafa, near the Sinai–Palestine border (now Ein Rafa), on the morning of 9 January 1917. The telegraph lines to Gaza were cut. Now the Anglo-Australian force could move to attack the main Turkish lines near Gaza on the coast. The first assault on Gaza on 26 March began well at 2.30 a.m. in a dense fog. Chauvel was given the Imperial Mounted Division as well as having his own men to attack Gaza from the north. But even as he was advancing and entering the outskirts of the town he heard to the east a battle to stop Turkish reinforcements arriving. Against his strongest protest he was ordered to withdraw and began the process. He ordered that badly wounded Turks be left close to the road for retrieval. At campfires that evening, the light horsemen were furious at being withdrawn.
Chauvel now became a lieutenant general in command of the Desert Mounted Corps, including the Camel Brigade. Of its nine horsed brigades, four were Australian, four British and one New Zealand. The artillery was mainly British. Another attack on Gaza was meant to distract the Turks while 9 miles (15 kilometres) inland at a junction named Beersheba the Mounted Corps was to make an enveloping attack from all sides. It was an irony that the comrades of the Light Horse lived in mud and ice in France and Flanders while all operations in Palestine involved control of water. The future of the advance in Palestine depended on the capture of the Beersheba wells. The Turkish Eighth Army garrisoned in Beersheba did not know that they, instead of Gaza, were the target. But if the wells could not be taken on the first day, Chauvel would have to pull his Desert Mounted Corps back. Chauvel’s men made an assault on the height above Beersheba, Tel el Saba, at 3 p.m. on 31 October, and with the sun due to set at 4.30 he did not have a lot of time for the capture of the wells. But the hilly defence position was captured before Beersheba. Then, in waning light, the famous incident of the day occurred, the entirely successful charge of the 4th Light Horse Brigade.