Allenby's Final Triumph [Illustrated Edition]

William Thomas Massey

• Publisher: Verdun Press
• Year: 2014
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782895480
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Includes the World War One In The Desert Illustration Pack- 115 photos/illustrations and 19 maps spanning the Desert campaigns 1914-1918
THIS narrative, it is hoped, will serve to remove the impression which prevails among a not inconsiderable section of the British public that the Army commanded and handled with such consummate skill by Lord Allenby in Palestine had a comparatively simple task...
In 1918 General Allenby had to contend with enormous difficulties. He was faced with the problem of having to arrange his operations so as to fit in with the calls made upon him to reinforce the Western Front. At a time when the Turkish moral was still good, he had to send to France the bulk of his veteran British infantry when they were in the highest state of efficiency, and, with new Indian troops in their place, he had to build up another army. In these pages I have tried to show how, while increasing the power of his fresh troops, he forced down the fighting capacity of his enemy, and then, when by a most ably worked out scheme of camouflage he had concealed scores of thousands of men and horses at the place of attack, he launched his host against an army whose moral he had reduced to a low level. By employing a magnificent body of cavalry he gave another lesson to the armies of the world in the employment of the mounted arm, and, uninfluenced by the desires of London and Paris that this or that should be his aim, his own plans, worked out in his own way, secured far more than War Councils or War Cabinets had any right to expect. The Army's appreciation of Lord Allenby is correct.

CHAPTER I — CROSS CURRENTS

BEGUN at the right moment, conceived on bold lines, and executed with magnificent energy and skill on every section of the front, General Allenby’s final attack in Palestine will go down in history as one of the most successful operations in the war. It marked the beginning of the war’s last stage, and by destroying the Turkish armies and capturing practically all their war equipment the Palestine force precipitated the collapse of the Allies’ enemies on all fronts, and brought hostilities to an end much earlier than anyone had anticipated at the beginning of the summer. If it would be over-stating the facts to say the world-war was won in Palestine, it is beyond dispute that General Allenby’s absolute triumph made the Allied victory certain, and when the historian is able to marshal his military facts alongside the political questions which swayed the councils of the Allies, he will appraise Allenby’s work as highly as that of any commander-in-chief. His strategy was based on a masterly appreciation of the situation, not merely in his own theatre of operations but on the whole of the European fronts, and by postponing the delivery of his mighty blow till its effect would turn the balance in favour of all the Allied armies, his victory exerted a power that directly influenced every nation fighting against us. It came at the psychological hour. Bulgaria saw her days were numbered when Turkey’s flank was smashed, and Austria recognised the inevitable. The Palestine triumph, as much as anything else, made them sue for peace, and Germany, left alone on a line where America was soon to pull her full weight, could not continue through another winter. The Palestine Army’s efforts have won a permanent place in history, and Lord Allenby of Megiddo will go down to posterity as one of the greatest soldiers who saved the world from German kultur.

This book, I believe, is the first full record of the final phase of the Palestine campaign. I do not claim to put forward a complete story of the political side, though I refer to one or two matters which have not been given to the public hitherto. But in the delicate condition of international affairs, when disclosures of facts are considered unfriendly to some of the peoples who conquered a common foe, it will probably be several years before the world knows how military strategy in Palestine had to fit in with the desires and claims and ambitions of our Allies, and how policy decided upon in Paris affected the trend of events. The public did not understand the conditions on the Palestine front, and there was every excuse for the public, for even after explanations by generals who had the conduct of operations, certain politicians visiting the front could not appreciate the difficulties of attack in the wild hills of Judea and in the mountains east of the Jordan. They expressed themselves too hurriedly, but a curb was put on their premature desires by the generals who had to study the problems of water supply, transport, communications, and, above all, the cost in lives. In Palestine no operation was started without counting the cost, and there was always a doubt whether Britain could adequately fill gaps created by the wastage of war. When General Allenby’s Army had won the world-resounding victory of Jerusalem, arm-chair strategists at home studied the map and asked for the Haifa-Nazareth-Nablus line. Central. Palestine had then been secured at the cost of tens of thousands of casualties after months of bitter fighting. Divisions had been depleted by fierce contact with a stubborn foe who never gave battle except in country which suited his tactics. They had not been fully made up in numbers, and in the then condition of the Turkish army, holding as it did positions of great natural strength, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force would have had to be increased by several new divisions before there was any hope of gaining by the early summer the more northerly line that was suggested. The requirements of the British Army on the Western Front prevented fresh divisions being sent to Palestine, and the struggle on the Somme in March fully justified the military advisers of the War Cabinet in refusing to sanction any weakening of our force in France. Yet when the Supreme War Council came to consider the situation in 1918, the Palestine Army was regarded as the force which should achieve victory without any increase of its strength.

That august body was not optimistic of victory on the Western Front in 1918. America could not be at the high-water mark of numbers and efficiency in that year, and calculations had to be based on a defensive along the whole line in France. The people of the Allied nations and neutrals had to be considered, and if there was the appearance of stalemate, with nothing to show that the tide was flowing towards victory, might not some regard favourably suggestions Germany would assuredly throw out for peace? In short, it was necessary to obtain victories in order to keep the people as staunch and confident as the troops. Could Italy be ready to regain her prestige which was unfortunately damaged at Caporetto? She had a great deal of reorganising to do, and she must wait till later in the year. Was the Salonika force in a position to make certain of success in the Balkans? That, too, was quickly ruled out, and Palestine was the only field that remained.

But the Supreme War Council expected too much. They wanted an immediate advance in March, the early occupation of Nablus, and, I think, of Haifa and Nazareth by June, with nothing but the old, tried, war-worn divisions to do it. It may not have been an impossible task. General Allenby and his Army had done wonderful things, of which the Supreme War Council had ample knowledge, and they might have succeeded. But that hypothesis is extremely doubtful. General Smuts came to Palestine in March, and there was great activity among the staffs of G.H.Q. and Corps. They set about preparing plans for an offensive to conform to the wishes expressed in Paris. On the XXth Corps front the attack had to be made over a series of mountains athwart the Nablus road. The ridges were high, there was practically no fiat, many boulder-strewn water courses had to be crossed, roads had to be constructed every yard of the way, and guns could only be moved forward by a long and tedious process.

The XXth Corps had just made an advance, and after three days of very hard fighting by troops who had no superiors in the world they had managed to wrest a few thousand yards of country from the enemy. The tactics of the Turks were to employ an exceptionally large number of machine guns and, with rocky hills affording them the best of cover, it was hard to dislodge them, and until they were dealt with an advance was bound to be slow. The result of the operations in the first fortnight of March proved conclusively that the enemy would hold tenaciously to the hills, and though General Allenby would probably have got to Nablus his army would have suffered heavy losses, and the casualties might have crippled his force and prevented the execution of the bolder, wiser, and infinitely more effective scheme which the Commander-in-Chief had in view. And what would Nablus have meant to the world? Nablus without Haifa and Nazareth would have had no moral effect, and the world would have regarded it as a trifling incident of the war. Nablus alone was not worth the price we should have paid for it, and except for being compelled to give up a few miles of country, the Turks would have remained in a good position, nearer to their main railway line, and with better communications with their base than they had on their old entrenched system. If General Allenby had been given the divisions required to take Haifa and Nazareth when London suggested those places as the aim of the force, there is not the slightest doubt that the line would have been secured in the early summer, but the plan of the Supreme War Council put an enormous burden on the Commander-in-Chief and his Army, and some of those who were on the spot thought they were being asked to do more than could be reasonably expected of them. Perhaps those responsible for putting forward the plan imagined the Turks’ moral was broken, and despised the fighting qualities of the soldier of the Crescent. At this time the Turk was still a gallant man in attack and defence. He failed in attack because his attack always lacked depth, but he was a stout enemy until late in the summer, when his moral failed under the relentless tactics of General Allenby.

The German thrust on the Somme created an entirely new situation, and instead of the Supreme War Council relying on the Palestine Army to bring the world to support their view that victory was coming to the Allies, General Allenby was called upon to reduce his strength by sending a considerable proportion of his best troops to reinforce the Western Front. Accordingly before the end of March all preparations for an offensive were abandoned. Operations on a big scale could not possibly have been carried through with the same far-reaching results as the autumn offensive, even if the work in the coastal sector had had the most favourable turn, but the withdrawal of many of his veteran troops also compelled General Allenby to hold up a scheme for summer operations against the Turks. If these could have been carried through the war might have been over before November. After the Somme General Allenby was left alone to proceed with his campaign on his own lines. He had to reorganise his force in face of the enemy and to train comparatively raw troops. If there were anxious days there was no pessimism. While making ready for the grand effort the Commander-in-Chief, by a system of continuous raids by large and small forces, wore down the enemy’s moral until, at the moment he launched his famous divisions of cavalry and infantry to the attack, he was faced by an army depressed in spirit and haunted with the fear at meeting better men. Doubtless it was wiser that the end should be worked out in this way. The lives of thousands of gallant men were saved by the abandonment of the earlier operations of 1918, and those lives were more important than the money Britain poured into the battle for the Holy Land. Moreover, the Turk was more completely finished when he reeled and fell before the hammer blow in September than he would have been by a series of battles fought during a slower progress northwards.

There was one other suggestion from home which, if acted upon, might have made the autumn victory less crushing. I will refer to it in detail later on. Briefly the idea was that when the Turkish defensive line north of Jaffa to the Jordan was broken, General Allenby should make a cavalry raid on Aleppo, more than 300 miles as the crow flies. The proposal came from the War Cabinet, but it was merely a suggestion and was in no sense intended as an interference with General Allenby’s plans. Indeed when the Commander-in-Chief showed that the wiser plan was to proceed to his goal by stages, his opinion was at once accepted, and the War Cabinet made no attempt to argue or dictate. There was good sense in that attitude. General Allenby working out his own scheme at what he judged to be the proper time, without any outside interference except the observance of certain regulations which were to be put in force when particular areas of enemy territory were occupied, won for Britain and her Allies a victory as complete as any in the war. His triumph was gained at an astonishingly small cost. Preparations were made for 30,000 casualties; the battle casualties were a sixth of this number. There was genius in the General’s strategy. He took the only route by which his cavalry could get into position to close the Turks’ avenues of retreat, yet his operations for the preceding six months had so mystified the Turks that the enemy High Command made all their calculations to resist him on the other flank. He concentrated a mass of cavalry and infantry in comparatively open country within a few miles of the line, but so cleverly were the troops concealed that the enemy was completely surprised, and in a few minutes, certainly in less than half an hour, the infantry had secured their first object, that of breaking through the defences and opening a way for the cavalry to pass on. General Allenby was an ideal Commander-in-Chief. He set a fine example by never leaving the front unless his presence in Egypt was necessary to attend an official function or to inspect the base, and he was never absent longer than a day or two. A Spartan life was the rule at G.H.Q. Work was the order of the day every day. Continually with his troops, it can be said with absolute truth that no commander-in-chief was better known by his soldiers, and none possessed in a higher degree the affection and confidence of his men. They knew his deep sympathy for them; they knew that if his enterprise was characterised by boldness it was never rash. Over and over again he decided against operations which would incur substantial losses, and the high value he placed on the comfort and well-being of his command was reflected in the remarkably low sick rate of the Army while it was in the country he controlled.

CHAPTER II — CAVALRY’S OPPORTUNITY

THE last part of the campaign in Palestine was unlike anything else in the war. It afforded the opportunity all cavalrymen hoped for of proving that a large force of mounted troops was as necessary in an army to-day as in the past. Indeed, the operations firmly established the fact that cavalry were more than ever required in the British Army, which has to protect every link of a far-flung Imperial line, and may at any time be called upon to operate in country where mobility is most essential, and though the big following of the school trained in the trenches of the Western Front will probably continue to maintain that the day of mounted troops is past, there is little fear that the lesson of the Palestine campaign will be ignored. Tanks, aeroplanes, and the best of the new mechanism of war are, we know, indispensable parts of an army in the field, but they cannot take the place of cavalry. No engine has yet been devised which could capture more than 400 miles of country in six weeks—the feat which General Allenby’s cavalry accomplished. Only a cavalry force could have done it, and though infantry, after smashing the whole of the Turkish line, could have kept the enemy on the move, they could not have captured the three Turkish armies, even if they had had the support of many squadrons of armoured cars and tanks. It was General Allenby’s cavalry that was responsible for the complete overthrow of the Turk. The infantry was able at any time to break through any line of defences the Turks might occupy after the entrenched line from the sea to the Jordan had been carried, but alone they could not prevent a more or less methodical retirement.

Nothing but the splendid mobility of the cavalry could have closed all the roads by which the enemy might have escaped, and, while it is equally true that without the infantry and artillery the cavalry could not have gained a passage through the entrenched line, the big results of the last months of the campaign were obtained by mounted troops. They accomplished in six weeks what the infantry would have taken at least a year, and perhaps two years, to do. Without a great preponderance in cavalry the advance through Northern Palestine and Syria would have been slow. Experience had shown us that in the rude hills of Judea a progress of five miles in three days’ stern fighting, when our attack was pushed home by a much larger body of troops than was available for the defenders, was the best that could be hoped for, and for many miles in their rear the enemy had equally good positions. This sort of fighting could have gone on for months, and while no one doubts the ultimate success of the infantry, it would have been at the cost of great sacrifice, and the majority of the enemy would almost certainly have got away to hold new lines right up the country. If this went on the Turks could have replaced many of their losses by fresh troops from Anatolia and the Caucasus. But the Turks were faced with a very different problem when the cavalry had dealt with them. Three Turkish armies were wholly destroyed by the cavalry passing round the flank to their rear. and sitting astride every road the enemy could take to the north. No reinforcements could replace them; no new armies, if they had been available, could, in the existing state of the Turkish communications, have prevented our cavalry getting to Damascus and Aleppo, and holding the ground they won. The two hours’ work of the infantry on the morning of the attack was all that was required to enable the mounted men to finish the war with Turkey. The infantry for three days continued to perform a hard task with grand skill and determination. They were all-conquering and irresistible, and were continually pressing forward, but if they had been held up in the hills the result would have been the same, for the cavalry cordon was unbreakable, and the Turks were between upper and nether millstones.

A man of strong will and rare energy, General Allenby had the gift of imparting to others his own enthusiasm for work. The heads of his various departments at G.H.Q. were as untiring as himself, and they well served the Commander-in-Chief. Major-General Sir L. J. Bols came to Egypt as the Chief of the General Staff when the attack on the Gaza-Beersheba line was being prepared. He brought with him a ripe experience of latter-day warfare gathered in the strenuous fields in France, and he applied the lessons learned there with consummate skill and judgment. His appreciations of the situation were masterpieces of sound reasoning and judgment, and a more hard-working, conscientious, and capable C.G.S. never served an army. The Brigadier-General in charge of the earlier operations was General Dawnay, who remained in Palestine until Jerusalem had three lines of defences which no force that the Turks could put into the field could break. The enemy had not given up hope of retaking the Holy City, and documents secured at Nazareth told us how the Germans and Enver Pasha were looking for a victory which they rightly judged would have a great political effect. But their intention to make an attack from the Jordan Valley was never prosecuted, and had it been attempted it would have been a hopeless failure. General Dawnay was called to France to take up a high position on Field-Marshal Haig’s staff, and his place at G.H.Q. was filled by Brigadier-General W. H. Bartholomew, who had been B.G.G.S. of the XXth Corps. General Bartholomew had earned his higher post by the work he did as General Chetwode’s chief staff officer. The plans for the attack on the Beersheba flank were worked out by him in most elaborate detail, and in that complicated movement which had to be hidden from the enemy’s eyes till the battle burst upon him there was not the slightest hitch, every part of the intricate machinery of a big Army Corps assembled for battle running as true as a well-tested engine. The scheme for the capture of Jerusalem was also passed on by him to divisional commanders, and in the gaining of successive lines in the Judean hills his soldierly hand arranged the details. But before this, when the XXth Corps took over the right of the line after the XXIst Corps had failed to thrust the Turks back from Jerusalem by striking at the Nablus road north of the Holy City, General Bartholomew, under Sir Philip Chetwode’s direction, was largely responsible for the heavy reverse sustained by the enemy who tried to force through the positions we held about the Beth-horons. If that enemy counter-attack had got home, the capture of Jerusalem would have been postponed. The line at this part was held by troops who had been fighting hard in the hills for days, and the situation was saved from becoming critical only by the fortuitous circumstance, of which the XXth Corps made the most, that the 52nd Division, which had been relieved at Nebi Samwil by the Londoners, was marching to rest by the Beth-horon road. That counter-attack was boldly dealt with, and the defeat so took the heart out of the Turks that their resistance in the defences outside Jerusalem was not so strong as we expected. General Bartholomew was chief of the operations staff at G.H.Q. when the scheme for the final overthrow of the Turkish armies was settled, and in its preparation he took a leading part. To point to the result is to pay the finest tribute to ‘Operations,’ for everything had been provided for, and not at any one point did anything miscarry.

The Quartermaster-General’s department was another ably-managed branch of G.H.Q. Major-General Sir Walter Campbell was assisted by Brigadier-General Evans, who, like General Bartholomew, was attached to the XXth Corps in the first stage of the campaign. General Campbell had seen the Egyptian Expeditionary Force grow from a comparatively small army sitting on the Suez Canal to defend that waterway. Being responsible for transport he had a great deal to do with the building of the Desert Military railway, and with the establishment of an enormous supply base at Kantara. From 1916 onwards he saved an immense amount of tonnage and a vast sum of money by organising local resources boards in Egypt and in getting wheat and potatoes grown in place of other crops. When supplies could only be obtained with difficulty from home, General Campbell procured them in nearer markets, and even at the period when submarine activity was at its height in the Mediterranean the Force was never short. On his shoulders, too, rested the burden of assisting the civil population of Jerusalem, who were found with little food when the Turks were forced out of the city. But of all the many problems that faced the Quartermaster-General during the war, none was so serious as that of supplying the Army in the great advance of September and October 1918. For an advance of this magnitude General Campbell was inadequately supplied with motor transport, but all his men loyally responded to the call for a sustained effort, and ‘Q’ made a meritorious record. I have devoted a chapter to this work, and the one fact that the lorries had a mileage of 720,000 miles in three weeks, or a daily average of 70 miles per lorry, is sufficient to show with what untiring energy the supply branch laboured to keep the fighting men fit for their stupendous task. Haifa was a long way short of 100 miles from the big supply depôts formed at Ludd, but the country was so bad for wheeled traffic that it was found easier to send stores back to the Suez Canal, 200 miles by railway, and to ship them to Haifa, than to forward them by road.

In Major-General Smith, the senior artillery officer, General Allenby had one of the most scientific gunners in the service. Some of the batteries on joining the Force saw action for the first time. They were opposed by skilful Austrian and Turkish gunners, but we obtained a marked superiority in artillery, and the accuracy of our gun fire well maintained the traditions of the Royal Regiment. On September 19 the artillery absolutely drowned the enemy’s fire, but magnificent as was their work that day, I doubt if the...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• LIST OF MAPS
• CHAPTER I - CROSS CURRENTS
• CHAPTER II - CAVALRY’S OPPORTUNITY
• CHAPTER III - TROOPS OF THE EMPIRE
• CHAPTER IV - CROSSING THE JORDAN
• CHAPTER V - FIRST ATTACK ON AMMAN
• CHAPTER VI - OVER JORDAN AGAIN
• CHAPTER VII - FIGHTING IN THE JUDEAN HILLS
• CHAPTER VIII - CAMOUFLAGING AN ARMY
• CHAPTER IX - PLAN OF ATTACK
• CHAPTER X - SEPTEMBER 19
• CHAPTER XI - THE GREAT BLOW
• CHAPTER XII - VICTORY IN THE AIR
• CHAPTER XIII - CAVALRY ON ARMAGEDDON
• CHAPTER XIV - STERN HILL FIGHTING
• CHAPTER XV - INFANTRY SECURE THE RAILWAY JUNCTION
• CHAPTER XVI - WRECKING AN ARMY
• CHAPTER XVII - THE CAVALRY’S NET
• CHAPTER XVIII - AMMAN AT LAST
• CHAPTER XIX - ADVANCE ON DAMASCUS
• CHAPTER XXI - STREET FIGHTING IN THE CITY
• CHAPTER XXIII - INFANTRY AT BEYROUT
• CHAPTER XXIV - THE FINAL STAGE
• CHAPTER XXV - ALEPPO
• CHAPTER XXVI - FROM TEKRIT TO TRIPOLI
• CHAPTER XXVII - THE AIRMEN’S PART
• CHAPTER XXVIII - MIRACLES OF SUPPLY
• CHAPTER XXIX - HOW SIGNALS WORKED
• APPENDIX A
• APPENDIX B
• APPENDIX C
• APPENDIX D
• APPENDIX E