From Gaza to Jerusalem

by Stuart Hadaway

  At least the British reactions to the rise of nationalism remained relatively light-handed. Just two nationalists were executed during the war. In April 1915, Mohammed Khalil attempted to assassinate Sultan Hussein Kemal, but his bullet missed and Khalil was arrested and executed the following month. In July 1915 a further attempt on the sultan saw a bomb being thrown at him in Alexandria, although it did not explode. Two men were arrested and sentenced to death by the British military authorities, but their sentence was commuted to hard labour for life on the sultan’s insistence. The other man to be executed was civil servant Saleh Abdel Latif, who stabbed and seriously wounded government minister Ibrahim Fathi Pasha in September 1915. In both cases, execution would almost certainly have been the sentence passed by the civil courts in peace time. Apart from these few extreme cases, by the end of 1917 just fifty-eight men had been deported or exiled from Egypt for their nationalist or anti-war activities, while somewhere over 500 more had been imprisoned or had their movements in other ways limited (including being banned from certain militarily important areas).170

  In higher political terms, the only major potential crisis of 1917 was when the sultan died. Hussein Kamel, who had been ill earlier in the year, died on 9 October 1917, and the prospect was briefly raised that his son, Prince Kamel-El-Dine Husein, a known nationalist, could succeed him. However, some ground work had already been laid by all sides, and the prince refused the offer on the basis of his own unwillingness to help the British in any way. Instead, the throne passed to the late sultan’s brother, Ahmed Fuad. Although also a nationalist, Fuad was far subtler in his approach to the issue, and was willing to work within the system to finally secure Egyptian independence.

  While the internal politics of the country churned on, and preparations were made to continue the campaign on Egypt’s eastern border, a military and political solution were also devised for the lingering Senussi threat in the west.

  The Senussi were an Islamic sect whose influence stretched across North Africa. Under the leadership of the Grand Senussi, Sayyid Ahmed al-Sharif, members of the sect had been resisting the Italian invaders in Libya since 1911. From 1914, they came under increasing pressure from the Ottomans and Germans to also attack the British in Egypt. Sayyid Ahmed al-Sharif was initially very reluctant, having nothing particularly against the British and being hesitant to open a new front in his war. However, the pressure increased, and with it the flow of supporting troops, arms and gold, until November 1915 when the actions of a German submarine forced the issue. After sinking a British patrol boat, HMS Tara, and delivering the crew into the hands of the Senussi, the submarine then attacked the Egyptian Coastguard station at Sollum, precipitating general fighting. Initially, the British and Egyptian forces fell back along the coast, consolidating their forces at Marsa Matruh. Preoccupied with the fighting at Gallipoli, few troops could be spared for this new campaign. Those that could be fought a series of inconclusive skirmishes and actions with the Senussi, at least some of which could be said to have been British defeats.

  Only in January 1916 did the British begin to gain the upper hand, and by the end of March they had retaken Sollum and rescued the crew of HMS Tara. With the coast secured, attention turned to the inland areas, where Senussi forces had occupied several of the large oases that dotted the otherwise barren Western Desert. These were slowly isolated and pushed back, often simply by using long-range patrols of armoured cars, light patrol cars* and Imperial Camel Corps (ICC) to intercept Senussi supply columns and cut their lines of communications. Skirmishes occurred, but the biggest danger was usually the desert itself. Geoffrey Inchbald, an officer with the ICC, would record:

  There was no water, no growth and no sign of life, nothing but gravel, rock and during the daytime a burning shimmering heat which distorted everything into fantastic shapes and images. Things were not made any easier by the fact that we were supposedly in enemy territory and had received orders to be always on the strictest guard and never to show ourselves on any skyline and I must admit that, as our trusty camels bore us further and further into this dreadful wilderness, we began to feel very small and lonely.171

  The land could vary from flat, open plain to tangles of dunes hundreds of feet high and miles long. Such dunes could be almost impossible to climb (even without the orders not to appear on the skyline) and great detours were needed to navigate through them. With the objectives and bases of the patrols usually being small oases or outposts, it was all too easy to miss them and become lost in the vast wilderness.

  However, the campaign worked and by early 1917 the only Senussi force still active was at the Siwa Oasis. This oasis was in fact a large depression, about 16km (10 miles) square and including the settlements of Siwa and Girba and the long valley in between. Under Sayyid Ahmed al-Sharif and his senior remaining commander, Muhammed Saleh Harb, its garrison consisted of about 1,200 men. On 21 January General Murray ordered preparation to be made to launch a coordinated attack on Siwa with cameliers and cars. It was estimated that it would take a month to gather the resources and make the plans needed to take such a force across 320km (200 miles) of desolate desert. But within days intelligence was received that Sayyid Ahmed al-Sharif was preparing to leave and return to Libya. If a move were to be made, it had to be done immediately, and so the cameliers were dropped and the task force was ordered to go with motor transport alone.172

  The force left Marsa Matruh on 1 February 1917. It consisted of the eleven Rolls-Royce armoured cars of the Light Armoured Car Brigade, Nos 4, 5 and 6 Light Car Patrols (each with six Ford cars), and over eighty support vehicles including ambulances, supplies and headquarters staff, under the command of General Henry Hodgson.173 At noon the next day, after covering over 290km (180 miles), the convoy arrived at the ‘Concentration Point’, about 21km (13 miles) north of the Shegga Pass, which led into the valley between Siwa and Girba. Here the force was to split. The bulk of the fighting vehicles – eight armoured cars and two of the Light Car Patrols – plus headquarters, signals and medical vehicles, led by Major L.V. Owston, were to descend the Shegga Pass. For this they were guided by Captain Leopold Royale, now of the Royal Flying Corps but formerly an officer with the Egyptian Coastguard. They were to strike the main Senussi camp, believed to be near Girba, while a smaller force swung around the edge of the depression and took up position to the west. This smaller force – three armoured cars, No. 6 Light Car Patrol and an ambulance, under Captain C.G. Mangles – was to take up position overlooking the Manassib Pass, which lay on the direct route between Girba and Jaghbub. This later place was on the Egyptian-Libyan border, and was a holy site for the Senussi. It was presumed that the Grand Senussi would fall back this way, and would then be cut off by the blocking force, allowing the main body to catch up and deal with them.

  The attack began at dawn on 3 February. As the main force descended onto the floor of the depression, six of the armoured cars spread out in pairs to scout the way forward. This initially lay over a salt-plain, where several of the cars broke through a thin crust into boggy ground below and had to dig themselves out. As they reached the far side of the plain they entered a tangled country of tall dunes and rocky outcrops, with narrow, windy tracks between them. Driver Sam Rolls recalled that:

  Driving down the camel track between those overhanging heights, ignorant of what lay behind the next bend, and in constant expectation of being met with a hail of lead, was nerve-racking work.174

  Although taken by surprise by the appearance of the British force so close, the Senussi reacted fast, taking to the high ground with machine guns and two mountain guns. These targeted the narrow tracks, pinning the advancing armoured cars down. With poor visibility confounded by the restricted view from the cars, the scouts could only inch forward, struggling to spot the sources of the incoming fire. They frequently stopped to allow the lighter Fords to catch up in order to dismount their machine guns and haul them to the tops of outcrops to provide covering fire. It was hot, confused and noisy wor
k:

  My gunner took a snatch at his gun-belt to make sure that his next cartridge was well home in the breech, and then swung his turret in the direction from which the sound had come. But at that moment a deafening rattle of rifle-fire came from the other side, and a hail of bullets crashed against the armour and the wooden rifle-boxes at the rear. My gunner struggled to bring the turret round again, but it was jammed through the car being at that moment in an inclined position, for she was running sideways on a slope. The gunner swore and muttered, but in a few moments we came on level ground, and there I halted the car. The turret swung round with a jerk and the gunner fell in a heap on top of me. Then I cursed too, and the suppressed excitement in that little steel cylinder was terrific. In another moment the gunner was on his feet and blazing away at the rocks with a reckless expenditure of ammunition … The unholy din inside the steel cylinder during the action, chiefly caused by the firing of our own gun, was such that weeks passed before I became free of the sense of a continual metallic clanging in my ears.175

  The fighting lasted all day with little progress made. Only at the following dawn, after a final flurry of fire, did the Senussi withdraw. Their actions had given the Grand Senussi, who had been at Siwa with around one-third of his men, time to withdraw. After taking a day to carefully sweep the area and rest, the British entered Siwa Oasis at dawn on 5 February.

  After so long in the desert, the experience of entering the area of the oases was profound. ‘We had come out of the wilderness into a veritable Garden of Eden,’ wrote Sam Rolls:

  Along a deep valley cut in the yellow rocks a mass of dark palm trees stretched for mile upon mile to the eastward. This paradise of colour and shadow was the Siwa Oasis … The road soon entered between avenues of trees, heavily laden with limes, figs, olives, pomegranates, oranges, lemons, and other fruits; and the rows of date palms extended for miles about us. We drove across quaint little wooden bridges which spanned the irrigation channels of cool clear water, and passed several lakes bordered by green fields and more orchards.176

  The town itself was an equally strange spectacle. Generations of families had built and lived on exactly the same spots, leading to multi-layered houses where the lower levels were derelict:

  The castle-like town was built of mud, and on its decayed walls tier above tier of little wood-and-mud houses were stuck like swallow’s nests. Some of the crumbling mounds looked like huge ant-heaps, swarming with brown human beings instead of ants.177

  At the town the soldiers were met by the local leaders and enthusiastic residents, and welcomed and feasted. The next day, 6 February, the column returned to the Concentration Point, and on 8 February arrived back in Marsa Matruh.178

  The second column had less success. The ground leading to the Manassib Pass proved too rough for two of the armoured cars, which had to be left behind. The final car and the Ford trucks managed to edge nearer and arrived over the pass at 7 p.m. on 3 February. The following dawn they successfully ambushed a Senussi caravan, but the survivors warned their comrades and all of the forces fleeing from Girba were directed towards a second pass to the south, out of the reach of the British forces.

  The action cost the Senussi an estimated forty men killed and 200 wounded, and the British three officers wounded. More than that, it finally destroyed any credibility that the Grand Senussi still had. Increasingly his supporters ebbed away to join his nephew, Sayyid Muhammed Idris. The son of the previous Grand Senussi, Idris had only been a child when his father died. His uncle, with popular support, had taken the title, but after Idris came of age a growing ground-swell of support wanted the title passed back to the original heir. Idris had been against the war with the British from the start, writing to General Maxwell soon after the campaign started offering to open negotiations. Such talks had started in July 1916, although due to an Anglo-Italian agreement any negotiations had to be joint ones. The issues with the British were fairly simple, but the questions over the fate of Libya were far more complex. Talks broke down in September, but restarted the following January. The British victory so soon afterwards merely confirmed the hopelessness of the Senussi position, and terms were quickly agreed. The Senussi would end hostilities with the British, return all prisoners, and confine their Egyptian presence to the holy site at Jaghbub. Still, Libya remained a sticking point, but with the Anglo-Italian alliance against them, Idris bowed to the inevitable and a tri-partite agreement was signed on 14 April 1917, bringing peace.179

  For the Grand Senussi, this was merely a formality. With his followers and power leaking away, he fled to the Libyan desert where he remained until August 1918, when he escaped to Constantinople in a submarine. For the British, it meant that their western border in Egypt was finally secured, and they could concentrate their attention on the east. Here, they could more gainfully employ their armoured cars and cameliers not only in the Sinai and southern Palestine, but also in Arabia.

  Notes

  * Light patrol cars were flat-bed light trucks with a machine gun fitted in the rear.

  160 Richmond p. 172

  161 Vatikiotis pp. 254–5

  162 Elgood p. 300

  163 Vatikiotis p. 255

  164 Elgood pp. 320–1

  165 Richmond p. 174; Vatikiotis p. 255

  166 Elgood p. 324

  167 See Woodward, pp. 52–63, for a very good summation of the uses and treatment of the CTC

  168 Murray’s Despatch of 28 June 1917, Appendix F

  169 Fahmy ‘Media Capitalism: Colloquial mass culture and nationalism in Egypt 1908–1918’

  170 TNA FO141/469

  171 Inchbald p. 73

  172 MacMunn & Falls Vol. 1 p. 142

  173 McGuirk p. 264

  174 Rolls p. 110

  175 Rolls p. 112 & p. 115

  176 Rolls pp. 116–17

  177 Rolls p. 118

  178 MacMunn & Falls Vol. 1 pp. 143–4; McGuirk pp. 264–71

  179 MacMunn & Falls Vol. 1 pp. 141–4

  7

  ARAB REVOLT

  A REBELLION HAD broken out in Arabia in June 1916, led by Sharif Husein bin Ali, the Emir of Mecca. In the opening months of the fighting the Arabs had captured Mecca as well as the critical ports of Jeddah, Rabegh and Yanbu on the Red Sea coast, allowing communications with the outside word, and in particular the British in the Sudan. The Sharif’s forces were large but poorly equipped, with few modern rifles and no artillery or machine guns. With the capture of the ports, weapons and advisors began to flow in, including by the end of the year a detachment from No. 14 Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps, artillery batteries from the Egyptian Army, thousands of rifles, dozens of machine guns, artillery pieces, and millions of rounds of ammunition for them all; millions of pounds of rice and flour; grenades, explosives and detonators; wagons, boots, saddles, mess tins, buttons and water-bottles; and prodigious piles of British gold. For the British the new front in Arabia was another opportunity to drain away Ottoman resources for relatively little cost. While equipment was fairly cheap for the British – especially as many of the weapons were old ones deemed too worn out for use by the army, or of Japanese types – they knew that any men or material that the Ottoman Empire committed to the campaign would be sorely missed elsewhere. British, and thus Christian, troops were a different matter, particularly so close the Muslim holy sites at Mecca and Medina, but as the campaign moved north that problem slowly faded.

  The Sharifian army waxed and waned in both numbers and successes over time. It was a complicated mix of tribes and families, many of whom had age-old grievances with each other, and who came and went from the alliance at will. Their traditional style of war-fighting was raiding. Committing themselves to the steady, constant effort that modern warfare demanded, with pitched battles, discipline and standing armies, was largely alien to them. They were also highly territorial, and often unwilling to fight outside their traditional tribal lands. Numbers steadily declined through the autumn, and by the end of the year the situation was g
rim. In October 1916 a British delegation was sent to make an assessment of the situation. This consisted of Ronald Storrs, a civil servant with the Egyptian Government, and Captain Thomas Lawrence of the Arab Bureau, a part of the British headquarters’ intelligence organisation. Lawrence, having travelled through the Middle East during his pre-war studies and work as an archaeologist, while also covertly mapping certain areas for the British Army, spoke Arabic and knew a certain amount about Arabic culture and politics.*

  Lawrence and Storrs toured the Arab forces, speaking to the Sharif himself and his sons Ali, Feisal and Abdullah, each in the field with their own armies. They returned to Cairo to advise that the revolt was doomed unless British aid and advice was stepped up. The Arabs could not defeat the Ottoman forces in the field as they were, and serious changes were needed. Lawrence was sent back to Yanbu to talk to Feisal, the Sharif’s middle son. Fresh from defeat in the field, he was preparing defences with the aid of Bimbashi Herbert Garland of the Egyptian Army. By chance, the Ottoman efforts in Arabia were also starting to flag, mainly due to supply shortages, and Feisal’s forces were given a respite long enough for Lawrence to persuade him to make one more effort. In early January 1917, Feisal’s forces struck up the coast to the port of Wejh, 320km (200 miles) north. At the same time a small Royal Navy flotilla took 500–600 Arabs north by sea, with the intention of making a coordinated attack on the port on 23 January. In the event, Feisal’s men were delayed by a day, but the naval commander decided to attack anyway. The Arabs and 200 armed sailors were landed under the command of Major Charles Vickery and Captain Norman Bray and successfully took the port.