Table Of ContentThe Battle for Syria
1918–1920
The Battle for Syria
1918–1920
.
john d grainger
the boydell press
© John D. Grainger 2013
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First published 2013
The Boydell Press, Woodbridge
ISBN 978 1 84383 803 6
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Contents
List of illustrations vi
List of maps vi
Preface vii
Introduction 1
1 Defeats 13
2 The Turks 25
3 The New Army 35
4 The Arabs 54
5 The French 65
6 The Plan 73
7 Preparations 85
8 Preliminaries 98
9 The Infantry Battle 111
10 The Cavalry Battle 130
11 The East, Haifa, Samakh 147
12 Damascus and Beirut 162
13 Aleppo and Haritan 178
14 The Occupied Territories 188
15 Problems with the Army 198
16 Rebellion in Egypt 207
17 France and Syria 222
Conclusion 235
Maps 237
Bibliography 243
Index 249
Illustrations
Between pages 146 and 147
1 Allenby
2 The Allenby Bridge
3 Prickly Pear
4 The Kia Ora Coo-ee
5 Dummy Horses in the Jordan Valley
6 Megiddo
7 Acre
8 The Jordan Valley
9 Sea of Galilee
10 Golan
11 The Yarmuk Valley
12 Lawrence arrives in Damascus
13 Aleppo: the Citadel
14 Allenby, Faisal and Lloyd George in London
15 Edessa/Urfa: The Citadel
16 The Jebel Ansariyeh
Maps
1 The Battleground 237
2 The Eastern Front 238
3 The Infantry Battleground 239
4 The Cavalry Battleground 240
5 The March to Damascus 241
6 The Sykes-Picot Allocations 242
Preface
he Middle East has been a disturbed region, to put it no stronger, through-
T
out the twentieth century, and it looks as though that reputation will con-
tinue on into the twenty-first. In fact, its disturbance as a major international
concern only began during the Great War, when the Ottoman Empire fell into
war on the German side, and became subject to attacks by the Allies.
Every section or region of that former empire has been part of the ‘distur-
bances’, from Libya to the Caucasus, from Constantinople to the Yemen, from
Cairo to Baghdad, but the most violent, confused, and complex region has
been Syria. This is a geographical term which includes the modern states of
Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian West Bank, and Jordan, together with
parts of Egypt and Turkey. It is, and has been for fifteen centuries and more, a
land whose society is much divided, particularly among religious communities
– in their census in 1906/1907 the Ottoman authorities distinguished nineteen
separate religious groups, and this in a country half the size of Britain.
The proximate cause of the change from a group of fairly somnolent Otto-
man provinces to the most notorious hotbed of warfare and intrigue in the
modern world was its conquest by British forces in 1917 and 1918. In the course
of the fighting a series of promises were made by the British to other peoples
and countries which were all impossible to keep. In the stress of an appallingly
difficult war the British government was lavish in agreeing to reward others,
without bothering too much that these rewards and promises overlapped. In
1918 and 1919, of course, the contradictions emerged. Hence the constant trou-
bles ever since.
The capstone to this unstable edifice of nods, winks, agreements, and
promises was the victory in September 1918 of British forces – though they
were mainly non-British as it happens, Indians, Australian, New Zealanders,
and others. Had that battle not been the overwhelming victory it was, or had
it been never been fought, it is possible, if unlikely, that the British could have
found excuses not to honour some of their wartime promises. If the region of
modern Syria and Lebanon had not been conquered, France could have been
denied it, the Arabs could have been given only Jordan, maybe the Jews would
not have so exuberantly ‘returned’ to Palestine. The new international bounda-
ries which emerged after 1918, most notably the boundary between Turkey and
viii Preface
Syria, resulted from these campaign,. Where the armies stopped, there the
lines were drawn.
The battle in Palestine in September 1918, therefore, is a crucial event in
modern Middle Eastern history. The intention, in Britain at least originally,
was to conquer only Palestine – ‘from Dan to Beersheba’, in Lloyd George’s
phrase – to drive Turkish power from Egypt and the Suez Canal. As it hap-
pened, the victory in September was so overwhelming that General Allenby
decided to take Damascus, which his Arab allies in particular wanted, and
then Aleppo and Lebanon, which both the Arabs and the French wanted. So
the sheer unexpected scale of the exploitation of the victory was to lead to a
Franco-Arab war and to a Franco-Turkish conflict in 1919 and 1920, both of
which the British were quite content to observe without becoming involved in.
But it also led to an Arab-Jewish conflict in which the British were the victims
of both sides.
This battle was fought in the coastal plain of Palestine just north of Jaffa,
a region now covered with roads, houses, factories, and all the paraphernalia
of modern life, to such an extent that the land is totally different from what it
was in 1918. But this is also the narrow waist of the Israeli state, only a dozen
miles wide, which is now defined by the sea on one side and the concrete wall
separating Israel from the Palestinian West Bank on the other. This wall fol-
lows more or less the line established by the British imperial infantry forces
at the end of the fighting on 19 September 1918, an indication of the power of
geography to determine events.
The British gave the overall name of Megiddo, popularised as ‘Armageddon’,
to the battles that took place in that September. In fact Megiddo itself did not
feature in any way in the conflict, but it suited the British to adopt the apoca-
lyptic name for a decisive battle in the ‘War to end Wars’. For the Middle East
it was the reverse, of course, a war to begin wars, while for far too many of the
people it was a battle whose results changed their world radically.
This book follows from another on the conquest of southern Palestine in
1917, but in this case the scale of events is wider, its effects deeper and more
complex. An account of the battle itself is a necessary element in the overall
story, since it was the way the battle was planned, conducted, and exploited
which is a fundamental element in the historical development of the whole
region in the following decades. It was, if not ‘Armageddon’, at the least it was
a decisive ‘battle for Syria’.
1 Allenby. Allenby is shown in his field marshal’s uniform as High Commissioner in Egypt in 1922. By
this time it was unusual for him to be wearing a uniform.
