The Battle for Syria, 1918–1920 PDF
Preview The Battle for Syria, 1918–1920
The Battle for Syria 1918–1920 The Battle for Syria 1918–1920 . john d grainger the boydell press © John D. Grainger 2013 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. The right of John D. Grainger to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2013 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978 1 84383 803 6 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mount Hope Ave, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Papers used by Boydell & Brewer Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY 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.
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