Thursday, November 01, 2007

Beersheva commemoration

October 31 marks the 90th anniversary of one of the most glorious yet obscure events in modern military history, the last successful horse charge by the 4th Australian Light Horse Regiment, in the Battle for Beersheva in 1917. This was commemorated yesterday in Beersheva by a re-enactment of the charge by a group of Australians and New Zealanders, including many descendents of the original horsemen, and in a ceremony near the old Turkish railway station attended by the Ambassadors of Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Turkey and Israeli dignitaries.
Having been stymied by two unsuccessful direct attacks on the entrenched Turkish garrison in Gaza, Gen. Edmund Allenby, Chief of the British Expeditionary Forces in Egypt, accepted a plan devised by his staff to attack Beersheva and outflank the Turks. However, this was a very risky strategy because it required men to move rapidly across the hostile desert, take the Turkish garrison in Beersheva by surprise, and capture the water supplies intact. Without the water from the Beersheva wells, the men and their horses would die of thirst, and the whole plan would collapse.
In order to carry out this plan there were three indispensible elements: First, the men, the Australians and New Zealanders of the ANZAC regiment were no ordinary soldiers. Most of them were Australians who had volunteered to go to war, far away, and had done so with their own horses, largely at their own expense. But, the British Army tended to look down on them, and they saw little action at first. When their officers and 500 men were asked it they would take this terrible risk, to go across the unknown desert without sufficient water supplies and attack an entrenched garrison, they jumped at the chance to redeem themselves. It should be noted that the difference between cavalry and "lighthorsemen", is that the horsemen were infantry on horseback with light weapons that their horse take into battle and then they dismount to fight, while the cavalry fight from their horses.
Second, they would not have been able to make this attack without detailed maps of the desert. These were supplied to the British by a member of the "Nili" spy ring of Zichron Yaakov, Avshalom Feinberg. He was a colorful character, who had made friends with the Beduin, otherwise he would not have been able to make forays into the desert to obtain the information needed, and would not have been able to cross Turkish lines to pass the information to the British in Cairo. Unfortunately he disappeared on his return journey. It was rumored that he was the lover of the beautiful Sarah Aaronsohn, sister of the Nili ringleader Aaron Aaronsohn. She committed suicide soon after her arrest and torture by the Turks in 1917 (the restored house of the Nili spies can be visited in Zichron Yaakov). The maps given by Nili to the British enabled them to maintain the element of surprise, since the Turks had no idea that the British would try such a foolhardy scheme as to attempt to move enough men over the trackless desert to Beersheva to carry out such an attack.
Third, another element in the surprise was the deliberate dropping of a saddle bag carrying supposed plans of the next British attack on Gaza by Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, Allenby's Chief of Intelligence, and a very colorful character. This was found by the Turks and convinced them that they need not worry about Beersheva, which had a small garrison of ca. 2,000 Turkish soldiers with German advisors. Meinertzhagen was a proto-Zionist of German origin, who became the British representative of the Zionist delegation to the Peace Conference at Versailles after WWI, the opposite number to Col. T.E. Lawrence who represented the Arabs.
So the 500 lighthorsemen tracked across the desert undetected, but arrived too late for an early morning attack. Nevertheless, with the sun in their eyes they mounted the attack on the trenches of the Turks and catching them by surprise were able to capture the essential water sources, thus ensuring their survival (there is a 1988 movie entitled "The Lighhorsemen" that vividly recaptures this incident.)
This apparent sideshow in a huge war had enormous consequences, it caused the Turks to give up Gaza and lead to the capture by Allenby of Jerusalem. A few days after the capture of Beersheva, on Nov. 2, 1917, the British Government issued the Balfour Declaration, that envisaged the establishment of a "national home" for the Jews in Palestine. This is precisely what the Nili and other early Zionists had been fighting for, and they knew that it could only be achieved if the British defeated the Turks and captured the Holy Land. Subsequently this lead to the establishment of the State of Israel. We owe a lot to those ANZACs men who died in this Battle and who are buried in the Commonwealth cemetary in Beersheva.

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