Broadly, Allenby’s plan was like a soccer player taking a penalty: his arm and body signal towards the Turkish right at Gaza, but his foot shoots left to the Turkish left at Beersheba and curves the ball into the back of the net. It was risky: the desert route to Beersheba was suitable for horses and camels, but not for vehicles, and there would be problems supplying the animals with water. It was vital that the Turks be led to believe that any movements in that direction were only routine reconnaissance or feints; they had to think the real British attack was going to come up the coast to Gaza.
T. E. Lawrence wrote that Guy Dawnay
found an ally in his intelligence staff who advised him to go beyond negative precautions, and to give the enemy specific (and speciously wrong) information of the plans he matured. This ally was Meinertzhagen, a student of migrating birds drifted into soldiering, whose hot immoral hatred of the enemy expressed itself as readily in trickery as in violence.
Major Richard Meinertzhagen (1878–1967) was the future author of Nicoll’s Birds of Egypt, Birds of Arabia and a study of avian robbery, Pirates and Predators. His commander-in-chief, Allenby, was also an ornithologist, and perhaps their knowledge of the aggressive world of birds led both men towards deception. Dick Meinertzhagen (the surname is German) recorded his life in seventy-six volumes of diaries full of horror and hilarity. According to him, when he first met Adolf Hitler in 1934, the Führer threw his right arm up and said ‘Heil Hitler!’ Slightly puzzled, Meinertzhagen put his arm up and said ‘Heil Meinertzhagen!’ It is a great story, except that he never met Hitler.
You get the flavour of Meinertzhagen as a schoolboy from the dialogue he says he had with Lord Salisbury during inspection on a Volunteer Corps field day at Hatfield Park in the summer of 1892:
‘One of my rabbits?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And how did you kill it?’
‘With a stone.’
‘Well done. Are you going to eat it?’
‘No. It’s for our eagles at Harrow.’
According to his Diary of a Black Sheep, when Meinertzhagen was at his second prep school near East Grinstead he was sexually abused and sadistically flogged by a schoolmaster called Walter Radcliffe. Young Dick claimed to have felt so abandoned that evil crept into his soul. From prep-school age he determined to be the predator, never again the weaker prey. All his life rage lurked behind Meinertzhagen’s armour of opinionated intransigence. It could be expressed in violent words or deeds, or suddenly masked in urbane humour and charm.
Meinertzhagen had joined the Army in India and spent 1902–6 seconded to the King’s African Rifles, often up-country in Kenya where he enjoyed slaughtering both animals and humans. It was while leading a punitive expedition against the Kikuyu and the Embu people in 1904 that he managed to discover the new species of eastern giant hog which now bears his name, Hylochoerus meinertzhageni. Meinertzhagen finally left Kenya after facing three courts martial because of the machine-gunning of twenty-three Nandi-speaking tribesmen on 19 October 1905. They had been resisting the building of the British Mombasa–Uganda railway (dubbed the ‘Lunatic Express’) through their land, and their chief was due to meet Meinertzhagen to sue for peace. When they moved to shake hands, Meinertzhagen pulled out his pistol and shot Koitalel arap Samoei dead. He claimed it was self-defence against a wicked old man who was about to murder him and use his body parts for a magic broth.
He was a life-long obsessive field naturalist who used deception when hunting. In Kenya, he constructed a dummy ostrich by stretching the skin of a female ostrich over a bamboo frame. Holding the separate head and neck in his right hand and his rifle in his left, he could get as close as twenty-five yards to most game if he approached upwind. Meinertzhagen thought ‘the hunting of men – war – is but a form of hunting wild animals’.
According to T. E. Lawrence, Meinertzhagen
was logical, an idealist of the deepest, and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with an African knob-kerri.
Meinertzhagen was shocked by this portrait of himself and begged Lawrence to remove it from Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But his own diaries give an even worse impression. When he was at the Staff College in Quetta, Baluchistan, Meinertzhagen says that when he found his syce or stable groom mistreating his ponies, he beat the man to death with a polo mallet. He claims to have hushed the matter up with the police and got the dead man registered as a plague victim. In the East African campaign against the Germans in Tanganyika, Meinertzhagen laid dead birds and animals around a clean water-hole and signposted it POISONED so as to deny it to the enemy but keep it safe for his own use. As the British Intelligence officer, he once sent a suspected German spy 1,500 rupees and a thank-you note and made sure the Germans intercepted it, so they would shoot their own man and save Meinertzhagen the trouble. Running an effective network of agents in East Africa, Meinertzhagen discovered that the German officers’ latrines were a good source of soiled documents and letters, yielding ‘filthy, though accurate information’. This was the vigorously amoral soldier who played a part in British deception in Palestine.
Meinertzhagen spent some time secretly preparing the famous ‘haversack ruse’ of 10 October 1917 which Allenby credited with a major role in the successful attack on Gaza, and always claimed to have carried it off, in person and alone. In essence, Meinertzhagen said he rode out into the country north-west of Beersheba, deliberately tangled with a Turkish patrol and got himself shot at. He slumped in the saddle, dropping his water bottle, field glasses, rifle and, most important of all, a khaki haversack stained with his horse’s fresh blood, containing personal letters, papers and £20 in notes. Then he rode away, mimicking the tactics of the lapwing, pretending to be wounded to draw predators away from its nest. But he lingered long enough to see the rifle and haversack were picked up.
The abandoned papers in the haversack looked absolutely genuine but were all forgeries. A British staff officer’s notebook, Army Book 155, was filled with ‘all sorts of nonsense about our plans and difficulties’. The supposed agenda for a staff conference would have told the Turks and Germans the main attack was coming at Gaza, preceded by a mere feint at Beersheba, the opposite of the truth. There was also an ardent letter from a wife announcing the birth of a son called Richard (written, Meinertzhagen first claimed, by his sister who had never had a child and was miles and weeks away in England, though he later said it was composed by a nurse at El Arish). There were also notes on a cipher which would enable the enemy ‘to decipher any camouflage messages we might send later on’.
Meinertzhagen claims he backed up his stratagem by sending out anxious wireless messages about the haversack and furious divisional orders regarding proper security of papers; Turkish and German intelligence officers monitoring radio traffic took the bait to the commander of the Eighth Turkish Army, General Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, who swallowed it. Two British soldiers, not in the know but captured while genuinely searching for the haversack, confirmed its credibility, as did the finding of a copy of Desert Corps Orders (apparently carelessly thrown away in the wrappings of an officer’s lunch) requiring the lost notebook to be returned to GHQ.
‘The haversack ruse’ is a terrific story. Something like it did, indeed, happen. But in his 2007 biography, The Meinertzhagen Mystery, Brian Garfield says that the idea for it came from another man, Lieutenant Colonel J. D. Belgrave, and that the actual perpetrator was a man called Arthur Neate, on 12 September, and not Meinertzhagen at all. If Garfield is right, Meinertzhagen swooped in to steal the credit for other men’s initiative and courage.
Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Wavell was a direct participant in these Palestine events as the liaison officer between the Chief of the Imperial General Staff i
n London and the commander-in-chief in the field, Edmund Allenby. Later, when Wavell himself had become commander-in-chief, Middle East, he would write an admiring biography of Allenby, subtitled A Study in Greatness. Allenby’s use of intelligence, deception and guerrilla forces in what Churchill called the ‘brilliant and frugal’ operations in Palestine profoundly influenced Wavell in the next World War.
Allenby’s great push for Palestine began at the end of October 1917. The RFC and the RNAS had air superiority when the Royal Navy began shelling Gaza from the sea. The British in Cairo could listen in to all German aerial and airfield communications from Syria to Sinai, which meant they could send up planes to intercept any German efforts at aerial reconnaissance. Because of this, the enemy never spotted 40,000 British troops slipping eastwards on the night of 30 October. The British infantry seized the garrisoned town of Beersheba by surprise and, following a spectacular charge by the Australian Light Horse, the cavalry and camelry of the Desert Mounted Corps took the vital water wells before they could be demolished.
Then Allenby attacked Gaza on the night of 1 November. This distraction drew all the Turkish reserves westward. Deluded by false intelligence, including the haversack ruse, the Turks assumed this was the main assault of the Third Battle of Gaza. But on 6 November British mounted divisions attacked the Turkish lines from the east, from Beersheba. The Turks panicked: Gaza was abandoned the next day and Turkish troops began retreating north along the coastal plain.
Meinertzhagen later claimed that many of these soldiers were drowsy and fuddled, because of another of his tricks: thousands of cigarettes, ‘heavily doped with opium’, had been dropped on their lines. Meinertzhagen says he later tried one himself: ‘They were indeed strong. The effect was sublime, complete abandonment, all energy gone, lovely dreams and complete inability to act or think.’ There is absolutely no confirmation of this story from anyone but Meinertzhagen.
According to Meinertzhagen, his haversack ruse had completely wrong-footed the enemy, and the German General Kress von Kressenstein was subsequently relieved of his command. We are told that Allenby later wrote on Meinertzhagen’s confidential report: ‘This officer has been largely responsible for my successes in Palestine.’ But Dick Meinertzhagen made sure the official historian knew all about his exploits, and the source of Allenby’s assessment is Meinertzhagen’s own edited diaries. No man was a greater burnisher of his own reputation.
In Palestine, Allenby’s forces pushed on fifty miles in ten days, took the Mediterranean port of Jaffa where the Royal Navy could land supplies, then turned east into the Judean hills toward the great prize of Jerusalem. On 8 December 1917, the Turkish forces abandoned the Holy City. The mayor of Jerusalem came out in a frock coat and fez, carrying a white flag and the keys to the city, which he offered, in a moment of bathos, first to some army cooks from London, then a sergeant, then some gunnery officers, then a brigadier, until, at last, a general could be found.
So Allenby gave Lloyd George and the British people the gift they had asked him for in time for Christmas 1917. This Allied victory was both symbolic and historic: for the first time since 1244, the Christians wrested the Holy City back from the Muslims. But their plan to share it with the Jews sent shock waves through the region that still make the world tremble to this day. Lloyd George had seen that the support of international, and especially US, Jewry for the Allies was invaluable and that the Zionist movement could be used (in John Marlowe’s phrase) ‘as a wooden horse of Troy to introduce British control into Palestine’. He had discussed it all with his Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour.
Arthur Balfour’s bland letter of 2 November 1917 to the Zionist federation, by way of Lord Rothschild, contained a single sentence, the famous ‘Balfour Declaration’, which has caused much grief. Its slippery surface is why Palestine has been dubbed ‘The Twice-promised Land’:
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine …
At midday on 11 December 1917, six weeks to the day after his attack on Beersheba, General Allenby made his official and symbolic entry to Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate, on foot. (By contrast, in 1898, the German Kaiser had arrogantly ridden in on horseback. The Catholic spin-doctor Mark Sykes hoped that the faithful of the local three great religions would appreciate this British gesture of humility towards their Holy City.) Allenby censored all references to the recent Balfour Declaration as potentially inflammatory to Arab feelings. The Press Bureau of the Department of Information (which of course was run by John Buchan) issued a D-Notice to the media on 15 November:
The attention of the Press is again drawn to the undesirability of publishing any article, paragraph or picture suggesting that the military operations against Turkey are in any sense a Holy War, a modern Crusade, or have anything whatever to do with religious questions. The British Empire is said to contain a hundred million Mohammedan subjects of the King and it is obviously mischievous to suggest that our quarrel with Turkey is one between Christianity and Islam.
British propagandists had already spread the word that the name ‘Allenby’ was a version of the Arabic al-Nabi meaning ‘The Prophet’, and the Haram-esh-Sherif or Temple area of the city known in the Islamic world as Al-Quds was conspicuously put under the guard of Indian Muslim soldiers from the Egyptian Expeditionary Force.
Other soldiers, English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Australian, New Zealand, French and Italian, were drawn up at the Jaffa Gate. It was a cold but sunny morning. General Allenby appeared flanked by the French and Italian commanders and followed by twenty of his principal staff officers and the commander of XX Corps, Sir Philip Chetwode. Among them, walking next to Colonel A. P. Wavell, was Major T. E. Lawrence, joking about his borrowed British uniform. Three weeks before, he had endured what Ronald Storrs called ‘hideous man-handling’ (homosexual rape and flogging) by Turkish soldiery after being captured near Deraa. At the Citadel, the proclamation of martial law was read out in seven languages to ‘the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Blessed and the people dwelling in its vicinity’. The declaration said that ‘every sacred building, monument, holy spot, shrine, traditional site, endowment, pious bequest, or customary place of prayer of whatsoever form of the three religions will be maintained and protected’. Then Allenby met the city’s notables and religious leaders, before the military reformed their procession and went back out through the gate to where they had left their horses. This simple but impressive ceremony at the Jaffa Gate was for Lawrence ‘the supreme moment of the war’.
But politics continued as ever. That afternoon, Lloyd George announced the news of the capture of Jerusalem to a cheering House of Commons; the War Cabinet was soon urging the occupation of all Palestine. The appalling battle for the ridge at Passchendaele had ended the month before with a gain of five miles of bloodsoaked mud at the cost of more than 250,000 Anzac, British and Canadian casualties. Allenby’s defeats of Turkey in the Middle East, ‘knocking out the props’ as it was called, were seen as an escape from the horrendous stalemate on the Western Front. The ‘Easterner’ faction got a great boost.
Early in 1918, T. E. Lawrence was given a new role – helping the Arab Northern Army, led by Feisal, but under Allenby’s command – to harry the left of the Turkish Fourth Army as they retreated northwards. Lawrence was under increasing nervous strain after his brief capture by the Turks at Deraa, when ‘the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost’, as he put it. Now he accused himself of ‘accessory deceitfulness’ and ‘rankling fraudulence’ towards the Arabs in his ‘pretence to lead the national uprising of another race, the daily posturing in alien dress, preaching in alien speech’. He wanted to be free of it. In fact he wanted to be tinkering with Rolls-Royce armoured cars among men of his ow
n sort. But Allenby needed him to help take Damascus and if possible Aleppo.
There was no escape for me. I must take up again my mantle of fraud in the East … It might be fraud or it might be farce: no one should say that I could not play it.
Allenby gave Lawrence more money, 2,000 camels, armoured cars and aircraft to push forward attacks by Feisal’s army against the Amman–Deraa–Damascus sector of the Turkish line, in order to make them reinforce east of the river Jordan. The final phase of the Palestine campaign in September 1918 called for more British trickery. This time they feinted right, up the Jordan valley from Jericho, but really broke through on the left, straight up the coastal plain from Jaffa. Lawrence records, in chapter XCVIII of Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
After the Meinertzhagen success, deceptions, which for the ordinary general were just witty hors d’oeuvres before battle, became for Allenby a main point of strategy. Bartholomew would accordingly erect (near Jericho) all condemned tents in Egypt; would transfer veterinary hospitals and sick-lines there; would put dummy camps, dummy horses and dummy troops wherever there was plausible room; would throw more bridges across the river; would collect and open against enemy country all captured guns; and on the right days would ensure the movement of non-combatant bodies along the dusty roads, to give the impression of eleventh hour concentrations for an assault.
The deception was wholly successful: three whole divisions moved west to the coast by night, hiding in orange groves by day, without being seen. Soldiers doubled up in the tents, daylight movement was prohibited, and horses could only be watered at fixed hours when the RAF was up in full force to deter enemy spotter planes. Dummy cavalry horses were left behind in the Jordan valley, made of wood and canvas, stuffed with straw. Mules pulled wattle hurdles to raise dust at the time these ‘horses’ were meant to be trotting to water. An Indian havildar or sergeant deserted and told the Turks the true facts, that a great attack was coming up the coast, but the new German commander Liman von Sanders dismissed him as a plant – another haversack ruse – because any evidence to confirm what he said had been skilfully hidden.
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