By the time everyone had been assembled the Warwicks had about 86 men available and the Worcesters about the same, giving the approximate equivalent of ten troops. However, when the Hotchkiss light machine gun sections, the shoeing smiths and the led-horse holders had been fallen out, this left about 120 men for the attack itself, far too few for what was required of them. Nevertheless, Gray-Cheape, fully aware of the punishment the 60th Division was taking, could only comply with Shea’s orders and, sending back a message to inform his own brigade commander what was happening, and a request that the Gloucesters, the machine gun squadron and the artillery be hurried forward, he and Wiggin prepared their plan of attack.
At that moment, approximately 13:20, the two regiments were positioned below the south-western end of a shallow, banana-shaped ridge. It was decided that they would use this feature as cover for an approach around its south-eastern end, which would then place them about 900 yards from the left flank of the enemy batteries and in position to mount a charge.
The Worcesters, being on the right, moved off first with Major M. C. Albright’s A Squadron leading, followed by two troops of C Squadron; the Warwicks were led by Captain R. Valintine’s B Squadron with two troops of the regiment’s C Squadron bringing up the rear. The advance was made at a trot, raising an unavoidable dust cloud that alerted the enemy. Suddenly, rounding the end of the ridge, Albright’s squadron came under fire from a hitherto unsuspected four-gun mounted battery and about 200 infantrymen situated on a low rise about 600 yards to the north-west. Realising at once that these troops would be able to enfilade the attack against the main enemy position, Albright did not wait for orders and, pausing only to form into a half-squadron column, immediately launched a charge. Taking place over good, open going, this quickly reached a full gallop. Unnerved, the Turkish infantry and gunners began firing wildly and then broke, running down the reverse slope of the rise. Albright’s troopers were soon among them, putting many to the sword.5 They then closed in on a 5.9-inch howitzer battery that was withdrawing to the north but at this point Wiggin arrived and ordered a halt to the pursuit, informing Albright that the principal attack against the original objective was proving to be a bloody business and that he should rally and reinforce this immediately.
As soon as Albright had launched his charge Gray-Cheape had instructed Valintine’s B Squadron and the two remaining Worcester troops, the latter commanded by Second Lieutenant J. W. Edwards, to swing left, form half-squadron column and attack over the north-eastern crest of the covering ridge. This would take them down a gradual forward slope into a shallow valley and then up the other side into the gun position, with the last 150 yards becoming steadily steeper. As soon as the first ranks appeared over the crest the enemy gunners, who were Austrians, swung round the trails of their 75mm field guns and commenced a rapid fire, progressively dropping the range until their barrels were at maximum depression and their shell fuzes set at instantaneous. Likewise the four machine guns in the immediate vicinity, which were probably under German command, and the two companies of Turkish infantry that formed the escort for the guns, all engaged the approaching lines of galloping horsemen. Among the Warwicks, only one officer, Lieutenant W. B. Mercer, remained unhit, and his account of the charge is quoted from the Official History of the campaign:6
‘Machine guns and rifles opened on us the moment we topped the rise behind which we had formed up. I remember thinking that the sound of the crackling bullets was just like a hailstorm on an iron-roofed building … A whole heap of men and horses went down twenty or thirty yards from the guns. The squadron broke into a few scattered horsemen at the guns and then seemed to melt away completely. For a time, I at any rate, had the impression that I was the only man left alive. I was amazed to discover we were the victors.’
The Austrians had courageously fought to the muzzle, but the subsequent mêlée among the guns was brief. Those who remained upright or ran were ridden down or spitted, only those who fell flat remaining beyond reach of the thrusting swords. In return, some of the yeomen fell victim to the enemy’s cruel saw-edged bayonets. At the end of it, perhaps a score of them remained mounted but, without hesitation, they spurred for the machine guns. How this might have ended there is no telling, but just then Albright’s squadron came bearing down on the enemy left and overran them. Having already witnessed the determined charge against their artillery, this was too much for the Turkish infantry, who broke and fled. Some were cut down by vengeful yeomen, although the latter, being now too few in number, were unable to mount an organised pursuit. At this moment, however, the half-section of the machine gun squadron, which had followed Valintine’s charge, arrived and turned its two guns, as well as the four just captured, on the fugitives, scything through the running figures. The Turkish rout was completed by Gray-Cheape, who had used the Warwicks’ two reserve troops to secure the now-abandoned mountain guns and ride down the retreating battery of 5.9-inch howitzers.
As a direct result of the Warwicks’ and Worcesters’ charge, eleven guns, four machine guns and 70 prisoners had been taken, an unknown but substantial number of the enemy killed or wounded, and Shea’s division was able to advance beyond Huj that evening.7 The remarkable thing about the action was that, save in its concluding stages, the primary weapon used by the British had been the sword. The price, however, had been terribly high. The Warwicks had lost thirteen men killed and 23 wounded, the Worcesters nineteen killed and 35 wounded; among the officers, Albright, Valintine and Edwards were either killed or died of their wounds, and Wiggin was wounded. Well over 100 horses had been killed or had to be put down and many others were wounded, mainly by machine gun fire. Immediately after the action the area surrounding the Austrian battery presented a horrific scene of concentrated carnage. Dead troopers, Austrians, Turks and horses lay sprawled thickly together around the guns while the wounded crawled their painful way towards help. As luck would have it, an enemy field ambulance unit had been captured in a hollow behind the battery and it was thanks to the medical supplies obtained from this that many men owed their lives. There was little, however, that could be done for most of the terribly wounded horses; for many cavalrymen this was by far the most harrowing part of their ordeal, terminated only when the merciful crack of a rifle ended an animal’s agony.
Astonishing as it was that the enemy’s rearguard on this sector of the front had been successfully broken by so few men, Chauvel may well have doubted that Shea’s problem was so urgent that its solution could not have awaited the arrival of the Gloucesters, the artillery and the rest of the machine gun squadron, which could have provided fire support and so reduced the number of casualties. Whatever subsequently passed between the generals, after Huj no further unsupported charges were made by the Desert Mounted Corps save in pursuit of already beaten troops. Yet the consequences of the charges at Beersheba and Huj, and a further charge with the sword made by the 6th Mounted Brigade (Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars, Berkshire Yeomanry and Dorset Yeomanry) at El Mughar on 13 November, were far-reaching.8 The Turks now regarded the British and Commonwealth cavalry with awe, were convinced that they had scant regard for their own lives, and were unwilling to stand against them except in prepared positions. Analysis of these actions also confirmed that in mounted attacks the sword retained its value and the following year the Australian Mounted Division, at its own request, was trained and equipped with this weapon.
The pace of Allenby’s advance following his victory at Gaza/Beersheba was partly dictated by logistic considerations and partly by the physical limitations of his mounted troops, who were sometimes forced to go without water for a day and more at a time. It was true that the rapid abandonment of Gaza had foiled his attempt to entrap Kressenstein’s army, but after nine months’ stalemate he had broken the enemy line beyond retrieval and was to advance 75 miles before the heaviest winter rains in living memory put an end to movement of every kind.
During the early hours of Sunday 9 December the last Turkish garrison of
Jerusalem left the city. Shortly after dawn the Governor, Izzet Bey, sent out a note formally confirming his surrender and by noon the first British patrols were moving through the narrow streets. Among the Arab customers of the coffee shops there was jubilation that, save in one particular, the curious old prophesy had at last been fulfilled, for was not the British commander named Allah-en-Nebi, which could only be translated as the Prophet of God? The only unanswered question was how the latest of Jerusalem’s conquerors would enter the city. Allenby, of course, was fully aware of the prophesy and may have decided to fulfill the last of its predictions; on the other hand, he may have acted from a sense of personal inclination. On Tuesday 11 December, he entered Jerusalem by the Jaffa Gate, humbly, on foot, and accompanied only by his staff. Watched in something like awe by the large crowd he walked to the base of the Tower of David. There his proclamation was read out, expressing the wish that the inhabitants should return to their daily business and guaranteeing protection for the ancient sites sacred to Christian, Jew and Moslem. Then, he left as quietly as he had come.
There is good reason to believe that Allenby could have finished off the Turkish army in Palestine during the spring of 1918. During that very period, however, he was compelled to send some of his best troops to France to assist in stemming a series of powerful German offensives that almost succeeded in breaking through the Western Front. Once the crisis had passed, two Indian cavalry divisions were sent from France to Palestine, less the statutory British regular regiments one of which formed part of each brigade, these being replaced by yeomanry regiments on arrival. This brought Chauvel’s corps up to its maximum strength and enabled Allenby to plan an autumn offensive with which he intended to utterly destroy his opponents.
The battle, which was to take its name from the historic battlefield of Megiddo, some miles to the north, began on 19 September when, following a concentrated bombardment, the infantry of XXI Corps secured a breakthrough on the coast near Arsuf. Through the gap poured the entire Desert Mounted Corps, swinging right-handed across the rear of two Turkish armies, reducing them to the lot of fugitives within days. It was Allenby’s greatest triumph, and the last strategic victory to be won by mounted cavalry.
Notes
1. In 1918 this was removed by Colonel T. E. Lawrence. It now resides within the Imperial War Museum.
2. The Trans-Sinai railway remained in use until the Six Day War of 1967, after which the Israeli Army removed most of the rails for incorporation in the bunkers of the Bar Lev outpost line on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal.
3. These characteristics were equally evident during the Second World War. Rommel, doubtless with the siege of Tobruk in mind, described the Australian infantry as the toughest he had ever met. Again, it took the personal pleas of Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet for the New Zealand government to change its mind about withdrawing the 2nd New Zealand Division from the Mediterranean theatre of war after the Second Battle of Alamein.
4. Only Allenby and a few senior members of his intelligence staff were privy to the ruse. Chauvel, on whose sector the incident took place, gave Meinertzhagen a verbal flaying on his return, then reported him to Allenby for his criminal incompetence!
5. The weapon itself was the straight 1908 Pattern sword with a narrow blade 35 inches long. Highly regarded, it was designed specifically for thrusting but had only a limited cutting ability.
6. Falls, Captain Cyril, Military Operations, Egypt & Palestine, Vol II, HMSO 1930.
7. Kressenstein’s forward headquarters had been located in Huj. During their hurried departure his staff left behind their radio code book, thereby providing Allenby’s intercept operators with some interesting listening.
8. Some squadrons, on reaching their objective, dismounted and cleared it with the rifle and bayonet.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Leading the Way –
US Rangers at the Pointe Du Hoe and
Omaha Beach, D-Day, 6 June 1944
In the mist-laden, grey first light of 6 June 1944 two former cross-channel ferry steamers, the Ben My Chree and the Amsterdam, hove-to some twelve miles short of the French coast in the midst of the largest invasion fleet ever assembled. Both vessels had been converted to the role of infantry landing ship and in place of the lifeboats that had once hung from their davits there were now rows of assault landing craft. Hard-looking American infantry, wearing only their basic battle-order, scrambled aboard them and then they were lowered in succession into the heaving water below to circle until at a given signal they formed into loose lines and headed for the unseen shore. There was an extremely heavy, breaking swell that began to affect those prone to sea-sickness and soon everyone aboard was drenched by the clouds of flying spray that burst over the blunt bows of the LCAs. One was swamped and although its occupants were quickly picked up, smaller craft everywhere could be seen to be labouring or in difficulty. Large formations of aircraft had been passing overhead regularly, their noise smothered by the thunder of the invasion fleet’s massive preparatory bombardment. Aboard the LCAs were the US Army’s 2nd and 5th Ranger Battalions, commanded respectively by Lieutenant-Colonels James E. Rudder and Max F. Schneider, and the story of their mission was one of the most remarkable on a day of remarkable stories.
It had begun two years earlier, in Northern Ireland. There, Brigadier-General Lucian Truscott, having obtained the approval of the Army’s Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, had begun to form units intended to perform the same functions as the British commandos, recruiting men of above-average physical fitness and initiative drawn from the 1st Armored and 34th Infantry Divisions, which were on the spot. They were given an unbelievably tough basic training, involving the use of live ammunition, by the Commando Training Centre at Achnacarry, near Fort William in the Western Highlands of Scotland, then sent back to pass on their newly-acquired skills. It was decided that the new units would be known as Rangers after the famous irregular unit raised by Major Robert Rogers which had so distinguished itself during the eighteenth century French and Indian Wars in North America. It was also decided to follow the commando example and keep the basic unit organisation small. The ranger battalion consisted of six companies, each with three officers and 64 other ranks, and each company consisted of two platoons, each with two twelve-man assault sections and a mortar section.
Commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel William Orlando Darby, the 1st Ranger Battalion fought so well in Tunisia that by the end of the North African campaign the decision was taken to form four more battalions. The 1st Rangers therefore provided cadres for 3rd and 4th Rangers, which were raised in Algeria, and also sent personnel back to the United States to assist in training the 2nd and 5th Rangers.
Together, the 1st, 3rd and 4th Rangers made up the Ranger Force. Darby, now a full colonel, led it through the Sicilian campaign, then at Salerno and in other battles on the Italian mainland. During the bitter struggle for the Anzio beachhead, however, disaster struck when the 1st and 3rd Rangers were cut off and overrun near Cisterna, only eighteen men managing to escape. Simultaneously, the 4th Rangers sustained heavy casualties while trying to break through to their trapped comrades.
The tragedy had its roots in a basic misunderstanding of the Rangers’ role. The original intention had been that the Rangers should fight short, sharp decisive actions in the commando manner and then be withdrawn to train for their next mission; they were, in fact, neither structured nor equipped to fight in any other way. But whereas the British Commandos had a powerful advocate in Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations, to ensure that this policy was strictly implemented, the Rangers lacked anyone with comparable clout to speak for them. Therefore, local American commanders, delighted to have such high quality troops at their disposal, tended to keep them in the line in the manner of conventional infantry units, thereby wasting their specialist skills as mounting casualties began to take their toll. That the Rangers had done so well prior to Cisterna was a tribute to their fighting abilities
and esprit de corps.
These lessons seem to have been absorbed, for when the 2nd and 5th Battalions were committed to the D-Day landings it was in a specifically commando role. The inner flanks of the two American beachheads, Utah on the right and Omaha on the left, were some eight miles apart, physically separated by the wide sands of the Vire estuary, to the east of which was a rock shelf four miles long and up to a mile deep that formed a physical barrier to an assault landing, while east of this again were several miles of cliffs between 80 and 100 feet high, ending near Vierville-sur-Mer. Just to the east of the rock shelf was the Pointe du Hoe, on which the Germans had built a fortified coast defence battery. According to intelligence sources, this was armed with six powerful 150mm guns that were capable of enfilading both Utah and Omaha Beaches while the landings were in progress and would therefore have to be eliminated during the early stages of the operation. Neither bombing attacks from the air, nor bombardment with the 14-inch guns of the battleship USS Texas, could be relied upon to destroy the entire battery, and for that reason the position would have to be physically stormed by the 2nd Rangers before it could cause any damage. The actual assault would be made by the battalion’s D, E and F Companies while C Company tackled the fortifications on another headland to the east, the Raz de la Percée, between the Pointe du Hoe and Vierville-sur-Mer. A and B Companies, together with the entire 5th Battalion, were to be held in reserve and come ashore at the Pointe du Hoe if the assault succeeded; if it did not, they were to land near Vierville on Omaha Beach and operate under the command of 116th Infantry on the extreme right of Major-General Leonard T. Gerow’s US V Corps.
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