The Battle for Palestine, 1917 (review)

In recent years, all aspects of the First World War on the Western Front have come in for a raft of critical (re-)evaluation: some of it vitriolic and personal; most of it considered, interesting, and scholarly. This new approach is now spreading to theatres of combat outside the Western Front, as is shown by, inter alia, Hew Strachan's The First World War, vol. 1, To Arms (2001), Ross Anderson's The Forgotten Front: The East African Campaign (2004) and Edward Paice's Tip and Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa (2007), providing us with fresh, noneurocentric (or, more precisely, non–Western Front) perspectives on the Great War that broaden and contextualize our understanding of the war. John Grainger's volume is one of several recent books and articles that have critically examined the Palestine campaign, warts and all, but does show one of the limitations of this approach: these studies, while examining non-European campaigns, tend to do so through the prism of European armies rather than the local peoples or countries involved, not least as it is usually hard to find primary material for a 'subaltern studies' approach. In the case of Palestine in 1917, this is hampered further by the difficulty in gaining access to Ottoman and Arab archival/primary material—and if access is granted having the language skills to read the documents—which make for rather one-sided texts.

With this caveat, a book such as Grainger's is to be welcomed as General Edmund Allenby's cavalcade through the Holy Land in 1917 and 1918 at the head of the British-led Egyptian Expeditionary Force offered such a pleasing contrast to the attritional grind in France that, after the war, there emerged a sanitized literature on the campaign, dominated by battle narratives, memoirs, or partisan "national" histories. This has lingered to the present, not helped by T. E. Lawrence's desert operations with the "Arab Revolt," which has prompted another distracting strand of analysis. Grainger has chosen to examine a slice of the campaign from the assault on Gaza town in early 1917 to the historic capture of Jerusalem in December 1917, but the text covers events before and after 1917, thus providing something of a complete campaign history. While he does not present any radical new thesis, Grainger's analysis is informed, critical, readable, and supported by a wealth of unpublished and printed primary material. His use of Australian and New Zealand archives is especially useful.

Key themes emerge, most of which will be familiar to any student of war. Firstly, there is the impact that a new commander can make. In Palestine, the arrival of Allenby to replace the lackadaisical General Archibald Murray in June 1917 had a huge effect, boosting the morale of the ordinary soldier. Secondly, this study proves the truism of the statement that amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics. The British-led campaign was built on solid supply lines, with railways and water pipelines the vital elements for success in battle. Thirdly, there was the need for careful preparation before the battle, built on a willingness by London to supply Allenby with the men and guns required to break the Turks' lines; once battle was joined terrain, water and supply lines determined the pace of the advance as much as enemy resistance. Finally, Grainger tempers the idea that cavalry played a determining role in defeating the Turks, showing instead the limitation of an arm of war heavily dependent on water supplies and easily checked by determined defenses. In this respect, his discussion of the cavalry charge that took Beersheba at the third battle of Gaza is especially interesting. The book concludes with the capture of Jerusalem on 9 December 1917, the Christmas present for the nation that David Lloyd George had demanded of Allenby before he left for the Middle East. Portrayed as a modern-day crusader—appearing...