Welcome to The Deep Dive. It is really great
to have you with us today. For this deep dive,
we are digging into a massive, I mean, meticulously
detailed source. We really are. We're looking
at a very comprehensive Wikipedia article covering
the Sinai and Palestine campaign of World War
I. Right. And our mission today is to take this
complex, multi -year military campaign. One that
was often, you know, totally dismissed back in
London as just a mere sideshow to the Western
Front. Exactly, a sideshow. We wanted to distill
that down for you today. transform this incredibly
dense military history into a story of incredible
logistical feats, brutal desert warfare, and
ultimately the literal redrawing of the modern
Middle East. It really is an astonishing piece
of history. I mean, we all know the broader strokes
of the First World War, muddy trenches, right?
Yeah, the mud of France and Belgium. Right. But
the context here shifts the paradigm entirely.
We are moving away from the European theater
and looking at a campaign fought across vast,
unforgiving deserts by a wildly diverse cast.
You're talking about the British Empire forces.
Exactly. And that meant British, Australian,
New Zealand, and Indian troops fighting alongside
French and Italian contingents and the absolutely
crucial fighters of the Arab revolt. All of them
pushing against the central powers. Yes, entirely
focused on dismantling the combined forces of
the Ottoman, German, and Austro -Hungarian empires
in some of the harshest terrain on earth. OK,
let's unpack this, because the strategic threat
to the Suez Canal in 1915 essentially forced
a total rethinking of British defense in the
region. It did. The Central Powers knew the canal
was the main artery of the empire. It was what
cut the sailing time to India and Australia.
It was vital. The ultimate weak link. And in
early 1915, a German -led Ottoman force commanded
by Kress von Kressenstein crosses the Sinai Peninsula
and attempts a surprise attack directly on the
waterway. They actually managed to get a couple
of companies across before the British and Indian
defenders repelled them. So the attack fails.
It fails, yeah. But it triggers a massive realization
for the British command. Sitting defensively
on the western bank of the canal was no longer
tenable. Right. You can't just wait for them
to show up at the banks. Exactly. To project
power and actually protect the canal, they had
to push their defensive line out. They had to
march eastward, straight into the harsh Sinai
desert. Which brings us to the logistics. And
reading through these source notes, the sheer
scale of the engineering required is just staggering.
It is mind blowing. They couldn't just march
an army of hundreds of thousands of men and horses
into the deep desert. There was no local food,
no local water. They basically had to build their
environment as they moved. What's fascinating
here is how this campaign became an engineering
problem of the highest order. To move across
the Sinai, the British Royal Engineers constructed
a massive pipeline. Right, the water pipeline.
Yes, pushing six million gallons of fresh Nile
water straight across the desert. And right alongside
that pipeline, they were building a standard
gauge railway. At a rate of about 15 miles a
month, the source says. Which is incredibly fast
for the conditions. They were laying down the
industrial tracks of an empire just to keep their
men alive. And doing it over deep, shifting sand,
I was looking at the notes on how they moved
infantry and artillery without everything just
sinking to the axles. The source mentions these
things called rabbit wire roads. Oh, the chicken
wire? Yeah. They would literally take miles of
simple chicken wire mesh, roll it out side by
side over the sand, and peg it to the ground.
It sounds almost comically simple, but did that
actually hold up the weight of an army? It did.
By dispersing the weight just enough, it kept
men and light vehicles from sinking into the
dunes. But you have to remember, this was a heavily
mounted campaign. Lots of horses. Tens of thousands
of horses. And they require immense amounts of
water. And that pipeline couldn't be everywhere.
So, Australian engineers invented a brilliant
device called a spear point. I read about this.
It was a perforated pipe, right? Yes, covered
in fine brass mesh. They could drive it deep
into the sand with a sledgehammer and immediately
pump out brackish groundwater. It allowed the
cavalry to operate independently from the main
water pipeline for short stretches. Even with
those brilliant innovations, the environmental
conditions were just brutal. The source describes
wildly fluctuating temperatures. Freezing at
night. blistering during the day. Right. And
then these calm sinned dust storms, hot southerly
winds that would blow for days, turning the air
into a choking haze of floating sand. And if
you were wounded in those conditions, the reality
was grim. The medical evacuation? Yeah, the standard
medical evacuation method was transporting men
in cacolets, which were basically stretchers
rigidly strapped to the sides of camels. That
sounds awful. The swaying, jarring gate of a
camel over rough desert terrain is explicitly
described in the historical accounts as a form
of travel exquisite in its agony. Exquisite in
its agony, wow. Despite the environment, though,
the allied forces now known as the Egyptian Expeditionary
Force, or EEF, pushed across the Sinai through
1916. They won victories at Romani, Maghtaba,
and Rafa. But then in 1917, they hit a brick
wall on the border of Palestine. Gaza. That wall
was Gaza. The First and Second Battles of Gaza
in March and April 1917 were just absolute disasters
for the British. Why was it so hard to break
through? The Ottomans had spent months building
incredibly strong readouts. These are highly
fortified, mutually supporting defensive earthworks
and trench systems. The British relied on frontal
assaults. Treating it like the trenches in France.
Exactly. Essentially trying to force Western
Front tactics onto the desert border and they
were cut to pieces. The failure was so complete
that the British commander, General Archibald
Murray, was sacked. Enter General Edmund Allenby,
who takes over the EEF in the summer of 1917.
Here's where it gets really interesting. Allenby
completely throws out the traditional Western
Front playbook. He had to. He looks at the slaughter
of those frontal assaults and pivots his entire
strategy. So what does he do? He recognized that
the Ottoman line stretched from Gaza on the coast
all the way inland to a town called Beersheba.
Gaza was the heavily fortified anchor. Beersheba,
out in the desert, was the vulnerable eastern
flank. Ah, so he goes around. Right. Allenby
orchestrated a massive deception to keep the
Ottomans fixated on the coast while secretly
moving a massive striking force east toward Beersheba.
But the catch was water. To take Beersheba, Allen
B's mounted troops had to make a huge flanking
march through arid wasteland. A literal race
against thirst. If they didn't capture the ancient
water wells inside Beersheba by nightfall, the
horses would die of thirst and the entire army
would face collapse. So on October 31st, 1917,
the infantry fights all day. securing the outer
defenses. But as the sun starts setting, the
town itself is still in Ottoman hands. And Ottoman
engineers are literally rigging the water wells
with explosives. It was a moment of absolute
desperation. The horses of the desert mounted
corps had been without water for days. So the
order is given for something incredibly audacious.
The charge. Yes. The 4th and 12th Australian
Light Horth regiments are ordered to charge the
Ottoman trenches. Now these guys are mounted
infantry, right? They usually ride to the battlefield,
dismount, and fight on foot with rifles. Usually
yes. But there's no time. They leave their rifles
slung, draw their 18 -inch bayonets, hold them
like cavalry swords, and charge. Thousands of
horses galloping full speed over open ground
directly into rapid artillery and rifle fire.
I had to reread that section. How did they not
get completely wiped out? The audacity of the
charge actually broke the defenders' mechanics.
The Ottoman defenders were so shocked by the
speed of the horses coming directly at them that
they failed to adjust the sights on their rifles.
Well, because the distance was closing so fast.
Exactly. Yeah. As the light horse rapidly closed
the distance, the Ottoman bullets began firing
harmlessly over the Australians' heads. They
jumped their horses straight over the front line
trenches, dismounted in the rear, and engaged
in fierce hand -to -hand combat. And they secured
the wells. Just before they could be detonated.
It completely broke the stalemate. It triggered
a profound domino effect. The fall of Beersheba
collapsed the entire eastern flank of the Ottoman
defensive line. The Ottomans were forced into
a massive retreat, allowing the British to roll
up the line, capture Jaffa, and by December 1917,
capture Jerusalem. Which was huge news back home.
Oh, massive. For the British public, reeling
from the horrors of Passchendaele back in Europe,
the fall of Jerusalem was an enormous morale
boost. The loss was so catastrophic for the Ottomans
that their regional commander, Jamal Pasha, resigned.
So the EEF is poised to keep rolling north and
knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war. But
then global events suddenly hijack the local
campaign. If we connect this to the bigger picture.
We have to look at the strategic debate happening
in London. The British war cabinet was deeply
divided between the Westerners and the Easterners.
Right. The Westerners being the faction that
wanted to focus all troops on defeating Germany
and France. And the Easterners, who argued for
knocking Germany's allies like the Ottoman Empire,
out of the war entirely. And in March 1918, Germany
makes the decision for them. They launch a massive
spring offensive on the Western front in Europe,
shattering the British lines. And the ripple
effect hits Allenby instantly. The war office
panicked. Allenby was ordered to immediately
strip his army of his best, most experienced
British infantry and yeomanry cavalry regiments.
The volunteer mounted forces that had been absolutely
crucial to his mobility. Gone. Packed onto ships
and rushed to France. Almost overnight, Palestine
goes from being a top priority to a forgotten
sideshow again. Reading about how Allenby handled
this is wild. He had to rebuild his army on the
fly using Indian Army recruits. Many fresh from
Mesopotamia or directly from India. The source
notes the sheer chaos of this reorganization.
In some battalions, junior British officers were
totally green and the language barrier was severe.
There's this one detail about a battalion where
only one Indian officer spoke English and only
two British officers could communicate with their
men. Trying to coordinate a modern military offensive
with that level of linguistic disconnect is almost
unthinkable. And he did it. He did. And while
Allenby was meticulously integrating these Indian
divisions, he was leveraging another profound
asset, the Arab revolt. Right. British forces,
including T .E. Lawrence, encouraged Arab forces
under Amir Faisal to attack the Hejaz Railway.
Which was the main logistical artery for the
Ottomans. By doing that, they isolated Ottoman
garrisons and tied down massive amounts of their
resources. So we fast forward to September 1918.
Allenby has his army retrained and he is finally
ready to launch his master stroke, the Battle
of Megiddo. It's a brilliant piece of deception.
The British convinced the Ottomans that the attack
would come from the east near the Jordan Valley.
But that was a fake out. Completely. They built
fake horse lines in the east. They marched troops
east during the day and secretly trucked them
back west at night. So where did the actual breakthrough
happen? On the Mediterranean coast, far to the
west. And the collapse of the Ottoman forces
was incredibly rapid from there? It was. The
British Royal Air Force gained total air superiority.
They systematically bombed the Ottoman communication
hubs and retreating columns. In a matter of weeks,
the Allied forces captured Damascus. And the
source mentions that Damascus was entered almost
simultaneously by the Australian Light Horse
and Lawrence's Arab Irregulars. Which immediately
sparked political tensions over who actually
controlled the city. And then eventually they
take Aleppo. But... We really need to tally the
grim human cost here to underscore the scale
of this campaign. Yeah, the casualties. The Allies
suffered roughly 168 ,000 casualties, but a huge
portion of that, over 100 ,000, were evacuated
sick, mostly from diseases like malaria in the
Jordan Valley. For the Ottomans, the losses were
catastrophic. Estimates put their casualties
at over 230 ,000. Effectively wiping out their
fighting force in the region. Yes, and directly
forcing the armistice of Mu - in October 1918.
So what does this all mean? Why should you, listening
to this today, care about this historical deep
dive? It matters because of the monumental legacy
of this campaign. The long -lasting effect was
the complete partitioning of the Ottoman Empire.
Secret treaties like the Sykes -Paco agreement
led to the creation of the British mandates of
Palestine and Mesopotamia and the French mandate
for Syria and Lebanon. So the map of the contemporary
Middle East, the borders of Israel, Jordan, Syria
and Lebanon, and the geopolitical tensions that
exist there today, that map was literally drawn
in the aftermath of these very cavalry charges
and desert pipeline projects. This raises an
important question. Consider how much of our
21st century global geopolitics is just an echo
of a 100 -year -old conflict that the British
public originally dismissed as a mere sideshow
to the real war in Europe. A sideshow that shaped
the modern world. Exactly. How many sideshows
happening in the world today are actually quietly
drawing the maps of tomorrow? And think about
Beersheba. In the 20th century, global conflicts
were largely driven by land and oil. But as we
look ahead to a rapidly changing climate, will
the major geopolitical conflicts of the future
return to the harsh reality of 1917? Will the
wars of tomorrow simply be desperate struggles
over access to fresh water? That is a fascinating
and sobering thought to leave on. Thank you for
joining us on this deep dive. Keep questioning
the history behind the headlines, and we'll catch
you next time.