Arab Revolt

{{Infobox military conflict | conflict = Arabia and Southern Arabia Campaigns | partof = Middle Eastern theatre of World War I | campaign = | image = | caption = Lawrence of Arabia after the Battle of Aqaba. | date = June 1916–October 1918 | place = Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon | result = Treaty of Sèvres | territory = Partitioning of the Ottoman Empire | combatant1 = Hashemite Arabs United Kingdom

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Sultanate of Nejd (Unification of Saudi Arabia) | combatant2 = | commander1 = Faisal Edmund Allenby T. E. Lawrence | commander2 = Djemal Pasha Fahreddin Pasha Muhiddin Pasha | strength1 = 30,000 (June 1916) | strength2 = 23,000 This number however probably applies to the Arab Regulars who fought with Allenby's main army, and not the irregular forces under the direction of Lawrence and Feisal. On a few occasions, particularly during the final campaign into Syria, this number would grow significantly. Many Arabs joined the Revolt sporadically, often as a campaign was in progress or only when the fighting entered their home region. During the Aqaba raid, for instance, while the initial Arab force numbered only a few hundred, over a thousand more from local tribes joined them for the final assault on Aqaba. Estimates of Hussein's effective forces vary, but through most of 1918 at least, they may have numbered as high as 30,000 men. The Hashemite Army comprised two distinctive forces; tribal irregulars who waged a guerrilla war against the Ottoman Empire and the Sharifian Army, which was recruited from Ottoman Arab POWs, and fought in conventional battles. It should also be noted that in the early days of the Revolt, Hussein's forces were largely made up of Bedouin and other nomadic desert tribes, who were only loosely allied, loyal more to their respective tribes than the overall cause. The Bedouin would not fight unless paid in advance with gold coin, and by the end of 1916, the French had spent 1.25 million gold francs in subsidizing the revolt. The Hashemite forces were initally poorly equipped, but later were to receive significant supplies of weapons, most noteably rifles and machine-guns from Britain and France.

Ottoman troops in the Hejaz numbered 20, 000 men by 1917. Moreover, the Ottomans relied upon the support of Ibn Rashid, the King of Ha'il whose tribesmen who dominated what is now northern Saudi Arabia and tied down both the Hashemites and the Saud forces with the threat of their raiding attacks. The great weakness of the Ottoman forces was they were at the end of a long and tenuous supply line in the form of the Hejaz railroad, and because of their logistical weaknesses, were often forced to fight on the defensive.

Prelude

Because of repression by the Ottoman Empire and their Central Powers allies, Grand Sharif Hussein, as the guardian of the holy city of Mecca, entered into an alliance with the United Kingdom and France against the Ottomans sometime around 8 June 1916, the actual date being somewhat uncertain. This alliance was facilitated by the services of a mysterious young Arab officer in the Ottoman army named Muhammed Sharif al-Faruqi.

Hussein had about 50,000 men under arms, but fewer than 10,000 had rifles. Evidence that the Ottoman government was planning to depose him at the end of the war led him to an exchange of letters with British High Commissioner Henry McMahon which convinced him that his assistance on the side of the Triple Entente would be rewarded by an Arab empire encompassing the entire span between Egypt and Persia, with the exception of imperial possessions and interests in Kuwait, Aden, and the Syrian coast. Hussein, who until then had officially been on the Ottoman side decided to defect over the Allied camp because of rumours that Sharif Ali Haidar, leader of the competing Zaid family for the position of Sharif of Mecca was in increasing favour with the Ottoman government, and that he would soon be desposed. The much publicized executions of the Arab nationalist leaders in Damascus led Hussein to fear for his life if he were deposed in favour of Ali Haidar. The revolt proper began on June 10, 1916 when Hussein ordered his supporters to attack the Ottoman garrison in Mecca. In the Battle of Mecca, there ensured over a month of bloody street fighting between the out-numbered, but far better armed Ottoman troops and Hussein's tribesmen. The port of Jidda was attacked by 3500 Arabs on 10 June 1916 with the assistance of bombardment by British warships and seaplanes. The Ottoman garrison surrendered on 16 June. In addition, a French military mission commanded by Colonel Edouard Brémond was sent out. Lawrence's major contribution to the revolt was convincing the Arab leaders (Faisal and Abdullah) to co-ordinate their actions in support of British strategy. Lawrence developed a close relationship with Faisal, whose Arab Northern Army was to be become the main beneficiary of British aid. By contrast, Lawrence's relations with Abdullah were not good, so Abdullah's Arab Eastern Army received considerably less in way of British aid. Lawrence persuaded the Arabs not to drive the Ottomans out of Medina; instead, the Arabs attacked the Hejaz Railway on many occasions. This tied up more Ottoman troops, who were forced to protect the railway and repair the constant damage.

On December 1, 1916 Fakhri Pasha began an offensive with three brigades out of Medina with the aim of taking the port of Yanbu. It was fire and air support from the five ships of the Royal Navy Red Sea Patrol that defeated the Ottoman attempts to take Yanbu with heavy losses on December 11–12, 1916.

The coastal city of Wejh was to be the base for attacks on the Hejaz railway. While the 800-man Ottoman garrison prepared for an attack from the south, a landing party of 400 Arabs and 200 Royal Navy bluejackets attacked Wejh from the north on 23 January 1917. The Arab force had increased to about seventy-thousand men armed with twenty-eight-thousand rifles and deployed in three main groups. In late 1916, the Allies start the formation of the Regular Arab Army (also known as the Sharifian Army) raised from Ottoman Arab POWs.

1917

The year 1917 began well for the Hashemites when the Emir Abdullah and his Arab Eastern Army ambushed an Ottoman convoy led by Ashraf Bey in the desert, and captured £20, 000 worth of gold coins that were intended to bribe the Bedouin into loyalty to the Sultan. Starting in early 1917, the Hashemite guerrillas began attacking the Hejaz railroad. At first, guerrilla forces commended by officers from the Regular Army such as al-Misri, and by British officers such as Newcombe, Lieutenant Hornby and Major H. Garland focused their efforts on blowing up unguarded sections of the Hejaz railroad. In February 1917, Garland succeeded for the first time in destroying a moving locomotive with a mine of his own design. Captain Raho was to emerge as one of the leading destroyers of the Hejaz railroad. Typical of such attacks were the one commanded out by Newcombe and Joyce who on the night of July 6/7, 1917 when they had planted over 500 charges on the Hejaz railroad, which all set up off at about 2am.

In March 1917, an Ottoman force joined by tribesmen from the Kingdom of Ha'il led by Ibn Rashid carried out a sweep of the Hejaz that did much damage to the Hashemite forces. Lawrence and Auda left Wedj on 9 May 1917 with a party of 40 men to recruit a mobile camel force from the Howeitat of Syria. Typical of such raid was one led by Lawrence in September 1917 that saw Lawrence destroy a Turkish rail convoy by blowing up the bridge it was crossing at Mudawwarah and then ambushing the Turkish repair party. In November 1917, as aid to Allenby's offensive, Lawrence launched a deep-raiding party into the Yarmouk River valley, which failed to destroy the railroad bridge at Tel ash-Shehab, but which succeeded in ambushing and destroying the train of General Mehemd Cemal Pasha, the commander of the Ottoman VII Corps. Allenby's victories led directly to the capture of Jerusalem just before Christmas 1917.

1918: Increased Allied assistance and the end of fighting

By the time of Aqaba's capture, many other officers joined Feisal's campaign. A large number of British officers and advisors, led by Lt. Col.s Stewart F. Newcombe and Cyril E. Wilson, arrived to provide the Arabs rifles, explosives, mortars, and machine guns. Artillery was only sporadically supplied due to a general shortage, though Feisal would have several batteries of mountain guns under French Captain Pisani and his Algerians for the Megiddo Campaign. The Royal Flying Corps often supported the Arab operations, and the Imperial Camel Corps served with the Arabs for a time. The French military mission of 1,100 officers under Brémond established good relations with Hussein and especially with his sons, the Emirs Ali and Abdullah, and for this reason, most of the French effort went into assisting the Arab Southern Army commanded by the Emir Ali that was laying siege to Medina and the Eastern Army commaned by Abdullah that had the responsibility of protecting Ali's eastern flank from Ibn Rashid. The total number of Ottoman troops bottled up in Medina by the time of the surrender were 456 officers and 9, 364 soldiers. Though the attacks were mixed in success, they achieved their primary goal of tying down Ottoman troops and cutting off Medina. In January 1918, in one of the largest set-piece battles of the Revolt, Arab forces (including Lawrence) defeated a large Ottoman force at the village of Tafileh, inflicting over 1,000 Ottoman casualties for the loss of a mere forty men. In April 1918, Jafar al-Askari and Nuri as-Said led the Arab Regular Army in a frontal attack on the well-defended Ottoman railroad station at Ma'an, which after some initial successes was fought off with heavy losses to both sides. However, the Sharifian Army succeeded in cutting off and thus neutralizing the Ottoman position at Ma'an, who held out until late September 1918. The British refused several requests from al-Askari to use mustard gas on the Ottoman garrison at Ma'an. In May 1918, Hedgehog led to the destruction of 25 bridges of the Hejaz railroad. A particularly noteable attack of Hedgehog was the storming on August 8, 1918 by the Imperial Camel Corps, closely supported by the Royal Air Force on the well-defended Hejaz railroad station at Mudawwarah. For the final Allied offensive intended to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war, Allenby asked that Emir Feisal and his Arab Northern Army launch a series of attacks on the main Turkish forces from the east, which was intended to both tie down Ottoman troops and force Turkish commanders to worry about their security of their flanks in the Levant. Supporting the Emir Feisal's army of about 450 men from the Arab Regular Army were tribal contingents from the Rwalla, Bani Sakhr, Agyal, and Howeitat tribes. In addition, Feisal had a group of Gurkha troops, several British armored car squardons, the Egyptian Camel Corps, a group of Algerian artillery men commanded by Captain Pisani and air support from the RAF to assist him.

In 1918, the Arab cavalry gained in strength (as it seemed victory was at hand) and they were able to provide Allenby's army with intelligence on Ottoman army positions. They also harassed Ottoman supply columns, attacked small garrisons, and destroyed railroad tracks. A major victory occurred on 27 September when an entire brigade of Ottoman, Austrian and German troops, retreating from Mezerib, was virtually wiped out in a battle with Arab forces near the village of Tafas (which the Turks had plundered during their retreat). This led to the so-called Tafas massacre, in which Lawrence claimed in a letter to his brother to have issued a "no-prisoners" order, maintaining after the war that massacre was in retaliation for the earlier Ottoman massacre of the village of Tafas, and that he had at least 250 German and Austrian POWs together with an uncounted number of Turks lined up to be summarily shot. In part due to these attacks, Allenby's last offensive, the Battle of Megiddo, was a stunning success. By late September and October 1918, an increasingly demoralized Ottoman Army began to retreat and surrender whenever possible to British troops. The Ottoman army was routed in less than 10 days of battle. Allenby praised Feisal for his role in the victory: "I send your Highness my greetings and my most cordial congratulations upon the great achievement of your gallant troops... Thanks to our combined efforts, the Ottoman army is everywhere in full retreat".

The first Arab Revolt forces to reach Damascus were Sharif Naser's Hashemite camel cavalry and the cavalry of the Ruwallah tribe, led by Nuri Sha'lan, on 30 September 1918. The bulk of these troops remained outside of the city with the intention of awaiting the arrival of Sharif Feisal. However, a small contingent from the group was sent within the walls of the city, where they found the Arab Revolt flag already raised by surviving Arab nationalists among the citizenry. Later that day Australian Light Horse troops marched into Damascus. Auda Abu Ta'yi, T. E. Lawrence and Arab troops rode into Damascus the next day, 1 October. At the end of the war, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force had seized Palestine, Transjordan, Lebanon, large parts of the Arabian peninsula and southern Syria. Medina, cut off from the rest of the Ottoman Empire, would not surrender until January 1919.

Aftermath

, 2006]] The United Kingdom agreed in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence that it would support Arab independence if they revolted against the Ottomans. The two sides had different interpretations of this agreement. In the event, the United Kingdom and France reneged on the original deal and divided up the area in ways unfavourable to the Arabs under the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. Further confusing the issue was the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised support for a Jewish "national home" in Palestine. The Hedjaz region of western Arabia became an independent state under Hussein's control, until 1925, when, abandoned and isolated by the British policy–which had shifted support to the al Saud family–it was conquered by Saudi Arabia.

See also

Sinai and Palestine Campaign

Pan-Arabism

Suleiman Mousa

Notes

Reference

Murphy, David The Arab Revolt 1916-18 Lawrence sets Arabia Ablaze, Osprey: London, 2008, ISBN 978-1-84603-339-1.

Further reading

Fromkin, David (1989). A Peace to End All Peace. Avon Books.

Korda, Michael, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. ISBN 978-0-06-171261-6.

Lawrence, T. E. (1935). Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Doubleday, Doran, and Co.

Wilson, Jeremy (1990). Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T.E. Lawrence. Atheneum.

External links

History of the Arab Revolt (on King Hussein's website)

Arab Revolt at PBS

Campaigns: Arabian Peninsula at Turkey in the First World War website

Category:Arab nationalism Category:Guerrilla wars Category:History of Israel Category:Conflicts in 1916 Category:Conflicts in 1917 Category:Conflicts in 1918 Category:History of Jordan Category:History of Lebanon Category:History of Saudi Arabia Category:Military history of Syria Category:Islamic history Category:Rebellions against the Ottoman Empire Category:Campaigns and theatres of World War I Category:20th century in Saudi Arabia Category:Middle Eastern theatre of World War I Category:Fertile Crescent Category:Rebellions in Syria