{"id":78587,"date":"2021-07-13T06:50:59","date_gmt":"2021-07-13T11:50:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=78587"},"modified":"2021-07-13T09:17:50","modified_gmt":"2021-07-13T14:17:50","slug":"judgement-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=78587","title":{"rendered":"Judgement Day"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The transformations of four years of war were readily apparent at 1am in the skies above Al-Afuleh in Palestine on September 19th, 1918.\u00a0 One British Handley Page 0\/400 bomber flew over the city, the headquarters of the Ottoman\/German command for Palestine in the Jezreel Valley, dropping it’s payload of sixteen 112-pound bombs.\u00a0 Four years earlier, the first “heavy” bomber in aerial history, the French Voisin III, could carry one 132-pound bomb, dropping it indiscriminately with little to no accuracy.\u00a0 Aerial operations in 1914 were reconnaissance-focus; by 1918, both sides were using planes in intra-service coordination to attack and overwhelm their enemy’s lines.\u00a0 With a singular strike, the Handley Page bomber destroyed the telephone exchange and main railway station, serving communications between the Ottoman\/German High Command and their soldiers.<\/p>\n

A few hours later, the British army roared to life, with 385 field guns lashing out at the Ottoman line.\u00a0 A massive coordinated campaign of artillery, cavalry, infantry and Arabian guerillas would destabilize what remained of the Central Powers’ position in Palestine, destroying two Ottoman armies and reducing the Ottoman morale to dust.\u00a0 As had happened to the Germans<\/a> and the Bulgarians<\/a>, now the Turks would face a killing stroke that would set in motion the end of their Empire.\u00a0 It would be a fitting conclusion to a battle chosen by the British because of the proximity to the ancient city of Megiddo – or as it was known in Hebrew, Armageddon.<\/p>\n

British troops advance with air cover – the modern ability of airpower to attack ground forces would set a historic precedent at Megiddo<\/p><\/div>\n

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The capture of Jerusalem in late 1917<\/a> had been a welcome victory for an Allied war effort that appeared to be falling apart.\u00a0 In a few sharp battles, British General Edmund Allenby had driven the Turks out of southern Palestine with thousands of casualties to few losses of his own.\u00a0 Where the British had been stymied in the Sinai and Gaza for years, racking up losses of tens of thousands of men, in six months Allenby had gutted the Ottoman line, destroyed entire armies and all for the loss of perhaps just over 3,000 men.\u00a0 Accuracy, speed and guile had been Allenby’s tools and they had worked wonders against veteran Turkish soldiers and accomplished German commanders like Erich von Falkenhayn and Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein.\u00a0 But the victories hadn’t meant the end of the Palestinian campaign and Allenby would now face his greatest opponent – the British War Office.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Allenby had barely begun his next campaign when London forced him to transfer units from the Middle East to France to counter the German Spring Offensive<\/a>.\u00a0 60,000 men and Allenby’s entire tank corps were sacrificed from the Middle East to block the rampaging Boche in France, leaving Allenby with a depleted force to try and drive the Turks out of Palestine and the Jordan Valley.\u00a0 Further complicating Allenby’s objectives was the presence of the Arabian Sharifian Army, or Arab Northern Army, to his east.\u00a0 Lead by Faisal bin-Hussein, who had risen in prominence within the Arab Revolt due to his control of the guerilla Hashemite Army<\/a> and the media campaign of T.E. Lawrence<\/a>, the conventionally armed and organized Sharifian Army was one part ally, one part enemy.\u00a0 \u00a0The Hashemite guerrillas and Lawrence had sowed chaos in the Arabian interior, but now were marching to gain and hold territory of their own.\u00a0 And twice within four months Faisal had attempted to switch sides if only the Turks would grant him control over Syria; offers that Enver Pasha would arrogantly refuse as he remained bizarrely confident of the Ottoman Empire’s chances at victory.<\/p>\n

Pasha’s confidence might have been because of the Ottoman\/German changes in command.\u00a0 Former Chief of the General Staff Erich von Falkenhayn had been exceptionally unpopular with the Ottomans, despite Falkenhayn’s reputation and successes on other fronts.\u00a0 The Turks hated Falkenhayn’s “yielding defense” strategy of slowly surrendering territory until the British exceeded their ability to resupply, as the strategy cost them Gaza and Jerusalem.\u00a0 Top Ottoman brass also disliked Falkenhayn’s moral indignations against Turkish policies, such as the Ottoman attempt to essentially engage in ethnically cleansing the Jews out of Palestine and Syria which the German refused to carry out.\u00a0 Falkenhayn would be replaced by the chief German liaison to Constantinople – Otto Liman von Sanders, whose role in modernizing the Ottoman Army and leadership at Gallipoli inspired Turkish officers that they finally had a supreme commander who both respected them and knew how to win.\u00a0 Instead, Sanders might have felt captive to the Turkish demands to draw a literal line in the sand and fight.\u00a0 Falkenhayn’s slow retreat had been unpopular but was likely the right strategy for an army group running on empty.\u00a0 The Ottomans didn’t much fight left in them; Sanders was tasked with wringing the last vestiges of combat out of them before their morale vanished.<\/p>\n

Otto Liman Von Sanders – Sanders had been the head of the German military mission to Turkey since 1913<\/p><\/div>\n

Sanders’ orders to stand and fight played right into Allenby’s strategy.\u00a0 Allenby had been seeking a decisive fight on flat ground in the hopes of recreating the cavalry charge at the Battle of Beersheba on October 31st of 1917, in which his mounted troops had driven through and behind the Turkish line, destroying their entire force for a handful of British casualties.\u00a0 Megiddo, situated at a plateau base near an adjoining valley, would be a perfect launching point if the Turks, rallying at this location, could be defeated.\u00a0 Like he had before, Allenby constructed a series of deceptions, including secretly transferring forces from the Jordan Valley and having Arab guerillas “accidentally” leave traces of British goods and materials scattered for the Turks to find east of the Valley, letting the Ottomans believe the Allied forces might try to flank them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sanders wasn’t fooled by the misdirection – he had fairly corrected surmised Allenby’s intention and the size of the British force.\u00a0 But Sanders had committed nearly the entirety of his force to defending his first trench lines; a tactic now abandoned on the Western Front in favor of “defense-in-depth.”\u00a0 Everything Allenby wanted at Megiddo had been put into place – the Turks would stand and fight on favorable ground to British cavalry and could potentially be overwhelmed at the front of the battle.\u00a0 The fact that the battle would take place at a site listed in the Book of Revelations as home to the climatic struggle between good and evil was merely icing on the cake.<\/p>\n

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The opening of the British attack went about as well as Allenby could have wished.\u00a0 The Turkish line was pierced within hours and Sanders’ own headquarters was overrun, with the German commander narrowly avoiding capture himself.\u00a0 The British and Australian cavalry charged through the Ottoman rear lines, breaking down the entire front.\u00a0 Mustafa Kemal, like Sanders, one of the Turkish heroes of the Gallipoli Campaign who had been transferred to Palestine to save the failing effort, ordered his 7th Army to retreat into the Jordan Valley.\u00a0 Barely 48 hours after the start of the attack, Kemal had seen enough; he was now trying to save the lives of his men and keep them from falling prisoner to the Allies.\u00a0 Kemal’s rearguard units successfully blocked the advancing British, but the man soon to be known as Ataturk and founder of the Turkish Republic could hardly have foreseen that his army was about to fall into the history books.<\/p>\n

Turkish prisoners marched into captivity<\/p><\/div>\n

On September 21st, 1918, the Royal Air Force spotted Kemal’s retreating 7th Army.\u00a0 The British had long since established air superiority in the region and now intended to unleash their airpower against the Turkish columns.\u00a0 The RAF had hoped that they might get four or five hours of combat time before the 7th Army moved outside of their range.\u00a0 In 60 minutes, the entire 7th Army was destroyed by airpower alone.\u00a0 Arab guerillas found the remains of 87 guns, 55 motor-lorries, 4 motor-cars, 75 carts, 837 four-wheeled wagons, and thousands of dead and wounded Turks.\u00a0 As T.E. Lawrence noted, “the RAF lost four killed. The Turks lost a corps.”<\/p>\n

Typically in any of the handful of Great War battles that turned into routs, the attacking force eventually had to halt to resupply or otherwise stop due to battlefield losses.\u00a0 There would be no “halt” to Allenby’s Turkish Armageddon.\u00a0 The mobility of Allenby’s forces, and their Arabian allies, meant they could continue to keep pressuring the Ottomans.\u00a0 And Sanders couldn’t find the men or battleground to make another stand.\u00a0 City upon city in Palestine and Jordan fell to the Allies and by the end of September, less than two weeks after launching the initial assault, Damascus was captured, along with 20,000 Turkish soldiers.\u00a0 In all, Allenby had destroyed two armies and captured 75,000 additional Ottoman troops by the 1st of October.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Remains of the Turkish 7th Army; for the first time in history, airpower had solely defeated ground forces<\/p><\/div>\n

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In March of 1918, Enver Pasha had dismissed Faisal bin-Hussein’s second offer of alliance in the belief that the Turks would be victorious without Arab help; by October 4th, 1918, the man who ruled the Ottoman Empire so completely that diplomats referred to the nation as “Enverland”<\/a> was out of power.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mehmed VI, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, had assumed the throne just months earlier with the passing of his half-brother Mehmed V.\u00a0 Unlike his half-brother, Mehmed VI was neither passive in disposition nor concerned about his relative lack of authority and demanded Enver resign as Minister of War.\u00a0 Enver did and the junta of the “Three Pashas” collapsed as Talaat Pasha, the de facto Prime Minister, resigned shortly thereafter.\u00a0 None of the men who had schemed to get the Ottoman Empire into the war were willing to negotiate the Empire’s now inescapable defeat.\u00a0 Talaat, who had just returned from a tour of Germany and Bulgaria, had already been convinced of the Central Power’s eventual collapse.\u00a0 Like the Bulgarian government, Talaat had initially attempted to seek American intervention in negotiations but to no avail.\u00a0 Now the head of the Turkish government claimed that his resignation was the only avenue to minimize the terms of a future peace treaty as Talaat publicly reasoned the Allies would impose harsher penalites if the leaders that had started the war were seen as still in power.\u00a0 None of the “Three Pashas” seemingly resigned with an initial belief that the move would be permanent.\u00a0 Even as they escaped on a German U-boat following the Armistice of Mudros that pulled the Ottoman Empire out of the war, each of them sought to establish political connections that might allow them to resurface in power somewhere else.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Regardless of future intentions by their leadership, by early October of 1918 it was clear that the next nation in the Central Powers alliance was about to fall.\u00a0 In the span of a few months, each member of the alliance had suffered a debilitating defeat and Bulgaria, and now apparently Turkey, would surrender.\u00a0 The hope for a negotiated end was fading quickly with the growing realization that a borderline unconditional surrender might be the only remaining option.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The transformations of four years of war were readily apparent at 1am in the skies above Al-Afuleh in Palestine on September 19th, 1918.\u00a0 One British Handley Page 0\/400 bomber flew over the city, the headquarters of the Ottoman\/German command for Palestine in the Jezreel Valley, dropping it’s payload of sixteen 112-pound bombs.\u00a0 Four years earlier, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":425,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105,281],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-ringer","category-ww1-fact-and-myth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78587"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78740,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78587\/revisions\/78740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}