Australia's Palestine Campaign 1916-1918 by Jean Bou

Author:Jean Bou
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Big Sky Publishing

LOGISTICS IN PALESTINE

Logistics in Palestine were as vital to effective operations as in any campaign. The Ottoman Army, despite its often admirable battlefield performance, laboured under severe shortages of most things. By contrast, the EEF’s operations were underpinned from the beginning by thorough, if not always perfect, logistic arrangements.

The pace of the EEF’s advance across the Sinai was based on how quickly a railway and water pipeline could be built from the Canal Zone in Egypt, and through 1917 efforts were made to improve this link and support the army in southern Palestine better.

Port facilities beyond Egypt were always limited, and those supplies that came from the sea into the Sinai and southern Palestine usually arrived over the beach in small boats and lighters. It was not until the seizure of Jaffa in November 1917 that the EEF had access to a port east of Alexandria, but it was small and underdeveloped. The operations in northern Syria at the end of the campaign in 1918 were also facilitated to a large extent by the seizure of Tripoli on the Lebanon coast, which considerably shortened the EEF’s lines of communications.

Beyond the ports and railheads, transportation was by mixture of road and animal means. Motor transport became increasingly important during the campaign, and was essential to supporting the cavalry advance to Damascus in 1918. Earlier, the Egyptian manned camel transport was vital, as were unit and formation based wagons and their drivers.

Rapid improvisation and adaption were often required, as in late 1917 when donkey and horse pack trains were hastily established to move supplies to the troops operating in the mountains of Judea, or in 1918 when the raiders headed towards Amman shed most of their wagon transport and transferred everything to animal packs.

The demands of the EEF, like any army, were voracious. In 1918, for example, it consumed 2100 tons of frozen meat, 9000 head of sheep or goats and 7500 tons of wood fuel, among other things, each month. The high proportion of cavalry in the EEF, and the use of an animal transport system, meant that supplying fodder was a major matter (in mid-1917 there were more than 80,000 horses, camels and mules in the EEF).

The system was most strained by rapid advances, and the move from Beersheba to central Palestine in late 1917 was marked by fodder shortages and monotonous tinned rations. In those circumstances, many Australian mounted troops resorted to the age old, but frowned upon, practice of taking what they needed from the local inhabitants.

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