Chapter 3

‘John Turk must pay for his audacity’

5–12 August 1916

At 4 a.m. on 5 August 1916, the Wellington Mounted Rifles with the 7th Light Horse on their right flank and British infantry on their left attacked Wellington Ridge at bayonet point and drove the Turks off. As Colonel Royston noted in his report, ‘that was the turning point . . . the enemy broke and fled in disorder’. The Turks retired to Mount Meredith and then back to Katia.¹ Bill Peterson wrote of how ‘the whole line advanced dismounted, the led horses being brought along behind’. The bodies of two men killed the previous day were found. ‘Lieutenant Righetti and Sergeant Jepson are lying close together,’ Peterson wrote, ‘both shot through the head and both stripped for their superior clothes and boots.’² There were 800 prisoners taken along with seven machine guns and an ammunition column. A battery of artillery was abandoned in perfect order.

At 6.15 a.m. the 1st Brigade charged the Turks on the ridges of Mount Royston. ‘Absolutely cleared the Turks out and got them running,’ Bert Billings wrote. ‘Terrific bombardment by our 18 pounders, whole patches being subjected to terrific shelling.’³ Ken McAulay, who was with the 2nd Light Horse, watched as the line of men ‘raised a cooee and charged. It was not a charge but a drive.’⁴ As Robert Farnes observed, ‘the whole line advanced and cut the Turks up terribly . . . dead and dying were lying everywhere’.⁵ ‘The fruits of victory are not yet plucked and John Turk must pay for his audacity in full,’ Mick Bruxner later wrote. ‘At the first shimmer of light the long line of men went quietly into the darkness.’⁶

Fred Tomlins observed the effects of the British artillery: ‘Camels were lying dead everywhere some loaded with artillery shells and others with machine guns. Amongst the dead Turks lying about were odd German officers, also Germans to every machine gun we came across.’⁷ A complete Turkish ambulance unit of five officers and 58 other ranks, with 80 camels and drivers attached, was captured and put to work treating their own wounded.⁸ ‘The Jackos were coming in with pieces of white rag tied on sticks everywhere,’ Lloyd Corliss wrote.⁹ ‘Got a few prisoners . . . who were absolutely done in,’ Gordon Cooper added.¹⁰ Mick Bruxner watched them come in: ‘Turks had their hands stretched high above their heads silhouetted against the skyline of Wellington Ridge.’¹¹

1st Light Horse troops halt in the desert. John Gorrell collection. Courtesy of Richard Gorrell.

By 8 a.m. the Turks who had managed to withdraw were in prepared positions at Katia alongside fresh troops, which had arrived to cover the retreat to Oghratina. ‘Unfortunately for us the enemy did not attack us on the morning of the 5th but under cover of darkness retreated to Katia,’ Maurie Pearce wrote.¹² After meeting with Meredith and Meldrum, General Chaytor ordered a combined attack on Katia that afternoon. The New Zealanders would go in on the right with the 1st Brigade in the centre and the 2nd Brigade on the left, all advancing under an umbrella of machine-gun fire. The light horsemen reached the palm fringe before dismounting under heavy fire.¹³

At 3.15 p.m. four mounted brigades moved on Katia. Maurie Evans observed that ‘Everywhere the eyes could see over the desert there were mounted troops advancing on Katia.’¹⁴ Lloyd Corliss watched as four mounted brigades lined up and galloped down a slope at the Turkish position about 3 kilometres ahead. When they came under heavy fire the men dismounted and got the horses under cover. Corliss was a horse holder, keeping the horses away from the Turkish shellfire that was searching for them.¹⁵ Jim Greatorex was with the 1st Brigade machine-gun section. ‘We attacked at 4 p.m.,’ he wrote. ‘Galloped a mile into action and brought gun into position to cover the advance of the dismounted troops.’¹⁶ ‘A regiment of English yeomanry attacked with swords and lost 35% of their men and did no good,’ Fred Tomlins observed. ‘Their machine gun fire was too hot.’¹⁷

A horse holder. One of the men from each four-man light horse section had this task. Wilfred Baker collection.

Brigadier General Antill’s 3rd Brigade had left Dueidar at dawn on 5 August and ‘marched under a boiling sun all the morning’.¹⁸ At 1.30 p.m. the 9th Light Horse moved off to attack followed by the 10th Light Horse and the supporting gun battery. Stan Parkes remained at the oasis in charge of the dressing station. An hour later the first of fourteen men wounded in the attacks came back on sand carts. While the 9th attacked with two squadrons, the 10th moved around the enemy left flank. ‘By this time the enemy could be seen to be falling back as fast as possible,’ Parkes wrote. But the German machine-gunners stayed at their guns.¹⁹ ‘After some 2 hours fighting enemy hoisted white flag.’²⁰ Some 500 prisoners, including some Austrians and Germans, were captured, the latter rather surly.²¹ ‘We have quite a number of German prisoners, mostly officers and machine gun crews,’ Maurie Evans wrote. ‘The Turks fought well but say the Germans turned the machine guns on them when they started to retire or surrender.’²² Bill Peterson later wrote of a ‘German officer found dead outside Katia with a Turkish bayonet right through him’.²³

Turkish prisoners escorted by Indian guards. The tall prisoner at the front is an Austrian. Joseph Bradshaw collection.

At 5.30 p.m. the battle was at its height. ‘They have been at it hard since 2 o’clock . . . the fighting is terrific,’ Bill Peterson wrote. ‘Machine guns by the dozen are going as fast as they can feed them with belts of ammunition,’ he added. ‘Shells of all calibres are bursting around. Even shells from the monitors away out in the Med are heaving them in.’ One hour later, Peterson continued, ‘the sun is fast disappearing over the horizon as if ashamed to shed this glorious light on such a ghastly scene as this’.²⁴

Gordon Macrae was with the 6th Light Horse. ‘I never felt so done in all my life,’ he wrote. ‘I could no more run than I could fly and I don’t think I cared whether I got hit or not. My tongue and mouth was so swollen I could not chew a biscuit.’²⁵ ‘Our horses have been 48 hours without a drink and are just about beat,’ another 6th trooper, William Burchill, wrote.²⁶ Maurie Evans noted that ‘we had I think bitten off a bit more than we could chew’.²⁷ ‘Enemy tried hard to get our horses with shells,’ Lieutenant Stuart Macfarlane wrote. ‘This was the worst experience I have ever had, we only had one bottle of water for 35 hours and we all had an awful time from thirst. The horses were for 56 hours without water and for 44 hours in the saddle.’²⁸

The position was too formidable to take before nightfall, and without the water from the Katia wells the horses had to be taken back to Romani. The troops retired at 6.30 p.m. as dusk fell. ‘Under cover of darkness we withdrew to Romani, our horses and men being completely knocked up, hungry and thirsty after the two days strenuous battle,’ Maurie Pearce wrote.²⁹ Back at Romani that night, the men and horses were fighting at the troughs to get the brackish water.³⁰ Bill Peterson returned to Romani with the 2nd Light Horse at 11.30 p.m. ‘Dead dog tired, hungry and weary after being in the saddle for two days and nights,’ he wrote. Only some 135 men remained in the regiment.³¹

12th Light Horse troopers saddling up. George Francis collection.

The next day, 6 August, Fred Tomlins wrote, ‘we cannot get water today and are living on what tea we are issued with and some of the lads are drinking the salt water, dead horses are lying everywhere and are beginning to hum some’.³² Maurie Evans concurred. ‘To the west of the camp the air is heavy with the scent of dead horse,’ he wrote.³³ Jeff Holmes watched the British infantry units moving up to Katia. ‘All transport is done by camels and it is marvellous how the water, tucker, horse feed etc is kept up to so many soldiers,’ he wrote. ‘There must be fully 10 thousand to 15 thousand troops around Katea and 5 thousand or more horses . . . this campaign is a mounted man’s place and an infantry man is really out of place.’³⁴ In temperatures around 44 degrees Celsius, the infantry occupied Katia on 7 August following the phased withdrawal of the Turkish force. ‘On the trail of Jacko,’ Harry Bostock wrote.³⁵

On 7 August, the 11th Light Horse attacked at the gallop over some exposed low ground. After dismounting, the men ran up the sand ridges where, as Pelham Jackson related, the troopers ‘lined the crest and opened fire on the Turks’. As the Turks retreated under the covering fire of their rearguards, the light horsemen called up their horses and headed off in pursuit. But when the horsemen came over a low sand hill, the Turks opened fire from new positions. As ‘we raced along the side of the hill to get under cover’, Jackson was hit, the bullet grazing his right temple. ‘Just like a kick from a horse,’ he wrote. Pulling on the reins in shock, he fell to the sand with his horse across his legs, both man and beast pinned to the slope. Blinded by the blood and sand, Jackson lay helpless as more shots whistled by. After about fifteen minutes he was able to move aside and allow his horse to roll down the hill before staggering away. Next day, Jackson was back in action.³⁶

Supply carts at Katia oasis on 11 August 1916. Arthur Reynolds collection.

At 3 p.m. the 8th Light Horse moved out, following the ‘thousands of foot tracks in the soft sand’ of the retreating Turks, and was in touch with them all night. Early the next morning, the regiment drew rations for man and horse—about ten double handfuls of barley for the horse and six biscuits and a tin of bully beef for the man plus some section rations. Only one bottle of fresh water was allocated per man. To water the horses, one man drew the water from the well while another carried the buckets to the horses.³⁷

The 8th Light Horse was soon in contact and ‘the firing was pretty brisk’. Verner Knuckey was behind the top of a sand hill but was being fired on from the flank. The first thing he knew there was ‘a vicious “zip” and sand rose about two feet to my right’. When the second shot hit the same distance to his left, Knuckey knew it was time to move and sure enough the third bullet hit the ground where he had been lying. His squadron retired soon thereafter, the light horsemen suffering terribly in the heat. ‘The only shade was what the horse threw,’ Knuckey wrote. In the middle of the day, each man would try to sleep under their horse, which would not move an inch.³⁸ That day, Arthur Hogan wrote home to his mother about his ‘first fight with Johnny the Turk’: ‘I was fighting for 36 hours with the bullets flying around me the whole time. ‘I was expecting to get hit every minute but Johnny wasn’t as lucky as me & he couldn’t shoot straight.’³⁹

A well in the desert. Fred Horsley collection. Courtesy of Cliff Horsley.

Three light horsemen asleep in the shade of their horses. George Francis collection.

General Chauvel knew his mounted brigades were at the end of their tether but he was desperate to defeat the Turkish force before it could withdraw. He ordered a general attack on Bir el Abd for 9 August. The objective was to get behind the town and cut off any remaining Turks, but the enemy force was well entrenched, with strong redoubts that extended 24 kilometres inland from the coast. Some 6000 men were defending the position and they were well supported by artillery. During the night of 8–9 August, the 1st and 2nd Brigades moved north, with the 3rd Brigade and the New Zealanders bearing south. Chauvel, who had only about 3000 men, deployed the 1st Brigade on the left flank, the 2nd to its right, then the New Zealand Mounted Rifles and 3rd Brigades.

The 8th Light Horse attacked first followed by the 9th but, as Verner Knuckey noted, ‘it proved impossible to turn the enemy’s left’, despite support from seven machine guns and the Inverness battery. ‘The feeling was glorious, bullets hissing around us in open formation galloping forward,’ he wrote. One horse was shot in the front leg yet kept going with the mob, ‘screaming like a human being’ until ‘one of the men led the horse away and shot him’. The regiment dismounted and crossed the ground under machine-gun fire through a hail of lead. ‘One could almost feel them going past,’ Knuckey wrote.⁴⁰

‘The Turks opened the show by putting a couple of shells right amongst our horses before we dismounted for action,’ Fred Tomlins wrote, ‘but got none of us.’ The 1st Light Horse mounts were moved behind a steep sand hill for safety while the light horsemen took up positions on the hill above. ‘The Turkish infantry welcomed us with a burst of rifle fire from the ridge opposite and the fun commenced,’ Tomlins wrote.⁴¹

After the Ayrshire battery opened up, ‘they then gave us what oh!’ Bert Billings wrote. The Turkish artillery got onto the four 13-pounder guns, which were out in the open. At 12.35 p.m. a shell hit the led horses, killing four men and wounding about fifteen others. Many horses were also killed.⁴² The Turkish artillery fire took a terrific toll. ‘It was a pitiful sight to see the horses, the shells were landing right in amongst them,’ Robert Farnes wrote.⁴³ Yet, as Bill Peterson observed, ‘the four guns of the RHA kept on barking . . . the noise was ear splitting’.⁴⁴ Fred Tomlins, who was working with the battery as a signaller, ‘saw some of the finest artillery shooting I have ever seen wiping out a camel train and cutting up Turkish troops advancing across an open stretch of country to reinforce their men’.⁴⁵

The 1st Brigade leaving Etmaler for the attack on Bir el Abd, 8 August 1916. George Francis collection.

Soon after noon the Turks opened up with two 6-inch howitzers on the RHA battery. Low on ammunition, the battery soon retired. The Turks then fired on the horses and men. ‘It was concentrated hell for a while and was the hottest corner I have ever been in,’ Jim Greatorex wrote.⁴⁶ The Ayrshire battery fired from 7.15 a.m. to 2 p.m. when the guns were ordered back, but it was rendered immobile by the loss of horses. Reserves from 2nd and 3rd Light Horse were sent to the extreme left to hold back the Turks and provide horses to enable the artillery to escape.⁴⁷

At 2.15 p.m. the men of Colonel Bourne’s 2nd Light Horse had mounted and gone out to the left flank. ‘Jacko opened up with everything,’ Bill Peterson wrote, ‘horses going down like nine pins . . . bleeding and limping some were lying and struggling where they were struck down, numbers of them killed and some literally blown to pieces’.⁴⁸ The farrier quartermaster sergeant had perhaps the most difficult role of all: shooting the wounded horses.

At 3 p.m. the machine guns moved up in support to fire over the heads of the light horsemen, but this attracted shellfire from all around. ‘The next hour was agony for us,’ Verner Knuckey wrote. Five Echuca boys copped it and only two survived to be invalided home. Knuckey’s tent mate and great friend, Dick Chambers, was one of those killed, along with twelve horses. ‘Poor brutes,’ Knuckey wrote. ‘There are no half measures about shrapnel pellets.’⁴⁹ ‘Most of the casualties were from shrapnel,’ Fred Tomlins added. ‘Our horses suffered badly.’ Fortunately, many of the Turkish howitzer shells sank well into the sand before exploding. Tomlins wrote that ‘they made big holes and knocked scores of men down from the shock but hit no one . . . my body was paralysed at times from the explosions’.⁵⁰

The heat was merciless, the temperature 44 degrees Celsius in the shade, ‘which does not exist’.⁵¹ ‘If ever the sun burnt it did that day,’ Knuckey wrote. ‘The hot sand scorched our skin.’ Wounded men would crawl off for help. ‘In several cases I saw them crawling on one hand and the other arm practically blown off, blood was everywhere and at last we knew what war meant.’⁵² Serving with the 3rd Light Horse Field Ambulance, Stan Parkes helped treat 50 wounded men, some terribly mutilated. Five of them soon died of wounds while the others were evacuated on camels. ‘It has been a very hard day for our men and they have had a severe check, and badly knocked about,’ Parkes wrote.⁵³ During the day, Lance Sergeant John Flockhart, who was attached to the 8th Light Horse, brought in seven severely wounded men from the firing line on horseback while under fire. He was recommended for the Victoria Cross but awarded a Military Medal. Flockhart had done similar work during the fighting at Bir Nagid two days earlier.

When the Turkish infantry advanced, the RHA battery was ordered to use rapid fire but only had twenty rounds left and had to hold onto them. At 3.45 p.m. the 2nd Light Horse retired in sections through ‘a tornado of shells and bullets’. By 5 p.m. the whole column was heading back to Hod ed Debabis, 7 kilometres west of Bir el Abd. The horses drank their fill despite the water being ‘particularly vile’ and at 8.30 p.m. the 2nd Light Horse was back at Oghratina. ‘Jacko made the pace exceptionally hot to make up for his smashing defeat at Romani,’ Bill Peterson wrote.⁵⁴ Harry Maddrell noted how it was ‘all open fighting . . . only cover was what nature provided and I can tell you the Turks didn’t forget to use their artillery’.⁵⁵

Maurie Pearce wrote that ‘it was a bad day for us, one of our best tent pals poor little Nobbs killed . . . “Nobby” died wonderfully game, he was hit in the side by a piece of shell and also had his arm badly gashed.’ He died in the sand cart on the way back to Romani. ‘Before he died he merely remarked that it was the fortune of war,’ Pearce wrote. ‘He was only 21.’⁵⁶

With considerable Turkish reinforcements moving up and artillery ammunition low, Chauvel’s men pulled out. When the 1st Light Horse retired at 4 p.m., Harry Bostock was one of the last to go. ‘Laid in a little hole all day in the burning sun with bullets flying round,’ he wrote. ‘I had a most strenuous time. No rations or water all day.’⁵⁷

By late afternoon the light horsemen were ‘nearly mad for water’. As darkness fell, Lieutenant William McGrath pulled his 8th Light Horse troopers out, covered by the 10th Light Horse, which held back a Turkish counterattack. Most of the men and horses had gone for more than 24 hours without water.⁵⁸ Henry Langtip watched the wounded come back to Romani ‘on sand carts and camels’. ‘It must be terrible to be out in the desert for days,’ he wrote.⁵⁹Trooper Gordon McCook knew it. Three days later they found him still out there on the battlefield, shot through both legs and unable to move, barely alive. The Turks had found him first, made him comfortable and left him a full water bottle. That was only half the story. Ron Ross said that all McCook’s money and clothes had been stolen.⁶⁰ McCook would die of his wounds eleven days later.

The battle of Romani was as much a triumph for the horses as the men. ‘Until Romani our horses had never been really tested,’ Don Cross wrote. ‘Now they certainly were—ploughing through sand in the middle of an Egyptian summer with an average of [125 kilograms] on their backs, they went for 56 hours without water . . . on the last day they were so weary that at each brief halt they would lie down and stretch out, until the time came to move again.’⁶¹ ‘The fights at Bir el Abd and Bir Bayud spelt the end of the pursuit,’ Major Carl Mühlmann wrote. ‘We could not consider attempting a new attack. But the worse was that our unsuccessful attacks had clearly revealed to the enemy our weakness.’⁶²

Water troughs set up at a desert hod. Arthur Reynolds collection.

A church service at Romani in the shadow of one of the sand ridges. William and Francis Woods collection. Courtesy of Elizabeth Woods.

A dozen light horse officers who had been wounded at Romani recuperating at No. 3 Australian General Hospital in Cairo. Hugh Poate collection.

Bronco the circus rider, now serving with the Imperial Camel Corps but still performing. A well-handled camel could endure five days without water and carry considerably more weight than a horse. Joseph Bradshaw collection.