The Battle of Beersheba (1917)

On 31 October 1917 Ottoman Beersheba fell to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force of the British army

The story

On 31 October 1917 Ottoman Beersheba fell to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force of the British army, under the command of General Edmund Allenby, as part of the third campaign for Gaza. The city, which was founded in 1900 as an administrative center for the Bedouin population of the Negev and numbered on the eve of the war about a thousand residents, held 17 wells, and it was they that made it a target: without them the army could not continue northward. At 12:15 the 60th Division and the 74th Division, of the 20th Corps under the command of Philip Chetwode, opened an attack on the western line of defense, while the Desert Mounted Corps under the command of General Harry Chauvel moved from the east. In the afternoon Chauvel ordered Brigadier General William Grant to charge with the 4th Light Horse Brigade — the 4th and 12th Regiments — straight at the city, and at 15:45 the horsemen received the order to mount. They carried neither swords nor lances, and held the bayonets of their rifles in their hands. According to the Australian War Memorial the trenches were broken through in less than an hour, 2 officers and 29 Australian soldiers were killed in the charge, 8 officers and 28 soldiers were wounded, and 38 Turkish and German officers and about 700 soldiers were taken prisoner; the Hebrew Wikipedia counts in the charge 35 killed and 39 wounded. For the battle as a whole the English Wikipedia counts 171 killed on the British side, about 1,000 killed and wounded on the Ottoman side and 1,947 prisoners, and puts the defenders of the city at 4,400 rifles, 60 machine guns and 28 field guns. Of the 17 wells two were destroyed and two more were damaged. The fall of the city opened the outflanking of the Gaza–Beersheba line, and on 6 November the Ottoman army withdrew from Gaza. The charge is considered one of the last great mounted actions in history. The fallen of the battle are buried in the British military cemetery in Beersheba.

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