The Battle of Megiddo, fought between September 19 and October 31, 1918, stands as one of the most tactically complete victories in the history of modern warfare. In less than six weeks, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force under General Sir Edmund Allenby destroyed three Ottoman armies, captured 75,000 prisoners and 360 guns, and advanced 350 miles. The operation is also remarkable for being the last major campaign in history in which cavalry played the decisive offensive role — not as a supporting arm, but as the instrument of exploitation and pursuit that converted breakthrough into annihilation.

The operation's name derives from the ancient plain of Megiddo in northern Palestine, site of more battles across more millennia than any comparably sized piece of ground on earth. Allenby's choice of the name carried deliberate historical resonance. The substance of the victory deserved it.

The Strategic Situation, September 1918

By late 1918, the Ottoman Empire was exhausted. Three years of war against British, Commonwealth, and Arab forces in Sinai, Palestine, and Mesopotamia had consumed divisions, animals, ammunition, and, most critically, experienced officers. The Yildirim Army Group, commanded by the German General Otto Liman von Sanders, held a defensive line running roughly from the Mediterranean coast near Jaffa eastward through the hills of Judea to the Jordan River. It comprised three armies — the Seventh, Eighth, and Fourth — totaling approximately 36,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry, with 402 guns.

Allenby's force numbered roughly 57,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry, and 540 guns. The numerical advantage was real but not overwhelming. What Allenby possessed in greater measure was operational freedom, superiority in aircraft, and a deception plan of considerable sophistication.

The deception was directed by Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen and built on a precedent Meinertzhagen himself had established at the Third Battle of Gaza in 1917. The British sought to convince the Ottomans that the main effort would fall on the eastern flank, toward the Jordan Valley and Amman, while the actual assault was prepared in the coastal plain. Visible preparations were made in the east: camps were constructed, dummy horses were erected, water pipelines were ostentatiously extended. In the west, the real concentration was conducted under strict discipline — troops moved only at night, aircraft maintained air superiority over the coastal sector to deny Ottoman reconnaissance, and radio traffic discipline was rigidly enforced.

The Breakthrough, September 19

The assault opened at 4:30 a.m. on September 19, 1918, with a brief but intense artillery bombardment. The infantry of the XXI Corps, attacking along the coastal plain, achieved a clean breakthrough of the Ottoman Eighth Army's line within two hours. The breach was eight miles wide and, critically, extended all the way through the Ottoman defensive system — there was no second position to check the advance.

The Desert Mounted Corps, comprising the Australian Mounted Division, the 4th and 5th Cavalry Divisions, and the Indian 5th Cavalry Division, passed through the gap beginning at 7:00 a.m. Rather than turning east to roll up the Ottoman line — the conventional exploitation approach — Allenby directed the mounted forces to ride north and then east, curling behind the entire Ottoman Seventh and Eighth Armies and cutting their lines of retreat through the passes of the Carmel range at Megiddo, Musmus, and Jenin.

The riding was extraordinary. The 4th Cavalry Division covered 70 miles in 34 hours. Jenin fell on the evening of September 20. The passes were blocked. The Ottoman Seventh and Eighth Armies, attempting to retreat northward, found their routes sealed.

The Royal Air Force and the Wadi Fara

As the Ottoman columns streamed northward and found the passes blocked, they were forced to concentrate on the road through the Wadi Fara. What followed was, to that point in history, the most complete destruction of a military column by airpower.

RAF squadrons — Bristol Fighters and SE.5as — attacked continuously for the better part of a day. The road was narrow, the column was dense, and there was no cover. Bombs and machine-gun fire destroyed the lead vehicles, blocking the road, and the following elements piled up behind them. By the time the air attacks concluded, the road through the Wadi Fara was blocked for miles by destroyed vehicles, dead horses, abandoned guns, and the wreckage of what had been a functioning army.

"The road was choked with guns, transport wagons, and the bodies of men and horses. It was not a defeat. It was the disintegration of an army." > — Official British account, cited in Cyril Falls, Armageddon: 1918 (1964)

The Wadi Fara action demonstrated, for the first time in the war, what airpower could accomplish against a concentrated ground force in the open — a lesson that would not be fully institutionalized until the next war, but that was not lost on the officers who planned and observed it.

The Pursuit to Damascus

The mounted pursuit continued northward. Damascus fell on October 1. Aleppo, 200 miles further north, fell on October 26, five days before the Armistice with the Ottoman Empire took effect on October 31, 1918.

In the course of the campaign, the Yildirim Army Group ceased to exist as a functioning force. The Seventh and Eighth Armies were essentially annihilated in the initial encirclement. The Fourth Army, attempting to withdraw east of the Jordan, was harried by Arab irregular forces and RAF aircraft and arrived at Damascus in fragments. Liman von Sanders himself barely escaped capture.

Total Ottoman losses in the campaign were approximately 75,000 prisoners, 360 guns, and an uncounted but very large number of dead and deserters. British and Commonwealth casualties in the breakthrough battle and subsequent pursuit totaled approximately 5,666, of whom 782 were killed.

The Operational Template

Military historians have extensively analyzed Megiddo as a model of what Basil Liddell Hart later called the "indirect approach." The combination of deception to fix the enemy reserve, a narrow breakthrough using infantry and artillery, immediate exploitation by mobile forces riding for depth rather than flanks, and air interdiction of retreat routes anticipates in its essentials the operational method of armored warfare as practiced twenty years later.

Allenby's campaign is studied at staff colleges not because cavalry remains relevant — it does not — but because the principles he applied remain applicable whenever a force possesses the combination of surprise, mobility, and air superiority required to convert a tactical breach into an operational collapse. The technology changes. The logic does not.

Sources

Cyril Falls, *Armageddon: 1918* (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964) remains the most thorough operational account of the campaign. Matthew Hughes, *Allenby and British Strategy in the Middle East, 1917–1919* (Frank Cass, 1999) provides the strategic context. The official British history, Archibald Wavell, *The Palestine Campaigns* (Constable, 1928), was written by an officer who served in the campaign and remains an essential primary source.