THE GREAT WARTHE GREAT WAR||MIDDLE EAST CAMPAIGN MIDDLE EAST CAMPAIGN THE GREAT WAR|MIDDLE EAST CAMPAIGN
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X
ABOVE
A Norfolk desert
camp of the sort
that prompted
one officer to
describe his living
conditions as
‘nothing but sand!
Sand! Sand!’.RIGHT
An artist’s version
of the Norfolk
territorials’
disastrous attack
at Gaza on
April 19, 1917,
showing the tank
‘Nutty’ leading
the way into the
Turkish redoubt,
that was the
5th Battalion’s
objective.X
words the battalion is wiped out
and worse than at Suvla [Gallipoli].”
The ‘battalion’ was the 5th Norfolks,
a unit famed for its associations with
the King’s Sandringham estate, but,
as Purdy was soon to discover, their
losses – appalling though they were- were surpassed by those suffered by
their sister unit, the 4th Norfolks.
The final reckoning would show
that the two territorial battalions
had sustained a staggering 1,140
casualties, amounting to around 75%
of their combined strength, making it
far and away the regiment’s blackest
day of the Great War.
Theirs was a tragedy comparable
with that made by myriad ‘Pals’
battalions – comprising men who had
enlisted together – on the first day of
the battle of the Somme in 1916. Just
as those men of Kitchener’s Army,
they had marched, full of hope and
optimism, like lambs to the slaughter.
But whereas the sacrifices made
in Picardy and Flanders have come
to be enshrined in the nation’s
collective remembrance, the fearful
losses suffered on a dust-blown
Palestinian battlefield in a sideshow
theatre of war are all but forgotten.
The cruel irony is that Gaza was abattle fought to assuage the crushing
disappointment of costly failure on
the Western Front.In Need Of Good News
David Lloyd George, Britain’s newly
installed prime minister, had set
the ball rolling. Desperate for a
morale-boosting victory to lift the
nation’s spirits, he looked beyond the
entrenched deadlock in France to
the possibilities presented by the
Middle East and Egypt in particular,
where an expanded foce of British,
Indian and Anzac soldiers that
formed the Egyptian Expeditionary