03 | Anzac Massacre | The story of Surafend

In the final episode of Anzac Massacre, host William Ray delves into the unanswered questions surrounding the killings at Surafend, in Southern Palestine by the Anzac Mounted Division in December 1918. What motivated this brutal act?

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  Hello and welcome to Rewind. I'm Hilary Harper and yes, I'm moonlighting from my regular gig hosting weekday afternoons on Radio National to bring you the final episode of the series Anzac Massacre. Today, host William Ray examines the background to the events at Surafend in southern Palestine in December 1918.

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  Kala, called William Ray Tenney, welcome to Black Sheep. This is the third and final episode in our three-part series on the Surafend massacre, where men of the Anzac Mounted Division murdered upwards of 40 Arabic men in southern Palestine.

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  In our previous episode, we've talked about the story of the division in the Middle East. We've looked at how the massacre played out. Now, we're delving into the questions surrounding this massacre. Who carried it out? And why?

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  As we've said previously, we don't know exactly which troops carried out the massacre. Military historian Terry Kinlock says it could have been veterans who'd built up resentments over the long years of warfare. But it could equally have been hot-headed newcomers, maybe friends of Leslie Lowry, who himself had only just arrived in Palestine a few months earlier. But Defence Force historian John Crawford thinks it's most likely the raid was carried out by veterans.

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  I just look at the organisation and the level of violence and I'm beginning to think, these are hardened soldiers. But I just look at what happened, the planning, the execution of what went on, and I think these are people that knew what they were about in terms of planning an little operation. In this case, a mass murder, and conducting it.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  So, working with the assumption that it was the veterans, what might have been their motivation? The explanation given by at least one actual participant in the raid is that they were trying to find Lesley Lowry's killer.

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  Here's how that anonymous New Zealand soldier puts it in his account, which was published in Ted Andrews' book, Kiwi Trooper.

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  "The headman was to be called upon to deliver up the murderer. If he did not, then all inhabitants would be extracted. Women and children let loose and all men soundly thrashed. This duly began, but, in the event, the men resisted fiercely with a variety of weapons, and a general melee ensued, in which forty were killed and the village fired."

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  But, as Terry Kinlock points out, this explanation doesn't make much sense.

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  As I said before, I do not believe that Trooper Lowry's killer was in Surafend. He would be still running, he would be miles away. He certainly wouldn't have gone to the nearest village and hid and hoped to not get found.

• 3:57Speaker 05

  Just biggest belief. Some men say that all that was intended was to give the Arabs a beating, and that they only got killed because they fought back. I think that's pretty unlikely. You don't go into a village with clubs and bayonets with the intention of administering a beating.

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  According to some accounts, the men were told to leave their rifles and pistols behind, so they wouldn't accidentally shoot each other in the dark.

• 4:28Speaker 05

  I think they planned to go in there and kill as many Arab men as they could get their hands on. If they'd thought about it, I don't think they would have had any expectation of finding Lowry's killer. Nobody saw him. There were no witnesses. Even if he was standing right in front of them, how would they know it was him?

• 4:46Speaker 05

  He wouldn't have had the gun in his hand.

• 4:49Speaker 05

  If they had found him, that would have been a bonus. But I don't think that's why they did it.

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  So why did they do it? Well, here's how Lieutenant Colonel Guy Powells of the Canterbury Regiment answered that question in his memoir, which was published in 1922, just four years after the actual event.

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  For a very long time, there had been a feeling of bitterness throughout the forces on account of the many acts of the natives. At Rafa, some natives attacked two of our men, severely wounded one and killing the other, and also stealing his horse. Subsequently, the dead on the Rafa battlefield were dug up and stripped. This happened again after the action at Ayankara, which took place close by Surafend, and there is not the slightest doubt that these villagers were responsible.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  It's hard to know quite what to make of these accusations. And it's not just Lieutenant Colonel Powells, by the way. Similar complaints crop up in a whole bunch of accounts of the Middle East campaign. You might remember we quoted Ted Andrews talking about it last episode. I guess the first thing to say is that mostly, these accusations are uncorroborated, especially the claims of Anzac soldiers actually being murdered. No historian I've read or spoken to found evidence of any trooper, aside from Leslie Lowry, being killed. However, several historians, including Terry Kynlock, think the complaints about grave robbing and theft are more credible.

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  And they don't start in Surafend, they go all the way back to the start of the Sinai Campaign in 1916.

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  This is the most controversial part of the whole story, is what were the Bedouin doing to justify what was eventually being done to them?

• 6:43Speaker 05

  I lived in the Sinai for 18 months. It's empty, there's just nothing there. There's nothing grows, apart from few date palms, there's very little water. So the Bedouin, they were starving all the time. To them, anything that they've come across in the desert that's not tied down, that they can use, they will use it, they will take it. They don't consider it to be grave robbing or stealing things from the enemy, be it the Allies or the Turks. It's just a resource that's in the desert, and they need anything they can get. When they robbed a grave to get a soldier's boots or his clothes, it was to get boots and clothes because they were cold.

• 7:27Speaker 05

  Didn't bother them, they were digging up a dead anzac to do it.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Also, we should say the anzacs did a fair bit of looting themselves. Here's how Australian trooper Ted O'Brien put it in his interview with an oral historian in 1988.

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  It's shocking, that's what men will do. You know, I could tell you something, you know, I could tell you anything about that, but when we got ambushed and there was, you know, that had a scrap and everything, and those fellows, there was one bloke, standing up, you know, dying on his feet. And we used to go through the, you know, we used to get coins and things like that, we'd go and rob them, dead sort of business, you know. And I used me deck knife and everything like that, and I would pull his belt off like that, and I let him, he left his guts to come out, you know, and never, he was gone. As far as I was concerned. Yeah, well, he was standing up, wasn't he? Yeah.

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  Again, the quality of this audio isn't great. If you couldn't make it out, Edward O'Brien was talking about looting a Turkish soldier while he was still alive, dying on his feet, as he put it there. Later in that same interview, he mentions how the anzacs would sometimes use Turkish corpses as target practice. And I'm not trying to suggest Edward was an especially evil person for doing this, and I'm not trying to say it was okay either. It's just to point out that the Bedouins weren't alone in looting and desecrating the dead.

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  But what seems to have really annoyed the Anzacs wasn't so much just having their stuff stolen or their dead looted, it was how their superiors in British Command consistently ignored their complaints about this.

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  Writing his history of the Mounted Rifle Division in 1920, which is just two years after the massacre, Lieutenant Arthur Moore of the Auckland Regiment put it like this:

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  Although the action of the men in thus dealing drastically with affairs themselves at Surafen is morally inexcusable, it cannot be too strongly stressed that the blame for the occurrence of this regrettable incident lay in the first instance upon the British authorities.

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  Arthur Moore says it wasn't just the murder of Leslie Lowry, which was the final straw for the Anzacs.

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  It was that their British commanders forced them to lift their cordon around Surafen after the murder, potentially letting Lowry's killer escape.

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  For Lieutenant Moore and other Anzacs, this was part of a pattern where British High Command refused to respond to complaints about Arabs or Bedouins from Anzac troopers, but at the same time would come down hard on any soldier accused of committing an offence against local people.

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  Here's how Lieutenant Colonel Guy Powells put it in his memoir.

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  Claims for damage alleged to have been done by our men were always supported, and the men had to pay up. This began as far back as, oh, Sinai, where regiments were made to pay for damage alleged to have been done to the date palms there. Later, in Palestine, our troops suffered very much from the thieving propensities of the Arab. Here again, if any damage was done to crops and stock of a native, the claim was upheld.

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  But no redress was ever obtained against a native for theft.

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  So, why were the higher-ups acting this way? Well, the thing is, securing the alliance of indigenous Arabic and Bedouin populations was a critical part of the British strategy to defeat the Ottoman Empire. And in that context, I think you can understand this sort of softly-softly approach. Why stir up trouble with the people you were trying to get on your side? It's easier to just ignore the complaints from your troops and compensate the locals, even when you're not really sure which claims are accurate. But I think you can also understand how frustrating this apparent double standard would be for your average Anzac soldier, and how that frustration might build an intensity over two years of warfare.

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  Here is Australian journalist and author Paul Daley, whose book Beersheba looks at the Anzacs in the Middle East from the Aussie perspective.

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  The British needed to garner the support of the Arabs of the Medina to beat the Ottomans. But, you know, on a micro level, you know, there was one line I just read last night from one trooper in Tasmania, you know, whose voice recording I came across in the war memorial. He was talking about the contempt for the Arabs. He says, you know, "We hated them and we would shoot them on sight."

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  The veteran Paul Daley is talking about here is Edward O'Brien. We've already played some clips of him talking about the massacre throughout these episodes.

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  As we've said, Edward was a very old man when he was interviewed about these events by an oral historian, so his memory might be a bit shaky.

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  But here he is telling his story of what he and his fellows did, and why.

• 13:36Speaker 07

  They were wicked, you know. The Bedouins, you see, you didn't know whether they were for you or not. They finished up. They were the local natives, were they? Yeah, and they had to be treated as enemies to finish up, you know, and anyone, you know, you could shoot them on sight. Yeah. Were any Tasmanians involved in that little incident? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, God, it was hell, I was there. Yeah. But the whole squadron was involved, and the officers as well, or not? Oh, no. Oh, no, no, I think it'd be only the sergeants, the sergeants there. I can't think how it was organised, everything like that, it just happened. It was a wrong thing. What did you actually do? Did you go and wreck the village, or?

• 14:14Speaker 07

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah, oh, no, it didn't matter, there was cows, and ducks, and geese, and kids, but men, they all, you know, went for the men, they were baiting it, they got it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I can't think. But the women, they moved out, I suppose, I mean? Yeah, no, all that, they tricked out, they left the village the way they went. It was a real bad thing.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Again, apologies for the quality of this audio. If you had a hard time following it, I've included a link to the full transcript of this interview on our webpage. Clearly, you can hear some conflict in this recording. On one hand, the Bedouins were wicked, and what the Anzacs did was in some way justified. But on the other hand, Edward acknowledges the massacre was a terrible thing. One thing we do know is that this negative attitude towards Arabic people was widespread among the Anzac Mounted Division. And Defence Force historian John Crawford thinks many would have held these views long before they ever set foot in the Middle East.

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  New Zealand Defence Force historian John Crawford thinks this pre-existing resentment was a key factor in the massacre.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  You describe it as a massacre, a massacre always strikes me as rather an indiscriminate thing. The killings at Sarafim were quite deliberate. I would think it more of a mass murder.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  This is a very calculated act. What led to this was a history of the New Zealanders and the Australians, and other British troops too, considering that the British military authorities were not taking crimes committed by Bedouins seriously enough because they were concerned about keeping the Bedouin on side or at least keeping them neutral.

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  There's a long history of anger about this and the murder of Lowry really set it off.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  And I think, you say it's half the end of the war, but here they are. They've finished fighting, they're sitting in a camp, they don't expect one of their comrades killed. And that's another factor, I think. They're all keen to go home and then this happens. And they're absolutely furious.

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  So, there was a lot of obvious resentment over these issues of theft and a supposed double standard from British higher-ups.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  But when you read the accounts from the mounted rifles, it's obvious there was also an element of racial resentment.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  You don't want to generalize about this because I've been quite surprised at the number of people who really liked interacting with Egyptians, liked the whole exotic nature of life in Cairo and took a rather, you know, intelligent view of the whole position they were in.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  But then you get a lot of people who are very disparaging about Egyptian civilians. They call them all sorts of names. One of the least offensive is "town rats."

• 17:41Speaker 00

  There are plenty of accounts of Anzacs getting into fights with locals almost from the moment they arrive in Egypt. At the high end, there was the so-called Battle of Wazir on Good Friday, 1915, when up to 2,500 Anzac soldiers brawled with locals in a red light district of Cairo.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  At the low end, there are accounts of Anzacs handing out beatings to Arabic people who annoyed them, even beggars in the street.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  If you're prepared to beat a beggar in the streets of Cairo who annoys you, well, on the battlefield, you might be prepared to do more than that. Of course, the Kiwis weren't unique in this in any way. The Australians were at least as bad. And the way the Egyptian police behaved towards people, beating people in the streets for some misdemeanour, absolutely standard. So it's quite a violent place.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  But you think that the New Zealanders and Australians come to the Middle East with these attitudes sort of fully formed?

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Definitely. They regard themselves as being very superior Anglo-Saxons and look down, this is the majority of people, look down on Egyptians, definitely.

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  And while British High Command may have been trying to form an alliance with the various Arabic groups during the war, they also actively encouraged this sort of racism. When the Anzacs first arrived in Egypt, they were greeted with a number of documents and pamphlets, including a general order warning against interacting with local Egyptians.

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  "The natives in Egypt belong to races lower in the human scale. The slightest familiarity with them will breed contempt, which is certain to have far-reaching and harmful consequences."

• 19:44Speaker 00

  But as Australian author Paul Daley says, many men didn't need encouragement to look down on Arabs.

• 19:52Speaker 09

  Air quotes here, "They were the natives." Now, back home, for a lot of these bush guys who joined the Light Horse, the natives were Aboriginal people who lived on the edges of town, near where family properties would have been. And a lot of these guys would have grown up with living memory or family memory of massacres in and around rural properties from which Aboriginal people were dispossessed.

• 20:24Speaker 09

  So there was a parallel, I believe, between the way they viewed on a human scale the Bedouin and the town Arabs and the Aboriginal people they'd experienced back home.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  Al-Tiara has its own history of colonial violence, of course, but by 1914, the New Zealand wars had been over for about 40 years, and Pa Ke Ha soldiers often wrote very positively about the Maori troops they served with. In fact, that general order the Anzacs received on arrival in Egypt explicitly warned Pa Ke Ha troops not to let their feelings for Maori influence their views of Arabs.

• 21:07Speaker 10

  The natives in Egypt have nothing in common with the Maoris. They belong to races lower in the human scale and cannot be treated in the same way.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  This is a well-known trope.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  You dehumanise your enemy, makes it easier to do very bad things to them.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  And bad things didn't just happen at Surafen. John Crawford has found evidence of another potentially criminal incident involving another Anzac unit fighting against a Bedouin tribe known as the Sanusi in 1915.

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  John says that out of 10 Anzac accounts of this battle, three include descriptions of war crimes.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  And I was really quite taken aback by that, William, because any set of first-hand accounts, you'll find the odd mention of something which might well constitute a war crime. But to get three out of 10, that struck me as quite unusual and quite graphic.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Talked about killing prisoners. In one case, an elderly woman being shot by a New Zealand soldier in this wadi. And the final one was a diary entry about shooting or bayneting all the wounded Arabs in the wadi they could find. And all the animals, because one of the things about the Suniti was they were a nomadic group, so very dependent on their camels and other livestock. So one of the standard practices was to kill the livestock.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  In the days, months and years that followed the Surafend massacre, some members of the Anzac Mounted Division expressed regret or disgust for the crimes some of their comrades committed.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  But that feeling wasn't universal.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  You remember I said there was a poem about Surafend? It was published in the RSA Review, that's the official magazine for war veterans in New Zealand.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  The poem's credited to an unnamed soldier who took part in the massacre. I've got it in front of me now, I'm going to read you an extract.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  'Twas a never-to-be-forgotten night. The village was soon in flames. The wallads knocked when sighted, but protected were the dames. Although we are fighting Anzacs, our honour we uphold, and treat the women fairly, as did our ancestors of old. As morning dawned, we stood and watched that devastated scene, where but a single yesterday had flourished Surafend. We turned away in silence, but feeling justified, that for our murdered comrade, we would gladly have died.'

• 24:26Speaker 00

  That poem comes from the August 1939 edition of RSA Review. Whoever wrote it had 20 years to think and reflect, and was still proud of what he did.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  And having read a bunch of different veterans' accounts, that doesn't seem to be an unusual perspective. In fact, the thing former members of the division most often get upset about isn't the massacre. It isn't even the killing of Leslie Lowry. It's that General Allenby criticised them afterwards, said he wasn't proud of them, called them murderers and cowards, according to some.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  For modern New Zealanders and Australians, that label is hard to square with our story of the Anzacs. And we should be very clear that Surfarin is just one chapter in that much wider narrative. There were hundreds of thousands of Anzacs who served with commitment and courage and displayed remarkable empathy to enemies and allies alike. Tens of thousands of them were killed. And those who survived suffered physical and emotional damage which lasted the rest of their lives.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  So you don't want to tar all these thousands of men with that brush.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Surfarin, you look at the particular circumstances, and it's terrible, that's all you can say. It's a blot on New Zealand's history. And a whole lot of things came together to lead to what happened at Surfarin. And that's not to excuse it or anything. That's just to say it's quite a complex situation and a unique one, thankfully, as far as the New Zealanders are concerned. Certainly not unique in the history of warfare, or of the first world war, that matter, but unique for New Zealand.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  But as Paul Daley says, it's still important to remember this darker part of the Anzac story.

• 26:39Speaker 09

  I think it's really important that we look at incidents like this that have happened in the past, because it goes to the way we, you know, countries that is, conduct themselves in war and how they deal with wrongdoing. There's an enormous kind of retrospective at the moment going on in Australia about how some of its troops conducted themselves in the Middle East in the most recent wars there, in Afghanistan. You know, these things don't happen in historical isolation. You know, I think it's really important to stop and consider the meaning of them.

• 27:21Speaker 09

  And to look at questions of justice surrounding them. And I don't think there was any justice in relation to the dead at Surafend.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening, and special thanks to my guests in this series, Terry Kinlock, Paul Daley, and John Crawford. Terry's book is Devils on Horses, Paul's book is Beersheba, and both contain a lot more information about the Anzac Mounted Division in the Middle East. Black Sheep is written and presented by me, William Ray. Our sound engineers are William Saunders and Mark Chesterman. Our production coordinator is Brianna Urtich, and the executive producer is Tim Watkin. Follow and listen to Black Sheep on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcasting app so that you don't miss an episode. And you can always see or read more about this story on our webpage, rnz.co.nz/blacksheep. Ma te wa.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  And thanks to William Ray and RNZ's Black Sheep podcast for this series. I'm Hilary Harper. You can catch more great history here at ABC Rewind, and on my show, History Showcase, Monday afternoons at 2pm, exclusively on Radio National. Catch you then.

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