Pod Insights ABC Rewind Anzac Massacre | The story of Surafend | 01 About this episode The story of the Surafend massacre of December 1918, an event described by one historian as the worst war crime ever committed by New Zealand and Australian military personnel.
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0:07 Speaker 01 Hi, Hilary Harper here from Radio National's new weekly show, History Showcase. Today I've jumped into the Good Ship Rewind to introduce a three-part series from our friends at Radio New Zealand. William Ray, host of RNZ's Black Sheep podcast, brings us the story of what's been described as the worst war crime ever committed by Australian and New Zealand soldiers, the Sura Fend massacre of December 1918. Here's William with episode one of Anzac Massacre.
0:39 Speaker 02 Kia ora ko William Ray aho, no mai nga hibi pango. Hi there, I'm William Ray. Welcome to Black Sheep.
0:52 Speaker 02 Monday, the 16th of December 1918. We're in southern Palestine, near the city of Reshon Lesail. Today, this city's part of the modern state of Israel, just south of Tel Aviv, near Ben-Gurion Airport. But in December 1918, Reshon was crammed with soldiers, including several thousand war-weary men from the Anzac Mounted Division.
1:18 Speaker 02 The First World War had ended just a few weeks earlier. The troops are celebrating Christmas in a few days' time and then looking forward to finally sailing home.
1:30 Speaker 02 But they aren't relaxing today. There's tension in the air. The division's standing at attention on the parade ground, formed up in a hollow square with a space in the middle. Their commander, British General Sir Edmund Allenby, gallops up on his black Charger.
1:50 Speaker 02 He rides to the centre of the square and raises his voice so all the troops could hear him.
2:00 Speaker 03 There was a time when I was proud of you, men of the Anzac Mounted Division.
2:07 Speaker 03 I am proud of you no longer.
2:12 Speaker 03 Today, I think you are nothing but a lot of cowards and murderers.
2:25 Speaker 02 What happened next is disputed. Some say Allenby's words were received in silence.
2:33 Speaker 02 Others say there was a muttering and murmuring among the troops. One soldier said it sounded like millions of hives of angry bees.
2:45 Speaker 02 And some say that after hearing those words from General Allenby, the Anzacs started to count.
2:55 Speaker 02 Here's how one anonymous former New Zealand trooper described it.
3:00 Speaker 04 There was a slow swelling murmur from the troops. And then, the count began. One. Two. Three. General Tater sensed the feeling of the men, and told Allenby he would soon be unable to hold his troops.
3:23 Speaker 04 Without answering Tater's salute, Allenby wheeled his horse and galloped off to the strain of: Eight. Nine. Ten. Out!
3:37 Speaker 04 We Anzacs are not men to be sat on.
3:45 Speaker 02 Whether or not General Allenby really did ride off in fear as he was counted out by the Anzacs, this story is emblematic of the fury some of those troops felt about his comments, calling them cowards and murderers. It's a far cry from what you'd expect from a commander who'd led troops through three years of a campaign which one historian's called "one of the greatest of 20th-century warfare".
4:11 Speaker 02 In the months and years that followed, General Allenby did soften his tone somewhat. He praised the Anzacs for their service.
4:21 Speaker 02 But he never forgave or forgot what some of those troops did just after the war ended. A cold-blooded massacre. At a place known as Surafend.
4:51 Speaker 05 You know, a sergeant to be killed like that, you know, and everyone had a red hat with that sort of thing. That's right. You know, they'd do things you wouldn't do normally in this... Ah. But they did, they went in there, they did.
5:05 Speaker 02 This is a recording of Edward O'Brien, an Australian veteran of the Anzac Mounted Division. He was being interviewed by an oral historian in 1988 when, for some reason, he started talking about Surafend.
5:19 Speaker 05 A New Zealand sergeant was killed, a Bedouin, and apparently there were some others there and they turned on him and they killed him. Did they? A New Zealand sergeant.
5:30 Speaker 02 It's a bit hard to follow Edward here. He was a very old man when this was being recorded and I don't know if the recording gear was state of the art even in the 80s.
5:40 Speaker 02 But his interviewer knew the story he was talking about. It goes like this.
5:51 Speaker 02 At midnight on December 9, 1918, a New Zealand soldier, Leslie Lowry, was shot and killed while chasing an unidentified thief out of his tent. By the time other troops arrived, the killer was gone. But a trail of footprints allegedly led to a nearby village. Surafend.
6:14 Speaker 05 So they got their heads together, everything like that, in New Zealand and Australia and they went out to this village and they went through it with a bayonet.
6:23 Speaker 05 Did they? Yeah.
6:26 Speaker 02 In case you didn't catch that, Edward O'Brien said they went through it with the bayonet.
6:44 Speaker 06 The Australians, the New Zealanders and the Scots go into that village.
6:52 Speaker 06 They kill every able-bodied male.
6:58 Speaker 06 They burn the village and then they go to a nearby Bedouin camp and do something pretty similar.
7:10 Speaker 02 Murder, assault, arson, looting. Under British military law, which the Anzacs were still subject to,
7:19 Speaker 02 some of those attracted the death penalty.
7:27 Speaker 07 It's the calculating nature of the killings at Surafend that really chill you.
7:33 Speaker 07 I think without any doubt at all, by far the worst war crime committed by New Zealand military personnel.
7:42 Speaker 02 Usually on Black Sheep, we tell the stories of individual people. And I'd like to be able to tell you that there was one particular person or group who carried out the killings at Surafend.
7:55 Speaker 02 Then we could go back and say, you know, "Oh yes, Sergeant Smith grew up reading sensationalist newspaper reports about the Mahdi and Sudan and became Islamophobic because of that, and his diary entries show he was a really great mate with Trooper Lowry and was devastated by his death and so on and so on."
8:12 Speaker 02 But we can't say that.
8:15 Speaker 02 Because we don't know who did it. Or even exactly what they did.
8:31 Speaker 02 The thing that really surprises me more than anything is how they kept it so quiet. It never got out. Ever. This is Terry Kinlock. He's a military historian and author of a number of books, including Devils on Horses, A History of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade, which was part of the Anzac Mounted Division. The subject of the Mounted Division first piqued Terry's interest when he was serving in the New Zealand Defence Force. These days, being a mounted rifle in the army means being mounted on some kind of military vehicle. But back in the First World War, being in the mounted rifle still meant being mounted on a horse. You didn't charge into battle like a knight on horseback, instead you fought on foot. But you used horses to move rapidly from position to position,
9:15 Speaker 02 outflanking your enemy and getting away quickly if you needed to.
9:21 Speaker 02 As Terry Kinlock said, during the First World War, Queen Alexandra's Mounted Rifles was one of several New Zealand and Australian Mounted Regiments, which were part of the Anzac Mounted Division. And it was men from that division which carried out the massacre at Surafend.
9:46 Speaker 02 To start, let's fast forward quickly through the first two years of the war. In June 1914, an archduke gets assassinated, armies mobilise and smash into each other in Europe, and then they get bogged down in trench warfare.
10:01 Speaker 02 New Zealand and Australia join the war alongside Britain, and in April 1915, the Anzacs are sent to Gallipoli to fight the Ottoman Empire.
10:17 Speaker 02 The Gallipoli Campaign, as any school kid can tell you, is a disaster. In eight months, more than 10,000 Australians and New Zealanders are killed, and many more wounded. In January 1916, the Anzacs abandon Gallipoli and retreat to Egypt to recover. Our infantry are built up to a complete infantry division, are sent to the Western Front. Finally, the mounted troops, the New Zealand Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse... Stayed in Egypt because there was no work for horsemen in the Western Front. It's just trench warfare. But somebody had to protect the canal against the Turks, who were not very far away. The canal Terry Kinlock mentioned is the Suez Canal.
10:59 Speaker 02 And just like today, the Suez was an absolutely critical shipping route. Troops from New Zealand, Australia, India, food from those same places, all went through the Suez Canal. So that had to be kept open. We were left there, that's what the Mounteds thought. They'd been left there while the infantry went off to fight the real war. They were left to languish in Egypt.
11:22 Speaker 02 But they didn't languish for long. The Ottoman Empire knew that losing the Suez Canal would be a disaster for the British. All through 1915, while the Anzacs were fighting in Gallipoli, the Ottomans had raided British positions, disrupting or blocking supply lines.
11:42 Speaker 02 So, in January of 1916, the mounted rifles rode out to confront the Turks. First in small raids and reconnaissance missions, then in force. The two-year campaign which followed was completely unlike what you typically imagine for combat in the First World War. Western Front trench warfare, very immobile, just two opposing lines of trenches, you know, 400 kilometres long. Machine guns, heavy artillery, barbed wire, poison gas, all of that. And then, completely differently to that in the Middle East, because it's effectively desert. Lots of open terrain, practically no poison gas used, barbed wire very rare, very little
12:25 Speaker 02 artillery, relatively easy for mobile troops to move. That's completely different. As a result of all this, the casualties for the Anzacs in the Sinai were far lower than on the Western Front or at Gallipoli. But fighting in the desert came with its own unique horrors. Very hot, very little water, spiders, snakes, scorpions, tarantulas, malaria, all sorts of parasites and things from the drinking water. Food was dreadful, there's nowhere to go on leave. If you're on the Western Front, you've got some leave, you go to the UK and spend your leave in London. If you've got leave in the Middle East, you went to Cairo if you're lucky. Usually not even that.
13:12 Speaker 02 I think the thing that struck me most about the campaign in the Sinai was the threat from enemy aircraft. Riding through the desert, there was just nowhere to hide from enemy fighters. Unless you stood still. If you stood stock still, and there was a German aircraft overhead, which there were, even if there was a regiment of you with horses, if you stood stock still, they often wouldn't see you. If they saw you, they would drop bombs on you. And that killed a lot of horses, actually. A lot of our horses were killed by German bombs from aircraft. But, I mean, on the whole, the Allied forces, I mean, not just the New Zealanders and Australians, they do really well in this campaign.
13:55 Speaker 02 They're just steadily pushing the Turks back. Yeah. But it's one of the great successes of 20th century warfare. And it was just a coincidence of all those things. Mobile troops, horses and camels that they could use to cover very large distances very quickly. A relatively weak enemy. The Turks weren't particularly strong and they weren't particularly aggressive.
14:23 Speaker 02 But the Anzacs and the Turks weren't alone in the desert.
14:29 Speaker 02 The Sinai was, and still is, home to a people known as the Bedouin.
14:37 Speaker 02 In accounts from Anzac soldiers, the words Arab and Bedouin are often used interchangeably. But the distinction is that while all Bedouin are Arabs, not all Arabs are Bedouin.
14:51 Speaker 02 The word Bedouin basically translates as desert dweller. They're a nomadic people who've survived for thousands of years herding animals through the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. Because there's so little to eat, they can't stay in one place. They just basically, they go from water source to water source. And there might be some date palms. When that was consumed, and they'd move, and they just wandered.
15:19 Speaker 02 To them, the war, I mean, it wasn't their war. They'd been there for thousands of years before anyone else turned up. And all of a sudden, this industrial warfare arrives right on top of them.
15:31 Speaker 02 It's completely foreign to them. During the Sinai campaign, the Anzacs were told that any Bedouin they came across in the desert were probably allied with the Turks, seeing as both were overwhelmingly Muslim. And many Bedouin did join the Turkish side. The Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V had declared a jihad against the allies, essentially demanding all Muslims join the Ottoman side of the conflict. Some Bedouin decided to ally themselves with the Turks, some decided to ally themselves with the allies, some decided just to have nothing to do with it and just hope that it goes away. And those Bedouin who allied themselves with the Turks, that's the start of what eventually became the Surafend Incident.
16:21 Speaker 02 The thing is, it wasn't always easy for the Anzacs to tell which Bedouin tribes were hostile, especially as tribes shifted allegiance as the war went on. British policy in the Sinai was to intern any Bedouin that they caught. So they assumed that any Bedouin in the desert was working for the enemy, so they captured them and put them in prisoner of war cages for the duration of the war. And as the main concern, they're just spying? Yeah.
16:53 Speaker 02 Spying was the main concern, but not the only one.
17:01 Speaker 02 Here's how New Zealand veteran Ted Andrews put it in his 1962 book, Kiwi Trooper.
17:07 Speaker 03 The troops had suffered casualties throughout the Sinai and Palestine campaigns by treachery of the Arabs, who were seldom, if ever, punished. All stores had to be guarded against looting, sentries were murdered, and the dead at Rafa were dug up and stripped of their clothes.
17:27 Speaker 02 We'll be getting more into those claims, which of them are true, and how they relate to what eventually happened at Surafend, in our next episode.
17:37 Speaker 02 For now, just know that resentment is there, bubbling away beneath the surface.
17:46 Speaker 02 Throughout 1916, the Anzacs fought their way across the Sinai Desert in a spectacularly successful campaign. They were riding through the night to outflank enemy defences, carrying out commando raids to sabotage rail tracks, scouting, spotting for artillery. It's genuinely a really impressive story, and you can read all about it in Terry's book.
18:12 Speaker 02 But as the Anzacs pushed towards Palestine, resistance strengthened.
18:20 Speaker 02 One of the major cities of the Ottoman Empire was Jerusalem. They were really reluctant to give up Jerusalem without a fight. And also, there was a railway running from Turkey all the way down into what is now Saudi Arabia. It's called the Hejaz Railway. And that was a major supply line for Turkish forces all the way down that part of the desert.
18:42 Speaker 02 So there's Jerusalem and there's the Hejaz Railway. That's probably the two most important things the Turks had to protect.
18:49 Speaker 02 As the Turks committed more troops, the Middle East campaign turned into a grinding conflict. If anything, the Palestine part of the campaign was closer to Western Front, certainly than the Sinai was. Because the forces were bigger, they started to get German artillery, started to come in, all those sorts of things started to happen.
19:15 Speaker 02 But as 1917 drew to a close, the Anzacs and other Allied forces continued to push forward.
19:24 Speaker 02 On the 7th of November, they captured Gaza. On the 8th of December, they took Jerusalem.
19:36 Speaker 02 I guess it probably varied soldier to soldier, but to what degree were people conscious of fighting in the Holy Land? And was that important to them, or not particularly?
19:48 Speaker 02 You'll see the odd reference to someone who, you know, there was one of the regimental commanders when he got to... To the border between Sinai and Palestine, got off his horse and knelt down and gave thanks for being, having the privilege of riding into the Holy Land. It's a bit of that, not, not a lot. And they didn't seem to have any particular animosity towards Muslims? No, some of them had come through the Gallipoli campaign. And there's a, a well-known sympathy between Anzacs and Turks when they were fighting on Gallipoli. There was no sense of hatred from the Anzacs towards the Turks or vice versa. There was like a shared experience.
20:30 Speaker 02 And those mounted riflemen that after Gallipoli continued to fight into the Middle East kept that. So there was much more of a sympathetic attitude between the Anzacs and the Turks than there was between the Anzacs and the Bedouins. Maybe the most extraordinary example of this difference in attitude towards Turks and Arabs came right at the end of the war. It happened in late September 1918, near a place called Ziza Station, 25 kilometres south of Oman, the modern capital of Jordan. Remember I mentioned that there was the Hijaz Railway? There was a large Turkish force way down the bottom of that railway. And as the war turned against the Ottomans, that force had to move itself out of danger,
21:14 Speaker 02 back up into Palestine where the rest of the Ottoman army was. The only way they could do that was on the Hijaz Railway.
21:21 Speaker 02 The Turkish army was retreating on foot along the railway because the trains and rail infrastructure had been destroyed by Arabic forces who'd made an alliance with the British. If you know about T E Lawrence, the famous Lawrence of Arabia, this is probably a familiar story.
21:38 Speaker 02 There was a, a force of Arabs involved in that campaign called the Hijaz Arabs. They were Bedouin, but they would consider themselves a cut above the Bedouins in Sinai and Palestine.
21:53 Speaker 02 Were close on the heels of the Turks who were withdrawing up the line of the railway. And every chance they could get to cut off a few Turks and kill them, they did. It was brutal. So there's several thousand Turks retreating up the line of the railway with thousands of Hijaz Arabs sniping around the flanks, riding in on their camels to capture a few and to drag them off and kill them.
22:23 Speaker 02 The Anzac mounted division was camped north of this retreating Turkish army near Oman when they got news of what was happening. And they send down some riders to talk to the Turks to say, surrender. You know what's going to happen to you if you don't. These Arabs will kill all of you. The Turkish commander agrees to surrender, but on one condition. He won't surrender unless the Anzacs come in and join the defence against the Hijaz Arabs. Because they think that if they surrender without the protection of the Anzacs, they'll be killed.
22:59 Speaker 02 The Ottoman Empire had occupied huge swaths of the Middle East for hundreds of years. And they weren't benign occupiers. They were brutal overlords of the Arabs and that had been going on for hundreds of years. And all of a sudden, there's an opportunity for the Arabs to get back on top. Next, the Anzacs meet with the leaders of the Hijaz Arabs, who demand that either the Anzacs join their attack on the Turks or disarm them and hand them over.
23:30 Speaker 02 The Anzacs refuse. Instead, they turn their horses back towards the Turkish camp.
23:38 Speaker 02 The Anzac Australians and New Zealanders ride down, meet up with this Turkish force and then go into the defensive line with them.
23:47 Speaker 02 As night falls, skirmishes break out along the line.
23:52 Speaker 02 The Anzacs pick up their weapons to defend the Turks.
23:59 Speaker 02 And they're fighting off the Hijaz Arabs who are our allies. They are allies. Are they actually shooting at the Hijaz Arabs? Yeah. They are? Yeah. Wow. It's a really bizarre thing. And again, it's this sympathetic attitude between the Anzacs and the Turks that comes from Gallipoli. Opposed to, as far as the Anzacs are concerned... The Hijaz Arabs will probably know better than Bedouin. The ranking Anzac officer, Lieutenant Colonel Donald Cameron, said the Turkish officers he met appeared utterly defeated, even though they outnumbered the forces attacking them.
24:38 Speaker 00 The Turkish army was terrified of the Bedouin. Several instances occurred during the day of Bedouin capturing odd Turks.
24:48 Speaker 02 Lieutenant Colonel Cameron's troops clearly felt sorry for the Turks. Here's a quote from Sergeant Darcy Longy of Queen Alexandra's regiment. Like hordes of vultures, the Arabs and Bedouins were out in force preying upon the Turks, out for murder and loot. We had always respected the Turk for his courage, endurance, and fair observation of the rules of war. But as for these desert pariahs, our so-called allies, we had nothing but blazing hatred. Eventually, the Hijaz Arabs rode off in disgust. The Anzacs disarmed the Turks and marched them back to camp.
25:26 Speaker 02 When they arrived, some were so desperate for water that they burned themselves trying to drink from the boiler of a steam engine.
25:38 Speaker 02 This skirmish at Zeezer Station was among the last battles the Anzac Mounted Division fought in the First World War. On the 30th of October 1918, the Ottoman Empire signed an armistice. Germany would sign its own peace deal two weeks later, on November 11th.
26:02 Speaker 02 The war was over.
26:06 Speaker 02 But for some of the division, that blazing hatred Sergeant Darcy Longy described was still smouldering.
26:16 Speaker 02 And on the 9th of December 10th, with the murder of Leslie Lowry, it would flare up to engulf the village of Syraphant.
26:30 Speaker 06 The response of the men is to get command to go to the village to cordon around it and ask for the killer to be surrendered.
26:43 Speaker 02 The Anzac take all the women and children out of the village and then they go into the village and they beat at least forty Arab males to death.
26:57 Speaker 07 Massacre always strikes me as rather an indiscriminate thing. The killings at Surafend were quite deliberate. I just would think it more of a mass murder.
27:08 Speaker 02 In the next episode, we'll look at those killings at Surafend and also the questions which still linger.
27:20 Speaker 02 Who was responsible? Why did they do it? And why was nobody ever punished?
27:35 Speaker 02 Thanks for listening and special thanks to my guests in this series, Terry Kinlock, Paul Daly and John Crawford. Black Sheep is written and presented by me, William Ray. Our sound engineers are William Saunders and Mark Chesterman. Our production coordinator is Brianna Uretich and the executive producer is Tim Watkins. And you can always see or read more about this story on our webpage, rnz.co.nz/BlackSheep. Ma te wa.
28:05 Speaker 01 Join host William Ray next time here on Rewind for episode two of Anzac Massacre, about the shocking events in the Bedouin village of Surafend in December 1918. I'm Hilary Harper and you can join me for more deep diving into the past on History Showcase, every Monday afternoon at 2pm on ABC Radio National.
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