Pod Insights ABC Rewind Anzac Massacre | The story of Surafend | 02 About this episode Radio New Zealand podcast Black Sheep https://www.rnz.co.nz/podcast/black-sheep brings us 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.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Hi, Hilary Harper here. You might know me from Radio National's Life Matters and more recently hosting our new weekly history showcase programme, Monday afternoons from 2pm. Today I'm with you here in ABC Rewind to introduce the series Anzac Massacre. In the previous episode, host William Ray told the story of the Anzac Mounted Divisions campaign in the Middle East during World War One. In this episode, he picks up as the war is ending in November 1918 with the murder, one month later, of some 40 Arab civilians in a small Palestinian village.
0:46 Speaker 01 Kia ora, call William Ray pe me. No mai nga, hipi pangal. Hi there, I'm William Ray. Welcome to Black Sheep and the second in a three-part investigation of the Surafend massacre.
1:02 Speaker 01 We finished our last episode at the end of the First World War. The Anzac Mounted Division had fought their way across the Sinai Desert, through Palestine and up towards the Ottoman Heartland and Anatolia.
1:15 Speaker 01 Relatively small enemy positions sort of left themselves exposed to being snapped up by the mounted troops time and time again.
1:27 Speaker 01 This campaign was, as military historian Terry Kinlock put it, "one of the greatest success stories of early 20th century warfare".
1:39 Speaker 01 But along the way, some of the Anzacs developed a festering resentment for the Arabic people they encountered during the campaign.
1:51 Speaker 01 Those Bedouins who allied themselves with the Turks, that's the start of what eventually became the Surafend Incident.
2:14 Speaker 01 It's the night before the massacre, December 9, 1918. The Anzac Mounted Division is camped on the outskirts of a Jewish city, Rishon Les Zion. It had been founded in 1882 by Zionist settlers. The First World War had only ended a couple of weeks earlier with the Germans and Ottomans conceding defeat.
2:36 Speaker 02 The Turks signed an armistice on the 30th of October. By that stage, the Anzacs, particularly Australians, are way north. They're almost at the Turkish border, so they've occupied Aleppo and Homs, they've occupied Damascus. That's all occupied, so they're way north.
2:53 Speaker 01 In what state are the Mounted Division in at this point? I mean, they've been going for years now.
3:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, they are exhausted.
3:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:03 Speaker 02 They've been fighting non-stop since March 1916, so it's now October 1918. You know, it's not every single day, but it's pretty continuous fighting all the way. The New Zealanders didn't miss a single fight.
3:18 Speaker 01 And even when you're not fighting, like you say, there's not many opportunities for leave.
3:21 Speaker 02 It's hot and dirty and there's flies and there's malaria and there's spiders and the water tastes horrible. It wasn't a nice place. And one of the things that really annoyed the Mounteds was seeing letters from home talking about them having a cushy time in the Middle East while the real fighting was going on on the Western Front. That really annoyed them.
3:43 Speaker 01 It's kind of similar to what happened in the Second World War, saying, "Oh jeez, you must be having a nice time in Rome."
3:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's almost an obvious thing to say.
3:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:51 Speaker 02 But it really annoyed them.
3:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, you can imagine.
3:56 Speaker 01 After the war ended, the Anzacs were moved south to an army camp on the outskirts of Rishon, about 25 kilometres south of modern-day Tel Aviv. Just south of the Anzac camp, across a short stretch of sand dunes, was Surafend. And right next to Surafend was a Bedouin camp.
4:18 Speaker 02 One night, 9th of December 1918, trooper Leslie Lowry, who's a new arrival, he's only been in theatre for less than six months. He was asleep in his tent, it was about midnight, and somebody tried to steal his kit bag, which he was using as a pillow. Somebody reached under, either under the tent or came into the tent, pinched his kit bag and ran off.
4:48 Speaker 02 Leslie Lowry woke up, he was by himself, woke up, chased the thief, caught him on the sand dunes. The thief then produced a pistol and shot him. Shot him in the chest.
5:07 Speaker 01 Nearby troops heard the shot and Lowry's call for help. They raced out into the dunes, but they were too late.
5:15 Speaker 02 Leslie Lowry died, didn't say a word, died without speaking.
5:20 Speaker 02 There were no witnesses apart from the killer and Lowry, Lowry was dead. The killer was gone.
5:27 Speaker 01 The troops started looking round, trying to find a trace of the shooter.
5:31 Speaker 02 There was a few bits of evidence lying scattered around that they found the next morning. There was reportedly a trail of steps leading from the site of the murder to this village, to this Arab town. Hundred metres away, yeah, it was close. There was a piece of Arab clothing there and there was a little bit of blood from Lowry's wound.
5:56 Speaker 02 And that was enough, in the absence of any eyewitnesses or anything else, to decide that he had been killed by an Arab and it came from Surafend. Because that's where the tracks are pointing towards. That's pretty flimsy evidence.
6:10 Speaker 01 The immediate response of the Anzacs was to throw a cordon around Surafend to try and prevent anyone leaving. Then they sent a runner to camp headquarters, asking for instructions. The response from HQ came a few minutes later.
6:26 Speaker 02 They order the Anzacs to remove the cordon which they've put around Surafend, remove it immediately. And they have no choice, so they do. Immediately, at least a dozen Arab men leave the village and vanish. Now, we don't know whether the killer was one of them. We don't know whether the killer even went to Surafend at all. If it was me, and I'd just killed a soldier, then I wouldn't have stopped running for, you know, miles. I wouldn't have gone to the nearest village and hid. It's the first place that they're going to look. So, I don't think the killer was anywhere near Surafend. But, they were ordered to remove the cordon, which they did.
7:09 Speaker 01 The day passes. Then, just after eight o'clock in the evening, somebody in camp spots smoke on the horizon.
7:26 Speaker 01 Appendix to the war diary. Anzac Mounted Division, 11th of December 1918. Subject: The burning of the village at Surafend and the Bedouin camp south of Rashon Des Ayon.
7:40 Speaker 01 This is a report by Captain A.M. Unfortunately, I'm not quite sure what those initials stand for because I couldn't actually read his handwriting where he signs his full name. But anyway, Captain A.M. was the deputy provost marshal of the Anzac Mounted Division. He was at camp headquarters when the news of the attack on Surafend arrived. And it's worth noting in advance that his report is a somewhat dry account of what must have been some horrific scenes.
8:11 Speaker 03 At about 20:30 on the 10th of December 1918, I received a telephonic message from Major Walker, D A Q M G, to the effect that the village of Surafen was ablaze.
8:22 Speaker 01 Captain A M gathered some troops and military police and rushed out to Surafen.
8:28 Speaker 03 On arrival there, I found the village in flames. The New Zealand Mounted Rifles troops were patrolling the outskirts. I then went across to the Bedouin camp south of Rishon and found that the place was also in flames. Quite a number of New Zealand and Imperial troops, as well as a few Australians, were in and around the camp. I saw no soldier committing an offence to warrant his arrest.
8:52 Speaker 01 Captain A M ordered all the men to return to camp, and they began drifting away.
9:00 Speaker 03 I noticed that some of the men were armed, some with revolvers, some with rifles, while others had sticks in their possession.
9:08 Speaker 03 After seeing that everything was clear, I surveyed the camp and discovered that the whole place was in a total wreck.
9:19 Speaker 01 "Total wreck" was an understatement. The village and the nearby Bedouin camp were both burned to the ground.
9:29 Speaker 01 And while he didn't see any violence actually happening, Captain A M reported finding about a dozen male villagers dead or wounded at Surafen's and the nearby Bedouin camp.
9:45 Speaker 01 The true number of victims was almost certainly higher, but that's all he could see at that moment. He called an ambulance.
9:55 Speaker 03 As far as my observation went, I could not trace any signs of cruelty or an act of brutality done to women or children at either of the places burned down, but I noticed many of them huddled together in places.
10:17 Speaker 01 The senior commanders of the Anzac Mounted Division took a few days to arrive back in camp. General Allenby and his senior staff were in Cairo for a meeting when the massacre happened.
10:27 Speaker 02 He was apoplectic, he was furious. These are very serious offences, obviously. Murder, assault, arson. Under British military law, which the Anzacs were still subject to at that time, some of those attracted the death penalty. And the men would have known that before they went in, and they still decided to do it.
10:46 Speaker 01 To all appearances, General Allenby was determined to find the men responsible and punish them. He ordered an investigation.
11:01 Speaker 01 But, as Defence Force historian John Crawford says, this inquiry, and others which followed it, ran face-first into a wall of silence.
11:14 Speaker 04 The Mounted Rifles were a very tight-knit crew. They operated in very difficult conditions, out in the desert, harsh terrain, and they operated often quite small groups. If they decided they weren't going to say anything, the chances are no one was going to say anything.
11:35 Speaker 04 And of course, when you look at it, the best approach for those involved was to say nothing. If they all said nothing, they were pretty safe. Because there were no other eyewitnesses, certainly no European eyewitnesses. So if they all kept silent, they knew they pretty well were safe.
12:00 Speaker 01 After a few days, General Allenby had to admit defeat. He just wasn't going to get the answers he wanted.
12:14 Speaker 01 But he was gonna let the killers, and the men who covered up for them, know exactly what he thought of them. Here's how Australian trooper Ted O'Brien put it in his interview with an oral historian in 1988.
12:28 Speaker 05 Lovely horse he had, he galloped up to the line and everything like that. And he some reason followed us, they were all behind, and stood up in the stoop. He said, "I was proud of you once, but I'm proud of you no longer."
12:40 Speaker 02 This is a famous part of the story. General Allenby comes back from wherever he was, forms up the whole mounted division around him. He's on his big black horse, Hindenburg.
12:51 Speaker 01 Not a great name for a horse during World War I, is it?
12:53 Speaker 02 Yeah. And he bollocks them. Says something along the lines of, "I was once proud of you, I'm not proud of you any longer", things like that.
13:04 Speaker 01 Almost all the accounts I've read from former members of the Anzac Mounted Division include some version of the speech and a version of how the troops themselves responded to it.
13:17 Speaker 02 Some people will say that he was counted out. Counting out is when you start at 10 and you count down towards the subject of the counting down. And if he's still there when you get to zero, something happens to him. That's 10, 9, 8. And if it's aimed at you, you know that when it gets to zero, you're in trouble. Some men say that that happened. Most of the records that are of men who were there at the time say that did not happen. There was silence or there was muttering. Somebody talked about a sound like buzzing bees, muttering and grumbling, but no more than that. And then Allenby wheeled on his horse and charged off.
14:03 Speaker 01 And that, basically, was that. Dozens of people were dead and all General Allenby could do was give their Kellers a telling-off.
14:12 Speaker 02 Nobody was ever punished for what took place at Surafend. Some of the officers in the regiments were punished for not knowing what was going on and for not trying to stop it. But they just had some leave stopped. That was it. Very, very mild punishments for very serious offences.
14:34 Speaker 01 And those serious offences could well have been lost to history as the soldiers involved stayed silent and the work of winding up a war kicked into gear.
14:48 Speaker 01 The mounted rifles were moved from Palestine to Cairo to wait for a ship. But they didn't get to go home straight away.
14:57 Speaker 01 Just as they arrived in the city, a full-blown revolution broke out.
15:03 Speaker 02 At the start of the war in the Middle East, the British promised the Egyptians that if the Egyptians helped them fight the Turks, then, come the end of the war, the British would look favourably on Egyptian independence. So thousands of Egyptians supported the allied forces all the way through the campaign, digging ditches and moving water and stuff like that. And then come the end of the war, they find out that that is not the intention. That is not going to happen.
15:32 Speaker 01 Instead, Britain unilaterally declared Egypt a protectorate, meaning all political and military power was held by British officials. And they arrested any nationalist leaders who opposed them.
15:46 Speaker 02 So riots break out across Egypt. It just happens that the only troops that are handy, it's just like the days before Gallipoli. The only troops that were handy were the ones that were sent in to deal with it, and that was the Anzacs. They were expecting, you know, in the next month or so, they'd be getting on a ship and going home. And then this happens.
16:10 Speaker 01 The Mounted Division acted as the rapid reaction force, patrolling Cairo and its surrounding towns and villages. They had orders to shoot anyone trying to interfere with the rail lines and burn villages suspected of harboring saboteurs. And those orders were carried out. Here's an account from Captain Henry Palmer of the 10th Light Horse Regiment. It's dated March 16, 1919, and it's about one of the skirmishes that turned nasty.
16:43 Speaker 06 At 10:45, upon a train approaching from Cairo, a large mob of about 900 to 1,000 made a rush for the level crossing. Stones and bottles were thrown, and they were refusing to stop four yards from the rails. Lieutenant McGregor and others were being hit by stones. Rioters were also attempting to gain the platform from the end near the level crossing. It was then that Lieutenant McGregor gave the order, "Fire and ceasefire" when the mob broke.
17:15 Speaker 06 The firing lasted about one minute. Thirty-nine natives were killed and 25 wounded. The Egyptian police assert that 40 were also drowned, but my men only saw one sink of the many who jumped into the canal.
17:30 Speaker 01 Through the whole of the 1919 revolution, 61 Europeans died: 31 British civilians, 29 British soldiers, and a single Australian trooper. It's estimated 800 Egyptians were killed and 1,600 wounded.
17:50 Speaker 01 The revolution was crushed, but in the aftermath, the British eventually decided their protectorate was untenable, and Egypt gained its independence in 1922. With the end of the riots, the men of the Anzac Mounted Division finally returned home. On June 30th of 1919, the division was officially disbanded.
18:17 Speaker 01 As we've said, nobody was ever punished for the Surafend massacre. The only real nod to accountability came in 1921, when New Zealand and Australia agreed to reimburse Britain for the cost of rebuilding the village. Australia paid £515, Britain paid £686, New Zealand paid £858. Most historians see this payment as a tacit acceptance of guilt. And presumably, the reason New Zealand paid more than the Brits or Australians is because most of the people involved in the killing were New Zealanders. But we don't know that for sure.
19:06 Speaker 01 We don't know a lot of things about Surafend. How many people were killed? How many troops took part? Which units were involved?
19:21 Speaker 02 The thing that really surprises me more than anything is how they kept it so quiet. It never got out, ever. You know, I would imagine that everybody in the division, within a fairly short time, knew something about what had happened. But not one of them ever gave evidence at a court of inquiry sufficient to put the finger on someone for taking part. Not one. I think that's amazing.
19:50 Speaker 01 But of course, with an event this big, time passes and people talk.
19:59 Speaker 01 Eventually, as the years passed, parts of the story of Surafend leaked out. There are multiple accounts from interviews, letters, diaries, memoirs, even poetry. And they tell a grim story.
20:18 Speaker 01 The problem is, these accounts don't always agree with each other.
20:24 Speaker 02 There's one Australian account that says that a New Zealander was wandering around the Lighthorse Camp, calling for volunteers to go and deal to the Arabs in Surafend because they'd killed Lowry. There's other accounts that don't say that at all. Somebody decided that they were going to exact revenge on the Arabs. Logically, it was a New Zealander. New Zealand had been killed. Could have been an Australian. We don't know. Probably a Kiwi.
20:51 Speaker 01 But all the accounts generally agree about what happened next.
20:55 Speaker 02 During the day, more and more soldiers decided that they wanted to be part of this and they congregated over the back of the sand dunes somewhere out of sight and they manufactured clubs and bought their bayonets and got their instructions. And then, just on dusk the next night, again, they encircle the town and the camp with a cordon. They give the headman one more chance to produce the killer, but he doesn't, probably because he can't, because he's not there. And then, the Anzacs take all the women and children out of the village and put them somewhere safe. And then they go into the village and
21:37 Speaker 02 they beat at least 40 Arab males to death.
21:45 Speaker 01 Terry says at least 40 men were killed at Surafend. Different accounts give different numbers. At the high end, one Australian private claimed he counted 137 bodies. Terry Kinlock doesn't think that's credible, because that trooper made a whole bunch of other claims about Surafend, which are demonstrably false, including that no Australians took part in the killings.
22:13 Speaker 02 He was like the outlier. Everyone else, the numbers were, you know, 20, 30, 40. And then there's 137.
22:22 Speaker 02 It's just not possible to know who's telling the truth, who's lying, who just can't remember anymore.
22:29 Speaker 02 Some of these men, when they were interviewed about this, they were old, they were old, old men in their seventies and their eighties. My assessment, based on the numbers that I saw and the clustering, was at least 40.
22:43 Speaker 01 And for the number of troops taking part, you think somewhere in the vicinity of 200?
22:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's, that's just based on, on the jobs that needed to be done. To put a cordon around that's strong enough to stop anybody from getting out, that requires a lot of men. And then for the, for the men that actually went into the village and did, did the business, that would require quite a few. If you're going to beat adult men to death, you want to have enough people there to do it quickly and safely for you. So I think quite a large number.
23:17 Speaker 01 And the point that you make in your book and in a couple of articles you've written about this is that this is not people in the heat of battle getting out of control. This is a very premeditated attack.
23:29 Speaker 02 No, this, this is, as you say, this is premeditated, planned, cold-blooded attack.
23:42 Speaker 01 The question is, why?
23:48 Speaker 01 Revenge for Leslie Lowry's murder is the obvious motivation, but it seems completely out of proportion.
23:56 Speaker 01 How could the death of a single man motivate the massacre of dozens and dozens of others?
24:04 Speaker 01 We've already talked about some things. The anxieties about Bedouin people spying on behalf of the Turks, the accusations of theft and grave robbing.
24:16 Speaker 01 But there's more to this story than we've told you so far.
24:24 Speaker 02 This is the most controversial part of the whole story is what were the Bedouins doing to justify what was eventually being done to them?
24:32 Speaker 03 In our third and final episode, we're diving into that controversy.
24:38 Speaker 03 And we're also diving into the story of another series of war crimes involving another group of Anzacs.
24:49 Speaker 04 Killing prisoners.
24:52 Speaker 04 In one case, a elderly woman being shot by a New Zealand soldier in the Swari.
25:10 Speaker 03 Thanks for listening and special thanks to my guests in this series, Terry Kamlock, Paul Daly 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 Briana 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.
25:53 Speaker 00 And catch the final episode of Anzac Massacre next time in Rewind when host William Ray examines the background to the events at Surafend in southern Palestine in December 1918. I'm Hilary Harper and if you can't get enough digging into the past, then join me for History Showcase every Monday afternoon at 2pm exclusively on ABC Radio National.
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