Anzac Massacre | The story of Surafend | 03

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Kewada, call William Ray then, they 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.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  In our previous episode, we've talked about the story of the division in the Middle East.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  We've looked at how the massacre played out.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Now, we're delving into the questions surrounding this massacre. Who carried it out? And why?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  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 Lesley 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.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:02Speaker 01

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

• 2:27Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:02Speaker 01

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

• 3:08Speaker 04

  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.

• 3:26Speaker 04

  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.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:57Speaker 04

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

• 4:19Speaker 04

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

• 4:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:41Speaker 05

  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 in 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 Ayunkara, which took place close by Surafend, and there was not the slightest doubt that these villagers were responsible.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:57Speaker 01

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

• 6:04Speaker 04

  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?

• 6:13Speaker 04

  I lived in the Sinai for 18 months. It's empty, there's just nothing there. There's nothing grows apart from a few date palms, there's very little water. So the Bedouin, they were starving all the time.

• 6:26Speaker 04

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

• 7:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:14Speaker 06

  It's shocking, that's what men will do. You know, I could tell you something that, 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, you know, we used to go through the, you know, we did coins and things like that, we'd go and rob them, dead sort of business, you know. And I used me jackknife and everything like that, and I would pull his belt off like that, and I let his guts come out, you know, and he was gone, as far as I was concerned. Well, he was standing up, was he? Yeah.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  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:

• 9:12Speaker 07

  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.

• 9:34Speaker 01

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

• 9:44Speaker 01

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

• 9:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:23Speaker 01

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

• 10:29Speaker 05

  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.

• 10:58Speaker 05

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

• 11:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:50Speaker 01

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

• 11:58Speaker 08

  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."

• 12:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:45Speaker 01

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

• 13:05Speaker 09

  They were wicked, the Bedouins, you see, you didn't know whether they were for you or not. And they finished up. They were the local natives, were they? Yeah, and they had to be treated as enemies to finish up, you know, anyone. You know, you'd shoot them on sight. Were any Tasmanians involved in that little incident? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I was there. But the whole squadron was involved, the officers as well, or not? Oh, no, oh, no, I think it'd be only the sergeants, the sergeants there. I don't think it was organised, everything like that, it just happened. It was a wrong thing. Was she going to wreck the village? Oh, absolutely.

• 13:45Speaker 09

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

• 14:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:51Speaker 01

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

• 14:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  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 onside, or at least keeping them neutral.

• 15:39Speaker 02

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

• 15:50Speaker 02

  And I think, you say it's half the end of the war, but there 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.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  So, there was a lot of obvious resentment over these issues of theft and a supposed double standard from British higher-ups. But when you read the accounts from the mounted rifles, it's obvious there was also an element of racial resentment.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  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 intelligent view of the whole position they were in.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  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."

• 17:11Speaker 01

  There are plenty of accounts of Anzacs getting into fights with locals almost from the moment they arrive in Egypt.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:32Speaker 01

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

• 17:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:18Speaker 01

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

• 18:25Speaker 02

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

• 18:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:59Speaker 10

  "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."

• 19:14Speaker 01

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

• 19:21Speaker 08

  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.

• 19:53Speaker 08

  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.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  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 Pakiha 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 Pakiha troops not to let their feelings for Maori influence their views of Arabs.

• 20:37Speaker 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.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  This is a well-known trope.

• 20:57Speaker 02

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

• 21:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:27Speaker 01

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

• 21:38Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Talked about killing of prisoners.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  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. But that feeling wasn't universal. 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.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  '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 Anzac's, 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.'

• 23:55Speaker 01

  That poem comes from the August 1939 edition of RSA Review.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Whoever wrote it had 20 years to think and reflect, and was still proud of what he did. 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.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  So you don't want to tar all these thousands of men with that brush. 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, for that matter, but unique for New Zealand.

• 26:01Speaker 01

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

• 26:09Speaker 08

  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.

• 26:51Speaker 08

  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.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  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 or 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.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 28:26Speaker 10

  You've been listening to an ABC Podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.