Nicknamed “the Bull” for his massive size and his frequent out-bursts of anger, Edmund Allenby was the most accomplished and respected British general of World War I. He planned and executed the offensive that forced the surrender of Turkey and achieved the last large-scale victory by horse-mounted cavalry in the history of warfare.
Born to a relatively affluent East Anglican country family on April 23, 1861, Allenby graduated from the Royal Military College at Sandhurst in 1881. As a cavalry lieutenant in the Sixth Inniskilling Dragoons, Allenby joined his regiment in Africa, where he seFved for six years in Bechuanaland and Zululand. After a brief break back in England to attend the Staff College at Camberley, Allenby returned to South Africa in time to participate in the Boef War (1899-1902). At war’s end, Allenby, promoted to colonel, assumed command of the Fifth Lancers in Great Britain.
Allenby’s competence as a commander and trainer led to a series of positions of increasingly greater responsibility. By 1910 he was a major general and inspector general of cavalry.
As the senior cavalry officer on active duty in the British army at the outbreak of World War I, Allenby deployed to France as the Expeditionary Force Cavalry Division commander in 1914. Horse cavalry soon proved to have no role in the machine-gun- dominated trench warfare, but while Allenby’s talents as a leader of horsemen had become outdated, his ability to develop tactics and lead men in combat had not. In 1915 he distinguished himself as a corps commander in the Batde of Ypres and two years later commanded the Third Army in* the Batde of Arras.
In the summer of 1917, Allenby was presented the opportunity that would make his reputation as Britain’s top general of the war. Several offensives by the British command in Palestine against the Turks had been unsuccessful, and on April 17, Allenby left his command in France to report to Egypt, with the order to “take Jerusalem before Christmas.”
Allenby immediately moved his headquarters and staff from their comfortable Cairo hotel rooms to tents near the front, gain¬ing the admiration of the enlisted men and junior officers. While flooding the communications system to London with requests for more troops and heavy guns, Allenby reorganized his army. Unlike the trenches of France, the sands of Palestine provided excellent terrain for cavalry, and Allenby increased his mobility by organizing native camel detachments and integrating them with his horse¬men to form the Desert Mounted Corps.
In October, Allenby began his offensive. Leaving three divisions to feign an attack at Gaza, he committed his infantry to an assault against surprised Turkish defenses at Beersheba. Once the infantry breached the defenses, he sent his horse and camel cav¬alry through the opening to capture the city’s water supply.
Allenby did not slow his offensive after the capture of Beer-sheba. Instead, he committed his horse-and-camel cavalry in the pursuit of the withdrawing Turks to prevent their establishing extensive defenses. Although often short of supplies, Allenby’s troops quickly pushed the Turks out of Gaza and on December 9, 1917, nearly three weeks ahead of schedule, occupied Jerusalem.
Developments in Europe forced Allenby to transfer many of his infantry forces to France for the campaigns of 1918 and to halt his offensive for nine months in the ancient city while raw re¬placements arrived from Great Britain. By the time he was pre¬pared to resume fighting, the Turks had established an in-depth defensive line composed of forty thousand men and 350 artillery pieces, reaching from the shores of the Mediterranean inland to the Jordan River valley north of Jaffa.
Allenby employed elaborate deceptive measures of huge dummy tent camps and horse units along his western flank. When he felt he had convinced the Turks his attack would focus there, he began a devastating artillery barrage at the opposite end of the line on September 19, 1918. Once his infantry breached the enemy front, Allenby ordered his Desert Mounted Corps forward, with the support of artillery and Royal Air Force bombers.
On the twentieth, Allenby’s cavalry entered Megiddo and then turned east to cut off large portions of the retreating Turk¬ish army. Allenby continued his pursuit and occupied Damascus on October 1 and Aleppo on October 25, 1918, forcing the Turks to sue for peace. An armistice, signed on October 30, ended Turkey’s participation in the war. In thirty-eight days of nearly constant combat, Allenby’s forces advanced 360 miles and captured or killed more than eighty thousand Turks and their German and Austrian allies; his loss was 853 killed and 4,480 wounded.
Allenby’s reward included promotion to field marshal and later viscount. From the end of the war until his retirement in 1925, Allenby served as high commissioner in Egypt. He then re¬turned to England to spend his last days in pursuit of his hobbies of ornithology and botany and to briefly serve as the lord rector of the University of Edinburgh. He died at age seventy-five on May 14, 1936, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
When he captured Jerusalem, Allenby modesdy insisted on walking into the city rather than riding on horseback or in a staff car. Most often, however, Allenby “the Bull” bullied his officers and intimidated his men. Although not particularly well liked, Allenby had the respect of all. While he easily gains his place on this list as the leading British general of World War I, Allenby is also well de-serving of a place in history as the last commander to achieve a major victory through the classic use of massed horse cavalry.