In Pharaoh’s Footsteps

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Horses whinny softly, stamping nervously as their riders mount up in the chilly predawn air. The day’s mission looms ahead: a dangerous trek straight up the Wadi ’Ara and through the narrow Musmus Pass, then a quick dash across the Plain of Esdraelon to engage the enemy controlling ancient Megiddo, a city on a hill that commands the main road from Egypt to the Euphrates.

The year is 1479 B.C., and the army marching on Canaanite Megiddo is Egyptian, led by Pharaoh Thutmose III.

Or is the year 1918 A.D., near the end of World War I? Are the advancing troops actually Allied forces under the command of General Edmund H.H. Allenby, preparing to attack Ottoman-controlled Megiddo?

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The answer, of course, is both. Thutmose III and Allenby both gambled by sending their men through the slender Musmus Pass. Of the three passes leading into the Plain of Esdraelon, the Musmus Pass is the central one—the most direct route, but also the narrowest and most dangerous. Both men also won decisive victories, catching the enemy unaware and capturing the strategic site of Megiddo.

History had repeated itself after nearly 3,400 years. Was it mere coincidence? Or did Allenby, an avid student of military history, know about Thutmose III’s daring maneuvers in remote antiquity? Most of Allenby’s biographers have insisted that he must have known, since his tactics so closely mirrored those of the pharaoh.

The battle fought at Megiddo on September 20, 1918, legitimized the triumphant title “Allenby of Armageddon,”^a which General (later Field Marshal Viscount) Allenby adopted in the days preceding the final Allied offensive against the Turkish army in Palestine.¹

The battle at Armageddon was part of a much larger Allied campaign fought from September 18 to September 21. However, Allenby’s victory at Megiddo on September 20, together with his subsequent triumphs at Nazareth, Afula, Jenin and Beisan (ancient Beth-Shean) that same day, represented a major victory for the Allied campaign. Perhaps the defining moment of the entire offensive, the battle at Megiddo quickly resulted in “the destruction of the enemy’s army, the liberation of Palestine and Syria, and the occupation of Damascus and Aleppo,” as Allenby himself wrote on October 31, 1918. It may well have been the turning point of the entire war in the Middle East.

The original military plan to take Palestine was apparently proposed by the British War Cabinet, using information obtained by the South African general Jan Smuts, who visited Allenby in Egypt and Palestine in February 1918. The plan owed much to Allenby, who wanted the British to cross the Jordan Valley and demolish the Hejaz Railway near Amman, then advance into the Plain of Esdraelon, capture Haifa and Tiberias, and then continue marching up the Mediterranean coast to Beirut.

The War Cabinet approved the campaign plan late 036in the spring, giving Allenby the green light. By the end of the summer, he was ready to launch the offensive. Less than a month before the offensive was scheduled to begin, however, Allenby modified the plan substantially. He quietly assembled his forces near Jaffa, 50 miles southwest of Megiddo, and prepared to attack.

The offensive commenced with an artillery bombardment at 4:30 a.m. on September 19, 1918. About 15 minutes later, the invasion began. The assault on Megiddo was spearheaded by the 4th Cavalry Division, which was composed of the 10th, 11th and 12th Brigades, supported by artillery and armored-car units. Followed by the Australian Light Horse Brigade, the 4th Cavalry left its camp in the orange groves around Sarona and headed up the Wadi ’Ara toward the Musmus Pass. As darkness fell, the leading unit, the 10th Brigade, tired after traveling all day, missed the entrance to the pass and continued five miles too far to the north. The division commander, Major-General G. de S. Barrow, who had already driven up the pass with his staff officer and the brigade’s advance guard, the 2nd Lancers, returned to the mouth of the pass around midnight—only to find his troops nowhere in sight. After sorting through the confusion, Barrow demoted the commander of the 10th Brigade and gave the privilege of being first through the Musmus Pass to the 12th Brigade. It crossed without incident, as did the 11th Brigade and, soon thereafter, the truant 10th Brigade.

By early next morning, September 20, all the forces of the 4th Cavalry had breached the pass and were ready to enter the southern tier of the Plain of Esdraelon. At dawn, however, the Allied forces spotted a contingent of Turkish troops—the 13th Depot Regiment based at Nazareth—awaiting them on the plain. The previous afternoon, the entire Turkish battalion had been ordered to march to the Musmus Pass and defend it against the approaching Allied troops, but only a small advance guard had reached the plain by the morning of September 20—even though the Turks had nearly 18 hours to complete the 15-mile journey from Nazareth.

The Allied 2nd Lancers, usually attached to the 10th Brigade but now reassigned to the 12th after the confusion of the previous night, had been at the forefront of the march all through the night. In the early morning light, they charged the Turkish troops and easily overwhelmed them. Only one Allied soldier was wounded in the melee. The Turks, however, did not fare so well. The Lancers killed 46 Turkish soldiers and took another 470 prisoner. This turned out to be the only significant fighting in the 1918 battle at Megiddo.

Meanwhile, additional Allied troops were making their way toward the upper tier of the Plain of Esdraelon, north of Megiddo. The 5th Cavalry Division—consisting of the 13th, 14th and 15th Brigades, and artillery and armored-car units—broke camp early on September 19 and headed toward the Abu Shusheh Pass, which runs parallel to the Musmus Pass. The division briefly halted at the village of Liktera, where the 15th Brigade and the division’s artillery were left behind; the rest of the division entered the Abu Shusheh Pass early in the evening and reached the Plain of Esdraelon, near the ancient site of Yoqneam, a couple of hours past midnight on September 20.

From Yoqneam, the 5th Cavalry’s 13th and 14th Brigades both turned east, then headed for separate targets. The 13th Brigade ventured north toward Nazareth, where the enemy headquarters was located; it reached Nazareth by early morning, to the complete surprise of the German commander, Liman von Sanders, who reportedly fled in his pajamas, narrowly escaping capture. The 14th Brigade marched south to Afula and 037took the city with little effort.

Following the brief but decisive battle at Megiddo, the entire 4th Cavalry continued past the ancient mound to Afula, reaching the town at 8:00 a.m.—half an hour after the city had been occupied by the 5th Cavalry—and then proceeded on to Beisan, which it captured that same day, September 20. Following hard on the heels of the 4th Division through the Musmus Pass, the Australian Mounted Division reached Lejjun by noon on September 20; the 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigade occupied Jenin that afternoon.

Thus by the evening of September 20, barely 36 hours after the beginning of the campaign, Allenby’s troops had achieved their goal: They had routed the entire Seventh and Eighth Turkish Armies and secured control of Palestine. The 4th Cavalry alone had astonishingly covered approximately 80 miles in less than a day and a half, losing only 26 horses in the process.

The strategy for the Megiddo campaign, as ultimately approved by the British War Council, was uniquely Allenby’s. According to several of his biographers, Allenby felt that the original plan, submitted by General Smuts and approved by the War Council in the spring of 1918, was too limited and unambitious. Captain Cyril Falls, who compiled an official history of World War I based on documents in British archives, later wrote a volume on Allenby’s final offensive, noting that the original plan

was a sound scheme enough, but not a bold one, and it would not have led to the destruction of the Turkish armies. [Allenby] thought about it for another three weeks before, on returning from a morning ride, he astonished the corps commanders by an emendation of the most drastic kind … [I]t was the role of the cavalry which was most thoroughly transformed. It was to march on El Afula, 25 miles northeast of Tul Karm, and thence enter the Plain of Esdraelon at Lajjun (Megiddo). Dropping forces to close the Turkish retreat northward and northwestward, it was to descend to the Jordan Valley at Beisan … This was quite another plan, daring, grandiose … It had indeed little relation to the first plan, any more than to the one, frankly pedestrian, put forward by General Smuts after a visit to Allenby and actually approved by the War Office.²

How did Allenby come up with this idea? His biographers note that he was a student of military history who read voraciously about ancient Egypt and Syro-Palestine both prior to and during his 1918 campaign. One biographer, Colonel (later Sir General) Archibald Percival Wavell, who wrote a number of books on Near Eastern battles, including Allenby’s campaign, 038observes that Allenby consulted books on the ancient Near East, accounts of the Crusades and Herodotus’s histories—and even carried some of this material to the front.³ “No commander,” Wavell writes, “ever gave more careful study to the history and topography of the theatre in which he was operating than did General Allenby. Two books he consulted almost daily, the Bible and George Adam Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land.”⁴

Nearly 3,400 years before Allenby, Thutmose III also waged war at Megiddo, a campaign George Adam Smith succinctly describes:

The earliest historical battle of Megiddo was fought in 1479 B.C. between an army of Thothmes III of Egypt, that had come over from Sharon by the middle of the three passes into Esdraelon, and the forces of certain Syrian states allied against Egypt. The geographical details of the Egyptian preparation for this campaign and advance north from Gaza are of the utmost interest in their close correspondence to all subsequent advances of armies from Sharon to battle in Esdraelon.⁵

The Megiddo campaign is also recorded in Thutmose III’s annals, inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Amun at Karnak. This is the first battle in 039history for which we have any kind of detailed record.⁶

Thutmose III gained the throne of Egypt upon the death of his stepmother, the female pharaoh Hatshepsut. At this time, the Canaanite rulers of Syria and Palestine were vassals of the powerful Egyptian empire to the southwest and paid regular tribute to their Egyptian overlords. Perhaps anticipating a weakness in Egypt on account of the pharaoh’s accession, the king of Kadesh, a city on the Orontes River in western Syria, led a revolt by the Canaanite kings against the pharaoh and occupied the fortified Late Bronze Age city of Megiddo. Thutmose III assembled his army and marched to Yemma, a town on the southern slopes of the Carmel mountain range, probably arriving there on May 6, 1479 B.C.

Thutmose III’s army apparently rested for a few days at Yemma while scouting operations continued. On May 11, a council of war was held to decide the best route for the advance on Megiddo. The question was whether to take the central pass leading directly into Megiddo or one of the alternative passes to the north or to the south. As we have seen, the central pass was the most direct route, but it was also the narrowest and thus the most susceptible to a Canaanite ambush. The council urged Thutmose III to take either the northern or the southern route, but he stoutly rejected its advice (see the sidebar to this article). Assuming that the Canaanite leaders would think like his war council and thus expect the Egyptian army to traverse either the northern or the southern pass (or both of them), he decided to do the unexpected and take his army through the perilous central (Musmus) pass.

The next day was devoted to preparations. On May 13 the Egyptian army marched to Aruna, where it spent the night. Early in the morning on May 14, the march to Megiddo began in earnest, with the pharaoh himself at the head of the army, which, according to estimates, stretched nearly 14 miles long. The Musmus Pass is so narrow that the Egyptian army probably needed at least 12 hours to reach the Plain of Esdraelon; still, the passage seems to have been fairly uneventful, although one minor skirmish may have taken place at the mouth of the pass.

As it turned out, Thutmose III was right. The rebel Syrian army had not expected the Egyptians to come through the central pass and had concentrated its forces at the northern and southern passes, with only a small reserve of men guarding the Musmus Pass. In the early hours of May 15, the Egyptians attacked, taking the rebels by surprise and routing them. Unfortunately for Thutmose III, however, his army stopped to pillage the Canaanite army camp, thus allowing the inhabitants of Megiddo to close the city gates and deny the Egyptians a complete victory that day. It took a seven-month-long siege before the city fell, but the booty finally captured by the Egyptians more than made up for the long wait—as Thutmose III recorded at Karnak:

340 living prisoners and 83 hands; 2,041 horses, 191 foals, 6 stallions, and … colts; 1 chariot worked with gold, with a body of gold, belonging to that enemy, [1] fine chariot worked with gold belonging to the Prince of [Megiddo] … and 892 chariots of his wretched army—total: 924; 1 fine bronze coat of mail belonging to that enemy, [1] fine bronze coat of mail belonging to the Prince of Meg[iddo, and] 200 [leather] coats of mail belonging to his wretched army; 502 bows; and 7 poles of meru-wood, worked with silver, of the tent of that enemy.⁷

This was the first of Thutmose III’s 17 campaigns in Syro-Palestine, which took place almost every year for the next two decades. The Megiddo campaign may well have been the most significant, for it immediately reestablished Egyptian authority in the area and showed the Canaanites that their overlords were there to stay. The Egyptian presence in the southern Levant remained firm for the next 200 years.

Similarities between Allenby’s and Thutmose III’s invasions of Megiddo, particularly their daring decisions to strike through the Musmus Pass, have led many to conclude that history did not simply repeat itself—it consciously copied itself. As early as 1920, Egyptologist Harold Nelson made the connection, observing that both Allenby and Thutmose III defeated “an enemy advancing from the north toward Egypt.” Nelson emphasized the “striking parallels” between “the strategy of the earliest and of the latest victorious commanders of campaigns in central Palestine.”⁸ The two battles have been linked in print ever since.⁹

But did Allenby really know about Thutmose III’s campaign when he put his own battle plan into action?

Allenby, we know, regularly consulted George Adam Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land. But 040there are problems in citing this volume as a source of Allenby’s strategy. Although the book was originally published in 1894, its first two editions contained no discussion of Thutmose III’s campaigns. In 1896, a fourth edition appeared, containing more notes and a new preface—but no mention of Thutmose III’s campaign in Canaan. Subsequent editions were published almost yearly, but no substantial changes were made to the text for more than three decades. The edition published in 1919—after Allenby’s successful campaign at Megiddo—mentions battles fought at or near Megiddo by the biblical figures Deborah, Barak and Sisera, Gideon and the Midianites, Saul and the Philistines, Jehu, Joram and Ahaziah, and Josiah and Pharaoh Necho, as well as battles between Saladin and the Crusaders, and Napoleon and the Turks.¹⁰ But there is no reference to Thutmose III’s battle at Megiddo.

Smith substantially revised his text in 1931 for the 25th edition. It is this edition that includes for the first time the description of Thutmose III’s campaign at Megiddo that biographers have often cited as a source of Allenby’s battle plan.

What probably threw biographers off were a couple of sentences in the preface of the 25th edition:

In this edition I have traced the successive stages of General Allenby’s campaign of 1917–18 … I have been much encouraged by the generous tributes from Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby and many of his officers in Palestine to the real usefulness of my volume in framing the strategy and tactics of their campaign.¹¹

However much Allenby may have profited from reading earlier editions of Historical Geography of the Holy Land, he could not have read Smith’s description of Thutmose III’s Megiddo campaign—for it was written 13 years after Allenby hatched his plan to cross the Musmus Pass.

But the story doesn’t end there. By the time of Allenby’s 1918 campaign in Megiddo, the British archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie had published his multivolume History of Egypt (the work’s first edition appeared in 1896, and subsequent revised editions were published in 1898 and 1904). The second volume of this massive work contains a complete translation of Thutmose III’s annals, including the record of his Megiddo campaign. A similar magnum opus by University of Chicago archaeologist James Breasted, entitled Ancient Records of Egypt, appeared in 1906; once again, the second volume of the series includes Breasted’s translation of and commentary on Thutmose’s annals at Karnak, including the pharaoh’s campaign against the Canaantite alliance at Megiddo.

Thus, accounts of Thutmose III’s invasion of Canaan were available in 1918. But did Allenby read them prior to his own invasion of Palestine? At the very least, Allenby, who was stationed in Cairo in 1917, must have known about Petrie and Breasted, who were among the world’s foremost Egyptologists. So it is possible that he consulted their work.

More likely, however, Allenby’s imagination was spurred by general accounts of Near Eastern campaigns, such as an early review of Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land written by Coutts Trotter in 1894 for The Geographical Journal—a periodical Allenby regularly read.¹² Although Trotter does not mention Thutmose III, he writes:

Across the Maritime Plain, and by easy roads into the great plain of Esdraelon, lay the beaten track of Egyptian armies going north to Tyre and Sidon and Asia Minor, or eastwards by the valley of Jezreel to the Jordan and Damascus; the route also of Syrian, Babylonian, and Persian invaders. Later on, across Esdraelon came the Greek 041settlers of the Decapolis confederacy, the Romans, and, a thousand years after, the Crusaders.¹³

Wouldn’t Allenby, an astute student of military history, have considered emulating battle tactics that had proven successful so often over thousands of years?¹⁴

Allenby also knew quite a bit about the military history of the Jezreel Valley and the Plain of Esdraelon. H.L. Eason, an acquaintance of Allenby’s, remembers that even prior to the Palestine campaign, the general was “convinced that in the unchanging East history would repeat itself” and that “the decisive battle of the campaign would be fought at the Pass of Megiddo.”¹⁵ But Allenby may not have known specifically of Thutmose III’s campaign at Megiddo; he did not learn of it from Smith’s or Nelson’s volumes, or from any of the other books his biographers claim he consulted. If Allenby had known, wouldn’t he or his biographers have mentioned the fact?^b

It is also important to note that Allenby did not exactly follow Thutmose III’s strategy. Though the pharaoh utilized only the central Musmus Pass, Allenby actually sent troops through two of the three possible passes. The 4th Cavalry Division followed the Musmus pass to Megiddo, but Allenby’s 5th Cavalry Division negotiated the northern Abu Shusheh Pass en route to Nazareth and Afula. Fortunately for Allenby, the Turks didn’t cover the Abu Shusheh Pass, and a deadly ambush was avoided.

During the 1996 excavation season at Megiddo, the current Lord Allenby visited the site and told me that if his great-uncle had known of Thutmose III’s battle at Megiddo and had altered the British War Cabinet’s proposed battle plan accordingly, he would have said so in letters to his wife. No such letter has yet turned up, though I plan to undertake a thorough search in the near future.

The American philosopher George Santayana is often quoted as having said that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. Had Allenby known of Thutmose III’s campaign, we might say instead that those who study history have the power to repeat it. Based on the evidence currently available, however, it appears that the similarities between Thutmose III’s and Allenby’s battle plans were a consequence of the topography of the area, which has changed little in 3,400 years. As military strategists often point out, “The geography of a land determines the course of its wars.”¹⁶

Horses whinny softly, stamping nervously as their riders mount up in the chilly predawn air. The day’s mission looms ahead: a dangerous trek straight up the Wadi ’Ara and through the narrow Musmus Pass, then a quick dash across the Plain of Esdraelon to engage the enemy controlling ancient Megiddo, a city on a hill that commands the main road from Egypt to the Euphrates. The year is 1479 B.C., and the army marching on Canaanite Megiddo is Egyptian, led by Pharaoh Thutmose III. Or is the year 1918 A.D., near the end of World War I? Are […]