Allenby/King Hussein bridge - VIP service $115 pp

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○ After the War; Baker's Hope: Jordan River As Peace Sign | NY Times - May 15, 1991 |
○ Allenby Bridge Journal; A 15-Yard Span Over a Great Divide | NY Times - July 18, 1987 |

Gen. Edmond Allenby Marches into Jerusalem

The Palestine theater of war (there was another battle zone in the Middle East - the war in Mesopotamia/Iraq in which the British suffered one of their worst defeats - the siege of Kut el-Amara) was secondary to the European war (especially the western front, but also the eastern front) but on the other hand, it was a more dynamic and fast going war, unlike the static and indecisive war on the western front.

Turkey entered the war on November 2, 1914, after concluding a secret pact with Germany. The war in the Middle East started at the end of that month, when a British force, sent from India, landed in Basra and conquered it.

New Zealand Palestine Campaign - 2nd Battle of Gaza

The British gamble on winning a quick and daring victory at Gaza in March 1917 had failed. The commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF), Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Murray, now drew up a more cautious plan for a second attempt to take the town, three weeks later.

Three of the EEF's infantry divisions, the 52nd (Lowland), 53rd (Welsh) and 54th (East Anglia), would attack together in a set-piece frontal assault, supported by as much firepower as Murray could scrape together. Extensions to the British railhead from El Arish allowed him to add 16 heavy guns to his artillery brigades' 92 18-pounder field guns and 24 4.5-inch howitzers. Gaza's proximity to the Mediterranean coast enabled naval support from the French coastal defence ship Requin and two Royal Navy monitors. Murray also managed to get a shipment of eight tanks and 4000 gas shells from the United Kingdom. This would be the first time that gas was used in the Middle Eastern theatre.

Rewriting history ...

Mesopotamia 1920s Churchill's battle planes drop poisonous gas shells

A new way of controlling Iraq was needed, and the man who needed it most was Winston Churchill. As war secretary in Lloyd George's coalition government, Churchill had to square huge military budget cuts with British determination to maintain a grip on its mandate in Iraq.

The result became known as "aerial policing". It was a policy Churchill had first mused on in the House of Commons in March 1920, before the Iraqi uprising had even begun.

○ The 1920 Iraqi Revolt and the Emergence of Aerial Control in Iraq

"It may be possible to effect economies during the course of the present year by holding Mesopotamia through the agency of the Air Force rather than by a military force. It has been pointed out that by your Air Force you have not to hold long lines of communications because the distance would only be one or one-and-a-half hours' flight by aeroplane. It is essential in dealing with Mesopotamia to get the military expenditure down as soon as the present critical state of affairs passes away."