A member of the Australian 2nd Light Horse Brigade on active duty in the Middle East, 1917. Photo: Public Domain
In December 1918, New Zealand and Australian soldiers murdered upwards of 40 Arab civilians in a Palestinian village. But more than 110 years later, we still don't know exactly who did it, or why.
In a new season of RNZ's Black Sheep podcast, we investigate what one military historian describes as "by far the worst war crime ever committed by New Zealand military personnel" - The Surafend massacre - and other allegations of war crimes against Anzacs in the Middle East and North Africa.
"They got their heads together, the New Zealand and Australians, and they went out to this village, and they went through it with the bayonet."
These are the words of Edward O'Brien - a World War I veteran and former member of the Anzac Mounted Division. His words were recorded on tape by an oral historian and now sit in the archives of the Australian War Memorial.
After a short pause, O'Brien's interviewer, Major Douglas Wyatt, responds.
"Did they?" Wyatt asks.
"Yeah," O'Brien replies.
This interview was recorded in 1988. By that point, O'Brien was a very old man. Between the frailty of his voice and the poor quality of the audio, it is sometimes hard to make out what he is saying.
However, Wyatt immediately knew what O'Brien was referring to: The Surafend massacre of 10 December 1918. O'Brien is one of a bare handful of Anzacs who admitted witnessing the killing first hand - killing committed by both New Zealand and Australian troops waiting to head home just after the end of World War I.
"Yeah, I was there, but I don't know if I did anything," O'Brien says.
"What did you actually do?" Wyatt asks. "Did you go in and wreck the village?"
"Oh, absolutely," O'Brien responds. "Yes. It didn't matter. There were cows and ducks and geese. There were kids. But the men: they all went for the men with the bayonet."
The Surafend massacre is perhaps the darkest chapter of the Anzac story: A premeditated mass murder of at least 40 Arab civilians in southern Palestine (now modern Israel).
New Zealand Defence Force historian John Crawford says the Surafend massacre was "without any doubt at all by far the worst war crime committed by New Zealand military personnel".
Australian troops were just as complicit, and perhaps some Scottish soldiers as well.
The origins of a mass murder
"The thing that really surprises me more than anything is how they kept it so quiet," military historian Terry Kinloch says. "[Knowledge of the details] never got out. Ever."
Kinloch investigated the story of Surafend as part of the research for his book, Devils on Horses, a history of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigades, which formed part of the Anzac Mounted Division.
The Division was made up of New Zealand and Australian horsemen and was part of the wider Anzac force sent to Gallipoli in 1915.
In the wake of that bloody campaign, the Anzacs retreated to Cairo to recover and refit.
"The mounted troops, the New Zealand Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse, stayed in Egypt because there was no work for horsemen on the Western Front. It's just trench warfare," Kinloch says.
"But somebody had to protect the canal against the Turks, who were not very far away."
The canal in question was the Suez Canal - then, as now, a critical shipping route. If the canal was lost to advancing Turkish troops, it would have been a catastrophic blow for Britain and her allies.
In response, the Brits deployed several units, including the Anzac Mounted Division.
"It's one of the great successes of 20th-century warfare," Kinloch says. "It was just a coincidence of all those things: Mobile troops, horses and camels that they could use to cover very large distances very quickly. A relatively weak enemy. The Turks weren't particularly strong and they weren't particularly aggressive. They would prefer to fight from a fixed base rather than go out and looking for trouble."
Thanks to their mobility and the open terrain of the desert, the Anzac Mounted Division and allied forces repeatedly outflanked, surrounded and destroyed Ottoman forces - a far cry from the grinding stalemate at Gallipoli or on the Western Front.
Over the next three years, the Anzacs battled through the Sinai, then up through Palestine and into modern-day Jordan and Syria.
But the Anzacs and Turks were not alone in the desert. This region was (and still is) home to a network of people known as the Bedouin.
An 1870s map of Surafend. Photo: Public Domain
Desert-dwellers
The word "Bedouin" can be loosely translated as "desert-dweller". They are a nomadic, ethnically Arab people who live in the Middle East and North Africa.
In 1915 they were living much as they had for hundreds of years past - herding livestock through the deserts.
Then, with the outbreak of the Middle East campaign, industrial 20th-century warfare landed right on top of them.
"British policy in the Sinai was to intern any Bedouin that they caught." Kinloch says. "They assumed that any Bedouin in the desert was working for the enemy. So, they captured them and put them in prisoner-of-war cages for the duration of the war."
This policy was justified on the basis that the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed V, had declared a jihad on the Allies. It was presumed the Bedouin, being overwhelmingly Muslim, would heed that call.
The reality was more complicated. Some Bedouin did work for the Turks, mostly as scouts or spies, but many others chose to remain neutral, or fight alongside the Allies.
Over time, the British turned increasing numbers of Bedouin against the Ottomans with promises of independence and self-rule once the war was over. However, this change in allegiance was not always appreciated by the men of the Anzac Mounted Division.
Almost every memoir of the campaign includes bitter complaints about Arabs in general, and Bedouin in particular.
New Zealand veteran Ted Andrews put it like this in his memoir of the Middle East campaign:
"The troops had suffered casualties throughout the Sinai and Palestine campaigns by treachery of the Arabs, who were seldom, if ever, punished. All stores had to be guarded against looting, sentries were murdered, the dead at Rafa were dug up and stripped of their clothes."
These accusations are difficult to unpick. Stories of Anzacs being murdered by "treacherous" Arabs are (with one exception) uncorroborated, but Kinloch believes accounts of theft and grave robbing are credible.
"This is the most controversial part of the whole story," he says. "What were the Bedouin doing to justify what was eventually being done to them?"
Theft, grave robbing and double standards
Kinloch came to understand the answer to this controversial question in part through his own service with the New Zealand Defence Force in his previous career as a soldier.
"I lived in the Sinai for 18 months," he says. "It's empty. There's just nothing there. Nothing grows apart from a few date palms. There's very little water."
Kinloch says in these harsh conditions, the Bedouin felt justified in laying their hands on any resources available - especially in the middle of a war they had not asked for.
"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.
"So 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. It didn't bother them they were digging up a dead Anzac to do it. That meant nothing to them."
And the Bedouin were not alone in looting or desecrating the dead.
Accounts of Anzac veterans occasionally mention "liberating" fruit from orchards, or picking the pockets of fallen Turkish soldiers. One soldier regretfully mentions stealing a beautifully decorated knife from a Bedouin tent.
In his interview in 1988, O'Brien even mentions using Turkish corpses as target practice - although the memory clearly troubled him.
What really infuriated the Anzacs wasn't necessarily theft or graverobbing - it was a perceived double standard from British High Command: Accusations of theft or property damage against Anzac troops were punished severely, but similar complaints against Arabs were ignored.
In his 1922 memoir of the Middle East campaign, The New Zealanders in Sinai and Palestine, Lieutenant Colonel Guy Powles of the Canterbury Regiment put it like this:
"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 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, but no redress was ever obtained against a native for theft."
This double standard made perfect sense from the perspective of British High Command. They were trying to shore up a shaky alliance against the Turks. The last thing they needed was accusations of theft or grave robbing upsetting the apple cart.
However, it clearly caused deep resentment among the Anzac troops, who saw their own commanders as siding against them.
Possibly, it rankled even more given the attitudes some Anzacs held toward Arabs.
The New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade. Photo: A. Briscoe Moore
'Races lower on the human scale'
On arrival in Cairo, Australian and New Zealand troops were greeted with a number of written orders and pamphlets.
Among these papers was a General Order containing a stark warning about indigenous Egyptians:
"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."
Some troops took this warning to heart. Accounts from Anzacs often contain derogatory comments about Arabs. However, Crawford says those attitudes were not universal.
"You don't want to generalise about this because I've been quite surprised at the number of people who really liked interacting with Egyptians," Crawford says.
"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'".
Crawford says it is also clear many men held racist views about Arabs long before they arrived in Cairo.
"Definitely. They regarded themselves as being very superior Anglo-Saxons, and looked down on Egyptians," he says.
"Of course, this is a well-known trope ... You dehumanise your enemy. It makes it easier to do very bad things to them."
Curiously, this dehumanisation does not seem to have been extended to the Anzac troops' actual enemy - the Ottoman Turks. Anzac accounts are often very positive about Turkish soldiers. It was reported Anzac troops at Gallipoli rejected offers of gas masks, refusing to believe that the Turks would stoop to such brutal tactics.
Australian journalist Paul Daley investigated the racial attitudes of Australian soldiers towards Arabs and Turks in the process of writing his book, Beersheba. He thinks part of the explanation comes from Australia's history of colonial violence.
He says the Turks were identified as a "civilised" people, while Arabs were "natives".
"For a lot of these [Australian] guys who joined the light horse, the 'natives' were aboriginal people," Daley says.
"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. 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 back home."
Aotearoa has its own history of colonial violence, but by 1914, the New Zealand Wars were fading from living memory, and Pākehā soldiers often wrote very positively about the Māori troops with whom they served.
In fact, the General Order the Anzacs received on arrival in Egypt explicitly warned Pākehā troops not to let their positive feelings for Māori influence their view of Arabs.
It said: "The natives in Egypt have nothing in common with the Maoris (sic). They belong to races lower in the human scale and cannot be treated in the same way."
New Zealand forces at Surafend. Photo: George Westmorland
The murder of Leslie Lowry
By December 1918, the war was over and Anzac Mounted Division was encamped in southern Palestine, waiting for further orders, and - eventually - a ship home.
The camp sat on the outskirts of a Jewish city, Rishon LeZion, near Ben Gurion airport in modern-day Israel.
About 100 metres from the camp, across a stretch of sand dunes, was a small Arabic village: Surafend.
Around midnight on 9 December 1918, the troops heard a gunshot, and a scream for help.
Several men ran out into the sand dunes to find one of their men, New Zealander Leslie Lowry, mortally wounded.
It was later established Lowry had been awoken by someone reaching under his head, trying to steal the kit bag he was using as a pillow. He chased the man out into the desert, but suddenly the thief turned and shot Lowry through the chest with a revolver.
Lowry died without speaking, but alongside his body the troops found some pieces of evidence, including a piece of Arabic clothing, and (allegedly) a set of footprints leading towards Surafend.
"That was enough, in the absence of any eyewitnesses or anything else, to decide that he had been killed by an Arab and he came from Surafend," Kinloch says.
The troops responded by establishing a cordon around Surafend and sending a runner to headquarters, asking what to do next.
The orders came back within a few minutes: Disestablish the cordon and return to camp.
The troops were infuriated. Some later said they saw this as another example of High Command giving preferential treatment to Arabs.
However, the order was followed, and the cordon was abandoned.
The day passed - seemingly peacefully.
Then, around 8pm on 10 December, the evening after Lowry's murder, someone in camp spotted smoke on the horizon.
It was coming from the direction of Surafend.
The 2nd Light Horse Brigade, with prisoners. Photo: Public Domain
The massacre
The scene of the Surafend massacre is described in a somewhat sterile report from "Captain A.M." - the Deputy Provost Marshall of the Division - who rode out to investigate reports of smoke from the village.
"On arrival there I found [Surafend] in flames. The New Zealand Mounted Rifles Troops were patrolling the outskirts. I then went across to the Bedouin camp south of Richon and found that the place was also in flames ... the whole place was in a total wreck."
Captain A.M. reported finding about a dozen Arab men dead or wounded. The true number of victims was likely much higher.
He ordered the troops hanging around Surafend to return to camp, then called for an ambulance and sent his report to High Command.
The commander of the Anzac Mounted Division, British General Edmund Allenby, wasn't in camp at the time of the massacre. He was busy attending a conference in Cairo with other senior officers. On hearing the news, he returned to the camp at Rishon LeZion, and launched an investigation.
However, this investigation, and others which followed it, ran into a wall of silence.
'A very tight-knit crew'
No member of the Anzac Mounted Division admitted taking part in the massacre or named anyone else. The best Allenby got was vague testimony about some soldiers trying to round up a posse for a raid on the village. None of these soldiers, or their units, were clearly identified
"The Mounted Rifles were a very tight-knit crew," Crawford says.
"If they decided they weren't going to say anything, the chances are no one was going to say anything. 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. No European eyewitnesses anyway."
It is unclear why no Arabic witnesses were formally interviewed by military investigators. Possibly they were dismissed as unreliable, possibly they were too afraid to talk.
In any case, Allenby was furious at his inability to find and punish the men responsible. He ordered the entire division to stand before him at attention as he berated them from the saddle of his horse.
According to several accounts, he said something along the lines of: "I was once proud of you men of the Anzac Mounted Division. I am proud of you no longer. Today, I think you are nothing but a lot of cowards and murderers".
A Surafend investigation document. Photo: Archives New Zealand
The mystery of the massacre
More than 100 years later, there are still many mysteries surrounding the Surafend massacre.
Many accounts say the killers were motivated by anger over the murder of Lowry, but Crawford thinks there was probably a combination of motivations at play.
"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 the crimes committed by Bedouins seriously enough, because they were concerned about keeping the Bedouin on side," he explains.
"There's a long history of anger about this. And the murder of Lowry really set it off ... it's after the end of the war, but here they are. They're finished fighting, they're sitting in a camp. They don't expect one of their comrades to be killed.
"And that's another factor I think: They're all keen to go home, and then this happens, and they are absolutely furious."
Some accounts claim the men went into the village hoping to find Lowry's killer, and the violence only started when a village elder refused to give him up. But Kinloch is doubtful.
"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," he says.
"I think that's pretty unlikely ... I don't think they would have had any expectation of finding Lowry's killer. Nobody saw him. There were no witnesses. Even if [Lowry's killer] was standing right in front of them, how would they know it was him? He wouldn't have had the gun in his hand."
The identity of the perpetrators is as much a mystery as their motivation.
It is generally accepted the killers included New Zealanders and Australians of the Anzac Mounted Rifles, and probably some Scottish Highlanders encamped alongside them. However, it is not clear who led the raid.
"Somebody decided that they were going to exact revenge on the Arabs," Kinloch says. "Logically it was a New Zealander, a New Zealander had been killed."
He estimates 200 men were involved, but that is only a best guess based on the number of people required to surround the village and carry out the killings.
Another mystery is the number and identity of the victims.
An official tally of the dead is not included in any official report. Possibly that is because the bodies were removed for immediate burial, according to Islamic custom.
Most accounts say women and children were driven out of the village before the killing started, and the victims were described as "able-bodied males".
Captain A.M. reported he found "no sign of violence" against women or children, although he described seeing some "huddled together" in the ruins of the village.
Looking at various accounts, Kinloch estimates at least 40 people were killed at Surafend. Likely, we will never know for sure.
Surafend Army Camp from the air, 1918. Photo: Archives New Zealand
The aftermath
There was never an official apology for the Surafend massacre. No punishments were handed out beyond the suspension of leave and postponement of promotion for some officers.
The only 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, and New Zealand paid £858.
Most historians think the fact that New Zealand paid more than Britain or Australia is a tacit acceptance that most of the perpetrators of the massacre were New Zealanders.
In the decades that followed the massacre, some members of the Anzac Mounted Division expressed remorse. O'Brien was one. He described the massacre as "a terrible thing" in his interview with an oral historian in 1988.
However, those with regrets appear to have been in the minority. Maybe the most astonishing response to the massacre was a poem published in August 1939 by RSA Review, the official magazine for New Zealand war veterans.
It was republished in Ted Andrews' book, Kiwi Trooper, and attributed to an anonymous participant in the massacre.
T'was 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 Anzacs
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 Surafeen
We turned away in silence
But feeling justified
That for our murdered comrade
We would gladly have died.
For modern New Zealanders and Australians, what happened at Surafend is hard to square with our story of the Anzacs.
Surafend is just one chapter in that much wider narrative. There were hundreds of thousands of Anzacs who served with commitment and courage, displaying remarkable empathy to enemies and allies alike.
Tens of thousands of them were killed in WWI. Those who survived suffered physical and emotional damage which lasted the rest of their lives.
But as Daley says, this grim chapter of the Anzac story is important to remember.
"It goes to the way countries conduct themselves in war and how they deal with wrongdoing," he says.
Daley's own research into Surafend, and the conspiracy of silence surrounding it, was cited as part of an official inquiry into allegations of war crimes against Australian special forces in Afghanistan.
"These things don't happen in historical isolation," he says.
"I think it's really important to stop and consider the meaning of them, and to look at questions of justice surrounding them. I don't think there was ever any justice in relation to the dead at Surafend."
Follow and listen to Black Sheep on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, YouTube Music or wherever you get your podcasts.
