The Recovery of Palestine, 1917: Jerusalem for Christmas
By mid-1917, with the world war going badly on all fronts, and casualties burgeoning, Prime Minister David Lloyd George met with General Edmund Allenby, fresh from France. Lloyd George wanted “Jerusalem for Christmas” as a holiday “present” for the increasingly disillusioned British people. Its seizure would also eliminate the Ottomans, who had inflicted the dismaying disaster at the Dardanelles, as a factor in the war. As Allenby departed, the PM handed him George Adam Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land, remarking that it was a better guide to reaching Jerusalem than anything “in the pigeon holes of the War Office”.
Having been raised on the Bible, Allenby, as this narrative illustrates, did indeed exploit it. He would also have unanticipated expertise from an unknown and unmilitary officer, T. E. Lawrence, who turned his Arabian “sideshow” into campaigns distracting the Turks and their German military leadership. The desert war would be hard-fought, but, that December, after centuries in Muslim hands and with its sacred sites intact, Jerusalem fell.
Stanley Weintraub, PhD, published his first biography, about Lawrence of Arabia’s postwar years, in 1963. Since then he has been writing about other notable lives, and about wars, from the rebellion in America to Korea, with many of his books combining both aspects. Before beginning his writing career, he earned a Bronze Star in Korea as a young Army officer. He has published books about the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Korean War, as well as biographies of American and English figures of political, cultural and military significance, from Queen Victoria (which reached #1 on The Times bestseller list), Aubrey Beardsley (a National Book Award finalist), George Washington, to Dwight D. Eisenhower, among many others. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Stanley Weintraub is Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University.
"This book offers an excellent concise history of the British campaign, including many Australian and New Zealand troops, to take Jerusalem from the Turks and Germans during World War I. Weintraub tells this story in only 140 pages, but despite its concision, his book contains many fascinating details, ranging from the insects plaguing the British and Australian troops in the Sinai desert, the troops’ inadequate food rations, and their lack of cover from German planes in the open desert. [...] All in all this a very worthwhile study and is highly recommended for anyone interested in World War I."
Stephen E. Tabachnick, University of Memphis English Literature in Translation 61/2 (2018)
Stanley Weintraub
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