An Australian author has unearthed a tape of an Australian war veteran describing the night that New Zealand and Australian solders massacred Bedouin men in Palestine - after the end of World War 1.
The men were killed after Trooper Leslie Lowry - of the New Zealand Machine Gun Squadron lines - was shot and killed on December 9, 1918, by a thief he chased though his tent camp.
"It was always thought that New Zealanders were mainly responsible for the massacre," Paul Daley, author of Beersheeba told The Age newspaper in Melbourne. "The Australians' participation was assumed but never really proven."
The men on garrison duty at the time were from the ANZAC Mounted Division: the Canterbury Mounted Rifles and 7th Light Horse Regiment.
But Daley last year came across a tape recording of a former trooper in the Australian Light Horse, Ted O'Brien, who described in graphic detail how he and his comrades had "had a good issue of rum" and "done their blocks" in Surafend, and how they "went through (the village) with a bayonet."
The Bedouin, Mr O'Brien said, were "wicked...You'd shoot them on sight." Of the massacre at Surafend, he said "it was a real bad thing...It was ungodly."
Daley said that, while some people would no doubt define Surafend as a "war crime", technically it was not covered by the Geneva Conventions, and it actually happened after the war ended on November 11.
The British commander-in-chief, General Sir Edmund Allenby, is said to have called the soldiers "cowards and murderers" at a parade the next day. All leave was stopped, all men on leave recalled and all recommendations for honours were withdrawn.
Junior officers closed ranks and no one was charged but in 1921 New Zealand paid compensation of 858 pounds and Australia paid 515 pounds, to the British, who then ruled Palestine, for the reconstruction of the village. The British Army paid 686 pounds because a small number of Scottish soldiers had participated. No witness actually saw the New Zealander shot, or saw the killer run into the nearby village of Surafend.
But tracks led in that direction and the men of Lowry's unit threw a cordon around the village to prevent anyone from entering or leaving. They did not enter the village that night and the next day were ordered by officers to lift the cordon.
But that night about 200 Anzac troops surrounded the village, expelled the women and children and old men, and using pick handles and bayonets murdered between 40 and 120 men before torching their huts. The flames lit up the countryside for miles around. They then moved on to a neighbouring nomad camp, which they also burned to the ground.
One New Zealand witness claimed that Scottish artillerymen from the Ayrshire Battery took part using horse traces (heavy harness chains encased in leather.
Another Australian author, Patsy Adam-Smith, said in her book The Anzacs that one report stated that the men threw villagers down a well and rolled a large grindstone down on top of them.
"Their excuse was that they were sick of the natives stealing; for five years they'd put up with their small private possessions from home being stolen as well as their uniforms and gear, were weary of their men being ambushed and killed while the authorities did nothing".
