of the Hebrew name of an ancient town known in the west as Armageddon). The British made major efforts to deceive the Ottoman Army as to their actual intended target of operations. This effort was successful and the Ottoman Army was taken by surprise when the British suddenly attacked Megiddo. As the Ottoman troops started a full-scale retreat, the Royal Air Force bombed the fleeing columns of men from the air and within a week, the Ottoman army in Palestine ceased to exist as a military force. Despite its name, the actual battlefield of the Battle of Megiddo (1918) was relatively far from the site of the Biblical city. The emphasis on using the name "Meggido" was, in part, related to the overall propaganda effort to link victory in the Middle-East to the domestically well-known locations from the Bible, and thus boost British morale at home. The battle for "Armageddon" did not receive nearly the attention which might have been expected, however, with Eiten Bar-Yosef stating that, "[e]ven Cyril Falls’s Armageddon 1918 (1964), a detailed study of Allenby’s advance, does not elaborate on the metaphor, and it is not difficult to see why: Allenby’s swift progress up to Damascus was certainly not the bloody, colossal, definitive clash envisioned in John’s Revelation; that was taking place in the trenches of the Western Front." A number of historians have claimed the offensive which resulted in the capture of the Gaza to Beersheba line and Jerusalem, and the Megiddo operation were similar. In this regard, it is argued that they were both a cavalry envelopment of the Ottoman flank, and that the breakthroughs both came at unexpected locations. At Gaza–Beersheba, the breakthrough occurred at the eastern end of the front line at Beersheba instead of Gaza as the Ottomans had expected, while at Megiddo the breakthrough occurred on the Mediterranean coast at the western end of the front line when it was expected across the Jordan. Syrian campaign Pursuit to Damascus The war in Palestine was over but in Syria lasted for a further month. The ultimate goal of Allenby's and Feisal's armies was Damascus. Two separate Allied columns marched towards Damascus. The first, composed mainly of Australian and Indian cavalry, approached from Galilee, while the other column, consisting of Indian cavalry and the ad hoc militia following T.E. Lawrence, travelled northwards along the Hejaz Railway. Australian Light Horse troops marched unopposed into