On Oct. 1, 1918, legendary British officer Lawrence of Arabia led the capture of Damascus.
T.E. Lawrence spent his entire Army career in the Middle East as an intelligence officer based in Cairo. Once the first World War broke out, Lawrence convinced the British to support an Arab uprising against Turkish rule in lands west of the Suez. He was sent to be the liaison between British forces and the guerrilla Arab armies.
“One of the great civil-engineering projects of the early 20th century was the Hejaz Railway, an attempt by the Ottoman sultan to propel his empire into modernity and knit together his far-flung realm. By 1914, the only remaining gap in the line was located in the mountains of southern Turkey. When that tunneling work was finished, it would have been theoretically possible to travel from the Ottoman capital of Constantinople all the way to the Arabian city of Medina, 1,800 miles distant, without ever touching the ground. Instead, the Hejaz Railway fell victim to World War I. For nearly two years, British demolition teams, working with their Arab rebel allies, methodically attacked its bridges and isolated depots, quite rightly perceiving the railroad as the Achilles’ heel of the Ottoman enemy, the supply line linking its isolated garrisons to the Turkish heartland. One of the most prolific of the British attackers was a young army officer named T.E. Lawrence who, by his count, personally blew up 79 bridges along the railway.” — Smithsonian Magazine
https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/today-in-military-history-lawrence-of-arabia-captures-damascus/
