Battles on the Tigris

The Mesopotamian Campaign of the First World War

Ron Wilcox

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781526781666
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Primera Guerra Mundial

In 1914 the British expedition to Mesopotamia set out with the modest ambition of protecting the oil concession in Southern Persia but, after numerous misfortunes, ended up capturing Baghdad and Northern Towns in Iraq. Initially the mission was successful in seizing Basra but the British under Generals Nixon and Townshend, found themselves drawn North, becoming besieged by the Turks at Kut. After various failed relief attempts the British surrendered and the prisoners suffered appalling indignities and hardship, culminating in a death march to Turkey. In 1917 General Maude was appointed CinC but, as usual in Iraq, policy kept changing. Hopes that the Russians would come into the war were dashed by the Revolution. Operations were further frustrated by the hottest of summers. Fighting against the Turks continued right up to the Armistice. The conduct of the Campaign was subject to a Commission of Inquiry which was highly critical of numerous individuals and the administrative arrangements.

Chapter One

Small Beginnings

(See Map 1)

On the day after Britain declared war on Turkey in 1914, a force of British and Indian troops landed in southern Iraq, a country then usually known as Mesopotamia. Its orders from the Indian Government were to safeguard the Anglo-Persian oilfields leased from Persia at Shushtar in southern Persia and the pipeline that ran from there down to the refinery at Abadan on the Shatt al Arab river close to Mohammera. The Sheikh of Mohammera was friendly to the British, as was the Sheikh of Kuwait on the opposite side of the Persian Gulf, but this attitude was in contrast to most of the tribes in the area.

Shatt al Arab was the name given to the combined waters of the Tigris and Euphrates on their way to empty into the northern shore of the Persian Gulf. Mesopotamia was officially the three Turkish vilayets (provinces) of Basra in the south, Baghdad in the middle and Mosul in the north, but at the time the ancient name of Mesopotamia was used by the British for convenience to describe these particular sections of the Turkish or Ottoman Empire. Its name means ‘the land between two rivers’, the two rivers being the Euphrates on the west and the Tigris further east whose waters combine near the town of Amara.

In the remote past, Mesopotamia had been a rich and fertile land, the home of some of the greatest civilizations of the Middle East. Four thousand years before, the Uruk culture of the south had invented the earliest form of Western writing on clay tablets and produced the oldest work of literature in existence – ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ – and had first divided the hour into sixty minutes and the circle into 360 degrees. These people were followed by the Sumerians and later by the Babylonians with their great kings Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar who defeated Egypt, conquered Syria and Palestine, and captured Jerusalem. Their lands were converted from desert by elaborate networks of canals and channels using the waters of the two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, but by 1914 the cities and the irrigation systems responsible for creating the agricultural wealth of the ancient world had collapsed, leaving behind a countryside of ruin and poverty that had mainly reverted to primeval desert and marsh.

Mesopotamia had been part of the Turkish Empire from the sixteenth century but it was only after the discovery of oil in southwestern Persia that the area became of much interest to European nations, amongst whom Britain and Germany were the most prominent. It was (and is) a Moslem country with the people of the south, from Basra to Kut al Amara (henceforward referred to as Kut) Shia Moslems, professing allegiance to the Sultan of Khalifa, and the people of the north, Sunni Moslems, who used to profess allegiance to the Shah of Persia.

Oilfields had been discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century by an Australian with the most un-Australian name of William Knox D’Arcy. He obtained a concession of 500,000 square miles of territory from the Persian Government to develop the field and with help from Lord Fisher, First Sea Lord, formed in 1909 the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. A year or two later, a British Commission of Enquiry examined the prospects of the company and Fisher’s successor as First Lord, Winston Churchill, without reference to Parliament, bought for Britain a controlling stake in it for £2,200,000.

Britain’s interest in the area, apart from the oil, was a proposal to develop overland communication between Europe and India through Mesopotamia, a route that would obviate the sea journey via the Suez Canal or around Africa, while Germany was intent on building a railway through Turkey to Baghdad and beyond to achieve a similar link with south-western Asia.

Before the First World War, German influence in the region had been growing, particularly in the Turkish Empire where, at the approach of war, the property of British subjects was being confiscated and plans for blocking the Shatt al Arab were being made so that British steamers in the waterway would be prevented from sailing from Iraq’s chief port of Basra, at that time not particularly busy with ocean-going traffic but important for local traffic conveying dates, the chief product of its bankside groves, to the town.

Map 1. Lower Mesopotamia

Britain had stationed two warships on the river, HMS Espiègle anchored off Mohammerah, and HMS Odin at the mouth. In addition, the Royal Indian Marine HMS Dalhousie lay off Abadan. The Turks tried to order the British to leave in a letter delivered on board the Espiègle by a Turkish naval officer, that read: ‘Please you leave the Shat before 24 hours.’ In response the ship moved half a mile up the Karun river that joins the left bank of the Shatt at Mohammera where she was indubitably in Persian territorial waters. A few days later the Turks turned up the heat by positioning guns on the river bank opposite Mohammera and telling the British consul that the ship would not be allowed to go back down to the Shatt unless she left within eight days.

A week later the Turkish governor of Basra suggested to the Sheikh of Mohammera that he should allow a large body of Turkish troops disguised as Arab women to position themselves on the housetops on either side of the Karun river alongside the Espiègle. At a given signal, two guns on the island of Dabba would open fire on the British warship and when she returned fire the force on the housetops should open fire ‘especially at the gunners’ and ‘there will an unexpected slaughter. When no-one can defend the gunboat they will board it, killing everyone they can find and seizing the vessel.’ It was pointed out to the Sheikh that this act of treachery would be a valuable act of service to the Turkish Government. Needless to say, the Sheikh would have nothing to do with the scheme.

In Whitehall it was decided that although some action should be taken it was not necessary to make Mesopotamia the scene of any large-scale operations and the measures required for the defence of British interests there should be left in the hands of the Indian Government. They were told to prepare an Indian expeditionary force to be despatched with the objectives of reinforcing the morale of the Arab sheikhs at the head of the Persian Gulf and protecting the ‘oil stores’ by occupying Abadan Island where the oil refinery was. These instructions were not received with any great enthusiasm by the Indian Government which was of the opinion that the despatch of such a force was ‘provocative’.

So far, the most important military duties laid on the Government of India by the British Government had been to defend the North-West Frontier from incursions by Afghan tribes and maintain internal security in the country. Overseas expeditions of a minor kind might be undertaken but no additional expense was to be incurred. This was a policy suggested originally by the Indian Government itself and approved by the India Office in March 1914. Presumably, the Indian Government was now given to understand that this Mesopotamian venture was an ‘expedition of a minor kind’ and in this way they were dragged willy-nilly into a war that initially they were not keen on and certainly did not have the resources to support.

Vague instructions given to Brigadier General Delamain, the commander of the Force, by the Indian Government did not make clear how troops in occupation of Abadan could protect both the 130- mile long oil pipeline to the oil fields at Shushtar or the oilfields themselves in country controlled not even by the Persian Government in whose territory the oilfields lay, but by unreliable Persian nomadic tribesmen.

However, despite the Indian Government’s misgivings, an Anglo-Indian force, known as ‘Force D’, landed at Fao on 6 November 1914. It had been despatched from Bombay on 16 October in the utmost secrecy disguised as part of a large convoy destined for Egypt, with sealed orders that were to be opened after three days at sea. These orders told the force commander, Brigadier General Delamain, to detach his command from the convoy and head for Bahrain, there to await further instructions. These came within a few days and informed him that, after the capture of Fao, at the mouth of the Shatt al Arab, and Abadan, he was to move up the river and reconnoitre routes towards Basra in preparation for the advance of a larger force that was being mobilized in India. Basra, therefore, had now become the objective of the expedition. Constant changes of objective became, as we shall see, a recurring feature of the Mesopotamian Campaign.

The Indian Army was by no means a first-rate fighting force – the only thing that was outstanding about it was the character of the soldiers themselves, both British and Indian, who were to demonstrate bravery and endurance of the highest order in the coming years. It was a defensive force that had come into being in 1895 with the integration into one Indian army of the Madras, Bombay and Bengal armies, which had been made up of a number of military formations organized originally by the native princes. In 1903 this army was reorganized and renumbered to virtually create the army that was to fight in the First World War.

Infantry and cavalry were formed into double companies each commanded by a British officer aided by a British junior officer. In the infantry units the senior Indian officer was called the subahdarmajor and risaldar-major in the cavalry, whilst to each half company was attached a junior Indian officer called a jemadar. Indian officers issued all orders to the Indian troops. Four double companies formed an infantry battalion commanded by a British officer with a British adjutant, quartermaster, signalling, scout and transport officers. Shortly after the outbreak of the war, a re-arrangement into British-style companies and platoons was adopted, the commands being held by British and Indian officers respectively. Cavalry regiments were organized into four squadrons with sixteen British officers commanding the regiments and squadrons. In addition there were the risaldar-major, three risaldars and nine jemadars.

As mentioned above, the Indian Army was always intended as a defence force, but a suggestion had been made by Sir Douglas Haig, while Chief of Staff in India, that the Indian military establishment might one day have to put together an expedition armed and equipped sufficiently to confront a European army. The enemy he had in mind was Turkey, either alone or supported by Germany, but this idea was pooh-poohed by the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge. His decision was in line with the policy of the British Cabinet who were anxious to restrict expenditure, so nothing was done to modernize the force.

Sir O’Moore Creagh was Commander-in-Chief of the Indian military at the time and he was constantly calling for modern equipment like machine-guns, heavy howitzers and signalling equipment, but his demands were turned down by the Finance Department and the Viceroy and he became so frustrated that he resigned six months before the end of his term of office. He was succeeded by Sir Beauchamp Duff in April 1914 who was a far more complacent individual.

As a result, the Mesopotamian Expedition or ‘Force D’ as it was officially known, was equipped as though it was going to face a frontier rebellion of tribes armed only with rifles, while the Indian Government acted as though the war was going to be a short one and ordinary peacetime routine could be followed. In no way during the first eighteen months of the war did it rise to the challenge of conquering a whole country, which was what the campaign was soon to become, because it insisted on relying on the agreement that had been made with the India Office earlier in 1914.

Responsibility for the war was divided between the India Office in London who provided the day-to-day policy and the Indian Government who managed the expedition. As a result, the objectives of the expedition were never set out in advance, so that the Commander only knew what he had to do next and not what the long-term aims were likely to be. Advanced planning, therefore, was non-existent.

This lack of foresight is most obvious throughout the whole of the first half of the campaign in the shortage of river transport. There were no roads so the River Tigris was the only practicable route by which men and supplies could be carried to a battlefront that speedily retreated further and further away up an unstable river, yet this was never fully understood by the Indian authorities who, when they were called upon for more river transport, responded with inadequate and unsuitable vessels. General Cowper, senior administrative officer to General Nixon, who sent requests to India in 1915 for additional transport, was threatened with dismissal by Sir Beauchamp Duff, the Commander-in-Chief in India, for being too insistent. Allied to this, the base port of Basra, or more properly Ashur, its riverside suburb, was not equipped for handling the amount of material that had to be transferred from ocean-going ships to those that used the river, and long delays became the norm.

But the most scandalous failure was in the provision of medical equipment and personnel. No river hospital steamers were available, there were few medical personnel, either doctors or nurses, an inadequate land ambulance and a shortage of medical comforts, drugs and dressings. This was apparent from the first days of the campaign, but later on it became one of the blots on its otherwise gallant story.

Composition of ‘Force D’, November 1914 (16th Indian Infantry Brigade)

Brigade Headquarters

1st Indian Mountain Artillery Brigade

22nd Company, Sappers and Miners

2nd Dorsetshire Regiment

20th Punjabis

104th Rifles

117th Mahhrattas

Section, 34th Divisional Signal Company

125th Field Ambulance

12th Mule Corps

13th Mule Corps

Supply Column (S & TC)

Field Post Office

Ordnance Field Park

91 British officers, 918 British other ranks, 82 Indian officers, 3,640 Indian other ranks, 460 followers, 1,290 animals.

Chapter Two

Ambition is Stirred

(Maps 1, 2 and 3)

After occupying Fao, Delamain made a second landing a couple of days later at Saniya, 2½ miles north of the pipeline terminal at Abadan, where his camp was attacked by the Turks and the first British and Indian casualties occurred.

British troops formed almost a quarter of the force, the co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgements for Illustrations and Maps
• General Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Small Beginnings
• Chapter 2 Ambition is Stirred
• Chapter 3 Townshend’s Regatta
• Chapter 4 The Repulse at Ctesiphon
• Chapter 5 The Medical Scandal
• Chapter 6 The Beginning of the Siege
• Chapter 7 Attempts at Relief
• Chapter 8 The Surrender of Kut
• Chapter 9 A Nightmare Journey
• Chapter 10 The Capture of Baghdad
• Chapter 11 Advances in the North
• Chapter 12 Dunsterville
• Chapter 13 The End of the Campaign
• Chapter 14 Consequences
• Chapter 15 Aftermath
• Bibliography