A Naval History of World War I

by Paul G. Halpern

  The temptation to push on was irresistible. Sir Percy Cox, the newly installed British agent and political resident at Basra, strongly recommended taking advantage of their momentum and apparent Turkish weakness and pushing on toward Baghdad. The Government of India found this suggestion premature. The difficulties of communication were too great and the number of troops available too few. They compromised and agreed to advance as far as Kurnah, some 45 miles up the Shatt-al-Arab where the Tigris and Euphrates joined. This would provide a good defensive position for the entire Shatt-al-Arab. The advance began on 3 December, and navigational difficulties in the shoal water proved as hard to overcome as Turkish resistance. The Espiègle and Odin accompanied the advance, but the Odin disabled her rudder, and armed launches of a much shallower draft along with river steamers played an increasingly important role. By 9 December the British had taken Kurnah, capturing the Vali of Basra, the Turkish commandant, and approximately one thousand prisoners. The fighting at times had been stiff, and not without loss, but still very much in the colonial mold.62

  The psychological dimension of the campaigns against Turkey was always very strong, coupled with the threat that the proclamation of a Jihad might bring about a second mutiny among Great Britain’s Indian subjects. This made it hard for the Mesopotamian expedition to stand still in early 1915. To quote the historian David French, “The fear that Mesopotamia might be the domino which could bring down the Eastern empire underlay the whole policy of the government of India in 1915.”63 The British therefore could not limit themselves to minor expeditions to punish hostile and troublesome Arabs in the marshes of the Euphrates near Kurnah. They had to respond to two Turkish threats: one a concentration at Nasiriya on the Euphrates, followed by a move south of the marshes and along the new channel of the Euphrates toward the west of Basra; and the other a thrust across the frontier into Persia by a Turkish column directed at Ahwaz on the Karun River, with its oil fields and the pipeline that ran down to Abadan. Kurnah itself, during the winter inundations, was virtually an island and largely secure from attack.

  In March 1915 the navy was engaged in an interesting and unusual form of naval guerrilla war in the attempt to stop Turkish supplies, mostly carried in mahailas—a shallow-draft dhow native to the area—moving down the new channel of the Euphrates. The British created a special flotilla including two armed stern-wheel river steamers, a barge armed with a 4-inch gun, tugs, and motorboats. Operating in a vast, uncharted swampy waste, usually no more than three feet deep, grounding constantly, they pursued mahailas that hid in the high reeds and on the whole succeeded in blocking the Turkish Euphrates supply route. They also gained the dividend of weakening the allegiance of the local Arabs to the Turkish cause. The expedition up the Karun, assisted by the Sheik of Muhammerah and supported by armed launches, suffered an initial setback and had to be reinforced. The pipeline was cut in a number of places, and Persian Arabistan was still threatened.64

  The psychological element again played its role with the failure of the naval attack on the Dardanelles. Turkish strength in Mesopotamia was growing, they were obviously preparing for an attack, and the British realized they would have to increase their force. The government of India felt unable to do so, the garrison of India had been stripped to the bone, and in the end the troops—an Indian brigade—were taken from Egypt. The Mesopotamia Expeditionary Force was now roughly an army corps, with two divisions of infantry and a cavalry brigade but without a full complement of artillery. The Admiralty provided another sloop, the Clio. On 9 April 1915, General Sir John Nixon assumed command of the force with orders to retain complete control of lower Mesopotamia. This included the vilayet of Basra and all outlets to the sea, as well as all portions of neighboring territories that might affect his operations. He was also, as far as practical and without prejudicing his main operations, to secure the safety of the oil fields, pipelines, and refineries in Persia. Moreover, in anticipation of possible contingencies, he was to study a plan for an advance on Baghdad.

  The Turkish attacks began on 11 April, notably against Shaiba to the west of Basra. The Turkish attacks did not succeed, and the British promptly counterattacked. On 14 April the British broke the Turkish resistance, and the Euphrates flotilla helped to turn the retreat into a rout. The threat to Basra from the southwestern flank was ended. Nixon was now free to turn his attention to the Karun River, sending a division as reinforcements, and by 4 May the British had entered Bisaitin near the frontier. Persian Arabistan and the oil fields had been secured.

  The inevitable question now was how to exploit the victory and where to move next. The Allied forces were hung up at the Dardanelles; an advance in Mesopotamia was thus all the more attractive. Nixon realized that the Turkish attacks had developed from two centers, Nasiriya on the Euphrates and Amara on the Tigris. He concluded that their occupation was necessary to secure the position in lower Mesopotamia. The attack up the Tigris toward Amara took priority, for there was a chance to cut off the Turks retreating from Ahwaz. The attack posed considerable tactical difficulties, however, because of the inundations that had made Kurnah virtually an island and the area around it a vast, reedy waste of water, only about two feet deep but crisscrossed by numerous canals and ditches so as to make wading impossible. A few low sand hills provided the only dry emplacements for Turkish artillery and infantry. The British made their infantry amphibious by collecting a large number of bellums—rough paddle canoes used by natives. As many as possible were given some armor protection, with steel plates to deflect rifle and machine-gun fire, and the troops were trained in their use. There were ten men to a bellum, but the attempts at armor plate proved a mistake, because it made them more difficult to pole through the reeds. Under these conditions the naval flotilla took the place of cavalry, and after the attack had advanced beyond range of the Kurnah emplacements, provided the only artillery. The flotilla, commanded by Captain Wilfrid Nunn, included the sloops Espiègle, Odin, and Clio and the paddle steamer Lawrence as the heavier units, but also consisted of two armed launches fitted for minesweeping, two naval horse boats with 4.7-inch naval guns, two gun barges with 5-inch and 4-inch guns, and a large flotilla of small craft for supplies and field ambulances, rafts for machine guns, and about sixty bellums per battalion.

  The 6th Indian Division under the command of Major General Charles Townshend began its attack on 31 May, the troops during the preparatory bombardment “making their way like rats through the jungle of reeds” and largely unseen. The British took the Turkish outposts on the first day, and as the attack developed against the main position the following day, the Turks began to retreat. Townshend pursued, using his flotilla as cavalry in lieu of aircraft, which were hampered by a lack of dry ground on which they could land and deliver their reconnaissance reports. The infantry, loaded in river steamers, followed. Townshend was in the Espiègle, well ahead of his army, and the three oceangoing sloops steamed on against the current, approximately 150 miles from the sea, under conditions their builders could scarcely have imagined. The river grew narrower, the channel more and more tortuous, and the ships repeatedly scraped against the banks as they rounded the bends. The pursuit halted briefly during the hours of darkness and continued the next day. When the sloops could proceed no farther due to their draft, Nunn kept up the pursuit with the armed tug Comet and three launches, each towing a horse boat armed with a 4.7-inch naval gun. The Turkish river flotilla abandoned the gunboat Marmariss, the steamer Mosul surrendered, and the British flotilla also captured seven mahailas and two steel lighters. On the following day, Nunn continued the pursuit, and on the afternoon of the 3d the British captured the objective, Amara. It was only the following day that enough troops arrived by riverboat to really secure the town. The offensive had been a spectacular success, and the flotilla with improvised means had done wonders against a defeated and disorganized enemy, perhaps breeding a certain overconfidence about what river craft could and could not accomplish and, in the army as a whole, what the Tur
kish powers of resistance were likely to be.65

  Nixon’s next objective was to secure the western flank of the Basra vilayet by capturing Nasiriya on the Euphrates, approximately 70 miles west of Kurnah. The advance again posed considerable navigational difficulties as the hottest time of the year was approaching, and while much of the district was still inundated, the water level was falling. The Lake of Hammar, into which the Euphrates flowed some 40 miles west of Kurnah, could be navigated by only the shallowest-draft river craft, which meant that the sloops could not pass beyond the approaches to the lake. Once again the flotilla relied on the stern-wheelers, launches, and horse boats. The advance began on 27 June, but due to stout Turkish resistance, Turkish obstructions in the channel, and the steady toll of heat and sickness on the British force, the British had to commit additional forces. Nasiriya was finally taken on 25 July after the Turks evacuated the town. The campaign has been described as very much of an endurance contest for the British and Indian troops.66

  During the summer months of 1915, the British had to divert some troops and naval forces to Bushire in the Persian Gulf, where in March the British had established a garrison to protect the cable station that was an important link in the line of communications between Basra and India. The German consul, Wassmuss—often characterized as a would-be German Lawrence of Arabia—was successful in stirring up the Tangistani tribesmen to attack the British lines in July, and in August and September a minor expedition involving the cruisers Juno and Pyramus, the paddle steamer Lawrence, and a landing detachment of bluejackets, Royal Marines, and Indian troops defeated the threat. Bushire was nominally Persian, and Persia was a neutral state. However, the Persian government obviously could not control the situation at Bushire, and so this classic example of old-fashioned “gunboat diplomacy” took place in the midst of a great world war.67

  The British objectives in Mesopotamia had so far been essentially defensive. Nixon, however, had grander prospects—the capture of Baghdad. The first stage would be an advance to Kut, some 90 miles northwest of Amara, but twice as far by the tortuous river. Kut was just beyond the boundaries of the Basra vilayet, but Nixon justified its occupation as necessary to “perfect” the occupation of the Basra vilayet. The advance to Kut began on 12 September with the naval component of the army reduced to the armed tug Comet, armed launches, horse boats, and barges. The British broke through successive Turkish defenses and obstructions and reached the town on 29 September. The Turkish forces, however, were not routed and fell back to positions they had prepared long in advance at Ctesiphon, about 30 miles below Baghdad on the Tigris. The British lines of communications had grown much longer—nearly 400 miles by winding river to the base at Basra—and the force they could bring to face the Turks proportionately weaker.

  In late October the War Committee made the fatal decision to try for Baghdad. There is no space here to go into the decision in detail, but that old consideration of “prestige” in the east played a major role. The Mesopotamian campaign, so far, had been one of the few bright spots for the British in the Muslim world in 1915 in which the attack on Constantinople through the Dardanelles had been a failure, Egypt was threatened from the west by the Senussi, and German and Turkish intrigue seemed to threaten revolt among Britain’s Muslim subjects in India. The capture of Baghdad would cut German communications with Persia and Afghanistan and offset the effects of the failure at the Dardanelles. Nixon, although warned that he could not expect further reinforcements, thought he had enough forces to take the city and decided to press on.68

  It took nearly a month after the authorization to advance was received from London before the column under General Townshend was able to begin its advance on Baghdad. The low state of the river delayed the preparations. Townshend had with him HMS Firefly, the first of twelve so-called small China gunboats ordered by Fisher and shipped out to the Persian Gulf in sections to be assembled at Abadan. The Fly-class were armed with a 4-inch gun, a 12-pounder, a 6-pounder, a 2-pounder pom-pom, and four Maxim guns. They could steam at best at 9.5 knots. Their most ingenious feature was a screw that worked through a tunnel in the hull, giving them a very shallow draft of between two and three feet. They were fitted with wireless but, designed primarily for police work, they lacked any real protection. The Insect-class, the first of which only reached the Tigris front in March 1916, after having been towed out from England, were the “large China” gunboats. The term “China” was actually a cover; they were intended for operations on the Danube. The Insect-class were larger and more powerful, with two 6-inch guns and twin screws in tunnels. Captain Nunn described the Fly-class as “useful little craft” that would have been more useful had they more powerful engines and twin screws as well as more than one boiler. If a boiler was put out of action by a shell, there was no reserve and they became helpless. Nunn considered the Insects a little large and of too great a draft for the Tigris and Euphrates. He thought the ideal craft for Mesopotamian conditions would have been a cross between the two.69

  In the fighting before the Ctesiphon position 22–25 November, Townshend was unable to break through the Turkish position and decided he would have to retreat. The naval flotilla had been able to do little to help; the banks were too high in the reach below the Turkish position for direct fire, and the frail gunboats proved vulnerable to artillery fire from the opposite side of the river where there were no British troops to harass the Turkish batteries. The flotilla helped to cover the retreat of Townshend’s army, losing a launch that grounded. On the first of December there were more losses. The gunboat Firefly was disabled by Turkish artillery, which managed to secure a position from which it could open enfilading fire into the reach where the river craft were anchored. Unfortunately the tug Comet ran aground trying to tow the Firefly. Both had to be abandoned.70

  Townshend was besieged in Kut on 9 December. From January to April successive British commanders made unsuccessful attempts to break through Turkish defenses along the Tigris and relieve the town. The flotilla was strengthened by the arrival of more of the Fly-class and the Mantis, the first of the larger gunboats. The flotilla, though, had little scope for action in these operations to relieve Kut. To succeed, the British would probably have had to employ a far greater mass of troops and artillery than they had available or than could have been supported by the transport then available on the Tigris. There were attempts to drop supplies into Kut by air, but the amount of matériel that could be delivered by this means in 1916 was very small.

  In April a desperate attempt was made by means of river steamer to get more supplies into Kut. The steamer Julnar was stripped of all surplus woodwork, covered with plating, and crammed with 270 tons of supplies. There was no lack of volunteers from the river flotilla for the venture, which was generally reckoned as having little chance of success. On the night of 24 April, the Julnar, with three officers and twelve ratings, made the attempt. The Turks had been expecting some effort, and the steamer was detected, brought under fire, and forced aground after running into a cable the Turks had stretched across the river. The commanding officer, Lieutenant H. O. B. Firman, Royal Navy, was killed by a Turkish shell, and second in command Lieutenant-Commander C. H. Cowley, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, a former Tigris river steamer captain, was murdered by the Turks as a renegade after capture. Both received the Victoria Cross. With all hope gone, Townshend and more than thirteen thousand officers and men surrendered on 29 April.71

  The attempt to retrieve the prestige lost through the failure of the Dardanelles had therefore ended in the most appalling disaster. The British learned from their mistake. The first step came during the siege itself, when in February 1916 the War Office assumed control of the Mesopotamian expedition from the government of India, which had proven unequal to the task. The next essential step in the months following the fall of Kut was to put the expedition on a much sounder basis from the logistical point of view. The question of river transport was particularly crucial. Wemyss, after visiting Mesopo
tamia, was particularly critical of the Royal Indian Marine, which was not capable of handling the needs of an expedition greatly exceeding its normal responsibility. Moreover, it was not an independent service, but rather an adjunct of the Indian Army and subject to the Indian Army Council. The director of the Royal Indian Marine, although a naval officer, was located at Bombay, far removed from the Army Council at Delhi or Simla, and therefore handicapped in providing adequate advice or making his influence felt. The results were pernicious. The craft sent for river use in Mesopotamia often proved unsuitable or arrived in poor condition, if they did not sink on the way. For example, when the authorities in Mesopotamia asked for iron barges, they were sent wooden ones not strong enough to withstand constant bumping against the river banks. Basra was inadequate through want of organization and horribly congested. In April 1916 twenty ships waited at anchor for six weeks to unload. This waste of tonnage became even more intolerable once the U-boat war developed in earnest. Wemyss was unable to persuade General Lake, Nixon’s successor as commander in chief in Mesopotamia, to accept naval control of the transport. Nevertheless there was a thoroughgoing administrative reorganization. Sir George Buchanan, the experienced head of port administration at Rangoon, who had been out in Mesopotamia in an advisory capacity since early 1916, was given increased responsibilities for port administration and river conservancy. In April Brigadier General G. F. MacMunn was appointed inspector-general of communications and worked diligently and successfully at setting the logistical groundwork for future success. Lake arranged for the delivery from England and India of large numbers of river steamers, tugs, barges, and lighters, including a number specially adopted for medical use. The medical arrangements for the expedition had been scandalously inadequate. These improved when the P-50-class of steamers began to arrive toward the end of the year. These were modifications of the paddle steamers employed on the Tigris and Euphrates, could carry four hundred tons of cargo, and drew only four feet of water. To relieve congestion at certain restricted portions of the Tigris, the British also constructed railways, notably between Kurnah and Amara.72