In 1915, there had seemed to be an opportunity to seize Baghdad when the Ottomans were defeated in a series of tactical engagements in southern Mesopotamia. The Government of India had encouraged the local commanders to press forward on a tenuous line of communication and the result was that the British division on the Tigris, which was dangerously overextended, was bundled back to Kut where it was besieged. All efforts to relieve them were a costly failure, and, when the garrison capitulated in 1916, the British government stepped in to demand an end to offensive action.
By late 1916, the British and Indian forces in Mesopotamia had made significant improvements. There were steady increases in the manpower available. There was development in combined arms operations (including integration of the Royal Flying Corps), with the import of ideas from the Western Front.12 There was more artillery, providing a superiority in firepower. There were improvements in logistics and river transport, more efficient staff work, and increased intelligence collection. More proficient in combat, more efficient in supply, and arguably more realistic about its capabilities and limits, the British and Indian forces in Mesopotamia were far more effective as a fighting force.13
When in February and March 1916 the Russians advanced south from Persian Azerbaijan to Khanaqin, within the Ottoman borders, there seemed a possibility that the Tsar’s forces, rather than the British, might seize Baghdad. General Sir Stanley Maude, who had been building up his forces on the Tigris, was eager to make his long-awaited offensive against Kut, and the Russian movements might encourage the government at home to let him go forward. Fortunately, the Ottomans played into Maude’s hands. As General Halil, commander of the Ottoman Sixth Army, thrust against the Russians on the Persian border and then into the interior of the Shah’s domains in July 1916, they were drawn further away from their original positions on the Tigris. The Ottoman forces remaining around Kut were eventually reduced to 20,000. Even so, Robertson, always eager to preserve resources for France and Flanders, argued that, even if it could be taken, Baghdad had no value from a strategic point of view, and therefore he felt no advance could be justified. The War Cabinet initially agreed. For now, the British and Imperial forces on the Tigris remained where they were.
Maude was not prepared to accept the inactivity implied by his appointment to command in Mesopotamia in August 1916. He had fought at Gallipoli, and had seen action in France, where he had been wounded, so he was fully aware of the character of this war. He was no ‘Château General’ of the popular imagination, and his approach to operations mirrored the practices employed on the Western Front. He knew that taking an entrenched position required overwhelming firepower, close coordination of all arms, and resolution throughout every level of the army. Training and preparation were crucial. He would not be hurried, but would proceed with methodical and relentless calculation towards his objectives in his own time.
The preparations were meticulous. Reinforcements were introduced, acclimatized, and trained, and formations rehearsed. His divisions enjoyed a stronger ratio of artillery to provide crucial fire support. Basra was redeveloped as a port, greatly increasing its capacity to handle large volumes of stores and munitions. A light railway was constructed up to the front lines, while new river boats and hundreds of Ford motor lorries were brought in to speed up the supply system. Depots were opened up along the route to the front, and a precise approach was adopted to the question of logistics.
At the strategic level there was much better synchronization. On 1 October 1916, General Charles Carmichael Monro, the commander-in-chief of the Army in India, assumed overall direction of the Middle East theatre, integrating it into the strategy of the other theatres, which offered the opportunity for truly coordinated action against the Ottoman Empire. In contrast to the early years of the war, Monro was served by an experienced staff.14 While the Chief of the Imperial General Staff continued to insist that the theatre commanders make do with what they had, a coalition effort was emerging. The Russian General Staff agreed in principle there should be coordination between the Army of the Caucasus and the British forces in the Middle East.15
In December 1916, finally given the go-ahead, Maude deluged the Ottoman positions on the Tigris with artillery fire. Using a methodical series of belts of fire, the barrage proceeded with ruthless mathematical timing. Ottoman front-line trenches were subjected to intensive bombardment, while rear areas were shelled to prevent reinforcements coming up. British and Indian troops advanced as close as they could behind the advancing curtain of fire. Yet, the opening bombardment, intense though it was, could not guarantee success. Some infantry units were pinned down by Ottoman machine-gun fire, and others took heavy losses as they tried to get forward. In some locations, more fortunate bands penetrated the lines and started to consolidate. But this was a battle that would not be decided in one day. As had been found on the Western Front, engagements lasted weeks and even months. Ottoman positions were subjected to ‘bite and hold’, before reserves came up and developed the lodgements.
Maude had opened his assault with two corps advancing in parallel up both banks of the Tigris, a manoeuvre that made it more difficult for the Ottomans to concentrate their resistance. Heavy rain had impeded progress and the low-lying, marshy ground dissolved into a sea of mud, but it was actually Maude’s concern to minimize casualties and proceed methodically from one objective to the next that made this a painstaking process. For two months, he pounded the Ottoman defences, then carefully pushed his units into the gaps.
Maude possessed a skill that made this more than a mere attritional process. While the Ottoman defenders concentrated all their attention on their immediate front, Maude transferred part of his force across the Shumran Bend of the Tigris on a pontoon bridge on 23 February 1917 and assaulted the right of the Ottoman line. Simultaneously, his corps attacked the Ottoman left, opposite the Sanniyat defensive bastion. The crossing of the Shumran Bend, which enabled a force to establish a position some five miles upriver from Kut, threw the Ottomans completely off balance. The bridgehead was expanded quickly and the Ottomans, whose position was unhinged, were in danger of complete encirclement. They withdrew, but Maude now unleashed a pursuit. Having proceeded so slowly hitherto, the sudden and penetrating advance threw the Ottomans into shock. Captain W. Nunn of the Royal Navy led the chase with a flotilla of five British gunboats, seizing Kut and then steaming upriver. The Ottoman rear guard caught Nunn’s little fleet in an intense crossfire at point-blank range from the banks, but his crews pressed on regardless, and steaming parallel to the main body of retreating Ottoman troops, they opened up with devastating results. The entire Ottoman force was destroyed or dispersed. Barely 5,000 Ottoman troops escaped Maude’s offensive.
Maude regrouped his forces at Aziziyeh, restocking his logistics, resting the troops, and preparing for the next pulse of the offensive. He did not wish to repeat the error of 1915 and advance so far that he risked reaching a culminating point. The Ottomans were meanwhile being forced to completely redesign their defences of Mesopotamia. Their planned advance into Persia had to be abandoned. The priority now was the defence of Baghdad, a prestigious symbol of Ottoman power in the region.
In Britain, the army and the government were divided about the next move. Robertson was adamant that there should be no further advance. While insisting the War Cabinet left the direction of the war to the military, he reasoned that if Baghdad was taken, it was not clear how it would be held and to what purpose.16 If the Ottomans reinforced the front, there was a risk that the British would merely repeat the siege of Kut but in the more exposed and extended location of Baghdad. He would permit raiding by cavalry, the extension of ‘influence’ into the province of Baghdad, but he cautioned against any situation that would compel a withdrawal of British forces because of the ‘objectionable political effect’ that might ensue.17 He repeated his determination that the war would be won or lost on the Western Front against the main adversary Germany, and continued to regard Mesopotamia as an exp
ensive and wasteful sideshow.
General Monro in India took a diametrically different view. He urged Maude to press on and seize Baghdad while the Ottomans were broken on the Tigris. He argued that taking Baghdad would prevent the Ottomans from reforming and it would provide an important prestige victory for the British amongst their colonial Muslim subjects.18 Maude concurred with Monro, but the deciding factor for the government was the prospect that the Russians might extend their own area of control from the Caucasus to Mosul and northern Mesopotamia.19 A renewed Russian offensive toward Baghdad could not be ruled out, particularly with Ottoman troops so significantly reduced. In a post-war settlement this would give Russia enormous influence across the Middle East, and such empowerment left British officials in India concerned. Robertson relented. He permitted an advance if Maude judged it prudent, with all his previous caveats.20
Maude therefore resumed his offensive on 5 March 1917 and it took just three days to reach the Diyala River where Halil had prepared defences on the confluence with the Tigris. On 9 March, the initial British probing attacks were repulsed and Maude opted to outflank the river positions and threaten Baghdad directly. The city was 226 miles away but Halil could not protect it if Maude’s force moved around his defences. The British manoeuvre forced Halil to readjust his line, and shift the bulk of his force to face the new threat and leave the main defences in the hands of a single regiment. Maude then switched axis again, assaulted the Diyala defences frontally, and overwhelmed them. The Ottomans were defeated decisively. On 11 March, Maude was able to secure Baghdad without resistance. Some 9,000 Ottoman troops were captured in the confusion and their resistance in the area had been broken. It was an enormous encouragement to the British government: with this achievement, they wondered whether similar progress could be made in the Near East.
After the capture of Baghdad, Maude’s concern was to prevent the remainder of Halil’s force north of the city joining with the 15,000-strong corps led by Ali Ihsan Bey, a formation that was withdrawing from Persia under Russian pressure. Maude’s solution was to seize the rail junction at Samarrah, some 80 miles to the north. Marching out with 45,000 men, Maude planned four short attacks and his first objective was to prevent any attempt to flood the Euphrates plain and thus render further British operations impossible. A secondary objective was to secure the western approaches to Baghdad since Ottoman forces still lay out along the Euphrates. The first thrust to the north was resisted strongly but the British drove the Ottomans back 22 miles to the Adhaim River.
Halil was therefore compelled to withdraw to a much stronger series of prepared defences at Istabulat, which lay between the Tigris and the Ali Jali Canal. Maude made a series of attacks along these defensive lines on 21 April, and some positions changed hands several times in close-quarter fighting. The Ottomans were eventually pushed out, and occupied a low ridge some six miles from the Samarrah railway junction. Maude kept up the pressure, and when the Ottomans realized their position could no longer be held, Maude’s force secured the town. His offensive had been a complete success.
The Russian war effort had been ebbing just as the British advanced up the Tigris. In the autumn, communist revolutionaries seized power and the Russian Army began to break up and withdraw. Thus the German and Ottoman strategic dilemma in late 1917 was how to make best use of the new reserves that had been released from Europe and the Caucasus following the collapse of the Russian war effort. With the Bolsheviks in power, Russian resistance in the Caucasus and northern Persia was melting away. The divisions now available from South-East Europe and the Caucasus gave Istanbul a strategic reserve, the Yıldırım (Lightning) Army Group, and this could be committed either to the recovery of Baghdad or to bolster the Palestine front against an expected British offensive. The German contribution was the seasoned and well-equipped brigade Pasha II, which was armed with a generous scale of machine guns and field artillery. This force was designed to support an Ottoman offensive to retake Baghdad, although General Falkenhayn, effectively now in command of the Middle Eastern theatre, was conscious that any attack in that direction would first have to ensure the security of Jerusalem and Palestine lest the Allies break through and threaten the Turco-German lines of communications in Syria.
Just as the Central Powers agreed on where the strategic weight of the Ottoman Empire would be committed, namely in Mesopotamia against Maude, General Allenby commenced his operations in Palestine and the Ottoman Yıldırım Group had to be diverted. The strategic situation therefore altered again, and further operational successes for the British in both theatres began to alter the balance irrevocably in their favour.
Meanwhile, to the west of Baghdad, Maude had taken Fallujah on 19 March 1917 and his units fanned out to pacify the area. When operations were resumed here in March 1918, the 15th Indian Division took Hit without resistance, as the Ottoman garrison gave way in its path. The Ottomans adopted delaying tactics, fighting just long enough to inflict casualties, and then pulling out to new positions in the rear. In September, Ramadi was taken in a brilliant British mobile operation that had cavalry, horse artillery, armoured cars, and infantry in motor transport working in close cooperation. Swinging around the Ottoman positions to get into depth, a series of cut-off groups decimated the Ottomans’ attempts to make their usual tactical withdrawal. The manoeuvre broke Ottoman resistance, rolled up its reserves and headquarters units, and effectively placed the Euphrates under British control.
To the north, the final phase of the Mesopotamia campaign fell to Maude’s successor Sir William Marshall. The strategic direction was the British government’s desire that Mosul, and its valuable oil resources, should be in British hands at the end of the war. This was to be a vital diplomatic advantage for London in any peace negotiations, for it was anticipated that Bulgaria would soon be knocked out of the war and this would cut the lines of communications from the Central Powers to Istanbul. The British government was eager to exclude France and Russia from the region, and ensure a strong security zone could be established for the allied independent Arab territories to the south.21
The problem was that Marshall’s Tigris force had been denuded of some of its transport by the need to convey ‘Dunsterforce’, a detached contingent, to Baku, where it could provide security against a final Ottoman attempt to control the oil resources of the Caucasus and Trans-Caspian region.22 Resources also had to be diverted to Palestine for Allenby’s offensive beyond the Judaean Hills, so the final push in Mesopotamia was made by a much smaller force than had been available to Maude.
Marshall was undaunted by the loss of his numerical advantage, defeating the remnants of Halil’s Sixth Army, restyled as the Dicle Grubu (Tigris Group), in a series of engagements that culminated in the battle of Sharqat. The Ottoman Army in Mesopotamia were at the end of their endurance, with too few horses and mules to move, short of ammunition, in rags of uniforms, and ravaged by disease. Ottoman officers feared a breakdown of discipline as their forces wasted away. Marshall had correctly deduced that he needed to keep up the pressure by advancing into depth. The Armistice was declared when Marshall’s force was just a few miles short of Mosul, but the city was taken in anticipation of the peace settlement that would follow.
The British and Indian troops in Mesopotamia had achieved a significant victory. Supported by modern aircraft and motor transport, they had fought their way over 600 miles up the Tigris and Euphrates, against determined resistance and in demanding climatic conditions. They had endured floods, sandstorms, choking dust, and deep mud. They had broiled under the sun, and frozen in the exposed plains in the winter. Sicknesses had taken their toll, and it is worth remembering that more lives were lost through disease than combat in this campaign.23 The Ottomans had fought for virtually every mile, hurling at the British forces every available weapon of war. Maude’s and Marshall’s forces had fought with endurance and imagination, combining material advantages and efficient organization with skilful manoeuvre. Yet an even more stunning campa
ign had unfolded in Palestine to the west, and it was here that the Ottoman armies were finally broken.
Palestine and Syria, 1918
Although they were in strong positions and had repulsed two British offensives in 1917, severe supply problems affected the Ottoman troops dug in at Gaza. But the relative weaknesses of the Ottoman forces on the Palestine front were not the immediate concern of the British War Cabinet or of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Robertson informed the headquarters at Cairo that their request for two divisions would be denied and that, while ‘every opportunity should be taken’ to defeat the forces to their front, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) in southern Palestine would simply not be required to conduct major offensive operations.24 Nevertheless, the Prime Minister, given the grave situation in Russia and on the Western Front in late 1917, could not permit inactivity, and more mounted troops were dispatched. The whole mobile contingent of the EEF was then reorganized as three distinct divisions, with supporting artillery.25 Eventually, despite Robertson’s objections, the two infantry divisions that had been requested were also dispatched. Rail and water supply lines were extended to support the EEF’s lines and the troops were subjected to intensive training, incorporating lessons derived from operations on the Western Front.
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