by N S Nash
By June 1915, Nixon controlled the wrist and the back of the hand (Abadan and Basra), the little finger (Ahwaz and its oil), the junction of the first finger and thumb (Kurnah) and the first finger as far as the first joint (Amara). The Turks held the tip of the first finger (Kut–al-Amara) and the tip of the thumb (Nasariyeh).
With Amara secured and now occupied by 17th Brigade, Nixon turned his sights to the west and, specifically, to the Shatt-al-Hai, which is an apology for a river. It is very wide but far too shallow to allow the passage of any significant vessel; indeed for seven months of the year it is unnavigable, but nevertheless it runs from Kut to near Nasariyeh.
Nixon obviously thought that the Turks, who were unable to sail down the Tigris to Kurnah and Basra, might just see the Shatt-al-Hai as presenting a passage to that town and, from there, threaten Basra. That all seemed to be unlikely but, nevertheless, in order to thwart that possibility he gave orders to the GOC 12th Indian Division to take Nasariyeh, located 68 miles west of Kurnah. The Indian Government approved this excursion, as did Chamberlain, in London, who would have been hard-pressed to forbid it.
Townshend had his name in lights and there can be no doubt as to his bold, inventive and practical soldierly skills. The successes thus far were, predominantly, Townshend’s. At this time he was the most successful general on the Allied side and far more newsworthy than his fellows who were bogged down in the trenches of Flanders and Gallipoli.79 Nixon wallowed in the reflected glory of his subordinate and cast such common sense as he had to the winds.
He had done little to improve the berthing arrangements in Basra and nothing to bring the medical support to a level commensurate with likely casualties. Hardinge and Duff had given him his head and he was deaf to Townshend’s plea to release those of his soldiers who were now carrying out line of communication defensive duties. Relations between the two generals cooled but remained strictly professional.
Sight must not be lost of the fact that this campaign was being fought ‘on the cheap’. The IG had starved its army for a decade or more and Sir William Meyer,80 the civil servant appointed as Finance Member of the IG, could not allocate funds that did not exist. The parsimony of the IG was coming home to haunt it.
23. Pack animals being moved upstream. (Dr G. Bulger. Original photo by Harry Weaver)
Townshend intended to establish a firm base at Amara on the right bank overlooking the town and, to this end, he asked for six months’ reserve of food and ammunition. Nixon sheltered behind the Indian Army regulations and declined. This caused Townshend uncharacteristically to burst into print and he lucidly addressed his ire to Nixon’s Chief of Staff (who was the same rank),81 saying among other things, ‘I do not think that regulations should come into the question.’82 This illustrates the curious manner in which, although Nixon prosecuted the campaign aggressively, he was nevertheless unable or unwilling to provide Townshend with the means to do his bidding. He wholeheartedly supported his staff, who seemed to be incapable of recognising that the situation the force faced was quite unlike anything for which the ‘regulations’ had been written. Eventually the desired supplies were located at Amara, but only after a protracted bureaucratic battle.
Nixon had a number of shortcomings; perhaps one of the most significant was that he never solved the problem of river transport. From that flowed all manner of crises. It was a task given to him on appointment and although he had made requests for more ships, it was only on 10 July 1915, eight months after the invasion, that he got around to asking the IG to provide six paddle steamers, three stern wheelers, eight tugs and forty-three barges. This points to a significant gap in the transport inventory that Nixon and his staff had recognised, albeit belatedly. However, despite the serious impact the transport deficiency had upon his logistic capacity, he did not adapt his master plan to take Baghdad.
The river transport requested by Nixon did not exist and the Mesopotamia Commission Report (at page 19) observed:
The additional transport asked for was sanctioned after lengthy correspondence but the execution of the order under any circumstances would have taken from eight to ten months before completion, and the ships would then have had to be conveyed whether under their own steam or piecemeal to Basra. Under no circumstances would they have been available till towards the middle of 1916.
Townshend’s 18th Brigade lost its sappers, miners and supporting field artillery, all of which were now moved to the command of General Gorringe to support the attack on Nasariyeh, where there was a Turkish concentration, and so Nixon’s fears were justified. Access to the objective was by way of the Euphrates River and the very shallow Lake Hammar. In fiercely oppressive heat, on 25 July, Major General Gorringe,83 aided by a flotilla of small boats, attacked and took his objective – and 950 prisoners. British casualties were 553 all ranks, but there was much sickness in addition.84 The Indian Army Medical Service was kept fully occupied.
24. Austen Chamberlain, Secretary of State for India, 1915–1917.
Ignoring the practical problems that confronted it, and as success piled on success, the IG’s ambition knew few bounds – it really was all just too easy. Hardinge sent a telegram to Austen Chamberlain on 27 July, which read: ‘Now that Nasariyeh has been occupied the occupation of Kut-al-Amara is considered, by us, to be a strategic necessity.’85 Chamberlain demurred initially but, when furnished with the details of Nixon’s military arrangements, he gave his assent. This followed the usual pattern of London balking initially at a request but then, belatedly, conceding and giving permission.
Wilfred Nunn noted that it was 112 river miles from Basra to Amara and a further 152 river miles from Amara to Kut. Ctesiphon, on the outskirts of Baghdad, is about 170 miles above Kut, ‘on the river upon which we were depending for our supplies and ammunition, as we had no railway.’86
To ‘fast forward’ ninety-two years to 2007, when Major Chris Hunter RLC found himself fighting a different war but in the same place (modern spelling Al-Amara), he wrote:
As I climb out of the warrior, I am blinded by the brilliant sun. The stench of rotting garbage and crap is all too familiar now, but it still makes me want to puke. It’s just like being in the back streets of Basra. I’m beginning to wonder whether every city in this country smells of shit or they just saved the best ones for us. Among the two-storey flat-roofed buildings and palm-lined boulevards I can feel the blue touchpaper and the whole place is going to explode any second.
This is supposed to be the location of the Garden of Eden and to those that live there I’m sure Al-Amara is the most wonderful place on earth. But as far as I am concerned, this collection of flyblown hovels in the middle of nowhere is one of the most violent shit-reeking slums I’ve ever visited. Burnt-out cars, festering rubbish and piles of brick and rubble litter every street. Centuries-old buildings have been destroyed by insurgent mortar and RPG fire. Al-Amara is a city in ruins and the people who live here don’t give a damn.
It is difficult to imagine the extreme squalor that faced Townshend in this, his latest prize. The 6th Division now spent from 3 June until mid-September, about ten weeks, encamped outside Amara. Townshend did not want his troops to be billeted in this health-threatening place, and of necessity a tented barracks sprang up. For the soldiers this was not by any means a holiday; quite the reverse, it was an uncomfortable, miserable and very boring existence. It generated physical and mental illness.
The rate of physical sickness had risen to alarming proportions and was no respecter of rank. The soldiers who had not succumbed to ‘fever’ reacted to their surroundings in different ways. Their lifestyle gave rise to extreme boredom, anxiety, restlessness and frayed tempers, although it was reported in the Press, specifically The Times, that ‘some efforts were made to alleviate their circumstances with the provision of mosquito nets, ice, mineral waters and fresh vegetables.’
That was quite untrue.
It was the work of an early twentieth-century, cynical, spin doctor – the reality was ver
y much removed. At 0500 hrs in Mesopotamia it was already too hot to sleep. For those who ventured out, sunstroke and heatstroke were common occurrences. The mercury habitually exceeded 110°F and often reached 116°F. In one period from 7 to 28 July 1917, the temperature did not fall below 116°F in the shade. The climate was lethal, and 423 British and fifty-nine Indian troops died of heatstroke.87 William Bird, a soldier in that most excellent battalion, the 2nd Dorsets, alleged in a letter that he had experienced ‘127°F in the shade’.
The Tigris water was unclean, but it was the only source and so dysentery and paratyphoid cases multiplied. Men lay all day on ‘beds’ with rushes used as mattresses. Any exertion was hazardous, as the following demonstrates:
I remember very vividly a burial party. We started out for the cemetery, about a mile away, at about 6.00 am. Before we had gone half the distance a man went down with heatstroke and was carried back, limp and twitching to hospital.
As the corpse was lowered into the grave, one of the men on the ropes stumbled forward and fell limply into the grave on top of the dead body. As we fell in to march back, another man went down. Luckily, we had brought a spare stretcher and with one man on this and the other on the stretcher on which the dead man had been carried to the grave, we returned.
We had buried one man, and lost three others over the job.88
The impact of all of this on Force levels is evident. Townshend’s division was evaporating. Townshend recorded that, within ten days of taking the town, about 1,200 of his men ‘were on the sick list.’ Townshend undertook a reconnaissance north of Amara and he soon, thereafter, contracted a fever; he was rushed downriver to Basra and thence to Bombay, where he had time to recover, free from the attention of the flies. In a curiously un-soldierly letter to his wife, he wrote:
This is the first day my darling, I am up and dressed and I am now rapidly getting stronger. After the business at Amara, I was on a long reconnaissance all day along the road to Baghdad. No one looked after me to see that I had any food and I was too much taken up with my work to think of food, and so went empty all day under a blazing sun.89
Townshend was in command of that reconnaissance party; he decided where it went and where it would stop to eat, drink and water its horses. To suggest that he, an able bodied, fit soldier on active service should have had to be ‘looked after’ is complete nonsense. The tone of the letter is very revealing and this wimpish ‘poor me’ attitude would surface again in the future.
He was most fortunate in the priority treatment he received while he was ill. This was a service not available to his soldiers, who took their chances with the regimental medical officers, the enervating heat, poor diet, dirty water and those ‘bloody flies’.
Townshend was evacuated and treated in India. As he remarked in his book, ‘It was only my splendid constitution that pulled me through.’90 Many of his soldiers were not so fortunate. Cemeteries were being filled and his soldiers’ bones are there to this day. That letter to Townsend’s wife ended with:
I told you darling, that I only wanted my chance! You should have seen the British and Indian soldiers cheering me on as I stood on the Comet. I must have the gift of making men (I mean soldier men) love me and follow me. I have only known the 6th Division for six months and they’d storm the gates of hell if I told them to.
Townshend was heroically heterosexual. He was an averred and enthusiastic admirer of the female form – so it is curious that he needed to include the phrase in parentheses, and to his wife, of all people.
While in India, Townshend stayed with Hardinge as his guest and during that sojourn he wrote to his friend, General Sir James Wolfe-Murray.91 At the time, Wolfe-Murray was the professional head of the British Army and the propriety of a relatively junior officer writing in the following terms may be doubtful. Townshend wrote:
I believe I am to advance from Amarah to Kut-al-Amara92 directly I get back to my division, my headquarters being at Amarah. The question is where are we going to stop in Mesopotamia? I stayed with the Viceroy, but could not get anything out of him as regards our policy in Mesopotamia. … We have certainly not good enough troops to make certain [Townshend’s italics] of taking Baghdad, which I hear is being fortified, and guns of position are being mounted there.
We can take no risks of a defeat in the East. Imagine a retreat from Baghdad and a consequent instant rising of the Arabs of the whole country behind us, to say nothing of the certain rise in the case of the Persians and probably the Afghans in consequence, as the Amir is only keeping his country out of the war with difficulty. You can afford to have reverses in France and retreats, witness that from Mons to the Marne; you cannot do that sort of thing in the East and retain prestige.
Of our two divisions in Mesopotamia, mine, the 6th, is complete; the 12th Division (Gorringe) has no guns! Or divisional troops – and Nixon takes them from me and lends them to the latter when has to go anywhere.
I consider we ought to hold what we have got and not advance anymore – as long as we are held up, as we undoubtedly are, in the Dardanelles. All these offensive operations in secondary theatres are dreadful errors in strategy: the Dardanelles, Egypt, Mesopotamia and East Africa! I wonder and wonder at such expeditions being permitted in violation of the greatest of all the great fundamental principles of war, especially that of Economy of Force. Such violation is always punished in history.93
The letter goes on at greater length and becomes a gratuitous lesson in military strategy to a general vastly his superior, albeit not with the same grasp of military history. The letter concludes by mentioning the plaudits that he has received and the record he has established ‘in the way of pursuits’. Russell Braddon was no fan of Townshend and his book, The Siege, has a persistent, angry undertone. He commented very strongly on this letter, saying:
The letter was completely in character. It revealed a gift for strategic appreciation amounting almost to prescience. It revealed Townshend’s chronic tendency to criticise his superiors and his obsession with his own affairs to the exclusion of all others. It revealed his habitual lack of generosity to colleagues whom he praised only if they were of inferior rank to himself – his tendency to whine and his almost embarrassing immodesty.
Norman Dixon thought that the letter, and Braddon’s observations upon it, were sufficient evidence to include Townshend in his work on Military Psychology.94 This calls into question the depth of Dixon’s research into other subjects upon whom he passed judgment in his book.
Setting letter writing to one side and to return to the chronology: Townshend met with the Commander-in-Chief on 10 August. And the senior man was given an up-to-date, if shaded, briefing on the situation of 6th Indian Division. At his meeting with General Sir Beauchamp Duff, Townshend made the valid point that to take and hold Baghdad would require a corps of two full divisions. According to the GOC 6th Division, Duff replied, saying, ‘Not one inch, Townshend, shall you go beyond Kut unless I make you up to adequate strength.’95
Townshend was itching to put up the third star that would go with command of a corps. The ‘K’ that usually went with promotion to lieutenant general would be a very acceptable bonus. It had not occurred to Townshend that anyone else might be given the job – if indeed a job was created. As Townshend’s biographer, the author (who studied his man in some depth) believes Charlie’s overriding and dominant characteristic was his utterly unbridled and unattractive ambition. It shaped everything in his life and affected the way he related to all other people. He made it his business to cultivate his seniors and he used his association with them shamelessly. His soldiers were no more than a means to his ends and there is no recorded indication of his personal care for any of them.
Townshend started his journey back from India and at about the same time the MC noted:
On 15 August 1915 Surgeon General Hathaway made application to the Inspector General of Communications at Basra for a steamer to be set apart and fitted for the conveyance of sick and wounded or alterna
tively for a tug and two mahailas. The steamer and tug were refused on the ground that all were required for the movement of troops and supplies.96
Surgeon General Hathaway did not impress the need on General Nixon and he showed little foresight … his request on 15 August 1915 for an improvised steamer was not urged persistently or with sufficient emphasis.
Townshend returned to his duty and Nixon had briefed him that Suleiman Askeri Bey, who had commanded at Kurnah and Shaiba and suffered defeats in both places, had committed suicide – such was his shame. His successor was Nureddin (Nur-Ur-Din), a very capable soldier, who had taken a position astride the Tigris at Es Sinn. He was thought to be particularly strong on the right bank. His strength was estimated at about 10,000 men and thirty-two guns. There is no record of whether or not Nixon and Townshend discussed river transport at this meeting. If they did not, then they should have done so. If they did, then the conversation was unproductive.
Townshend concentrated his force at Ali Gharbi and took stock. In addition to his three-brigade division he had 6th Indian Cavalry Brigade, 10th Royal Field Artillery Brigade and two battalions of 30th Indian Brigade. All up he commanded 11,000 men and twenty-eight guns. The downside was that his riverine assets were, at best, barely adequate and he could not afford any losses. A wise man once said, ‘Victory is the beautiful, bright coloured flower. Transport is the stem without which it could never have blossomed.’97 In this case and, indeed, throughout the campaign, the ‘stem’ was weak, thin and vulnerable.