by N S Nash
When it became clear that Kut could not be re-supplied by river the only alternative was to drop food from the air. However, aircraft were few in number, ill-equipped for the purpose and the pilots unskilled in the process. Small amounts were safely delivered, but frequently the bounty fell into the river or inside Turkish lines. The pilots, in their flimsy canvas and string aircraft, were much at risk from small-arms fire and the higher they went to avoid it, the less accurate their ration drop. At this stage in the siege, any successful drop was greeted with acclaim.
61. British graves. (Dr G. Bulger, original photo by Harry Weaver)
Starvation was now evident and the Kuttites started to show all the signs of vitamin deficiency, about which the medics could do nothing. The horses ate the tails of their fellows and their head ropes. Anything that grew was eaten; grass and weeds were much favoured and when stewed up, described as ‘spinach’. Rats, cats and dogs all headed for the pot, and this was not the time to be squeamish. It may have been coincidence but, on 12 April, Brigadier General F.A. Hoghton ate some of the ‘spinach’ and died soon thereafter. It seemed that the stew had contained something injurious and brought about an ignominious end for a brave and effective commander. His comrade, Major General Sir Charles Mellis VC, was unwell, but still breathing fire and brimstone, and appeared to be indestructible.
It may well be restating the blindingly obvious but, when the Duke of Marlborough wrote to Colonel Cadogan in 1703, he remarked that, ‘An army cannot preserve good order unless its soldiers have meat in their bellies, coats on their backs and shoes on their feet.’ In March 1916, the Kuttites would say ‘aye’ to that, especially as eating their boots looked like becoming an option.
It came as a severe shock to Hardinge when he discovered that Townshend had advised strongly against the advance to Ctesiphon and that Nixon had not only ignored the advice, but had kept it to himself. Hitherto, Hardinge had been Nixon’s unquestioning and greatest supporter but, by 25 March 1916, with Nixon now back in India on sick leave and his own tenure at its end, Hardinge was sadly disillusioned. He wrote to Chamberlain expressing his dismay.250
After the bloody affair at Dujaila, the British spent the rest of March adjusting, reinforcing, and reorganising shattered units. The heavy loss of officers made it difficult to regain the cohesiveness and rapport at unit level that is so essential to sound morale and efficiency.
On 4 April, Lord Hardinge vacated the appointment of Viceroy of India, handed over to Lord Chelmsford and embarked on a ship for the journey back to the UK, where he would be warmly welcomed back into the heart of the British establishment. There was no hint of criticism of his management of the Mesopotamian campaign. Smoothly, after some leave, he once more took up the appointment of Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office. Hardinge, ‘a rather cold, reserved man’,251 was now a lonely one. His wife Winifred had died in July 1915 and his son Edd had died of wounds some six months before. His public life, always important, now assumed greater importance.
In Mesopotamia, spring was in the air, it was warmer and the nights, although cold, were not life-threatening. The warmer weather signalled the reappearance of the hosts of energetic flies. However, they were not the only enemy. As the snows melted high in the Caucasus, the meltwater flowed by way of countless, previously dry streambeds to the headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Inexorably, the river level rose.
It had risen every spring, ‘even before Pontius was a pilot’252 (Pilate). Over 10,000 square miles of the Babylonian Plain, between the rivers, flooded. The area around Kut was subject to this annual, irresistible inundation.
Troops on both sides set to, constructing bunds to hold back the waters, with only very limited success. Wheeled vehicles were immobile and the gunners in particular were hamstrung. Both sides patrolled, but with little hope of any sort of tactical success. Patrols had to wade through filthy, muddy water and sought to clear the dry ground of enemy snipers. This was very dangerous work and death by drowning was always on the cards for the man brought low in the endless water-covered landscape. Any form of large-scale operation was impossible and it was obvious to all, except General Sir Percy Lake, that the relief of Kut was becoming more unlikely, day by day.
The conditions were dangerous. Latrines were flooded and raw sewage swirled around the trenches. Sleeping was only possible above the water level; washing was an improbable aspiration and hot, freshly cooked food non-existent. The maintenance of high morale in these conditions was a herculean task.
Curiously, the sailors in HM’s ships on the water were much more comfortable and drier than the soldiers ashore who were in the water.
In Basra, communications were maintained with units and one British battalion arrived at the front equipped with a Japanese invention, ‘a fly-catching machine’. These were issued on a scale of one per company. The inventor and the staff officer who arranged the purchase of this absurd device clearly had no appreciation of just how many multiple millions, nay trillions of flies there were. An issue of 10,000 machines per company would probably have been insufficient. This high-tech device was described as:
A box with a triangular piece of wood revolving on a clockwork-operated spindle and its purpose as might be deduced was to reduce the vast numbers of the fly population with which troops in the forward areas were infested. Through a cutaway opening in the box the unsuspecting fly settled on the revolving triangle, which was sticky with a fly catching material, and then slowly revolved into the box where the now thoroughly bemused fly was scraped off.253
The box came complete with operating instructions and helpful photographs of piles of dead flies slain by this lethal weapon. Predictably, the soldiers turned the boxes to good use and bet on the kill rate of each box. To the Staff in Basra, still utterly divorced from the real world upriver, there were records to keep, and apparently during a period of savage fighting the adjutant of one battalion received a signal to ‘report how many files caught in April’. Across the signal the adjutant wrote, ‘Balls’, and this message was relayed back to the assiduous staff officer in Basra. By immediate response came a correction saying, ‘For files, read flies.’ The adjutant responded, ‘For balls, read cock.’254
This same officer, who had just survived a Turkish bombardment, received a message from Basra asking him to comment on ‘the attitude of the enemy’. He replied, ‘Hostile’. An immediate return asked him to amplify his answer. He replied, ‘Very hostile’.
Townshend or his senior supply officer had initiated a search of Kut for foodstuffs and had found a remarkable amount hidden in the roofs, and in one case behind a skilfully constructed and camouflaged false wall. In addition, Townshend was buying grain from the population. This accumulation in due course would allow him to forecast with confidence that he could hang out until 15 April.255
On 11 March, General Gorringe took over command of the Tigris Corps and advised General Lake that he intended to extend along the right bank of the river, placing his artillery in positions to dominate hostile guns on the left bank. Gorringe, like all of those who had gone before him, was tied to the river and his capacity to move on that river.
That same day, the total number of river steamers and tugs available to support Gorringe was thirty-seven. These vessels propelled the sixty-eight available barges and provided an average daily delivery at the front of 300 tons, against a requirement of 468 tons. This is assuming that no personnel were to be transported and that the full number of craft was always available.
Of course, this was never the case.
Local assets had been commandeered and 200 of the slow and unwieldy mahailas were employed to help fill the transport gap. Matters did improve, albeit slowly, and by 25 March there were forty-five tugs and steamers and an additional seventy-nine barges. This increased the daily lift by 38 tons, offset in part by an increase in the demand of 22 tons.
One of the ongoing difficulties was that vessels sent out to the theatre were of v
arying types and there was no commonality on spare parts or fittings. Barges that were to be married to these steamers were often incompatible with the power available to move them. On arrival, some steamers required a refit. Unfortunately, Basra was not a port and neither was it a shipyard.
To have made the most of the existing steamers, six barges (two with steamer, two loading and two unloading) would have been necessary for each steamer, but owing to some misunderstanding nothing like this number were sent.256
The climate of Mesopotamia was always a factor; from here on it was the decisive factor. The ever-present Tigris shaped the actions of both sides as its flooding limited movement and, by so doing, negated the best-laid plans.
The newly arrived 13th Division brought the Tigris Corps up to a full strength of 30,000. The 13th Division was commanded by Major General Sir Frederick Maude.257 He was an experienced officer, having already served in the Dardanelles and on the Western Front. Maude was to prosper in Mesopotamia like no other general officer that served in that campaign. He was the only one to win distinction, other than Townshend, although the distinction of the latter ultimately faded.
Every attempt had been made to provide Gorringe with all that he needed and all available river craft had been put to the task of carrying troops, ammunition, ordnance, medical and other warlike stores. But they could not carry everything, and so it was the food that was left behind – it was then swiftly pointed out to Gorringe that he only had ‘rations for seven or eight days’.258 He also had a further 3,000 men in transit to the front, but now rations took precedence and those reinforcements were held back and would not be available in the short term.
Notwithstanding Aylmer’s bloody defeat at the Hanna Defile, Gorringe decided that he would repeat the action and he detailed 13th Division to make the attack. On 31 March/1 April, in very heavy rain, the Division started to move into the forward British trenches. The rain was so severe that the assault was delayed until 5 April, by which time General Lake was in attendance, as was a Brigadier General W. Gilman. The latter was the appointed liaison officer between Indian Expeditionary Force ‘D’ and the War Office in London. His presence was because Kitchener and Robertson obviously wanted their man on the spot to plug the perceived veracity gap; he would report directly to Lieutenant General Sir William Robertson.
The first objective for Gorringe on the left bank was the Turkish position blocking the Hanna Defile.
That consisted of five entrenched lines one behind the other covering a depth of about 1½ miles, with a number of gun positions behind the third line and a barbed wire in front of their advanced line. On the right bank their forward position, just east of the Abu Rumman Mounds, ran roughly southward from the Tigris for about 2 miles.259
There was to be a much more sophisticated artillery programme than hitherto, but there was understandable apprehension in the ranks at the prospect of charging across the same bloody plain that had been the site of an earlier catastrophe. In the event, at 0455 hrs, the 13th Division made its assault behind a rolling bombardment and took the first Turkish line but, nevertheless, with predictable losses. For example, The Prince of Wales Volunteers lost three officers and twenty-three men from its ‘A’ Company alone.
The main body of the Turks had withdrawn unseen and the trenches were empty. A handful of prisoners were taken who said that the flooding had forced the hand of Khalil. He had withdrawn very skillfully and established a new position on the left bank, centred upon the Fallahiya bend and at Sannaiyat.
Maude exploited this swift success by sending his 40th Brigade forward to secure and hold a line between the river and the marsh about 2,000 yards east of the Fallahiya position. Gorringe had no intention of letting the enemy consolidate their dispositions and he determined to apply pressure as soon as possible – not least because the Tigris was rising again, and if the Turks breached the bank they could flood the area in front of their trenches and stop dead any further British advance.
At 1100 hrs, Gorringe stopped any independent actions by his subordinate commanders. The day was brutally hot and the mirage made nonsense of any attempt at observation. He realised that with the marsh and river as his two boundaries on the left bank only a frontal attack was possible. An attack in the relative cool of the evening was favoured.
Meanwhile, over on the right bank, 3rd Division had made excellent progress and, skirting some floods, it had occupied the abandoned Abu Rumman position. The nearest enemy force was at Bait Isa and, according to aerial reconnaissance, that consisted of 1,000 infantry, and there were 2,000 cavalry and six guns at Umm al Baram.
At this point Gorringe had every cause to be satisfied with the opening phase of his plan. At about 1945 hrs, General Maude’s 13th Division, supported by artillery firing from both banks, assaulted Fallahiya. The ground was taken, but only after a stern, bloody fight in which 1,868 casualties were suffered. It was a surprise to find that the enemy position was not a continuous line, nor did it have any depth. All the indications were that Fallahiya was only a temporary blocking position designed to win time to build a stronger Sannaiyat position. Temporary or not, it was effective, as 1,868 witnesses would testify.
Gorringe’s Corps was committed and courageous, but courage was not enough to offset the handicap of a logistics system that failed in every possible respect. The Mesopotamia Commission commented in its Report:
There is a consensus of evidence that the Force was deficient, even as late as in the spring of 1916, in wire cutters, telephones, water carts, Very lights, rockets, tents, mosquito nets, sun helmets, periscopes, telescopic sights, loophole plates, flares, bombs, hand grenades and even blankets and clothing. Our heavy casualties and reverses were in fact largely due to the lack of articles essential to the success of war carried out under modern conditions.260
This is not a list of sophisticated ‘nice to haves’. These are low-cost, simple items that any nineteenth-century army would expect to have in its inventory, and this was the state of affairs nearly two decades into the twentieth century in an army of the British Empire, upon which ‘the sun never sets’.
The extreme left of the Turkish Sannaiyat position had been hard up against floodwaters that had overflowed from the Suwaikiya Marsh. However, capriciously, the water had receded and it looked as if it would be possible to outflank the Turkish left between its current position and the marsh. This was to be the objective of Younghusband’s 7th Division, and the advance of an estimated 2¾ miles across a flat plain should not have presented any navigational problems, especially as there was an old Turkish communication trench that ran from Fallahiya to Sannaiyat to act as a guide. The target was the northern flank of the position, which consisted of three lines of trenches, about 100 yards apart
The attack was timed for 0455 hrs, a favoured time just before first light, but the advance of 7th Division to its assembly position was not straightforward. 19th and 28th brigades arrived in the right place at the right time – this despite them getting tangled up with elements of the 13th Division and its wounded all going in the opposite direction. 21st Brigade got into a frightful mess and the upshot was that at 0455 hrs, the Division was not ready. General Kemball asked Younghusband, his commander, to come forward and make a decision.
It is clear that the enemy were much further away than had been originally calculated; the estimate of 2¾ miles had been about a mile short – perhaps more. Younghusband decided that the attack should continue as (almost) planned, at 0530 hrs. The shroud of darkness was lost but the enemy trenches could not be discerned, so the objective was unclear. What was clear was that the driving north-west wind was having the effect of pushing surface water from the Suwaikiya Marsh and by so doing had contracted the distance between the communication trench and the marsh to about 400 yards.
The British went forward and any doubts as to the location of the enemy were quickly dispelled when they ran into ‘a torrent of fire’261 from both sides of the river. Once again, the bloodletting was horrifi
c, and the first charge stalled, as did subsequent attempts. 7th Division went to ground 400 yards short of the Turkish wire.
The badly bruised 7th Division was extracted to fill a support role and 13th Division was ordered to make an advance on a two-brigade front, with 38th on the right and 40th on the left.
The flooded state of the Suwaikiya Marsh made a turning movement impracticable, and the frontage on which attack was possible was thus reduced to about 1,200 yards – in other words, manoeuvre was impossible, and the attackers were confined to the bottleneck of comparatively dry ground between the Tigris and the marsh.
Captain Whalley-Kelley, writing in the regimental history of The Prince of Wales’s Volunteers (South Lancashire Regiment), recorded a participant’s view of the events that followed:
By 2.00 am on the 9th April the [6th] Battalion [part of 38th Brigade] was formed up on its starting line in four lines of platoons in column at 50 yards distance, with the 6th King’s Own [Royal Lancaster Regiment] on the right and the 6th East Lancashires on the left in the same formation. The objectives were only 650 yards away across the plain, and consequently the men had to lie down while waiting for zero.
It was a bitter night, and during the long wait everyone became numb with cold. At 4.20 am the long lines of infantry moved off silently and punctually, covering the first few hundred yards quickly and easily. When the leading platoons came within a hundred yards of their wire, however, the Turks fired a number of flares obliquely from their front, causing some confusion in the direction of march. At the same time they opened a heavy fire with machine guns and rifles, followed almost immediately by a storm of well-directed shells. The rapidity with which this defensive fire was put down seems to indicate that the enemy was well aware of the impending attack, and as our own artillery bombardment was ten minutes late in commencing it failed to synchronize with the assault – a disastrous error which, combined with the confusion caused by the Turkish flares, prevented all but the leading platoons closing with their opponents. These small parties entered the trenches and drove the enemy back to his second line, but they were unsupported and unable to get farther forward. The Turks rallied and counter-attacked, regaining their front line, although the gallant survivors of the invading platoons held their own until their bombs gave out.