by N S Nash
Enquire into the origin, inception and conduct of war in Mesopotamia, including the supply of drafts, reinforcements, ammunition and equipment to the troops and fleet, the provision for the sick and wounded, and the responsibility for these departments of Government whose duty it is to minister to the wants of the forces employed in the theatre of War.282
So, who were the men selected to conduct this inquiry? Today their names ring few bells, and even in 1916 they may not have been front-line household names, but they were all firmly ‘establishment’ figures. They were:
Lord George Hamilton GCSI PC (1845–1927)
Educated at Harrow. In 1864 he was commissioned into the Rifle Brigade and served in Canada. Four years later, he ‘exchanged’ into the Coldstream Guards, but he was a guardsman only very briefly. Disraeli, no less, invited him to contest the constituency of Middlesex on behalf of the Conservative Party; duly elected, he held that seat for seventeen years (1868–85). He moved and represented Ealing from 1885 to 1906. He held office as Under Secretary of State for India for four years, from 1874 to 1878. He was only thirty-three when he was made a Privy Councillor in 1878. He moved on to become First Lord of the Admiralty in 1885 and served in that post until 1892 (with a brief gap in 1886). In 1895, he was appointed Secretary of State for India and held the job until 1903.
67. Lord George Hamilton – the Chairman of the Mesopotamia Commission.
Hamilton was well qualified to be the Chairman of the Commission; his experience of the India Office gave him an insight into the workings of that organisation and probably a feel for the relationships. However, his heart was not in the job, and he said so.
Richard Hely-Hutchinson, 6th Earl of Donoughmore KP PC (1875–1948)
Educated at Eton. He served briefly as a militia officer in Ireland and took his seat in the House of Lords in 1900. A Conservative politician, he was Under Secretary of State for War from 1903 to 1905 in Arthur Balfour’s government.
Lord Hugh Cecil, 1st Baron Quickswood MP (1869–1956)
Educated at Eton and Oxford. He was a Conservative politician and was first elected MP in 1895; he took especial interest in religious issues. He served in the Royal Flying Corps in France and, based on his practical experience, was a staunch defender of Lord Trenchard, who had a chequered career in the First World War. He represented Oxford University from 1910 until 1937. He was an opponent of Home Rule for Ireland and a man of strong principles. He was Churchill’s best man in 1908.
John Hodge MP (1855–1937)
His education is unknown but he attended the ‘University of Life’ and made a name for himself as a pugnacious trade unionist. He was a member of Manchester City Council from 1897 to 1901, and stood for Parliament in 1900 and 1903. He was eventually elected in the 1906 General Election. Hodge was staunchly patriotic, and the impression is that he was included on this commission by Asquith as a left-wing token.
Sir Archibald Williamson, 1st Baron Forres Bt MP (1860–1931)
Educated at Craigmont School and Edinburgh University. He was elected as the Liberal Member for Elginshire from 1906 to 1918, and for Moray and Nairn until 1922. He had been the chairman of several Home Office, Board of Trade and Parliamentary committees, so his experience led directly to his appointment to the MC. After the war, he became Financial Secretary to the War Office from 1919 to 1921.
Commander Josiah Wedgwood, 1st Baron Wedgwood DSO PC DL MP (1872–1943)
Educated at Clifton College and the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. When war broke out in South Africa, he was commissioned in the Army and served as a captain commanding a battery of artillery. After a period spent as a magistrate, he returned to UK and was first elected as a Liberal MP in 1906. At that time he made it clear that the party whip would not bind him.
In 1914, he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He served in France and was later wounded in the Dardanelles, having first won the Distinguished Service Order during the landings at Cape Helles. At this time he espoused the Zionist cause and returned to the Army to command a machine-gun company in the 2nd South African Brigade. In 1917, he was appointed Assistant Director of Trench Warfare in the rank of colonel. After the war, he described himself as an ‘impenitent, independent radical’. That he proved to be a ‘loose cannon’ on the MC probably surprised no one.
Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge GCB (1839–1924)
Educated at Walthamstow House. He joined the Royal Navy 1853 and served during the transition from sail to steam, seeing active service in the Crimean War. Interestingly, he commanded the Osprey Class Sloop Espiegle in the Western Pacific (a later ship of that name has already featured in this text). He was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Squadron in 1894, and in 1898, after promotion to vice admiral, he took command of the China Station. He retired from the Navy in 1904, aged sixty-five, and was then called on to investigate the Dogger Bank Incident.283
General Sir Neville Lyttelton GCB GCVO (1845–1931)
Educated at Eton. He was commissioned into the Rifle Brigade in 1865. In a lengthy and very successful career, he saw action in Egypt, the Sudan and South Africa. He was Commander-in-Chief South Africa, Commander-in-Chief Ireland and, finally, Chief of the Imperial General Staff 1904–1908. In the latter post he was the professional Head of the British Army. However, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography judged that he was ‘feckless, malleable and failed to lead the Army Council’. That is not a ringing endorsement of his ability.
68. General Sir Neville Lyttelton GCB GCVO.
Notwithstanding Lyttelton’s incapacity as a bureaucrat in his final appointment, it should not, and probably did not, dull his concern for the care of soldiers that he had had to exercise during his career.
* * *
Lord George Hamilton was by no means a neutral chairman, and later he made no secret of the fact that he had taken the job on in order to avoid a political crisis.284 There were six members of the Commission who had military experience to some degree.
Appointment to the Commission was not a sinecure and its members were all active in public life in one capacity or another. The Commission was given the authority to compel attendance by witnesses to take their evidence on oath. It met on sixty occasions and took evidence from those witnesses ‘who were either in England or could be brought home without serious detriment to the public interest’. A hundred and eighteen senior witnesses were duly examined and some are listed at Appendix A on page 268.
The Commission decided that it was unnecessary to visit Mesopotamia because it had access to the comprehensive records of the Vincent-Bingley Report, which it incorporated into its own report. Nevertheless, the decision of the MC not to visit the theatre was later perceived to have been a mistake, and as a result its credibility was damaged.
In the meantime, Major General Frederick Maude, who had previously served on the Western Front and in the Dardanelles, and had played a part in the operations to relieve Kut in April 1916, was the rising new star. He had witnessed the surrender of Kut and he prospered at the failure of Generals Lake and Gorringe, neither of whom had been able to relieve the garrison.
Maude was promoted to lieutenant general and given command of the Tigris Corps vice Sir George Gorringe in July 1916. Later that same month, he was appointed as Army Commander vice Sir Percy Lake. The rise of Maude had been nothing short of meteoric. He was to prove to be the right horse for the right course.
General Sir Wully Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, ordered Maude to stabilise the British line south of Kut, but Maude was more proactive than that and exceeded his brief. He reorganised his force and streamlined his logistic support, and as a result was well placed when he was ordered, on 18 September 1916, to advance further into Mesopotamia and up the Tigris. This was an entirely political decision driven through by Austen Chamberlain (Secretary of State for India) and Lord Curzon (a member of the War Council and Leader of the House of Lords), taken in the face of the opposition of the CIGS.
Maude was not an appealing personality, but he had an eye for detail and was known as ‘Systematic Joe’ by his officers. Heavily reinforced, Maude won the battles of Mohammed Abdul Hassan, Hai and Dahra in January 1917. He recaptured Kut in February 1917 and took the great prize of Baghdad on 11 March 1917. From Baghdad, he launched the Samarrah Offensive and extended his operations to the Euphrates and Diyala rivers.
By the summer of 1917, the British position in Mesopotamia was immeasurably stronger and more secure than when the MC was established. The port facilities at Basra had been rapidly increased and improved, and two further anchorages were established at Magil and Nahr Umar to reduce the bottleneck at Basra. Taken together, these initiatives increased the tonnage landed in the theatre from 38,916 to 100,000 tons by mid 1917. At this point fourteen ships could be attended to and cleared within three days. Maude’s appreciation that modern industrial warfare required the harnessing of all resources to achieve strategic advantage set him apart from his predecessors and, in part, he was responsible for transforming Basra into a major regional east-of-Suez port.285
The MC published its lengthy, 188-page Report in June 1917. The Press, and the Daily Mail in particular, fed public indignation and gave rise to the quotation at the head of this chapter. The judgments in the Report were all-embracing and broadly critical of both the Indian Government and HMG. Lord Curzon, one-time friend of Hardinge and a former viceroy, on reading the Report, did not sit on any convenient fence. He pronounced that, ‘I regret to say that a more shocking exposure of official blundering and incompetence has not in my opinion been made, at any rate since the Crimean War.’286 Curzon was a powerful political figure and his view carried weight.
The MC Report concluded that the despatch of Indian Expeditionary Force ‘D’ was justifiable but that the division of responsibility between the IG and HMG was unworkable, and the scope of the expedition ‘was never sufficiently defined in advance, so as to make each successive move part of a well thought-out and matured plan.’287 It drew attention to the fact that the commander-in-chief (Duff) should have visited the theatre and, because he did not do so, the Army headquarters in Simla did not appreciate the difficulties being experienced on the ground and, consequently, could not make adequate provision. It commented upon the advance to Baghdad in these terms:
The weightiest share of responsibility lies with Sir John Nixon, whose confident optimism was the main cause of the decision to advance. The other persons responsible were: In India, The Viceroy (Lord Hardinge) and the Commander-in-Chief (Sir Beauchamp Duff); In England, the Military Secretary of the India Office (Sir Edmund Barrow), the Secretary of State for India (Mr Austen Chamberlain) and the War Committee of the Cabinet.288
The Report dealt with ‘Supplies, Equipment and Reinforcements’ and found that the expedition was provisioned with general armament and equipment on a scale intended for an Indian frontier expedition and not up to the standard of modern European warfare, and was quite insufficient. It mentioned that the diet of Indian troops lacked nutritive qualities, causing scurvy and other conditions, but it balanced the criticism by agreeing that ‘since then this ration has twice been improved.’
An illuminating anecdote that gets a telling in many histories of the period concerns the Quarter Master General in Delhi, who, when advised that the lack of fresh vegetables in Mesopotamia was causing scurvy and beriberi, allegedly responded by saying, ‘That’s what they all say. What I always say is – if you want vegetables – GROW ‘EM.’ Chamberlain recorded this ignorant and unsophisticated attitude in a note on 14 July 1917.289
In dealing with transport, the MC findings were predictable. At page 113, sub-paragraph (f) appears: ‘With General Sir John Nixon rests the responsibility for recommending the advance in 1915 with insufficient transport and equipment. For what ensued from shortage of steamers, General Sir John Nixon must be held to blame.’ It goes on to describe the shortage of transport as ‘fatal’ to the relief operations. The facilities or lack of them at Basra were said to be ‘hopelessly inadequate’.
It was on page 114 that the Report reached ‘Medical’ and the reader will, by now, already have drawn his or her own conclusion on this topic. However, the formal record was predictably damning. The MC said Vincent-Bingley found that:
A grave responsibility for that part of the suffering, which resulted from avoidable circumstances, rests with the Senior Medical Officer of the Force, Surgeon General G.H. Hathaway and with General Sir John Nixon the General Officer Commanding the Force from 9 April 1915 until 19 January 1916. General Hathaway did not represent with sufficient promptitude and force the needs of the service for which he was responsible, and in particular failed to urge the necessity for adequate transport for the sick and wounded with the insistency that the situation demanded, General Nixon did not, in our opinion, appreciate the conditions which would necessarily arise if provision for the sick and wounded of his force were not made on a more liberal scale. We endorse the finding as regards Surgeon General Hathaway, who in our judgment showed himself to be unfit for the high administrative office he held.
The senior leadership in the Indian Army Medical Service had been unsettled during the campaign. Surgeon General Sir William Babtie was the Director of the service from March 1914 to June 1915. However, during this period he was out of station for six weeks in February/March 1915. His absence is unexplained, but no one was nominated to stand in for him, despite it being the normal practice for someone to deputise for a senior officer when he is out of station for an extended period. The six weeks that Babtie, the head of the medical service, was away saw his organisation leaderless. It was an unsatisfactory state of affairs. Surgeon General J.G. MacNeece relieved Babtie in July 1915 and followed him as Director. He returned ‘home’ on sick leave on 15 April 1916, just before the fall of Kut.
The Commission examined in some detail the performance of the man who headed the medical organisation. Given the dire under-achievement of the Indian Medical Service, it is little wonder that General Babtie suffered under the scrutiny. The Report considered:
In one sense, the numerous sanitary and precautionary requisitions of Colonel Hehir are a measure of Sir William Babtie’s omissions. We have seen that during the first months of the campaign Colonel Hehir was forced to wire to India for sun glasses, anti-toxin, mosquito-nets, spine pads etc. etc. Though it is true Sir William Babtie was not technically responsible for the actual provision of all of these requisites, yet it is quite clear that they were essential to the maintenance of the health of the troops, and in our opinion Sir William Babtie should have made it his duty to have impressed upon the Quarter Master General’s or other departments concerned the necessity for providing well beforehand, these and other medical ancillaries in which the expedition is proved to have been deficient. He did not do this, with the result that many of these essentials did not reach the troops in sufficient time and sufficient quantities.290
The evidence adduced by the Commission showed that the dietary needs of the soldiers were not satisfied, despite an early warning from Colonel Hehir on 8 April 1915 in which he gave clear warning that 2 ounces of potatoes and only 28 ounces of fresh meat per week was insufficient to prevent scurvy, unless supplemented by additional vegetables. Babtie said, in his defence, that he had raised the question of rationing at the Commander-in Chief’s conference and an additional ration was sanctioned. The Commission was unimpressed and sceptical about the implementation of this supplement because, nevertheless, Indian troops suffered from scurvy – an entirely preventable disease. This was an indictment of not only the medical establishment but the supply system as well. In May 1916, 7,500 men were lost to the force for nineteen weeks suffering from scurvy directly attributed to deficiencies in the Indian ration.
General Babtie came in for further criticism over the non-provision of medical personnel in that he ‘despatched Force ‘D’ 1,800 miles from its base, with medical personnel short even of the authorised scale. When reinforcements w
ere sent he took, or acquiesced in, measures that even further reduced the exiguous scale … so that each division was supplied with only twelve sections of field ambulance instead of the proper complement of twenty.’
Babtie, a soldier by profession but, more importantly, a doctor by discipline, was sufficiently senior that his responsibilities ranged well outside the detailed treatment of the sick and wounded. For example, at its base the scale of provision of hospital ships was dependent upon his advice. Later, the well-documented dearth and inadequacy of these vessels was laid at his door. He defended himself by saying that he was not in the ‘command loop’ and that Nixon had not made clear to him the extensive campaign up the Tigris that was planned. His medical arrangements were accordingly limited to the conquest and retention of Basra and the oil fields. He advised the Commission that, ‘if he had had a hint of Baghdad the arrangements would have had to be absolutely put into the melting pot.’291
Notwithstanding the litany of medical issues and their associated failings, Sir William Babtie, a distinguished and gallant officer, impressed the Commission as ‘an officer of ability and knowledge’ when it took his evidence. But, it concluded, he did not bring his qualities to bear upon the task before him and ‘he accepted obviously insufficient medical provision without protest and without adequate effort to improve it. He cannot therefore be held blameless.292 Having regard to all the circumstances, we desire to say that the faults of his administration were not in our judgment, such as to prove him unfit for important responsible administrative posts.’
Major General MacNeece, who replaced Babtie, was willing and desirous of leading his service to the best of his ability, but rather crushingly the MC described him as ‘a man of advancing years and diminishing strength, unequal to the position he was called upon to fill’. His administration of the Indian Medical Service covered the worst of the medical disasters, but he had inherited a bag of worms and quite reasonably he escaped any formal censure, particularly as the medical situation had, by now, improved.