Action at Mushahida

On 14 March 1917, three days after the British entered Baghdad, General Alexander Cobbe’s I Corps attacked the Turkish rearguard near Mushahida station, about 30 kilometres north of Kadhimiya, on the right bank of the Tigris. The station lay on the railway from Baghdad to Samarra, a section of the unfinished Baghdad Railway, along which the Ottoman XVIII Corps was retreating. The British chronology of the war calls the engagement the Action of Mushaidiya, and the British official history (Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia, vol. III) the action of Mushahida. The Turks called the station Müşahede. On this site we use the form Mushahida, closest to the Arabic name of the place.

After the capture of Baghdad General Frederick Stanley Maude could not rest. The season of the spring floods was approaching, and the Turks could cut the embankments on the Tigris and Euphrates and flood the country around the city. Airmen spotted two camps of about 4,000 men each by the river, taken to be the 51st and 52nd Divisions, at Hassaiwa and Mushahida. The horses of the cavalry division were so exhausted after the march from Aziziya that they needed several days’ rest, so on 13 March Maude ordered Cobbe to set out at night with the 7th Division, 34 field guns and 12 howitzers and attack the enemy in the morning. On the left bank of the Tigris the 40th Brigade of the 13th Division reached Kasirin, 45 kilometres north of Baghdad, on 14 March, pushing back a weak Turkish detachment.

The night march passed quietly, but at dawn the patrols did not find the Turks where they had been expected. The map was wrong: the railway line in fact ran several kilometres further west than it was drawn, and a strong mirage over the flat plain, crossed every few hundred metres by low sand ridges, hampered observation. Only before ten o’clock did the corps cavalry establish that the Turks were standing several kilometres south of the station, from the river to the railway and a little west of it, and that an armoured train stood at the station. The airmen estimated their strength at at least 5,000 rifles and 24 guns. At noon Cobbe decided to strike along the railway at the station, where he expected the Turkish reserves to be, counting on this to force the enemy to abandon his strongly entrenched left flank by the river.

The Black Watch assault

The attack of the 21st Brigade began only at 3.20 p.m., because moving the troops through the culverts under the railway embankment took a long time. In the first line went the 2nd Battalion of the Scottish Black Watch and the 1/8th Gurkhas, followed by the 9th Bhopal Infantry and two battalions of the 19th Brigade, including the 1st Battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders. The artillery covered them with a creeping barrage. At about 5 p.m. two companies of the Black Watch took the forward trenches on the ridge by the railway in a charge, and the 56th Rifles of the 28th Brigade came out onto the embankment and with flanking fire forced the Turks to abandon several hundred metres of trenches. The left wing, however, was held up in front of a hill called Bhopal Hill in British reports, which dominated the whole position. At about 6.30 p.m., after a heavy bombardment by artillery moved up closer, the Black Watch, the Gurkhas and the men of the Bhopal battalion took it by storm.

The commander of the Black Watch, Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Wauchope, received orders to take the station only after the hill had been captured. His men were suffering from thirst, because they had been able to refill their water only once during the day; they had fewer than a hundred rounds per rifle and had suffered heavy losses, but he decided to press on in the darkness. With the rest of the battalion, the Gurkhas and two companies of the Seaforth Highlanders he struggled for several hours across broken ground. At about 11.30 p.m., as they reached the station, they heard a train pulling out. They deployed for a charge, scattered the remnants of the defenders and took a few prisoners.

The balance

The British lost 518 men, 398 of them in the 21st Brigade. The Black Watch lost 230 men, including ten officers, or 43 per cent of the battalion’s strength. The Gurkhas and the Bhopal battalion each lost more than 70 men, and in the 1/8th Gurkhas only one British officer remained. The British estimated Turkish losses at 800–1,000 men, including more than fifty prisoners. On the morning of 15 March Cobbe proposed sending a cavalry brigade in pursuit, but Maude refused: he judged that the enemy had not been broken and that the horses needed rest. Patrols which reached the next station found only abandoned ammunition and equipment, signs of a hasty retreat. Maude ordered Cobbe to secure the embankments on the right bank and return with the rest of his troops to Baghdad. The Turks, commanded by Halil Pasha (Halil Kut), fell back towards Samarra, and the British took up the fight for it only in April.