Battle of Shaiba begins

At dawn on 12 April 1915 Turkish troops attacked the fortified British camp at Shaiba, a dozen or so kilometres south-west of Basra. It was the largest Turkish attempt to recover lower Mesopotamia, lost in the autumn of 1914. All day and all night the defenders beat off successive attacks, while the British in Basra struggled to get reinforcements to them across the flooded desert. Only three days earlier General John Nixon had taken over command in the Persian Gulf.

Askerî’s forces

The expedition was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Süleyman Askerî, a close associate of Enver Pasha and one of the organisers of the secret Special Organisation, commander of the Ottoman forces in Iraq since December 1914. In January he had been badly wounded in a clash with the British at Qurna, and even in April he still could not walk. He directed the expedition from a stretcher. The troops were commanded directly by Ali Bey, commander of the Istanbul fire brigade regiment, a military formation sent to Mesopotamia as one of the best units available. Alongside it went battalions of the 35th Division, the volunteer Osmancık battalion and battalions filled up with Kurdish volunteers. According to Turkish sources, at the end of March Askerî’s right wing numbered about 7,600 men with 21 guns, although the British estimated it much higher.

The largest part of the expedition consisted of Arab tribal warriors, according to Turkish sources more than 18,000 men. They had been brought in by powerful sheikhs, above all Ajaimi al-Sa’dun of the Muntafiq tribal confederation, and Shia clerics from Najaf and Karbala also called for war against the unbelievers. Askerî reckoned that if he took Shaiba and entered Basra, he would rouse the whole region to jihad.

Assault on the camp

The camp at Shaiba had a perimeter of more than five kilometres. Trenches with wire entanglements surrounded it in a semicircle, and its rear rested on flooded ground. In the middle of the western sector stood a brick serai known as Shaiba Fort. The commander here was General Charles Fry, who had under him two infantry brigades (the 16th and 18th), a cavalry brigade and several batteries of artillery. Warned of the attack, he had the trenches manned as early as the night before.

At about 5 a.m. the Turks opened rifle fire on the fort from the west and south-west, and at sunrise their twelve guns opened up. The British artillery quickly located the batteries and silenced most of the Turkish field guns, which had been placed without cover on an open slope, within a quarter of an hour. The infantry attack was directed mainly at a salient corner of the trenches south of the fort. By 8 a.m. it had been repulsed. At about 9 a.m. crowds of Arabs with six banners appeared on a mound north-west of the camp, called North Mound by the British, but their attempts to attack were broken up by rifle and machine-gun fire.

In the afternoon the Turks renewed their attack from the south. At about 1.30 p.m. thirty Arab sailing boats tried to enter the flooded area between Shaiba and Basra, but turned back. Arab marksmen were harassing the British artillery observers on the left of the camp, so Major George Wheeler of the 7th Hariana Lancers led out his squadron, scattered them with a lance charge and returned to the camp with the loss of one man wounded. For this sortie and for the fighting the following day he was later awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

At dusk the Turks again attacked strongly from the south. Within a quarter of an hour the Turks put out a British searchlight with rifle fire and put one of the machine guns out of action for two hours. Throughout the night, covered by heavy firing, they tried to cut the wire. The last attack came at about 3.30 a.m. The main burden of the defence fell on the 48th Pioneers and the 17th Company of Sappers and Miners, supported by the machine guns of the 2nd Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment. Despite many hours of fighting, the British and Indians lost, according to the official history, only five killed and 66 wounded.

Reinforcements across the water

Nixon wanted to set out for Shaiba with reinforcements in the morning. When at about 7.30 a.m. he reached the Zubair gate in Basra, it turned out that all the local boatmen had fled. A crowd of townspeople was gathering in front of the gate, concluding from the course of the fighting, visible through field glasses, that the Turks would soon enter the town. According to one British official, many of them were already prepared to welcome them.

At about 9 a.m. General Charles Melliss set off with the 30th Brigade on foot through the water towards the ruins of Old Basra, where according to Fry’s reports the Turks had appeared. The water came above the soldiers’ knees, and Fry reported that he could send only two battalions to meet them and that a landing at Old Basra would be very risky. When Fry gave his assurance that he would hold the camp, Nixon turned the brigade back. In the afternoon about 80 flat-bottomed boats, known as bellums, were collected, and when the boatmen refused to work, they were propelled by volunteers from the 20th Punjabis. At about 4.30 p.m. they set out with Melliss, the staff of the 6th Division and three quarters of the 24th Punjabis. When the water became too shallow, soldiers and officers had to wade beside the boats and push them ahead. Melliss reached Shaiba at about 8.30 p.m., and the last boats arrived at about midnight. On the way back the boats were attacked by enemy canoes. The losses were 22 Indians, most of them killed.

Melliss, senior in rank to Fry, took over command in the camp only at dawn on 13 April, when he could look over the position by daylight. The first day of the battle ended in failure for the Turks. They had not managed to break through the defences, and their Arab allies, on whom Askerî had counted so much, fought half-heartedly and kept well away from the British trenches.