Battle of Khan al-Baghdadi

The Battle of Khan al-Baghdadi was the last major British operation on the Euphrates during the Mesopotamian campaign. Half a year after the victory at Ramadi, the same Anglo-Indian 15th Division of General Harry Brooking repeated that manoeuvre on a larger scale. On 26 March 1918 the infantry pinned the Turks frontally, while the 11th Cavalry Brigade with armoured cars went round them through the desert and closed their line of retreat. During the night a Turkish attempt to break out collapsed, and at dawn on 27 March thousands of soldiers hung out white flags. In the pursuit the British reached Anah and went even further, on the way recapturing two of their own officers who had been taken prisoner two days earlier.

Name and dates

The British chronology of the war (Principal Events) records the “Action of Khan Baghdadi” under 26 March 1918 with the note “26/27”, and the occupation of Anah as a separate event. This page does the same: the battle covers the fighting of 26 March and the Turkish surrender on the morning of 27 March, and the pursuit beyond Anah is described as its aftermath. The main source is the British official history of the campaign (F.J. Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia, vol. IV), supplemented by the account of the war correspondent Edmund Candler, who rode with the motor column, and by the memoirs of Lieutenant-Colonel John Tennant, one of the two recaptured prisoners. In the sources the name of the place also appears as Khan Baghdadi. The British give the names of the Turkish commanders in different forms: Moberly writes of Nazim Bey and his predecessor Shukri Bey, Candler and Tennant of Nazmi Bey and Subri Bey.

Background

After the fall of Ramadi in September 1917 the Turks reinforced the Euphrates front. At the beginning of February 1918 the British estimated that around Hit and Sahiliya stood part of the Turkish 50th Division, the 157th and 169th Infantry Regiments, 4,000–5,000 men in all. The commander in Mesopotamia, General William Marshall, instructed Brooking to take Hit together with its garrison, although he himself expected that after the experience of Ramadi the Turks would not let themselves be easily surrounded. He was right. When on 8 March it turned out that the enemy was abandoning his positions, the British occupied Hit without a fight on 9 March, and Sahiliya a day later. The Turks fell back to Khan al-Baghdadi, about 35 kilometres upstream.

On 11 and 12 March Marshall and Brooking conferred in Baghdad. They agreed that towards the end of the month the 15th Division would push the Turks as far from Hit as possible and inflict as heavy losses on them as it could, then return to a position covering the town. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London had agreed to the occupation of Hit, but did not want the troops to go further up the Euphrates. Marshall therefore planned only a limited pursuit. He expected that the Turks, under pressure, would fall back beyond Haditha, perhaps even to Anah. According to British intelligence, the Turkish commander of the 50th Division, Shukri Bey, had meanwhile lost his post for giving up Hit too hastily, and the division had been taken over by Nazim Bey. Moberly and Candler agree that the successor, fearing a similar fate, was more inclined to accept battle. Brooking was counting on this. Several deserters insisted that the Turks would withdraw to Anah anyway, but he did not believe them.

Preparations

The British did everything to make the enemy believe they were preparing to spend the summer around Hit. A dummy defensive position was dug near Sahiliya, reconnaissance was restricted and the concentration of troops was put off until the last moment. On 23 March and for the two following days the III Corps and I Corps made feint attacks in the Jebel Hamrin hills and on the Tigris. According to Moberly they deceived the Turks, who gave no credence to reports of a concentration on the Euphrates and withdrew most, perhaps all, of their aircraft from there. General R.A. Cassels’s 11th Cavalry Brigade left Fallujah on 22 March and at dawn on 25 March, after a night march in a wide arc through the desert, hid in the palm groves near Sahiliya. About 500 vans brought supplies from the railhead at Dhibban, and river boats carried an average of 30 tons a day up the Euphrates.

Brooking had the 50th, 42nd and most of the 12th Infantry Brigade, the 11th Cavalry Brigade, two field artillery brigades, a siege howitzer battery, three light armoured motor batteries, sappers and four flights of aircraft of Nos. 30 and 63 Squadrons Royal Flying Corps with an observation balloon. The Turkish forces at Khan al-Baghdadi were estimated at no more than a hundred cavalrymen, 2,800 infantry and 12–16 guns. Their position consisted of a forward line of trenches (marked by the British with the letter “P”) about 2.5 kilometres south-east of the caravanserai, and the main area of fortifications (“Q” and “R”) on the steep slopes above a deep ravine to the west and north of it.

The plan was simple. General Andrew’s group (50th Brigade) and General Lucas’s group (42nd Brigade) were to strike frontally and pin the Turks down. Cassels with the cavalry and thirteen armoured cars was to go round their right flank through the desert and cut the road to Aleppo. In reserve stood Lieutenant-Colonel J.McK. Hogg’s mobile column, half a battalion each from the 1/5th Battalion of the Queen’s and the 2/39th Garhwal Rifles, with machine guns and sappers, carried in three hundred Ford vans. Brooking announced that the aim was the complete destruction of all Turkish forces below Anah. On 25 March, however, bad news came: the two-seater Airco DH.4 in which the commander of the air service in Mesopotamia, Lieutenant-Colonel John Tennant, had flown with Major Percy Hobart to look at the Turkish position was shot down over Khan al-Baghdadi, and both officers were taken prisoner.

Course of the battle

26 March

At 9 p.m. on 25 March Andrew’s group set off from Sahiliya along the Aleppo road, and at midnight Lucas’s group followed it. At about two in the morning three companies sent against the “P” trenches ran into artillery, machine-gun and rifle fire. Some of the men even broke into the trenches, but were driven out. The companies lost 43 men and withdrew. For Brooking this was good news: the Turks had not gone. Cassels’s cavalry set out at 3.30 a.m., after about ten kilometres turned off the road to the west and after sunrise passed Brooking’s headquarters, heading deep into the desert.

In the morning an aircraft dropped a message that the “P” trenches were strongly held, and “Q” and “R” only weakly. Brooking ordered Andrew to attack the right flank of the “P” trenches, and Lucas to pin the Turks frontally along the road. At about ten o’clock the mere movement of Andrew’s group, threatening the western flank of the position, induced the Turks to retreat. By 11.30 a.m. the British had taken the “P” trenches almost without a fight, along with about a hundred prisoners. The pursuit lasted until one in the afternoon, when the infantry was halted by fire from the main position. The Turks sat on the crests of the steep slopes above the deep ravine and swept the whole plateau on its southern side with fire. The British guns took a long time to struggle forward over the heavy, stony ground, one of the batteries lost a gun, and Andrew did not want to send the infantry in without good fire support.

Meanwhile the cavalry was making its way through one ravine after another. At 1.50 p.m. it reached the Wadi Hauran and watered its horses, and the airmen reported that there were no Turks to the north. Cassels turned back east. The Aleppo road proved further away than had been thought, but at about five in the afternoon his men cut the Turkish telegraph line and took up a position facing south-east along the northern edge of the Wadi Hauran, with their left flank on the road. The sector they held stretched for about five kilometres, and Cassels later extended it right up to the bend of the river near Alus.

At 5.30 p.m. the infantry went into the attack on a front of about 800 metres: the 1/4th Battalion of the Dorsetshire Regiment, the 24th Punjabis, the 1st Battalion of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and the 6th Jats, followed by the Gurkhas of the 42nd Brigade. The artillery at first fired slowly, and after a quarter of an hour switched to intense fire. The dust thrown up by the shells hid the attackers better than a smoke screen, and the machine guns fired over the heads of the infantry. The British crossed the ravine with almost no losses. A company of Jats took a ridge with four machine guns and captured a whole battalion of the 169th Regiment, twelve officers and 250 men. The others took the “R” trenches together with four guns. After dark the units scattered across the broken ground, and at 8.20 p.m. Andrew ordered them to spend the night where they were.

The night and the surrender

In the evening the airmen estimated that the British had already taken more than a thousand prisoners, and that the rest of the Turks were looking for a way of escape to the west and north-west. At 10.15 p.m. Brooking ordered the cavalry to close the road and the river tightly, and the infantry to give the Turks no respite all night. Just before midnight the Turks, by moonlight, tried to break through Cassels’s line at its strongest point. After three quarters of an hour of sharp fighting they hung out white flags. Two squadrons of the 23rd Cavalry gathered more than a thousand prisoners and several machine guns.

At 5.45 a.m. on 27 March Major Sir T. Thompson with eleven armoured cars found at the crossing of the road over the Wadi Hauran a packed mass of more than two thousand Turkish soldiers with white flags. Candler, who had climbed a nearby ridge with the motor column, wrote that the black masses of transport and infantry covered the slope like ants, with a white flag flying above them. By seven in the morning the British already had 3,000 to 4,000 prisoners, ten guns and many machine guns.

Pursuit

At 6.30 a.m. Brooking gave the order for a general pursuit. The armoured cars and Hogg’s group in their vans reached Haditha at about ten o’clock, where the Germans had managed to burn the wireless station. The road beyond the town was strewn with abandoned carts, animals and equipment, and small groups of Turks surrendered without resistance. Among the prisoners was the commander of the 50th Division, Nazim Bey, with part of his staff, who had slipped out of the encirclement in the night and was hiding in the hills. In the evening the cavalry and the cars halted near Fuhaimah.

On the morning of 28 March the armoured cars drove through Anah without a fight, about 80 kilometres above Khan al-Baghdadi. From the inhabitants Cassels learned that Tennant and Hobart had been taken away on camels towards Aleppo on the morning of the previous day, under a guard of Tatar cavalrymen, mainly deserters from the Russian army. He sent Captain Tod’s 8th Light Armoured Motor Battery after them with orders to pursue even for a hundred miles. About 50 kilometres beyond Anah the cars shot out from behind a bend in the road and opened fire on the guard. The prisoners ran to the cars under cover of the machine guns. Tennant recalled that Tod himself pulled them into the turret, and Hobart told Candler that the officer at the machine gun was the best deus ex machina he had ever seen. For this action Tod received an immediate award of the Distinguished Service Order. The battery also captured the wireless station from Anah.

On 29 March the armoured cars ventured another 117 kilometres beyond Anah, searching in vain for 18,000 Turkish gold lira supposedly intended for Sheikh Ajaimi, an ally of the Turks. In Anah and Haditha the British found enormous depots. Candler wrote that in Anah alone four million rifle cartridges and 50,000 artillery shells were destroyed, gathered for a Turco-German offensive against Baghdad that had once been planned. On 30 March the rest of the stores were blown up and the troops began to withdraw. On 6 April there remained on the Euphrates a brigade at Haditha and another with divisional headquarters at Khan al-Baghdadi.

Losses

According to Moberly the British lost only 159 men in the whole operation, including 36 killed or missing. Candler gives 157. They buried 40 Turkish dead; the rest were buried by the Turks themselves. They took 5,254 prisoners, among them 18 Germans, 12 guns, 47 machine guns and a great quantity of weapons, ammunition and equipment. Candler counts 213 officers and 5,032 other ranks, which agrees almost exactly with the official figures. There were more prisoners than the British had estimated the enemy’s entire strength to be before the battle, because the pursuit reached about 200 kilometres along the Turkish line of communications. Four armed motor boats and two barges of the German flotilla on the Euphrates were also sunk or captured.

Significance

The Turkish 50th Division ceased to exist, and the destruction of the depots at Anah and Haditha deprived the Turks for a long time of the ability to operate on the Euphrates. Moberly attributed the success to Brooking’s careful preparations, the skilful disposition of his forces and the immediate, determined pursuit, as well as to Cassels’s leadership, the co-operation of the air service and the work of the armoured cars and motor transport. Candler judged the battle as brilliant as Ramadi, and the enemy’s collapse even more complete. In two days the cavalry covered about 145 kilometres, and the armoured cars about 270.

It was, however, the last British advance up the Euphrates. London did not want further operations here, and the lorries and vans were soon needed on the road to Persia, where Dunsterforce was preparing to march towards the Caspian Sea. In April the British withdrew from their most advanced points, and at the end of the month small Turkish detachments again occupied Anah and Haditha. British troops returned to Anah without a fight only at the very end of the war, at the turn of October and November 1918. Major Hobart survived the war and in the Second World War commanded the famous 79th Armoured Division.