Battle of Sheikh Saad

The Battle of Sheikh Saad was the first battle fought by the British troops marching to relieve General Charles Townshend’s division, besieged at Kut on the Tigris. General Fenton Aylmer’s hastily assembled Tigris Corps came up against a strong Ottoman position on both banks several dozen kilometres downstream of the town. For three days British and Indian soldiers attacked across a flat plain without cover, in fog, mirage and rain. On the right bank they took the Turkish trenches, on the left bank they were held up in front of them. On the night of 8/9 January the Turks withdrew in good order, and Aylmer, with exhausted troops and thousands of wounded whom he had no means of treating, could not pursue them. The victory cost about 4,000 men.

Name and dates

The British official history (F. J. Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia, vol. II) speaks of the “Action of Shaikh Saad”. The name comes from the village on the Tigris that the Turks were covering. The fighting itself took place a few kilometres downstream, and the British occupied Sheikh Saad only at the end. We use the dates 6–8 January 1916, used in British lists of battles. The fighting began on 6 January, when the advanced guard ran into the Turkish trenches, and ended on 8 January, when Aylmer called off a planned attack. The Turks withdrew on the night of 8/9 January, and the British entered Sheikh Saad on the afternoon of 9 January, which is why the map in the official history covers 6–9 January.

Background

After the beginning of the siege of Kut on 7 December 1915, the commander of the British forces in Mesopotamia, General John Nixon, gave Aylmer command of all the troops on the Tigris and the task of relieving Townshend. Reinforcements, above all two Indian divisions from France, reached Basra piecemeal and in disorder, and there was a shortage of steamers on the river. In mid-December Aylmer judged that Townshend might not hold out beyond mid-January, and decided to set off on 3 January with whatever forces he could gather by then. The Tigris Corps was cobbled together in haste: it lacked staffs, land transport, pontoon bridges, aircraft and medical services, which were sufficient for roughly a third of the men. On 4 January General George Younghusband’s advanced guard set out from Ali al-Gharbi: the 7th Division and the 6th Cavalry Brigade, in all about 13,300 combatants with 36 guns, supported by the gunboats of Commander Wilfred Nunn. Aylmer was to follow with the rest of the corps.

On the Ottoman side the commander on the Tigris was Colonel Nureddin Bey. According to the German officer Hans von Kiesling, in the absence of Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz, who had gone to Persia, Nureddin decided to leave only small forces at Kut and send most of his troops downstream to meet the relief force. At Sheikh Saad the 35th Division dug trenches on both sides of the Tigris, while the 52nd Division and the remnants of the 38th Division were coming to its aid. The British estimated the defenders at 10,000–15,000 men. According to the Turkish general staff, on 6 January there were, not counting Arabs, about 2,600 rifles with a cavalry brigade and a camel regiment, and on 7 January, after reinforcements arrived, about 9,000. They were helped by thousands of mounted Arabs.

6 January: the advanced guard attacks

On the evening of 5 January air reconnaissance showed that the Turks were stronger than had been thought, and Aylmer ordered Younghusband merely to engage them until he arrived. Younghusband judged that he would best carry out this task without changing the orders he had already issued. In the morning, after a thick fog had lifted, his troops advanced along both banks. On the right bank General George Kemball’s 28th Brigade was to outflank the Turkish right and push the Turks into the loop of the river at Sheikh Saad. It turned out, however, that the trenches extended much further south than the airmen had indicated, and it was the British left that came under fire from the flank. The cavalry, which was to get behind the Turks, became bogged down among irrigation ditches, harassed by Turkish and Arab horsemen. On the left bank General G. B. H. Rice’s 35th Brigade got to within about 800 metres of the Turkish line and dug in under fire.

In the flat, featureless country it was hard to keep direction, the well-concealed Turkish trenches were invisible until close at hand, and mirage deceived the observers. At 3.50 p.m. Younghusband halted the attack, judging that he would not break through before dark and that committing his reserves would finally tie down the whole division. The men dug in for the night in the rain, a few hundred metres from the enemy. The day had cost them about 600 killed and wounded. The Turks knew, however, that they too were in a difficult position: in a report intercepted during the night from an Arab messenger, the commander of a Turkish column wrote of the hard-pressed flank of the 105th Regiment and an urgent shortage of ammunition.

7 January: the whole corps attacks

On the morning of 7 January Aylmer came up with the 21st and 9th Brigades. Younghusband proposed merely holding the Turks on the left bank and crushing the weaker group on the right bank with all available strength, then enfilading the trenches on the other side of the river from there. Aylmer considered this plan too risky: he feared that the stronger Turkish forces on the left bank would overwhelm the brigades left isolated there and reach the steamers. Nor did he want to delay, as every day gave the Turks time for fortifications and reinforcements. He ordered an attack in full strength on the left bank. Younghusband, with the 19th, 21st and 35th Brigades, was to turn the Turkish left from the north, and Kemball on the right bank was to attack once the turning movement had developed.

On the left bank the attack started before noon and at once began to lose its way. The commander of the 19th Brigade warned that the direction of march exposed his brigade to fire from advanced Turkish trenches, but divisional staff took them for a distant second line. The brigade swung too far north, and in trying to correct its direction it ran into crossfire. A Turkish counter-attack from the north was stopped only by battalions of the 21st Brigade switched to the right flank and by the artillery. The troops attacked into the sun, in a mirage that made it impossible for the artillery to find its targets. Veterans of Loos and Givenchy told the correspondent Edmund Candler that the Turkish rifle fire was no less intense than on the Western Front. By nightfall the line had got to within 300–400 metres of the trenches, and there it was halted. One company of the Seaforth Highlanders reached a point 40 metres from the Turks and had to wait until night to withdraw. The 2nd Battalion, Black Watch and the 6th Jats each lost nearly 400 men, including both commanding officers, and the 1st Battalion, Seaforth Highlanders and the 125th Rifles about 300 each.

On the right bank things went better. The 28th Brigade advanced at about two in the afternoon, supported by the accurate fire of a field battery and mountain guns. At about four the 2nd Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment, followed by the 51st and 53rd Sikhs and the 92nd Punjabis, rose for the assault over the last three hundred metres and broke into the first Turkish line. The second line was taken almost without a fight. Two mountain guns, three machine guns and about 600 prisoners were captured, and over 300 Turkish dead were found on the field. Further progress, however, was impossible. The ground behind the Turkish trenches was cut by irrigation ditches, which gave the defenders further ready-made positions. Over the two days the Leicesters lost more than 300 men, and each of the three Indian Frontier Force battalions more than 200.

8–9 January: the Turkish retreat

The night was wet and icy, and the men spent it collecting the wounded and carrying up ammunition, water and food. On the morning of 8 January Aylmer, judging that there should be no attack on the left bank until the Turkish trenches could be enfiladed, instructed Kemball to drive the Turks out of Sheikh Saad itself. Reconnaissance showed, however, that about 5,000 Turks were still holding out in front of the village. In the afternoon Aylmer postponed the attack, and Kemball admitted that his men urgently needed rest. The airmen meanwhile observed Turkish troops and transport moving upstream. On the night of 8/9 January, in the rain, the Turks abandoned their trenches. On the morning of 9 January the cavalry found the left bank empty, and before two in the afternoon the leading units of the 28th Brigade entered Sheikh Saad. The gunboats found a barrier of mines across the river.

There was no pursuit. The men were exhausted, the ground was sodden, and rain and fog grounded the only aircraft. Aylmer remained at Sheikh Saad on 10 and 11 January, waiting for reinforcements and sending back the wounded. Townshend, whom Aylmer had asked to consider a sortie to draw the Turks away, replied that his men were defending well, but would find it hard to leave their trenches and attack across open ground.

Losses

On 10 January Aylmer reported about 3,790 killed and wounded. Moberly gives a final figure of 4,007 men, including 417 killed. The battalions that attacked on the left bank on 7 January suffered most. The British estimated Turkish losses at about 4,000, including 650 prisoners. Some more recent studies based on Turkish sources give much lower figures, as few as about 1,200 men.

The fate of the wounded was the worst of all. The corps had medical resources for a small fraction of so many casualties. On the night of 7/8 January most of the wounded lay in the rain on the bare ground, without shelter, warm clothing or food. Until noon on 9 January the doctors could keep up only with first aid, and in the camp by the bridge about 2,000 sick and wounded were waiting to be sent back. News of their sufferings undermined the men’s morale and later became one of the main charges of the commissions investigating the conduct of the Mesopotamian campaign.

Significance

The Battle of Sheikh Saad was a British victory, but not the kind the relief force needed. The British official historian admitted that the Turks fought better and more skilfully than in previous battles on the Tigris, although they had been short of food for several days. They delayed Aylmer’s march, inflicted heavy losses on him and withdrew, taking their artillery with them. The men of the Tigris Corps were exhausted, and the sufferings of the wounded weighed on their morale. After the battle command of the Ottoman forces on the Tigris passed from Nureddin to Halil Bey. According to Moberly, it was most probably he who halted the retreat: the Turks turned back and dug in along the Wadi stream, in front of the narrow Hanna defile. There, on 13 January, another battle was fought, and on 21 January at Hanna the first attempt to relieve Kut finally collapsed.