Battle of the Wadi

The Battle of the Wadi was the second engagement of the first attempt to relieve General Charles Townshend’s division, besieged in Kut on the Tigris. A week after the bloody Battle of Sheikh Saad the Ottoman forces halted a few kilometres further upstream, behind the Wadi stream. The commander of the Tigris Corps, Lieutenant-General Fenton Aylmer, decided this time not to strike only from the front, but to turn their left flank and cut their line of retreat to the Hanna defile. On 13 January 1916, however, the outflanking move bogged down in the fire of Turkish trenches, dug hastily at right angles to the stream, and the frontal attack broke down with heavy losses. During the night the Turks withdrew unnoticed to a previously prepared position in the defile. The British occupied the battlefield, but instead of the victory Aylmer had hoped for, they faced an even stronger barrier.

Name and dates

Wadi is Arabic for a river valley, often a dry one (wadi). The British simply gave this name to the stream that flows into the Tigris from the left, northern side, below the Hanna defile. The British official history (Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia, volume II) speaks of “The Action of the Wadi”, and in Turkish it is Vadi Muharebesi. The actual fighting lasted one day, 13 January 1916. We adopt the dates 13–14 January because on the morning of 14 January the British found that the Turks had abandoned the position, occupied it and advanced to the Hanna defile. The British chronology of the war records the fighting on the Wadi under 14 January.

Background

After the Battle of Sheikh Saad (6–8 January) the Turks fell back upstream. On 11 January airmen reported to Aylmer that the Ottoman forces, estimated at 11,000 men, had come back and were digging in on the western bank of the Wadi, about 5–6 kilometres in front of the entrance to the Hanna defile, a narrow strip of land between the Tigris and the Suwaikiya marsh. The British official history supposes that this was the decision of the new commander of the Ottoman forces on the Tigris, Halil Bey (Halil Kut), who had replaced Nureddin. Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz, commander of the Ottoman Sixth Army, hurried to the front on hearing of it, and on 13 January was at Halil’s headquarters.

Aylmer received this news with relief. The Wadi position, unlike the defile, had an open left flank on the desert side. According to the German author Hans von Kiesling it was held by the 35th Division on the right flank, by the river, the 52nd Division on the left, and a cavalry brigade at the very end, where there were no trenches. Both divisions had been badly depleted in the fighting at Kut and Sheikh Saad. Aylmer had about 10,000 rifles, a weak cavalry brigade and gunboats on the river at his disposal. He knew too little, however, about the stream itself: Arab informants assured him that it could easily be forded, but its steep banks proved a serious obstacle.

Aylmer’s plan

Aylmer wanted to exploit the Turkish flank. Major-General George Younghusband’s 7th (Meerut) Division, with three infantry brigades (19th, 21st and 35th), was to march a dozen or so kilometres north during the night, cross the Wadi at dawn above the Turkish trenches and swing in a wide arc onto the enemy’s rear, towards the mouth of the Hanna defile. It was screened on the outside by the 6th Cavalry Brigade. Meanwhile General George Kemball’s 28th Brigade, reinforced by the corps artillery (16 guns and howitzers), was to pin the Turks from the front, and the gunboats Gadfly, Cranefly and Dragonfly were to shell their right flank from the river. The 9th Brigade stood in reserve at Sheikh Saad. Aylmer commanded from the steamer Mejidieh.

The course of 13 January

The night of 12–13 January was cold but clear. The 7th Division set out at 9.45 p.m. and by 2.30 a.m. was in its starting position without interference. In the morning thick fog delayed the move until 7.30 a.m. The infantry crossed the Wadi by several fords by 10 a.m., but the guns and transport took a long time to get across the steep banks: the last guns crossed only around 1 p.m., and the transport had not finished crossing by dusk. The division turned south-west, towards the Hanna defile. At about 11 a.m. the leading company of the 9th Gurkha Rifles came under heavy fire from the left. The Turks moved men to the threatened flank and dug in along an irrigation ditch with an embankment, running almost at right angles to the Wadi. Younghusband did not notice this. He believed that his brigades were closing a pincer on the Turks and were near the river, although in reality several kilometres separated them from it.

The 21st Brigade, with the 2nd Battalion, Black Watch and Indian battalions, and the 19th Brigade with the 1st Battalion, Seaforth Highlanders were pinned down in the afternoon 150–300 metres from the Turkish line and could advance no further. The Turks were bringing up reserves there. At about 5.30 p.m. the 28th Punjabis and the 1/5th Battalion, Buffs broke into the Turkish trenches, but flanking fire drove them out again. The 35th Brigade and the cavalry, sent to close the gap between the 19th Brigade and the river, got stuck several kilometres from the Tigris. The British official history points out that reports took hours to pass between staffs. Younghusband’s report of 1.30 p.m. reached Aylmer after 3.45 p.m., so the corps commander was making decisions on the basis of a picture that was no longer true.

At about 4 p.m. Aylmer, convinced that the Turks were tied down by the fighting on the flank and that some of them were leaving their trenches, ordered Kemball to attack from the front. The 28th Brigade, already weakened at Sheikh Saad, advanced across a flat plain on which the Turks had cut down the bushes and marked the ranges with poles every hundred metres. The 56th Rifles and the 53rd Sikhs got as far as the bank of the Wadi, but were stopped by crossfire from machine guns. After dark the remnants of the brigade were withdrawn. It had lost 648 men, including three of its four battalion commanders. The 2nd Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment lost 210 men, the 53rd Sikhs 194 and the 56th Rifles 172. By dusk both the outflanking move and the frontal attack had been halted. That day Sepoy Chatta Singh of the 9th Bhopal Infantry carried his wounded commanding officer out of the fire and earned the Victoria Cross.

The Turkish withdrawal (14 January)

The night was icy and it rained. According to Kiesling, Goltz concluded that the Ottoman troops would not withstand another day of fighting, and ordered them to break contact with the British during the night and fall back to the position in the Hanna defile. The withdrawal went unnoticed. At 7 a.m. on 14 January Younghusband’s brigade commanders reported that the trenches in front of them were empty. Prisoners spoke of heavy Turkish losses. The 35th Brigade reached the river and moved upstream along its bank, but a few kilometres further on came upon a line of trenches about 1,200 metres long, barring the entrance to the defile from the Tigris to the marsh. Aylmer demanded careful artillery preparation, and a gale and downpour delayed it so much that no attack took place that day. The gunboats that tried to move upstream turned back under accurate fire from the Turkish guns, and Gadfly, hit in the hull, had to go for repairs. The pontoon bridge from Sheikh Saad, dismantled and towed upstream on rafts, was largely carried away by the storm.

Losses

According to the official history the British lost 1,613 men, most of them from the 28th Brigade. The 19th and 21st Brigades each had more than 400 killed and wounded, the 35th Brigade only 39. The 41st Dogras lost 175 men, including its commanding officer. Aylmer estimated the Turkish losses at 2,000, but the American historian of the Ottoman army Edward J. Erickson, who used Turkish archives, gives a much lower figure, about five hundred. Once again care of the wounded failed: the ambulances did not manage to cross the Wadi, and there was too little transport for evacuation. Moving the wounded to the ships was completed only on 16 January.

Significance

The Battle of the Wadi was a bitter disappointment for Aylmer. For the second time in a week the Turks had slipped out of the trap and shut themselves in a place that could not be outflanked: the Hanna defile was protected on both sides by the river and the marsh. The Turkish General Staff later judged that the 35th Division, not sufficiently pinned by Kemball, had moved almost all its reserves to the threatened flank, and that the 52nd Division was so stretched that a bold attack in the afternoon would have cut the line of retreat of a large part of the Ottoman forces and their artillery. In his report to General John Nixon, Aylmer admitted that he now faced soldiers of a quite different class from those who had defended the Tigris earlier, because most of them were Turks. The following days turned the Tigris valley into a sea of mud, and floods repeatedly destroyed the bridges. A week later the Tigris Corps had to make a frontal attack on the Hanna defile, and the battle lost there ended the first attempt to relieve Kut.