First Battle of Hanna

The First Battle of Hanna ended the first attempt to relieve the British-Indian division besieged in Kut. After the Battle of the Wadi the Ottoman troops shut themselves up in the Hanna defile, a narrow strip of land between the Tigris and the Suwaikiya marsh, which could not be outflanked. Lieutenant-General Fenton Aylmer, pressed by the high command and convinced that the Kut garrison was running out of food, attacked frontally. On the morning of 21 January 1916, after a day of bombardment, the 7th Division advanced across open ground against trenches protected by barbed wire. A handful of soldiers of the Scottish Black Watch battalion and of the Indian Jats broke into the Turkish line, but without support they were driven out of it. Before noon a downpour began and the ground turned into a quagmire. The attack broke down, and the Tigris Corps lost 2,741 men.

Name and dates

The British official history (Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia, vol. II) speaks of “The First Attack on Hanna”. The war correspondent Edmund Candler, who was on the spot, wrote of the battle of Umm al-Hanna. The Turks call it the First Battle of Felahiye (I. Felahiye Muharebesi), after the Fallahiya position deeper in the defile. “First” distinguishes it from the fighting of April 1916, when the British finally took the Hanna position. The actual attack lasted one day, 21 January 1916. It was preceded by a full day of artillery bombardment on 20 January, and on 22 January the two sides concluded a truce of several hours to collect the wounded and bury the dead.

Background

After the fighting on the Wadi the Turks withdrew into the defile on the night of 13/14 January. From 14 January gales and downpours raged over the Tigris valley for several days. British sappers three times nearly completed a bridge over the Tigris, and each time a storm, the current or a drifting steamer destroyed it. On 18 January hope of a bridge in the near future had to be abandoned. Aylmer wanted to move a large part of his troops to the right bank in order to enfilade the trenches in the defile, but without a bridge he could ferry across only one brigade and a few batteries under Major-General Henry Keary. Meanwhile the Turks developed their position: their first line, about 1,200 metres long, ran from the river to the marsh, protected by entanglements, with a second line a few hundred metres behind and emplacements for guns firing across the river.

On the night of 16/17 January Aylmer proposed that Townshend should ferry the men fit to march across the river and break out of Kut to meet the relief force along the right bank. The commander of the forces in Mesopotamia, General John Nixon, firmly rejected this. He believed that abandoning Kut would be a disaster for the Empire’s prestige, that the enemy was weakened and that Aylmer had sufficient forces. Nixon was by then seriously ill, and on 19 January he handed over command to General Percy Lake. Reports from Kut said that food there would last only until 7 February, and intelligence predicted the imminent arrival of Turkish reinforcements. The evacuation of Gallipoli had freed further divisions for the Turks. Aylmer concluded that he had no choice but to assault as quickly as possible.

Forces

Major-General George Younghusband’s 7th Division, after its losses at Sheikh Saad and on the Wadi, numbered only about 3,700 rifles. Younghusband broke up the 21st Brigade and incorporated its battalions into the 19th and 35th Brigades. Behind them stood the 9th Brigade, including a newly arrived battalion of the Connaught Rangers, and in corps reserve the 28th Brigade. In all Aylmer had 21 battalions on the left bank, about 7,600 rifles and 30 guns. On the right bank stood Keary’s 7th Brigade with a dozen or so guns. Aylmer estimated the Turkish forces in the defile at 9,000 infantry and 26 guns. According to Kiesling the defile was defended by the 35th and 52nd Divisions, under the overall command of Halil Bey (Halil Kut) and Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz.

Course

On 20 January, a fine day, British guns and gunboats shelled the Turkish trenches from morning until dusk. Airmen and observers reported that the entanglements on the Turks’ right, riverside flank had been destroyed. During the night the British infantry moved up to about 300 metres from the Turkish line. Candler later observed that for a sector less than 1,300 metres long the British had a few dozen guns here, mostly field guns, whereas in the autumn of 1915 at Loos hundreds of guns and heavy howitzers had fired on a similar sector.

Fog delayed the attack until 7.45 a.m. After ten minutes of bombardment the 35th Brigade advanced along the river against a Turkish bastion. The Dogras, who reached the entanglements, found them largely intact and were repulsed. On the left flank, where the wire had been destroyed, about fifty men of the 2nd Battalion, Black Watch and ten of the 6th Jat Regiment broke into a Turkish trench two metres deep. They took about 140 metres of the line, two machine guns and a few prisoners. The 9th Brigade was unable to support them. The 62nd Punjabis, who had lost most of their officers, veered to the right, and the 1/4th Battalion, Hampshire Regiment and the Connaught Rangers, under heavy fire, got only as far as their own line. After more than an hour the Turks counter-attacked from two sides, including along a communication trench by the river, and drove out the handful of attackers. The 19th Brigade on the right flank, by the marsh, got to within a hundred metres of the Turkish trenches and was pinned down.

Communication with the leading units broke down almost at once. Aylmer, who was directing the battle from the steamer Mejidieh, believed for a long time that the attack was succeeding, because that was what the observers on the other bank reported, and he sent the reserve forward. At about 11.30 a.m. it began to pour with rain and blow. The ground turned into mud, in places knee-deep, the telephones stopped working, and runners were killed. The attack, renewed at 1 p.m. after a short and ineffective bombardment, made no progress. The soaked, numb soldiers could not run in the mud. At about 3.30 p.m. Younghusband, after a conversation with Aylmer’s chief of staff, General H. H. Austin, who had been sent forward by Aylmer, concluded that he had Aylmer’s consent and ordered a withdrawal after dark to the starting positions, about 1,200 metres from the Turks. When Aylmer learned of this he countermanded the order, but the message did not arrive in time. The Turks did not interfere with the withdrawal.

Losses

According to the official history the British lost 2,741 men, including 78 British officers. In some battalions losses reached from half to 90 per cent of their strength. The 2nd Battalion, Black Watch, which that morning numbered just over three hundred men, lost 181. Keary’s force on the right bank lost only 29 men. Aylmer estimated Turkish losses at 2,000, but Edward J. Erickson, who used the Turkish archives, gives about five hundred.

The wounded suffered terribly. The night was so cold that when the wind dropped the marsh froze. Whoever could be was brought in from the field, and on 22 January the British agreed a six-hour truce with the Turks to collect the wounded and bury the dead. Few wounded were left, however: some had been taken by the Turks, others had died of exposure. According to Kiesling the truce greatly helped the Turks, who had fired off all their ammunition and were able to replenish it. Captain John Sinton of the Indian Medical Service received the Victoria Cross for tending the wounded under fire, although he himself had been shot three times.

Significance

On the night of 21/22 January Aylmer informed Lake and Townshend that he was giving up a renewed attack. Lake ordered him to keep close to the enemy. For the Tigris Corps this was the end of the first relief attempt: between 6 and 21 January it had lost more than 8,000 men at Sheikh Saad, on the Wadi and at Hanna. On 21 January Townshend went on to half rations, and the next day reported that thanks to this he could hold out for another 27 days. A few days later, after requisitioning food in the town, he was already reckoning on nearly three months. Had this been known earlier, Candler wrote, “the tragic and futile affair of 21 January” could have been avoided. The next relief attempt, at the Dujaila Redoubt, came only in March, and the British took the Hanna position only on 5 April 1916, when the Turks, threatened by flooding, abandoned it during the night, leaving only a weak rearguard.