Mesopotamian campaign

The Mesopotamian campaign was one of the longest campaigns that Britain fought against the Ottoman Empire. It began as a small expedition of troops from British India, sent to the Persian Gulf to protect British oil and British prestige in the Muslim world. Within four years it grew into an army of more than 400,000 soldiers and followers. The British quickly took Basra and lower Mesopotamia, but in 1915, encouraged by easy victories, they marched on Baghdad with too few troops. They were stopped at Ctesiphon, and in April 1916 their division surrendered in besieged Kut. The rebuilt army of General Frederick Stanley Maude nevertheless recaptured Kut, took Baghdad in March 1917, and in the last days of the war destroyed the remnants of the Turkish Sixth Army on the Tigris and entered Mosul.

Name and dates

The British official history, General F.J. Moberly’s four-volume The Campaign in Mesopotamia 1914–1918, treats the whole as a single campaign. Most studies use the same name. The Turks speak of the Iraq front (Irak Cephesi). The campaign is usually divided into several stages: the conquest of the Basra vilayet in 1914–1915, the failed advance on Baghdad and the siege of Kut in 1915–1916, Maude’s offensive in 1916–1917 and the fighting in upper Mesopotamia in 1917–1918.

We take as its start 6 November 1914, when Indian troops landed at Fao at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab. Its end is dated in different ways. The fighting stopped at noon on 31 October 1918, when the Armistice of Mudros came into force, but British troops kept advancing on Mosul. According to Moberly the British took over the entire town on 10 November, after the Turkish government had ordered its commander to hand it over. We take that day as the end of the campaign. Moberly also states that Turkish troops were to leave the whole Mosul vilayet by 15 November. The English Wikipedia ends the campaign on 14 November and places the British entry into Mosul on that day, but the British official history does not confirm this.

Background

Mesopotamia, the land along the Tigris and the Euphrates, was before the war a neglected province of the Ottoman Empire, divided into three vilayets: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. Its importance for Britain lay in its position on the route to India and its proximity to Persia. On the Persian bank of the Shatt al-Arab, on the island of Abadan, stood the refinery of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which received oil by pipeline from the oilfields deep in Persia. The British government was a shareholder in the company, and the Royal Navy was just then converting its newest ships from coal to oil.

In the summer and autumn of 1914 the Foreign Office, the Admiralty, the Government of India and the India Office agreed that, in case of war with Turkey, troops had to be sent to the Persian Gulf in advance. Oil was not the only concern. The British also wanted to show the Arab sheikhs of the Gulf, especially the Sheikh of Mohammerah and the Sheikh of Kuwait, that they could count on British protection, and they feared that Turkish holy-war propaganda would stir up the Muslims of India. On 16 October 1914 the 16th Indian Brigade of Brigadier-General Walter Delamain, the vanguard of Indian Expeditionary Force “D”, sailed from Bombay; Lieutenant-General Arthur Barrett had been appointed to command the force. When the Ottoman fleet attacked Russian ports and on 5 November Britain declared war on Turkey, the brigade was already waiting aboard ship off Bahrain.

The Turks did not expect an attack. Most of the troops stationed in Mesopotamia had been sent to Syria and the Caucasus at the start of the war. According to a Turkish account quoted by Moberly, at the time of the British landing the entire defence of the province numbered about 17,000 rifles and 44 field guns. Its core was the 38th Division, supplemented by gendarmerie, frontier troops and Arab tribal volunteers.

From Fao to Nasiriyah (1914–1915)

On 6 November 1914, after a bombardment from ships, a detachment of British and Indian soldiers landed at Fao and took the Turkish fort and the telegraph station. A few days later Delamain’s brigade went ashore at Saniyah, north of Abadan, and when the main body of the force arrived with Barrett, the British defeated the Turks at Saihan on 15 November and at Sahil on 17 November. The Turks abandoned Basra, and on 22 November British troops entered it. In early December British and Indian detachments, soon reinforced by the brigade of General Charles Fry, sailed upriver to Qurna at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates, crossed the Tigris above the town and cut off its garrison. On 9 December the Vali of Basra, Subhi Bey, surrendered with more than a thousand men. Within five weeks the British had secured the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab and Abadan.

The Turks prepared a counter-offensive. In the spring of 1915 Lieutenant-Colonel Süleyman Askerî gathered regular troops and thousands of Arab tribal warriors on the Euphrates and advanced on Basra. On 9 April General John Nixon took command of Force “D”, now expanded to two divisions. On 12 April the Turks struck the British camp at Shaiba on the edge of the desert. The defenders beat off the assaults, and on 14 April, after heavy fighting, took the Turkish trenches at Barjisiyah Wood. The Ottoman troops fled, plundered by their former allies, and Askerî took his own life. Basra was never threatened again.

Nixon was ordered from India to take control of the whole Basra vilayet and began to advance up both rivers. On 31 May the 6th (Poona) Division of General Charles Townshend attacked Turkish positions on the flooded marshes north of Qurna in hundreds of Arab boats. The Turks fled, and the British flotilla pursued them up the Tigris so fast that on 3 June a handful of sailors with Townshend accepted the surrender of more than a thousand Turkish soldiers at Amara. The British called this operation “Townshend’s Regatta”. At the end of June General George Gorringe’s brigades set off up the Euphrates. For three weeks they fought in the heat and the floodwaters in front of the Turkish trenches, and on 24 July they broke through and the next day took Nasiriyah. The whole Basra vilayet was in British hands.

The advance on Baghdad and the siege of Kut (1915–1916)

Easy victories whetted ambitions. Nixon believed that the security of the Basra vilayet required the capture of Kut, where the Shatt al-Hai channel left the Tigris towards Nasiriyah. On 28 September 1915 Townshend’s division outflanked the fortified Es Sinn position by night and forced the Turks to retreat, and on 29 September it entered Kut. The Ottoman army of General Nureddin Bey escaped destruction, however, and dug in at Ctesiphon, some 25 kilometres from Baghdad.

Now the prize was the capital of Mesopotamia itself. The British government, which in the autumn of 1915 was living through the failure at Gallipoli and feared a loss of prestige in the Muslim world, was looking for a spectacular success. Townshend warned that his division was tired and that his line of supply, resting on too few river steamers, was growing ever longer. Nixon, however, was sure he could take Baghdad without further reinforcements. On 23 October the Cabinet authorised the Secretary of State for India, Austen Chamberlain, to send the Viceroy approval for the advance, if Nixon judged his forces sufficient. He was promised two Indian divisions from France, but they would arrive only after several months. Lord Kitchener was opposed and favoured at most a raid on Baghdad.

On 22 November Townshend attacked at Ctesiphon. He took the first line of Turkish trenches but failed to break the second, and lost nearly 40 per cent of his men. He beat off night counter-attacks but had no strength left for a further attack, and, convinced that the Turks were receiving reinforcements, he began to retreat on the evening of 25 November. On 3 December the exhausted division entered Kut, and on 7 December the Turks began to surround the town. Command of the new Ottoman Sixth Army was taken by the German Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz, who after a failed assault on Christmas Eve decided to starve the garrison out.

From January to April 1916 the hastily assembled Tigris Corps tried three times to break through to Kut. It won at Sheikh Saad, but lost 4,000 men there, and then broke itself on one Turkish position after another: on the Wadi, in the Hanna defile, at the Dujaila Redoubt and at Sannaiyat, in downpours, mud and floods. The wounded suffered terribly, because the medical services were not prepared for such losses. In January the sick Nixon was replaced by General Percy Lake, and in February the War Office in London took over the direction of the campaign from the Government of India. From January the Turks were commanded in the field by Halil Bey, who after Goltz’s death on 19 April took over the whole Sixth Army. After a failed attempt to run food into the town aboard the steamer Julnar, Townshend surrendered Kut on 29 April 1916, after a siege of 147 days. According to Moberly, 13,309 soldiers and Indian followers went into captivity. The rank and file were driven on foot to Anatolia, and of the roughly 12,000 men who went into captivity more than 4,000 died.

Rebuilding and the capture of Baghdad (1916–1917)

The surrender of Kut was a humiliation and provoked a wave of criticism in Britain. In August 1916 the government appointed a commission to investigate the conduct of the expedition and the sufferings of the troops. Its report, published in June 1917, severely criticised the command in India and Mesopotamia, and Austen Chamberlain, as the minister ultimately responsible for the expedition, took the blame upon himself and resigned in July. Meanwhile, on 28 August 1916, General Maude took over command in Mesopotamia. Over the summer and autumn the army was rebuilt. New river steamers arrived at Basra, the port was expanded, railways and roads were built, and supply and the medical services were improved. At the beginning of 1917 the authorised establishment of the forces in Mesopotamia provided for more than 120,000 soldiers and 83,000 followers. The Turkish XVIII Corps on the Tigris was clearly weaker, and part of the Sixth Army was fighting the Russians in Persia.

In the night of 13–14 December 1916 Maude set off at Kut. He did not attack head-on the positions on which the relief attempts had broken in the spring, but moved onto the right bank of the Tigris and for two months, trench by trench, pushed the Turks out of their bridgeheads. On 23 February 1917 the British forced the river at Shumran, upstream from the town, and on 24 February the Turks abandoned Kut and fell back towards Baghdad, pursued by gunboats. On 5 March Maude’s troops moved on. For three nights the Turks held out on the Diyala, and when Maude outflanked them along the right bank of the Tigris, Halil Pasha withdrew northwards by night. On 11 March 1917 the British entered Baghdad without a fight.

Maude wanted to secure the city against the spring floods and against Turks who could come from the north and from the direction of Persia. In April his troops drove XVIII Corps out of Istabulat and on 23–24 April took Samarra, the railhead of the line from Baghdad. They counted on cooperation with the Russian corps of General Baratov, which had come down from Persia towards the Ottoman border, but after the February Revolution the Russian army quickly lost the will to fight. Summer halted operations. An attack on Ramadi on the Euphrates in July collapsed in heat of more than 50 degrees. Only on 28 September 1917 did General Harry Brooking’s 15th Division surround the Turks there, and the next day their commander surrendered with more than 3,400 men. In early November General Alexander Cobbe’s I Corps attacked the Turks at Tikrit and took the town on 6 November. It was Maude’s last victory. On 18 November he died of cholera in Baghdad, and General William Marshall took over command.

The last year of the war (1918)

In 1918 Mesopotamia became a secondary front for London. Palestine mattered more, and after the collapse of the Russian army so did Persia and the Caucasus, where General Dunsterville’s mission, known as Dunsterforce, set off from Baghdad across Persia towards the Caspian Sea. Marshall therefore conducted limited but highly effective operations. In March the 15th Division occupied Hit on the Euphrates without a fight, and on 26 March at Khan al-Baghdadi the infantry pinned the Turks with a frontal attack while cavalry and armoured cars outflanked them through the desert. The Turkish 50th Division surrendered almost in its entirety, and in the pursuit beyond Ana the British took more than 5,000 prisoners. In May they entered Kirkuk without a fight but soon withdrew for lack of supplies. In the summer Ali Ihsan Pasha took over the Sixth Army from Halil. It was growing ever weaker, because troops were being taken from Mesopotamia for the Caucasus and Persia.

The final offensive began when the Ottoman government was already seeking an armistice. On 2 October the War Office, anticipating that the Turks would soon ask for a cessation of hostilities, instructed Marshall to gain as much ground as possible up the Tigris. On 23 October Cobbe’s I Corps set off from Tikrit up the Tigris. The Turks abandoned the position at Fat-ha without a fight but defended themselves stubbornly in the hills on the right bank of the river. Meanwhile two cavalry brigades outflanked them from the east, crossed the Little Zab and the Tigris and closed the road to Mosul. On 25 October another British column re-entered Kirkuk. On the morning of 30 October, the day the Armistice of Mudros was signed, the Turkish Tigris Group, surrounded at Sharqat, surrendered. In the whole operation the British took more than 11,000 prisoners and 51 guns.

The armistice came into force at noon on 31 October, when the British cavalry stood at Qaiyara, about 60 kilometres from Mosul. Marshall, citing Article 7 of the armistice, which allowed the Allies to occupy strategic points, nevertheless ordered the advance to continue. On 3 November General Robert Cassels arrived in the town with his staff. Ali Ihsan protested and refused to hand over Mosul without orders from Constantinople. On 7 November Marshall came to the town and ordered him to withdraw his troops from the whole vilayet. When the Turkish government’s order arrived on 9 November, the British took over the entire town the next day, and the Turkish troops withdrew to Nusaybin for disbandment.

Casualties

According to the British official history the campaign cost the British Empire 92,501 men: 14,814 killed and died of wounds, 12,807 died of disease, 51,386 wounded and 13,494 taken prisoner or missing. Post-war British medical statistics give somewhat different figures: about 85,000 battle casualties, plus more than 820,000 hospital admissions for sickness and other non-battle causes. Throughout the war heat, dysentery, cholera, malaria and scurvy were more dangerous in Mesopotamia than the enemy. The fighting for Kut was the costliest: the relief attempts alone consumed more than 23,000 men, and most of those taken prisoner were the town’s defenders. A great part of the losses fell on Indian troops, because soldiers from India made up the majority of the expedition throughout the campaign, and alongside them served tens of thousands of Indian followers.

Turkish losses are not known precisely. Moberly believed they were at least double the British, and over the whole campaign the British took about 45,500 prisoners and 250 guns. More recent studies based on the Turkish archives give widely varying figures, partly because some Turkish returns, for example for Ctesiphon, counted deserters among the losses. The war also struck the people of Mesopotamia hard: the inhabitants of besieged Kut, the villages through which the armies passed, and the tribes that changed sides again and again.

Significance

The Mesopotamian campaign began as a covering operation and ended with the conquest of an entire Ottoman province. The troops from India secured Abadan’s oil and the route to India, and by the end of the war the British controlled the whole country from the Persian Gulf to Mosul. In October 1918 the forces in Mesopotamia numbered more than 414,000 men, including about 217,000 soldiers, but only about 112,000 of them were fighting troops. Critics asked whether such large forces would not have been more useful on other fronts. Their presence, however, tied down Turkish troops that could have fought in Palestine, the Caucasus or Persia.

The campaign also showed how costly a war without a clear aim and without a proper base could be. The advance on Baghdad in 1915 and the disaster at Kut became a warning in Britain against underestimating the enemy and the problem of supply, and the report of the commission investigating the expedition forced a minister to resign. The victories of 1917–1918, in turn, were the work of an army that Maude and Marshall rebuilt from scratch, with a river flotilla, railways, motor transport and aircraft.

After the war the conquered lands became the basis of a new state. The dispute over the Mosul vilayet, occupied after the armistice, dragged on for years until the League of Nations awarded it to Iraq, and Turkey accepted this in a treaty of 1926. Britain received the mandate for Iraq, but its rule soon met resistance. In 1920 the Iraqi revolt broke out, and a year later the British placed Emir Faisal on the throne of the new Kingdom of Iraq.