British advance up the Euphrates

On 27 June 1915 the British and Indian troops of General George Gorringe set off from the Qurna area up the Euphrates. Their objective was Nasiriyah, the last important town of the Basra vilayet still in Turkish hands. After the occupation of Amara on the Tigris, the commander of British forces in Mesopotamia, General John Nixon, wanted in this way to close the second route by which the Turks could threaten Basra. The troops did not march across the desert but travelled by steamer and boat through the marshes of the lower Euphrates.

Why Nasiriyah

The Government of India had instructed Nixon to secure the whole Basra vilayet, and in his view this meant occupying Amara and Nasiriyah. Nasiriyah was the seat of the powerful Muntafiq tribal confederation. Nixon believed that a Turkish garrison in the town would be a constant threat to his supply lines, because at the slightest setback on the Tigris the Turks could again lead thousands of Arabs against Basra, as they had in the spring at Shaiba. The General Staff in India had doubts, but the Commander-in-Chief sided with Nixon. On 13 June the Viceroy of India informed London that he supported the operation. Having received no reply from the Secretary of State for India, Austen Chamberlain, the authorities in India assumed that London agreed and on 22 June gave Nixon the green light. Chamberlain learned that the advance had begun only on 27 June.

Nixon assumed that most of the Turkish troops had left Nasiriyah for Kut on the Tigris, so resistance would be weak. He also judged that a march across the desert at the height of summer would be too dangerous. The troops were therefore to travel along the old bed of the Euphrates from Qurna, across the shallow Hammar Lake, and then along the Akaika channel, one of the many branches into which the river spread above Suq ash-Shuyukh (PL). For this reason no pack animals were taken. Speed was essential, because the water was falling fast. At the end of June the route across the lake was about one and a half metres deep, by mid-July only about a metre.

Forces

Gorringe, commander of the 12th Indian Division, was given General Charles Melliss’s 30th Brigade: the 1/4th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment, the 2/7th Gurkha Rifles and the 24th and 76th Punjabis, together with two artillery batteries, sappers, pioneers and services. Sickness and heat had thinned the ranks so badly that, according to the British official history, the whole brigade numbered a mere 1,994 rifles, the Hampshire battalion only 297 of them. The flotilla was again commanded by Captain Wilfrid Nunn. The sloops Espiegle and Odin, however, could go no further than Kubaish on the edge of the lake. The main vessels of the expedition were therefore the armed launch Sumana, two boats carrying 4.7-inch guns and three old stern-wheel paddle steamers: Shushan, Mahsoudi and Muzaffari. Shushan had been built for the expedition that in the 1880s was to rescue General Charles Gordon at Khartoum. The troops travelled on river steamers with two field guns mounted in each bow. Rafts carrying mountain guns and machine guns were also towed, along with barges of ammunition and stores and 175 bellums, Arab boats propelled by poles.

The dam on the Akaika channel

On the evening of 26 June the flotilla and the steamer Blosse Lynch, with Gorringe’s staff, assembled near Kubaish. Early on the morning of 27 June they crossed the Hammar Lake, and the rest of the vessels set out from Qurna and joined them in the evening. As the gunboats approached the entrance to the Akaika channel, two Turkish motor boats fired on them and quickly withdrew. Gorringe and Nunn went on in Shushan, behind launches searching for mines, as far as a dam blocking the channel less than a kilometre from the lake. No mines were found. At four in the afternoon the flotilla anchored below the dam.

The dam proved to be a solid structure, standing well above the water and about nine metres thick at the top. According to the British official history it was not a military barrier: it had been built in 1913 to irrigate the fields, and its base consisted of sunken boats. The troops at once occupied the nearby villages, while sappers and pioneers spent the whole night preparing it for demolition. On the morning of 28 June an explosion opened a passage in it, but such a powerful current rushed through the breach that the old steamers had to be hauled upstream with ropes pulled by hundreds of soldiers. Forcing the vessels through the dam took several days. The real fighting for Nasiriyah began only in July, and the town fell on 25 July after a hard battle for which Gorringe twice had to call up reinforcements.