British capture Ramadi

On 28 September 1917 General Harry Brooking’s British-Indian 15th Division attacked the Turkish positions at Ramadi on the Euphrates. By evening the infantry had taken the heights south of the town, and the cavalry had closed the Turks’ line of retreat to the west. On the morning of 29 September the Turkish garrison laid down its arms. The British chronology of the war calls this engagement the “action of Ramadi” and dates it to 28–29 September. Two and a half months earlier, in the July heat, a smaller column under Lieutenant-Colonel Haldane had been repulsed from the same trenches, losing more men to heatstroke than to enemy fire.

Why Ramadi

In the summer of 1917 General Frederick Stanley Maude, who in March had taken Baghdad, expected a Turkish counter-offensive. Intelligence reported that General Erich von Falkenhayn was organising in Syria the Turkish-German army group “Yıldırım”, which was to come down the Euphrates from Aleppo and retake Baghdad. The Turks meanwhile reinforced the garrison at Ramadi and extended its fortifications. The town lay on the most convenient route along the river, and it was also a forward supply base through which food from the surrounding districts reached the Turks. Taking it would close that route and cut off those supplies. In the second week of September, when the heat had eased, Maude decided that it was time to occupy Ramadi for good. On 13 September he discussed the plan with Brooking.

Brooking was given the greater part of his 15th Division (the 12th and 42nd Infantry Brigades), the 50th Brigade, already stationed near Fallujah, General Holland-Pryor’s 6th Cavalry Brigade, four armoured cars and artillery. The lesson of July had not been wasted: 350 Ford vans, ten Fiat lorries and fifty ambulances were assigned to him to carry water and supplies. The troops from Baghdad marched to Fallujah in four echelons between 16 and 22 September. According to F. J. Moberly’s British official history, the Turks were estimated at about a hundred cavalry, 3,000 infantry and ten guns. The Turkish commander, later taken prisoner, stated that he had had a hundred cavalry, 500 gunners, 3,500 infantry and ten guns.

The trap

Brooking noticed that the Turks had arranged their defence as if they expected a repeat of July: an attack along the river, from the east. They believed that they were covered to the south by Lake Habbaniyah, and that its salt water would prevent the British from basing themselves on its shores. Brooking decided to confirm them in this belief. He had a bridge thrown across the Euphrates at Madhij and began building a road on the left bank, pitched camps by the river, and friendly Arabs collected supplies for him on the left bank, west of Ramadi. Even the operation order of the evening of 27 September recorded only the intention of occupying the Mushaid ridge “with a view to capturing the Ramadi position”.

At 9.45 p.m. that evening two brigades moved forward. During the night sappers seized and repaired the dam on the canal linking the Euphrates with the lake, and after dawn on 28 September Gurkhas of the 2/6th Battalion occupied the Mushaid ridge, abandoned by the Turks. The Turkish artillery was now shelling the ground by the river, where it expected the main British force. Meanwhile the 6th Cavalry Brigade crossed by the dam, got over the dry but six-metre-deep Aziziyah canal, in which the horses sank to their fetlocks, and at about 4 p.m. stood astride the road to Hit, roughly five kilometres west of Ramadi, cutting the telegraph line.

The infantry attacked from the south. At about 1.35 p.m. the 1/5th Gurkha Battalion reached the Ramadi ridge, a low, gentle and completely open rise in the ground, and came under violent fire from the main Turkish position. In a short time it lost more than a hundred men, but it dug in and would not be driven off. It was joined by companies of the 1/4th Battalion of the Dorsetshire Regiment and further Gurkha battalions. Moberly stresses that this attack pinned the Turks down: some thousand Turkish infantry, who had already been sent against the cavalry and were to clear a line of retreat, were then turned back. At 3.30 p.m. the 12th Brigade occupied the Aziziyah ridge west of the town. The Turks were shut in between the British infantry, the cavalry and the river.

Surrender

Soon after three in the morning on 29 September, when the moon had set, a Turkish column with several guns tried to break out westwards along the river, supported by the fire of guns on barges on the Euphrates. The cavalrymen let it come within two to three hundred yards and opened fire with twelve Vickers machine guns, 48 Hotchkiss guns and all their rifles. The fight lasted about an hour and a half. A British horse artillery battery sank both barges, and by dawn the Turks had fallen back behind the Aziziyah canal.

In the morning men of the 90th Punjabis, the 2/39th Garhwal Rifles and two companies of the 1/5th Battalion of the Queen’s Regiment went into the attack. At about 7.30 a.m. a mixed detachment under Captain Rodgerson captured the bridge over the Aziziyah canal together with three Turkish field guns. At about 9.15 a.m. the Turks began to surrender en masse to the Garhwalis at the bridge, and when the 42nd Brigade advanced on the trenches north of the Ramadi ridge, white flags appeared all along the line. By eleven o’clock the Turkish commander, Ahmed Bey, had surrendered with his whole force. According to some accounts a violent sandstorm arose immediately afterwards, in which the garrison could have slipped away had it begun a few hours earlier.

The British buried 120 Turkish dead and took 3,456 prisoners, including 190 wounded. They captured 13 guns, 12 machine guns, two armoured motor launches, two barges, and large stocks of arms, ammunition, railway material and food. Their own losses from 27 to 29 September amounted to 995 men, among them very many lightly wounded, because the Turkish shrapnel burst too high. The heat was still great, but this time water reached the front line: on 28 September the Ford vans alone brought the fighting troops more than 14,000 gallons, that is more than 60,000 litres. Maude wrote that Brooking had handled the troops admirably, methodically in preparation and with dash in the attack.

Echo

Only a handful of the whole garrison escaped. The Turkish staff officer Tevfik Efendi swam across the Euphrates and reached Hit only on the evening of 30 September, having been stripped naked by Arabs on the way. Until that moment the command of the “Yıldırım” group did not know what had happened. On the same day, 29 September, the British 7th Cavalry Brigade occupied Mandali on the Persian border without much fighting, while an attempted raid on Hit by motor vehicles on the night of 1/2 October failed. The British correspondent Edmund Candler wrote that in the Baghdad vilayet Ramadi was regarded as the “rung-down curtain” for the Turks. The fall of the town closed the route along the Euphrates and shook the loyalty of the local Arab tribes to the Turks. At the end of September, in any case, the Germans and Turks abandoned, for the time being without the British knowing, the plan for an offensive on Baghdad, and the forces of the “Yıldırım” group were soon sent to Palestine.