British cross the Tigris at Shumran

At dawn on 23 February 1917 British infantry crossed the Tigris on the Shumran peninsula, in a bend of the river about eleven kilometres west of Kut. After two months of fighting on the right bank, the troops of General Frederick Stanley Maude at last stood on the same bank as the town and behind the Turkish positions. The British chronology of the war records the recapture of Kut under this date, but on that day the British had not yet entered the town. On 23 February they forced the river; during the night the commander of the Ottoman Sixth Army, Halil Pasha (Halil Kut), ordered his troops to withdraw; on 24 February the Turks abandoned Sannaiyat and Kut; and British sailors raised the flag over the empty town only on the morning of 25 February. The crossing at Shumran nevertheless decided the town’s fate, and many authors combine the two events into one.

Feints

Maude wanted the Turks to be looking the other way. On 22 February the 7th Division broke into the Sannaiyat position, far downstream, and the Ottoman command drew there, as the Turkish officer Muhammad Amin later wrote, all the troops it had to hand at Kut and Shumran. That same night the 3rd Division mounted a raid across the river at Magasis. About a hundred men of the 27th Punjabis, with bombs and bayonets but no rifle ammunition, crossed in pontoons under fire, took a small Turkish redoubt with a trench mortar and returned in under an hour, having lost eleven men. The Turks reportedly lit beacon fires signalling that the enemy had crossed the river. All night the 40th Brigade, at the liquorice factory opposite Kut, simulated preparations for a crossing: it drove wagons about, dropped beams and splashed in the water, while artillery observers’ ladders were set up around the bend. According to the official history, in the morning the Turks were taken in.

The crossing

Three ferries were prepared at the eastern end of the Shumran peninsula. The pontoons were hauled up almost to the bank at night and laid behind the river embankment. At about 5.15 a.m., while it was still dark, they were carried over the embankment, and some minutes after 5.30 a.m., when the far bank could just be made out, the first boats pushed off. At the upper ferry the 2nd Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment surprised the Turkish outposts. The first ashore was Second Lieutenant B. F. Horner, who almost single-handedly captured a machine gun that was just about to open fire. By 9.30 a.m. the whole battalion was on the left bank. At the two lower ferries things went much worse. The Turks opened fire when the boats carrying the Gurkhas were halfway across. Of the thirteen pontoons of the 2/9th Gurkhas, ten reached the bank and six returned. At the third ferry the rowers of the 1/4th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment pulled so evenly that they landed several hundred metres further upstream than planned, but almost all the boats then remained on the other side, because most of the rowers had been killed or wounded. At about 10 a.m. only 56 men of the 1/2nd Gurkhas were holding on there on the left bank. They held out thanks to the artillery, which they directed by signals across the river. Major George Wheeler of the 2/9th Gurkhas, who with the first boat broke into a Turkish trench a dozen or so metres from the water and widened the bridgehead in hand-to-hand fighting, was awarded the Victoria Cross for that day.

The commander of the 14th Division, General Raymond Egerton, ordered work on the bridge to begin earlier than planned, to put heart into the men in the bridgeheads. Wagons carrying material drove up at the gallop at intervals of several hundred metres, dropped their loads and drove off. The pontoons could not be rowed against the current, so two motor boats, hauled there by oxen, were launched. The Turkish artillery searched for the bridge all day, and beams floated down on the current and were stopped by sailors. At 4.30 p.m. a pontoon bridge about 270 metres long, built in eight hours across a current running at five knots, was ready. Meanwhile both Gurkha battalions had crossed by the first ferry, and in the afternoon the Norfolks and Gurkhas pushed the Turks out of the southern part of the peninsula. At about midday the enemy had begun to surrender. Before midnight the whole 14th Division had crossed the bridge.

The day’s balance

The crossing cost III Corps about 350 men, about 200 of them among the rowers. The Hampshire battalion alone lost 98 men. The British took more than 540 prisoners and five machine guns. At Sannaiyat the 7th Division took the third and fourth lines of Turkish trenches that day, in which lay more than 600 dead, a large part of them probably from the fighting of 22 February. In the afternoon Maude urged the commander of I Corps, General Alexander Cobbe, not to let the Turks slip away, and warned him not to repeat the mistakes the Allies had made in the 1814 campaign against Napoleon.

Muhammad Amin wrote that while all eyes were turned on Sannaiyat the British crossed the river at Shumran, and the defenders there were so few that they could not carry out their orders and drive them into the water. In the evening the commander of XVIII Corps, Kâzım Karabekir Bey, told Halil that he could no longer hold the enemy. That same night Halil ordered the 51st Division to abandon Sannaiyat, moved his headquarters up the Tigris and demanded a new division from Constantinople. Maude did not know this. He estimated that the Turks had only about 9,200 rifles left along the river, and ordered both corps to continue attacking the next day, and the cavalry division to be ready at dawn for the pursuit.